1 Dipesh Chakrabarty Lectures on Global Change, the Anthropocene

Dipesh Chakrabarty lectures on global change, the anthropocene, humanities at Brandeis – 2017-01-23 16:26 1 D. Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy" - 2017-02-06 16:21 Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936.” Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Sciences, Routledge, 1989, pp. 26-58. In “Teddy Bear Patriarchy” Haraway looks at the planning and construction of the African Hall in the American Museum of Natural History in order to discover the hidden histories of race, class, and gender in the 1920s and 30s that influenced the form this exhibit took. Following the biography of Carl Akeley, the “mastermind” behind the exhibit, Haraway examines the ways in which the general social anxiety regarding new threats to white masculinity (such as immigration, new technologies, and capitalism) informed the ultimate purpose of the museum exhibit: to preserve the moment of encounter between man and mammal (using realist techniques in taxidermy, photography, and painting) and thus guide the museum visitor on a journey to manhood. This project depended on the idea that a certain “type” (white, male, Protestant) represented the perfect specimen within the social hierarchy, an attitude that informed Akeley’s search for perfect “types” of organisms to be displayed in the museum, which in an example of circular reasoning justified the social hierarchy of human beings as “natural.” This project of knowledge-making also meant that the contributions of women and Africans were ignored or belittled, which creates the illusion that white men are the seekers and preservers of knowledge while women and Africans—as the objects of their gaze—could only be the objects of scientific discourse instead of authors in their own right. (Although white women did author Akeley’s biographies, their authorship is ignored. Africans did not even get to write or tell their own stories.) Haraway uses the construction of the African Hall as a kind of case study into the ways in which the creation and promulgation of knowledge is informed by social narratives of race, gender, and class, and in turn justifies these narratives. Haraway’s essay is a useful model to keep in mind as we begin to ask similar questions for Project 1. Donna Haraway: Teddy Bear Patriarchy - 2017-02-07 17:27 Haraway, D. J. (1989). Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936. In Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern sciences (pp. 26–58). New York, NY: Routledge. Haraway closely examines the structure, design, exhibits of the Akeley African Hall constructed in the decades just prior to WW II within the American Museum of Natural History as well as the life and ideas of its principal designer and taxidermist, Carl Akeley. Haraway is interested in the narratives and meanings conveyed by this exhibition space, their origins within the personalities involved in its construction, and the intentions of those individuals to affect social change through those narratives. Haraway describes the conception of Nature and the natural world held by Akeley and other collector/researchers of his time (as well as the funders of the AMNH exhibits and political leaders such as Teddy Roosevelt) as that of remedy for the social and moral decay suffered by urbanites (particularly—or exclusively—White men) subject to current levels of industrialization, mechanization, and immigration with its inevitable social degradations. Haraway examines a diversity of artifacts—including the design of the exhibit hall and the museum, the taxidermied specimens, the tools used to collect photographic and physical specimens, the exhibit dioramas, writings of Akeley and his two wives, and photographs of collecting expeditions and African wildlife—to create a portrait of the narratives assumed and 2 conveyed. These narratives center around the main character of the nature-wise, white, fatherly hunter who has been reborn as a fully human adult male through his being tested against the dangers of nature and the blood of those he has successfully killed. They also assume the ability of the primary authors (adult, white men) to convey unchanging truisms about a natural order through their use of realistic art (taxidermy, sculpture, photography, film) that conveys their assumptions about racial and gender hierarchies mirrored within animal social structures. Haraway then examines how these “truisms” both serve the authors’ interests in promoting a peaceful society in which the hierarchies that most benefit themselves are reinforced and assuage their fears of social decay through their aspiration of the use of these narrative artifacts for the moral education of younger generations into the future.1 D.Haraway: Teddy Bear Patriarchy - 2017-02-07 21:51 In her article “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of the Eden, New York City” Donna Haraway presents the way in which the American Museum of Natural History was developed. That process focusses mainly in the African Hall where Carl Akeley played an important role. However, Haraway’s article is more than a simply linear narrative, because she puts in evidence the implications of the Akeley’s decisions in many levels. For instance, the dioramas and all the work that are behind them are linked to taxidermy but also as an expression of art thanks to its composition; also, the photographic activities of the safari explorers are seen as an artistic work. Together to the artistic aspect of it, there is manifested the scientific level of the diorama and the museum work. Thus, hunting, photographing, displaying a scene in an artistic way and the scientific taxidermy process are a multidisciplinary activity that brings together art and science. However, there is more implications according to Haraway. The African Hall and the American Museum of Natural History would be consider as a discourse that speaks of a position about race, class, gender, hegemony and national identity. These aspects were related to the ideological positions of these who designed and developed the Museum; for that, eugenics, racial purity, preservation of decadence, were ideas linked to social groups that were powerful during the rising of the capitalist society from the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Haraway, D (1989). "Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936", in Primate visions: Gender, race, and nature in the world of modern sciences (26– 58). New York: Routledge. 1 MBC (2017-02-14 20:04:30) Very efficient summary! Two queries about adjectives: 1) "inevitable" (end of 1st par.). I'm teaching a course in the literary/social history of utopias, so of course I'm inclined to think that's not *necessarily* the word for social degradation accompanying "industrialization, mechanization, and immigration"--though there's a lot of historical evidence for degradation of social conditions in the wake of industrialization and later mechanization. How might one check it out historically, rather than through imaginary utopian societies? Two recently industrialized/mechanized societies I think of (one of which has also experienced mass immigration, the other very little) are Israel and Iceland since WWII. That pair is interesting in that Israel includes all three of the conditions for "degradation" you list and Iceland only two. 2) The other adjective: "realistic" in "realistic art (taxidermy, sculpture, photography, film)." All those media can indeed be used for "realistic" art, but none of them need be-- e.g. Arp's photos, Cocteau's or David Lynch's films, Alexander Calder's sculpture, and though you may not have seen this, Renaissance collector, natural historian and museum-inventor Alissandro Aldrovandi's preserved dragon or indeed many imaginary stuffed or "preserved" beasts in the early days of "science": see e.g. Kathryn A. Hoffman, "Sutured Bodies: Imaginary Marvels in Early Modern Europe" (Seventeenth-Century French Studies 24 [2002]). 3 Haraway, D. J. (1989) - 2017-02-08 11:30 Haraway, D. J. (1989) “Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-1936” Donna Haraway’s “Teddy bear patriarchy” sprawls scientific discourse outward from a starting point in the American Museum of Natural History, problematizing colonial, gender, and ecological social issues through an analysis of the process of scientific display. The exhibition, whether it is taxidermy or diorama, is not a benign presentation of objects, but rather a site through which the contestation of discourse plays out. O ne should note the parallels with our pre-course reading, Dawn by Octavia Butler. Haraway’s playful framing of the act of shooting as something that can take place with a gun or a camera rephrases narratives of domination/destruction and preservation. No longer do these operate as binary oppositional forces, but rather as part of a singular process through which patriarchal control is asserted. Conservation is not benevolence, but conservatism—a force through which functions of power shift, in a Foucauldian sense, from the power to kill to the power to save. Ecological preservation is taxidermic preservation. The coding of masculinity—and, by proxy, the heterosexual matrix—in the “sporting” act of shooting (and yes, I was already using this chapter in my thesis) seems tailor-made for Haraway’s feminist analysis: Masculinity is something conferred through participation in coded actions, and as such can even be conferred to non-male, non-human subjects. Yet, masculinity is not something only to be bestowed. Haraway presents examples that demonstrate the passing of what we might call this “participation credit” (just a little PBL humor) to the patriarch of the family or the expedition, rather than the women who conducted the research and participated in the 4 masculinity-forming practices. Similarly, colonial, racial, and nationalist discourses serve to effeminize non-white subjects in Haraway’s historiography.

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