Perspective: Is re-interpretation enough? Dismantling violence in the natural history museum

Abstract

The taxidermy assemblage “Lion Attacking a Dromedary” (LAD) has been critiqued as a piece of French colonial propaganda, containing unethically sourced human remains, that desensitizes visitors to violence against people of color and lacks value for science education. It has also been on display continuously since 1899 at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and has sentimental and pedagogical value for local community, thus making it complicated to remove. To address its difficult legacy while maintaining its display, LAD has been re-interpreted multiple times with new descriptive labels. This approach is of limited success, however. Re-interpretation cannot sufficiently counter the visual narrative of the diorama itself. In addition to the aforementioned critiques, the figures in LAD are posed to tell a harmful “man versus nature” story. LAD points toward a broader narrative bias in natural history, namely an overemphasis on competition and an underemphasis on cooperation. For ethical and effective contemporary science education, and for galvanizing action on climate change and other sustainability and justice crises in the 21st-century natural history museum, there is an urgent need for radical deconstruction of dioramas like LAD.