Book

Articulating dinosaurs : a political anthropology

Noble, Brian, author

Overview

\"In this ambitious interdisciplinary study, anthropologist Brian Noble traces how dinosaurs and their natural worlds are articulated into being by the action of specimens and humans together. Following the complex exchanges of palaeontologists, museums specialists, film- and media-makers, science fiction writers, and their diverse publics, he witnesses how fossil remains are taken from their partial state and recomposed into astonishingly precise, animated presences within the modern world, with profound political consequences. Articulating Dinosaurs examines the resurrecting of two of the most iconic and gendered of dinosaurs. First Noble traces the emergence of Tyrannosaurus rex (the \"king of the tyrant lizards\") in the early twentieth-century scientific, literary, and filmic cross-currents associated with the American Museum of Natural History under the direction of palaeontologist and eugenicist Henry Fairfield Osborn. Then he offers his detailed ethnographic study of the multi-media, model-making, curatorial, and laboratory preparation work behind the Royal Ontario Museum's ground-breaking 1990s exhibit of Maiasaura peeblesorum (the \"good mother lizard\"). Setting the exhibits at the AMNH and the ROM against each other, Noble is able to place the political natures of T. rex and Maiasaura into high relief and to raise vital questions about how our choices make a difference in what comes to count as \"nature.\" An original and illuminating study of science, culture, and museums, Articulating Dinosaurs is a remarkable look at not just how we visualize the prehistoric past, but how we make it palpable in our everyday lives.\"--Page i.

• Publisher: University of Toronto Press
• Subject: American Museum of Natural History Exhibitions. / Royal Ontario Museum Exhibitions. / Dinosaurs Exhibitions Social aspects. / Museum exhibits Political aspects New York (State) New York. / Museum exhibits Political aspects Ontario. / Political anthropology. / Dinosaurs in popular culture. / Tyrannosaurus rex Exhibitions Social aspects. / Maiasaura Exhibitions Social aspects. / Natural history museums Exhibitions Political aspects New York (State) New York. / Natural history museums Exhibitions Political aspects Ontario. / Paleontology Social aspects.
• ISBN: 9780802096968, 0802096964, 9781442627055, 1442627050

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Call Number	Copies	Material	Location
QE861.4.N62 2016	1	BOOK	AUTOSTORE