Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads
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Amazon.co.uk Review
Science museums can be illuminating, exciting, and disturbing--just like the collectors that make them possible. In Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums Scholar Stephen T. Asma turns his professional curiosity about preserving bodies into an engrossing, wide-ranging exploration of the nature of these places and their curators. He brings a refreshing vitality to a subject usually thought boring, if not morbid. Asma's writing ranges from expositive to chatty and occasionally feels like a travelogue or memoir as he investigates the American Museum of Natural History, the Galerie d'anatomie comparée, and other collections in the US and Europe; this informality keeps the reader engaged throughout. Referring to the process of skeletonising specimens--while maintaining his hold on all but the most sensitive--he writes:
I stepped into the foulest, most pestiferous stench you can imagine ... Inside each tank were thousands of dermestid beetles, otherwise known as flesh-eating beetles, blissfully chewing the meaty chunks and strands off the bones. Each bug was no bigger than a watermelon seed, but en masse they could strip a skeleton clean in two short days.To Asma's credit, the bulk of the text is less a gross-out festival than a consideration of the hard, sometimes obsessive work of the men and women behind the displays. He examines the role of museums and collectors in the great evolutionary debates of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the future of these institutions as they come more and more to depend on corporate largesse. Equally enlightening and entertaining, Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is a perfectly exhibited specimen. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
"In Stuffed Animals, the natural history museum is a dimly lit stage for scientific dreams. Inside its cabinet of wonder, the mysteries of the natural world are laid bare and the rupture between the scientific and the sublime is momentarily healed."--Voice Literary Supplement
"Rich in detail, lucid explanation, telling anecdotes, and fascinating characters.... Asma has rendered a fascinating and credible account of how natural history museums are conceived and presented. It's the kind of book that will not only engage a wide and diverse readership, but it should, best of all, send them flocking to see how we look at nature and ourselves in those fabulous legacies of the curiosity cabinet."--Boston Herald
"Asma has already established himself as one of the most creative minds working in cultural history and the history of science. Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads is an incredibly stimulating discussion of the role of natural history museums in culture and society. It should b
Inside This Book
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First Sentence
COLLECTING AND DISPLAYING natural history specimens is a more complex and dramatic activity than most museum visitors appreciate. Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
COLLECTING AND DISPLAYING natural history specimens is a more complex and dramatic activity than most museum visitors appreciate. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
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4 reviews
26 of 28 people found the following review helpful
Mummies, Museums, and Metaphysics
22 April 2001
Format:Hardcover
If you do not want to know the nuts and bolts (or rather, the knives and molds) of the craft of taxidermy, but you want to know about why people might be interested in such an activity, what happens to their exhibits in museums, how museums express cultural and scientific philosophy, and how we come to categorize the biology that fills our world, then Stephen T. Asma's _Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums_ (Oxford University Press) will do nicely. It is an amusing ramble through museums, but since Asma is a professor of philosophy, it veers through much larger ideas.
Asma obviously likes museums, and he has gained entrance to the back rooms denied to other mortals. He is delighted to report his findings, such as the dermestid beetle room at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. These beetles, held in a stinky sealed room that has a door like a submarine hatch, swarm over the skinned bodies of specimens, literally gnawing them to the bone in a couple of days. He has interviewed curators and exhibition designers, and has them explain what they are trying to accomplish in their exhibits. But they may not know; how a display is arranged depends on scientific and social philosophy which varies from time to time and from nation to nation, and may be covert. Louis Agassiz displayed human racial artifacts at Harvard to emphasize that races were different, having been separately and specially created, rather than showing the continuity of human descent. The natural history museum in England have exhibits that emphasize Darwin, but the French hardly mention him. The Americans will have the most modern philosophy of taxonomy.
Comfortable with including Plato, James, Wittgenstein and others from his own field, Asma gives a wide-ranging discussion of epistemological issues that is academic but is never stuffy and never loses its sense of fun.
20 of 21 people found the following review helpful
Bizarre and Brilliant!
26 Feb 2004
Format:Paperback
This is an excellent and provocative book. Asma ranges widely, but also deeply, over the relatively uncharted territory of museum practices and theories --some mainstream and others quirky and idiosyncratic. One of the great virtues of the book is that it consciously avoids the typical postmodern cultural studies lingo that most of the other recent museum books invoke. This is clear and thoughtful analysis of the tradition of natural history collecting --analysis that brings us face to face with oddball curators like Peale and Hunter. But it also connects the older forms of edutainment (early taxidermy, etc.) with the more contemporary and controversial forms (Hollywood-type displays of dinosaurs, etc.). Two other important aspects of the book are scarcely mentioned in the promo blurbs, but they make for fascinating reading. One, is a fresh, if ocassionally dense, tour of European scientific classification theory --a philosophically important and often ignored area. And two, a powerful argument for evolution theory as against creationism and the increasingly popular "intelligent design" theory. Great writing and very intelligent!
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Blew my mind.
10 Sep 2008
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Highly recomended. I loved reading this. It gave insights into so many things I never thought of before such as the embalming process. A great work with expert diction and a great layout.
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