Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums

This book was recommended to me by my Ph.D. advisor and it didn't disappoint. It was a refreshing break from dry academic papers and I really couldn't put it down. Essential reading for museology, science history, zoology, or related fields.

loaned this book to a friend. She loved it. That is all that matters.

Not only is this a thoughtful exploration of the culture and evolution of natural history museums, it is a great read.

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.

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.

Asma writes a well-researched book about a truly fascinating topic -- and one dear to my heart.The 19th Century natural history museum is a work of art and an artifact on its own. It's swiftly being wiped out by foolish ideas about multimedia and interactive display, rather than being appreciated for its own artistry. The author provides a detailed and interesting glimpse into the intricacies of how a medium is executed and where the skills to do so actually come from.IMHO, the topic and the research stand on their own. The book could've been written in a more straightforward manner. Instead, it often feels like a stage for the author to prove to his peers how many literary references he can make:"Your incredulous self has to give your credulous self a wide berth in order for the imaginative magic to occur. You move between the literal Gradgrind-mind, which acknowledged the stuffing and the artifice, and the imaginative Munchausen-mind...."Much of the book consists of increasingly erudite rephrasings of statements already made. It makes the reading a little tedious.Love what the author is doing, though, and the conclusions he draws are thoughtfully made and totally convincing!

Unfortunately, I find that Stephen Asma is writing more for his philosophy students than for even erudite readers. He teases with an interesting story from the humanistic side of what goes on in a museum; his own experiences and a description of the displays or the fascinating people who developed the collections, and then continues with an acknowledgement that such things ARE interesting, but before we can truly appreciate them we need to know the entire history of taxonomy. This is a system he uses repeatedly in his writing: "Before we can make sense of what is laid out in Cuvier's gallery, it is important to excavate some of the history of classification. And before we dig in this direction, it is of paramount importance to examine why we classify things at all" (pg 83). Which is fine. But then he goes into about 150 pages of explaining taxonomy, which is hardly worth the three interesting sentences he devoted to the actual museum he was describing. There were several paragraphs that made the book exceedingly difficult to get through, such as this one from page 187:"Some systematists, including both cladists and pheneticists, remain so resolutely phenomenalist in their approach that they are uninterested in any evolutionary inferences. Cladists and pheneticists are really just trying to construct the most parsimonious arrangement of empirical data. But many evolution-minded biologists seek to establish the genealogical underpinnings for these parsimonious arrangements. If we take a pluralistic approach, incorporating aspects of the different systematics schools and evolutionary biology, we can try to reconstruct the evolutionary trajectory of certain organic structures." I really don't want to sound plebeian because I had to look up what the word parsimonious meant before I could begin to make sense of that paragraph, but the entire book is like that excerpt. If you got it, great - buy this book. If you're a student of the humanities and are looking for a more sociological approach to museums and curation, skip this one. Somewhere in chapter three I actually heard a student's head hitting a desk.