Essay review: Primate visions, a model for historians of science?

Abstract

Primate Visions has changed my life. Brought up near New York City, I thrilled to my trips to the Museum of Natural History. The great halls filled with skeletons of giant animals both extant and extinct, the dioramas depicting the lives of distant peoples, and, perhaps most wonderful of all, the great mammals of Africa moved me deeply, confirming my desire to study nature for myself. Reading Donna Haraway's account of the building of the Great Hall of Africa (chap. 3, "Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908--1936") profoundly disturbed my romantic vision of nature. No longer can I enter the museum with my child's mind. Her account of the killing, stuffing, and presentation of the mountain gorillas, her insight into "the Museum's task of regeneration o f . . . [an] urban public threatened with genetic and social decadence, threatened . . . [by] the new immigrants, threatened with the failure of manhood" (p. 29) has stolen my innocence. No longer can I look without suspicion at the display cases of butterflies or the dioramas of Native American families. Instead, I find myself asking about the hidden meanings, about the underlying visions of nature portrayed, wondering how I am being taken in, lulled into a social complacency by the museum display. And yet . . . . And yet I am still profoundly moved, as the romantic child I was and the wishfully thinking adult that I am; I am moved by the gorillas and the chimps and the whale skeletons; my eyes widen with wonder at the richness and grandeur of nature. But then Haraway calls my attention to the Museum entrance dominated by the statue of Teddy Roosevelt atop a horse, "father and protector of two 'primitive men,' an American Indian and an African, both standing, dressed as 'savages.'" Past the statue, just