Cultures of United States Imperialism

Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism (Durham: Duke UP, 1993).

This (654-page) anthology of essays aims to integrate the study of foreign relations and the study of American culture, breaking down boundaries between internal and external imperialisms and generally rejecting the idea that America is special because it hasn't had an empire (except for those little island states taken over at the end of the 19th century). Authors look at the ways in which America's project has been a fundamentally imperial one since the beginning.

Some of the noteworthy essays that I may need to refer to later:
-Donna Haraway's "Teddy Bear Patriarchy," on the fear of degeneration and white male anxiety in the founding of the AMNH (this essay originally appeared in Social Text and also appears in Primate Visions)
-Bill Brown's "Science Fiction, the World's Fair, and the Prosthetics of Empire, 1910-1915," is fantastic - analyzes the ways that scifi from this period merges man's perfect body and the extensions of his machines to imagine the technological manipulation of distant "prosthetic" places (as exemplified by the Panama Canal - which is the gap which Hercules creates in the body of the earth, in the image appearing on the cover of the book). Brown contrasts this emphasis on the perfect body with the previous century's scifi, and scifi from Europe, which sees science as a way to recuperate lost bodies or make up for deficiencies. Brown is at Chicago and co-edits Critical Inquiry - he also has written on "Thing Theory," which Janet had referred me to earlier this year and which integrates the analysis of the movements of material objects into an analysis of lit
-Vincente Rafael's "White Love: Surveillance and Nationalist Resistance in the US Colonization of the Philippines" contrasts the United States census, which was used as an "educational" tool by American colonizers intent on "lifting" certain Filipinos above others, and which fixed categories of race and gender, with Filipino street theatre which celebrated indigenous gender categories and created a Filipino identity
-Amy Kaplan's "Black and Blue on San Juan Hill" describes the controversy over TR's description of the supposed "cowardice" of the black soldiers during the Rough Riders' surge over San Juan Hill - Kaplan writes that the black community resisted this categorization, and that the way that TR focused on this cowardice, and the supposed disorganization of the Cuban resisters who assisted the United States, shows that race, and the organization of categories, was the most visible "happening" in the middle of a confusing battlefield. This episode also shows how TR lumped Cubans and American blacks together - they are seen as usable, when commanded by a white man, but not effective soldiers if working by themselves.
-In "Anti-Imperial Americanism," Walter Benn Michaels (Univ. of Illinois at Chicago, writes on race, literature and national identity) describes how pro-KKK southern writers saw themselves as "colonized" by Reconstruction.
-In "The Patriot System, or Managerial Heroism," Susan Jeffords talks about the Gulf War (which took up an inordinate amount of space in this book - see pub date, 1993) - she writes that Americans justify the war by describing themselves as the most competent of techno-managers - it's interesting to think about how different this thesis would look if applied to the current Iraq War...

American Technological Sublime

David Nye, American Technological Sublime (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994)

Nye teaches at the University of Southern Denmark, and has written several other books on technology and modernity in the US, including Electrifying America (on my list) and Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies. I'm not sure if he was trained in American Studies, but he apparently got his degree from Minnesota, so it seems likely. Regardless, this book could easily be used to answer the question "What does an ideal American Studies book look like?"

This book approaches its subject not through some artificially delineated rubric defined by race, age, gender, or time ("Italian immigrants in the cities, 1881-1911"). Nye picks an idea - that there is a particularly American form of expression/social interaction, called the "technological sublime" - and then picks a bunch of examples throughout American history in order to develop this idea. He effectively, then, creates a new rubric or a new category. And he uses the breadth of methodological sources that I would want from an American Studies book - responses from observers both "high" and "low"; examples from public entertainment settings (such as from expositions) and from cityscapes and defense departments (this shows how "technological sublime" is produced and managed by various agencies, with a larger or smaller degree of intent); the inclusion of fiction. I do think he could have had more in here about film, though.

Nye traces how the sublime, originally a concept articulated by Burke and Kant in order to describe a response to a natural object of great magnitude or impressiveness, shifted its boundaries in America to encompass the technological. On the way, Nye argues, the experience of facing the sublime shifted from an individual to a crowd context; from being provoked by nature to being provoked by machinery; and from an experience of "substance" into an electric image (277). His examples of various varieties of "technological sublime" include the electric sublime (see: lighting displays at World's Fairs); the industrial sublime (the curving, uniform lines of the factory walls at Manchester, NH's Amoskeag Mills - "complexity and order on a massive scale" [113]); the geometric sublime (skyscrapers and dams) and the dynamic sublime (the railroads).

His penultimate chapter, which describes the rededication of the Statue of Liberty in 1986, shows how the technological sublime as practiced in these public contexts participates in a utopianism that promises not a difference in social interactions but a difference in the kind of "stuff" that we own. These sort of un-radical (or even repressive) historical precedents for the technological sublime of television can be found way earlier, however, in the "industrial sublime," which subsumed images of workers below images of machinery, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and in the "geometric sublime," embodied by skyscrapers that shut out and alienated the street-level public while impressing a generalized "public" with their mass.

There is interesting thought in here too about the interplay between nature and technology - Nye claims that if a naturally sublime site faces down a technologically sublime possibility, as in the case of dam construction, the naturally sublime will always lose to the potential of construction, because while the natural sublime speaks of limits, the technological sublime speaks of "the idea of reason in constant evolution" (60).

The End of Victory Culture

Roll the dice, lady. Roll the dice.

Title: The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation (New York: Basic Books, 1995)

Author: Tom Engelhardt, a former journalist and book editor, now working as a fellow for the Nation Institute and writing for/editing the alternative news site TomDispatch.com. One of the things he works on for Metropolitan Books is called The American Empire Project and looks really awesome.

Argument: The time between the Cold War and Vietnam marked the beginning of the end of American triumphalism, which was at a high point at the end of WWII, but marred by the existence of the bomb. Combining a bunch of different previous scholarship about American exceptionalism (see Nash Smith), Native Americans (see Slotkin), narratives of war and racism (see Dower, Drinnon), as well as his own childhood reflections, Engelhardt seeks to answer the question of how Americans lost their loving feeling toward their own country - and especially, how children who grew up during that 1950s got to the point where they began to question the country's mission. All of this questioning added up to what Engelhardt terms The End of Victory Culture. (Problem: Weren't there dissenters and disbelievers in American culture all along? Anti-imperialists and war protestors? Socialists? Communists? Yes, there were... Also, there's still a Victory Culture: just ask any random person on the street in Concord, New Hampshire.)

Chapter-by-chapter:
I. War Story
1. Triumphalist Despair: Basic argument laid out.

2. Story Time: Real-life war stories of America, whose parameters are determined by the victors (see Lepore). Native Americans as central to these stories, while the black story is elided (and haunting in its absence).

3. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass: War stories in the movies. Short history of the Western, pre-1960, and its similarities with the war movies of the 1940s. A bit about captivity narratives; a bit about the "victim complex" (we are always the transgressed upon, never the aggressor).

4. Premonitions: The Asian Death of Victory Culture: How Asia became "the frontier", and how Korea became a precursor of/warning of what was to come in Vietnam.

II. Containments (1945-1962)
1. War Games: How the 1950s mixed wartime with peacetime objectives (see May). Includes section on children's war games (81).

2. X Marks the Spot: Articulation of tensions between inclusionary and exclusionary tactics during the Cold War (how are we safe? by assimilating difference, or rejecting it altogether?)

3. The Enemy Disappears: The invisibility of Cold War adversaries; coverage of the HUAC hearings and blacklisting (emphasis on the performative nature thereof).

4. The Haunting of Childhood: Childhood, during the Cold War, was the "symbolic meeting place" for two fears: the fear of infection by the Other (see juvenile delinquents); and the propensity of the media to "concretize the fantasies of the young and the nightmarish fears of grown-ups into potent products" (137). "Twilight Zone" seen as example of how these secret fears/fantasies emerged in the public eye.

5. Entering the Twilight Zone: The atomic stalemate "reflected the limits of what the American story, American national identity, could withstand" (157): we couldn't picture ourselves killing so many people without "provocation". This meant that adversaries had to be more careful, talk about things more, and that "a certain amount of control over the American war story...was placed in enemy hands" (161). Interesting piece on the invention of the Peace Corps as JFK's plan to Americanize far places through youth (164).

III. The Era of Reversals (1962-1975):
1. The First Coming of GI Joe: Evolution of GI Joe figures seen as marker of how American ideas of heroism and enemy-ship evolved during this time.

2. The Invisible Government: JFK's assassination, and subsequent conspiracy theories, indicated that Americans could now conceive that their government would keep things from them purposefully.

3. Playing with Fire: The story of Morley Safer's atrocity reports from Cam Ne, and how the response to it (people thought he was a Communist plant, and hey, he was Canadian) indicated America's inability to accept the possible moral bankruptcy of their mission in Vietnam.

Morley Safer at Cam Ne, 1965.

4. Into the Charnel House of Language: Vietnam's "backwardness" in the American war story led to linguistic machinations intended to help Americans process what was happening: an interesting analysis of the use of the word "quagmire", which holds that the word implies American victimhood, once again: Who's in the wrong, when men are being "sucked into" a war? The thing doing the "sucking", for sure. I'm never calling Iraq a quagmire again. (199)

5. The President as Mad Mullah: Nixon told advisors that he wanted the Vietnamese to see him as an evil madman so they would lose their nerve - a concept which fascinates Engelhardt, given American need to see their leaders as upright moral beings.

6. The Crossover Point: More on the American state of mind in Vietnam, including the "logic" of body counts, which built on itself, and the idea that America wanted to impose a "story" on Vietnam, not just political rule (214).

7. "Something Rather Dark and Bloody": The story of the My Lai massacre, and response to it. Interestingly, Engelhardt points out, everybody on either side of the protestor/establishment divide was interested in comparing the other side with Nazis.

8. The War Crimes of Daniel Ellsberg: Ellsberg, who worked for RAND and then leaked the Pentagon Papers, is seen as an exemplar of a young American who fell out of love with the war story he'd been raised upon.

D. Ellsberg.

9. Ambush at Kamikaze Pass (II): Reflections of the Vietnam War in film. Also, story of how young war protestors singlehandedly realized the twin fears of the Cold War era: Communism, and the vulnerability of the young.

10. Besieged: How the war protestors used the national media by manipulating symbols such as "Good War" paraphenalia in order to create a sort of living MAD magazine: a subordination of the accepted narrative. Those in charge were horrified: not only the war, but also the home agenda, was slipping from their grasp, due to the death of Victory Culture.

11. Reconstruction: How did post-Vietnam Americans, robbed of their self-image of conquering righteousness, think to recoup their self respect? Through the children, of course...

IV. Afterlife (1975-1994): Attempts to rehabilitate American self image include Star Wars, the first Gulf War (in its spectacular, TV-ready execution). More on GI Joe, and a bit of interesting, if slightly out of place, musing on the way that children's culture seems to drive all meaning before it in the creation of an apolitical, timeless global state of conflict (do I agree? don't know) (301).

Reviews: In Contemporary Sociology, George Lipsitz wrote (a bit scathingly, but rightly) that Engelhardt draws "sporadically and unsystematically" on recent scholarship, pointing out holes in interpretation caused by ignorance of such work as that of Eric Lott and David Roediger. Furthermore, Lipsitz continued, Engelhardt's unfamiliarity with the methods of cultural studies led him to write in a narrow, Myth-and-Symbol-style framework, ignoring contradictory or complicating aspects of his Overarching Narrative; and his lack of context for each cultural object (no analysis of the actors involved in production, etc) leads him to make unsupported guesses about their meanings. In the Journal of American History, Stephen Whitfield wrote that the book's analysis was "sprightly", if thin, and that Engelhardt's overall theory about triumphalism was worth encapsulating in book form. Both reviewers called Engelhardt a "leftist". It's interesting to see how differently a "popular" book is reviewed in scholarly publications...

Vocab words: "osculation" ("close contact, an instance of this; spec. (a) the mutual contact of blood vessels (obs.); (b) Geom., contact of curves or surfaces which share a common tangent at the point of contact (also used analogously of spaces of higher dimension)" - also, "kissing").

Books to follow up on: Primary: Books: Textbook from 1953: America Before Man; Nancy Carlsson-Paige and Diane E Levin, Who's Calling the Shots: How to Respond Effectively to Children's Fascination with War Play and War Toys (1990); MIA Hunter series ("Vietnam snuff novels"). Toys: GI Joe "Soldiers of the World" (p 175) and animal enemies. Movies: "North by Northwest"; "The Long Telegram"; "Fail Safe"; Morley Safer's reports on "The Burning of Cam Ne"; "The Dirty Dozen"; "The Wild Bunch"; "Bonnie and Clyde"; "Little Big Man"; "Soldier Blue"; "The China Syndrome"; "Coming Home".

Secondary: Stephanie Coontz, The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (1992); Leslie Daikin, Children's Toys Throughout the Ages (1953); Ruth Miller Elson, Guardians of Tradition: American Schoolbooks of the Nineteenth Century (1964); Frances Fitzgerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (1979); Antonia Fraser, A History of Toys (1966); Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984); John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism 1860-1925 (1975); Sydney Ladensohn and Ted Schhoenhaus, Toyland: The High-Stakes Game of the Toy Industry (1990); Edward Tabor Linenthal, Sacred Ground: Americans and Their Battlefields (1991); June Namias, White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier (1993); David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (1993); Michael Paul Rogin, Ronald Reagan, The Movie and Other Episodes in Political Demonology (1987); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (1987); Keith Thompson, Angels and Aliens: UFOs and the Mythic Imagination (1991).

Primate Visions

Jane Goodall, the white-bodied stranger, with a baby from another species.

Title: Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (London: Routledge, 1989)

Author: The awesome Donna Haraway, professor in UC/Santa Cruz' departments of the History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies. She has a PhD in biology, but has worked on the "humanities" side of things for years. It looks to me as though Visions is her first humanities book. She then wrote Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (1991); the awkwardly titled (surely on purpose! I have such faith in her prose) Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan
©_Meets_Oncomouse™ (1997); The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (2003). She's now working on a couple more books about dogs and people.

Argument: This is a big, long, complicated, important book basically dedicated to showing that the scientific discourses of primatology are culturally situated and infused with implications for (human) gender relations. Since the early twentieth century, at the beginnings of primatology, the observed actions of non-human primates have Meant Something about the human condition...and the results of these observations have shaped ideas of human society. Male and male-thinking scientists and anthropologists have traditionally structured their inquiries around the categories of sex and violence, and have invested time in observing male dominance hierarchies instead of female interrelationships. Meanwhile, female primates have been seen as resources in the lives of the males - there to be disputed, but not actors in their own rights.

Chapter-by-chapter: This could take a while.
1. Introduction: The Persistence of Vision: Sets up major questions of the tome: "How do the terrible marks of race and gender enable and constrain love and knowledge in particular cultural traditions, including the modern natural sciences?" (1) (That move - naming natural sciences as a "cultural tradition" - gives you a clue about where this is going...) Haraway uses Said's idea of orientalism to describe primatology, pointing out that the dualisms of nature and culture, as well as sex and gender, that the science cares about, are ways of constructing a false "other"ness - and that this book will seek to deconstruct these dualisms. She points out that this project is especially significant and freighted because of the heightened popular presence of primatology: "The boundary between technical and popular discourse is very fragile and permeable" (14). Therefore, she hopes this book will find a popular audience (hm) and that it will help "readers find an 'elsewhere' from which to envision a different and less hostile order of relationships among people, animals, technologies, and land" (15).

Part One: Monkeys and Monopoly Capitalism: Primatology before WWII
2. Primate Colonies and the Extraction of Value: Haraway considers the "psychobiological" origins of primatology in the US before WWII: "Primatology was overwhelmingly a laboratory and museum-based affair" (24) which was tied mostly to solving human health problems, not to figuring out new ways to think about human society.

3. Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908-36: This chapter appeared as an article in Social Text before this book's publication, and I used that for my MA thesis. Here is a very good chapter-length description of the early twentieth-c's elite scientific investment in animals and the "wild" as a renewal of (white male) human possibility, perceived as threatened by modernity. The story of Carl Akeley anchors.

4. A Pilot Plant for Human Engineering: Robert Yerkes and the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology, 1924-42: Yerkes, who founded a laboratory that was "paradigmatic" in the field, was also paradigmatic in his outlook on science: "For him, the tap root of science is the aim to control" (61). He saw his laboratory as a "pilot plant, a demonstration project for rational re-design of human nature" (64) (go Progressive machinism!) Yerkes' emphasis on dominance, Haraway argues, was a symptom of the times and their obsession with analyzing social systems and human relationships.

5. A Semiotics of the Naturalistic Field, From CR Carpenter to SA Altmann, 1930-55: The careers of these two scientists, Haraway argues, showcase the move in biological thinking between the vision of organic physiological organisms "ordered by the hierarchical divsion of labor and the principle of homeostasis" to a postwar emphasis on "cybernetic technological systems, ordered by communications engineering principles and a tightly associated principle of natural selection" (101). This sea change was part of other, similar research being done in the military, industrial, and corporate fields.

Part Two: Decolonization and Multinational Primatology
6. Re-instituting Western Primatology after World War II: Primatology goes global in this chapter. The United States funded more and more research, creating more available money for projects. The concept of the all-important, culture-generating Male Hunter came about (covered in a gloss in this chapter and more in-depth in Part III). Using primates as human stand-ins, scientists searched for answers to human problems including changes in family structure. Haraway believes that underlying all of this is a deep anxiety about what western humans have done to the earth (nuclear war, and all a that).

7. Apes in Eden, Apes in Space: Mothering as a Scientist for National Geographic: A great chapter that gets in the field with Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey, tracing the way that their work (and that of other white female scientists) gets appropriated by media such as National Geographic and corporate sponsors such as Gulf Oil. Here is Koko and her kitten, too. These women and their apes, Haraway argues, were deployed as surrogates to help white men get back in touch with a "lost" postnuclear nature. Their scientific efforts were not seen uncolored by the particular cultural encumbrances of their gender. I loved the part of this chapter in which Shirley Strum, baboon researcher, tells about how difficult it was to work with the Geographic on a story she wrote for them...they wanted far more pictures of her, made up anecdotes about the animals, etc. There is also an extensive analysis of the social dynamics at Goodall's Gombe research station, and of the filmic representations of her work. Haraway writes of these representations, "The lesson offered in all the versions of the narratives about Gombe's chimpanzees has been different: The world is given, not made. It's no wonder Gulf Oil was proud to sponsor that message" (185).

Koko and All Ball.

8. Remodeling the Human Way of Life: Sherwood Washburn and the New Physical Anthropology, 1950-1980: Haraway associates physical anthropology during this time period with UNESCO's Universal Man, which was a program conceived to try to strip science of its racism. Despite this, Haraway says, this kind of anthropology, exemplified by Washburn's influence (he had a ton of students), succeeded in creating a very distinct set of gender roles by codifying a narrative of Original Family. Haraway looks at the discovery of Lucy's bones and those of the Taung child, who's on this hologram on the cover of the Geographic (November 1985). Through the creation of these images of family, Haraway argues, technology became associated with man, and sexuality/reproduction with woman. Thus, the responsibility for the creation of Culture lies with man - and in the elimination of racism from this equation, women lose.


9. Metaphors into Hardware: Harry Harlow and the Technology of Love: Dr. Harlow, working at a lab at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, invented the fake mother, designed to help monkey infants live without their real mothers (if they stayed in dyads, they were apt not to want to be separated for purposes of the experiments desired by science). Haraway calls Harlow a sadist, and it's hard not to agree when reading some of the stories of experiments run on infant monkeys...how depressed would you get if you were raised without contact for the first couple months of your life? (It's the monkey version of "the forbidden experiment".) He also re-inscribed ideas of the nuclear family by setting monkeys up in apparati designed to enforce them, and then using data about how monkeys thrived in them in order to make points about human society (just about now, thinking about letting [white] women work more often...)

10. The Bio-Politics of a Multicultural Field: Haraway talks about differences in Japanese primatology, including the Japanese scientists' interest in concepts of self and society, and the science's diminished fear of "contaminating" monkey sample subjects by too much interaction. Although Japanese primatologists were more holistic, intuitive, and less dualistic, Haraway wishes to point out that all of these qualities, added up, don't necessarily mean that the assumptions or conclusions of said science were not "masculinist". There is also a discussion of primatology in India, where monkeys and men are more daily imbricated in each other's lives (but, Haraway points out, it cannot be said that Indians are inherently more reverent of the monkey...) Then to Africa, where the politics of the creation of national parks (see Dian Fossey's story, in which she was probably killed by poachers) is an international miscommunication. Finally, to the Malagasy Republic, where Allison Jolly, primatologist and field researcher, has worked for years, with a higher degree of cultural sensitivity than most Westerners...at least, Haraway points out, Jolly is aware that Westerners coming in to study the animals of non-Western countries without collaborating with the scientists of those countries are causing a reinforcement of the dynamics of colonization.



Part Three: The Politics of Being Female: Primatology is a Genre of Feminist Theory
11. Women's Place is in the Jungle: An overview of the re-thinking of the field by feminist/female practitioners. Haraway writes that cultural movement - "the worldwide reworkings of what the differences and similarities within and among women might be" (285) - have changed primatology, requiring that an entirely new set of descriptive practices be constructed. This construction, she argues, is "a serious form of feminist practice" (287). Occurring, as it has, mostly in the context of white Western female primatologists, however, it cannot completely universalize.

12. Jeanne Altmann: Time-Energy Budgets of Dual Career Mothering : Explorations of the careers of four female primatologists make up the third section. Altmann, most interested in methodology, nonetheless practiced a feminist intervention, according to Haraway, in her very questioning of the questions behind the science - she re-set the priorities of the field, thereby creating room for more nuanced studies of female primate lives.

13. Linda Marie Fedigan: Models for Interventions: Fedigan, an anthropologist, is most noted by Haraway for her carefully subjective language in field reporting, creating a more "semiotically open text" (319) in the interest of honest acknowledgment of bias.

14. Adrienne Zihlman: The Paleoanthropology of Sex and Gender: Zihlman, one of the major proponents of the "gatherer" thesis ("original" women were not just passive sexual beings, but have active functions within the survival picture, often using technology), has faced opposition and accusations of being a "bad" scientist. Haraway looks at these accusations and makes some points about bias and the denial of bias in scientific circles.

15. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy: Investment Strategies for the Evolving Portfolio of Primate Females: A sociobiology believer, Hrdy creates a vision of women who are competitive, even with each other, and whose lives are based around sex - but in a feminist way. Here is a discussion of the importance of female orgasm in female agency, and the way in which female orgasm in monkeys and apes came to be studied by primatologists, reconstructing said agency.

16. Reprise: Science Fiction, Fictions of Science, and Primatology: A concluding chapter focuses on Octavia Butler's Dawn (1987), reiterating questions of agency, subjectivity, and citizenship.

Goodall and friend.

Reviews: In Isis, Gregg Mitman called the book "brilliant, but at times impenetrable" (witness my difficulty penetrating it, above). He believed that the book was a significant step forward in integrating the history of science and the history of gender relations, but thought that the book's sometimes jargon-y tone would render it inaccessible for the popular reader. After describing the project, Lakshmi Bandlamudi, writing in Gender and Society, actually ejaculated "Yes!" in excitement. Bandlamudi saw the book as an excellent example of poststructuralism, and took issue with a New York Times review which apparently wrote that scientists might find Visions frustrating to read - a good scientist, she felt, should welcome the opportunity to dig deeper into the assumptions behind his or her work. In Current Anthropology, Peter Rodman was upset: "I cannot accept this vision of primatology." He angrily pointed out that it was a FACT that organisms compete for things, and not a made-up male paradigm. He seemed not to really have gotten point one of Haraway's analyses of the formation of scientific "objectivity" (he refers to "the cold eye of science", for example).

Vocab words: "interdigitate" ("to interlock like the fingers of the two hands when clasped"); "instaurate" ("to restore, renew; to erect; to supply"); "allochronic" ("of species, populations, etc.: existing at different points in (geological) time; breeding or flourishing at different seasons"); "protean" ("of or relating to Proteus, like that of Proteus. Hence in extended use: adopting or existing in various shapes, variable in form; variously manifested or expressed; changing, unpredictable"); "brachiation" ("lit: having arms; in Bot. having branches in pairs running out nearly at right angles with the stem and crossing each other alternately"; with apes and humans, the common feature of having arms placed like we do).; "alalia" ("loss of the power of speech").

Things to follow up on: Carl Akeley's book for kids: Lions, Gorillas, and their Neighbors (1922). P 163: References to 1950s films made for social studies curricula by primatologists. P 52: The Akeleys on their belief that highly effective black porters were motivated by the spirits of their masters (use for revision of agency essay). P 56: The AMNH's education extension programs. P 121: India's refusal to give us monkeys for nuclear research (1955). P 127: Time-Life Books' theories of male dominance and hunting at the origination of man. P 223: Stanford's undergrad Hum Bio major in the 1970s focused on solving problems of a biosocial nature (cf MACOS).

Movies to see: "Gorillas in the Mist"; "Miss Goodall and the Wild Chimpanzees" (1965) (narrated by Orson Welles); "The Gods Must Be Crazy" (1984); "Project X" (1989) (stars Matthew Broderick and Helen Hunt); "Primate" (1974) (dir. Frederick Wiseman).

Books to follow up on: Primary: Toni Cade Bambara, Salt Eaters (1980); Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).

Secondary: Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots (1983); Teresa de Lauretis, Technologies of Gender: Essays on Theory, Film, and Fiction (1987); John Michael Kennedy, "Philanthropy and Science in New York City: The AMNH" (1968, diss.); Karin Knorr-Cetina and Michael Mulkay, eds, Science Observed: Perspectives on the Social Study of Science (1983). This book has an amazing bibliography, for future reference.

Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads

Title: Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001)

The Akeley Hall of African Mammals at the AMNH

Author: Stephen T. Asma, professor of philosophy and interdisciplinary humanities at Columbia College, Chicago, and one of those academics with a neat website. Resume lists both "areas of specialization" ("Eastern Philosophy [esp. Buddhism], Philosophy and History of Science [Life Sciences], Museum Studies, Interdisciplinary Humanities") and "areas of competence" ("Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics, Cultural Studies Theory, History of Philosophy [Ancient & Modern]"). Previous book was called Buddha for Beginners; came out with what looks like a popular book, The Gods Drink Whiskey: Philosophical Dispatches From the Tattered Land of the Buddha, in 2005; apparently he's publishing a history of monsters in 2008 (I better hurry up with my cryptozoology idea...)

Argument: Part of the problem with this book is that the argument isn't really clear. One portion of that confusion comes from the fact that the book is attempting to reach a non-academic audience; part of it comes from the fact that this is an exploration of a subject matter somewhat outside of Asma's main expertise. He writes in the introduction that he hopes museum-goers will "not be able to look at exhibits the same way again" after reading the book, and that "once you've been behind the scenes to witness the backstage drama that is present in all natural history museums, and once you've learned that some of the historical and intellectual background of specimen collecting and exhibit creation, you'll find, I hope, every subsequent exhibit encounter to be more enlightening and more enjoyable" (xii). This is less an argument than, well, a goal, I guess? Have I become so used to reading scholarly writing that any book that doesn't start a graf "This book seeks to argue"...in the first chapter somewhere has lost me?

Chapter-by-Chapter: Chapter 1: Flesh-eating Beetles and the Secret Art of Taxidermy: Some discussion of Freud and Baudrillard on collecting. A small trip behind-the-scenes at the Field Museum to talk about wet-prep versus taxidermic preparations. Here is where the dermestid beetles make their appearance (these curator's-little-helpers eat flesh off the bones of soon-to-be skeletal specimens).

Chapter 2: Peter the Great's Mysterious Jars: How to Pickle a Human Head and Other Great Achievements of the Scientific Revolution: A couple good stories about Peter the Great's jars of heads (is this where "Surviving the Game" got the idea?) A visit to the Hunterian museum in London, and some short history of British collector and naturalist John Hunter (1728-1793). Other discussions of taxidermic techniques.

The Hunterian museum, before the wars.

Chapter 3: Taxonomic Intoxication, Part 1: Visualizing the Invisible : Here Asma begins an extended discussion of debates between Enlightenment scientists over taxonomy. This doesn't seem to have all that much to do with museums, except for how taxonomy influences the order in which museums are set up. Of course, I always like a nice detour through stories of eighteenth century naturalists, but I was left wondering what was going on.

Albrecht Durer's 1515 drawing of a rhino. Asma uses this to make a point about how mistakes got transmitted in the age before widespread knowledge of natural history; subsequent drawings of rhinos often gave them a second horn between the shoulders, like Durer's, where a real-life rhino has none.

Chapter 4: Taxonomic Intoxication, Part II: In Search of the Engine Room: More of the same: a history-of-science take on how taxonomy dealt with questions of the Designer. Lamarck, Linnaeus, Cuvier, etc. Short visits to Cuvierian armoires.

Chapter 5: Exhibiting Evolution: Diversity, Order, and the Construction of Nature : How have museums constructed evolutionary ideas for viewers? Here Asma writes that he plans to look at four particular museums to make his argument about national tendencies to place rhetorical emphasis on different strains of evolutionary thought. I can't really get out of this anything specific about American ideas of evolution, other than the fact that more Americans seem to question it, which I already knew. Asma says French museums care about beauty while American museums care about order, but I kind of don't believe this. The main debate Asma points to here is whether natural transformation is a bigger "engine" of evolution, or whether mutation is, which he kind of frames as a national debate (English vs. French), but kind of not.

Chapter 6: Evolution and the Roulette Wheel: A Chance Cosmos Rattles Some Bones : Ah! A return to a specific exhibit, at the Field Museum, that uses gambling metaphor to describe the evolutionary process, and a letter from a sort-of religious visitor who was upset at that choice. Then, a loooong digression into the social meaning of evolutionary thought, and a short interview with another curator at the Field, who talks about exhibit design. I wanted way more of this.

Chapter 7: Drama in Diorama: The Confederation of Art and Science: A bit of discussion about the importance of the visual in teaching, and then a discussion of the ways in which art and science used to overlap (see Akeley) and don't anymore. Digression into stories of medical illustration from back in the eighteenth C., mostly focusing on Jan Van Rymsdyk (see one of his drawings of a gravid uterus, below). Discussion of the use of humor in museum displays. All in all, this chapter seemed to focus way more on the actual museums than the previous chapters.


Reviews: In Isis, Keith R. Benson wrote, rather crankily, "Unfortunately, Asma does not deliver on his introductory promises" to talk about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the museum (a quibble with which I agree), but then goes on:

"To be sure, there are references to workers 'behind the scenes' and allusions to interesting specimens in many of the museums he has visited. But these subjects are never systematically or analytically treated. Moreover, there is little evidence that the author is thoroughly aware of the literature on museums or of the collecting cultures that contributed to their construction and elaboration. A cursory investigation of the literature cited reveals a shocking neglect of most foundational work, including that by the authors mentioned in the first paragraph of this review."

Sounds a bit like a bitter specialist annoyed with a relative layperson treading on his terrain, but I do have to agree that the book felt unsystematic and poorly planned. (Benson also points out that the photographs are atrocious, which is true.)

Meanwhile, in Reviews in American History, Steven Conn wrote that the book was saddled with confusing variations in tone, but praises its philosophical sections for their writing acumen. Conn points out that the observations Asma makes in the museums he covers are just the observations of a perceptive viewer; not much institutional history fleshes the picture out for the reader. Moreover, Conn writes, "Asma is not a historian," and thus the historical context of the museums in question is not clear (and why did he even pick the museums that he picked?) Conn delivers the final blow by calling Stuffed Animals itself a piece of "edutainment".

New words: "acromegaly" ("a disease characterized by hypertrophy and enlargement of the extremities"); "cladistic" ("of or pertaining to the study of clades"; a "clade" is a group of organisms evolved from a single ancestor); "seraglio" ("enclosure, place of confinement"; "the inmates of the harem; a polygamous household"); "furcula" ("a forked bone below the neck of a bird, consisting of the two clavicles and an inter-clavicle; the merry-thought or wish-bone"); "homology" ("sameness of relation, correspondence"); "prosopagnosia" ("an inability to recognize a face as that of any particular person"); "allopatric" ("applied to organisms that occupy different geographical areas"); "otiose" ("having no practical function; redundant; superfluous").

Leads to follow up on: The Field Museum's "suitcase dioramas" for education - program begun in 1911 (see reference, Field Museum and the Child [Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1928]).

Books to follow up on: Primary: Vinson Brown, Build Your Own Nature Museum (For Study and Pleasure) (1984); SH Daukes, The Medical Museum (1929); William T. Hornaday, Our Vanishing Wildlife (1913) (Project Gutenberg link); Jack Kevorkian, The Story of Dissection (1959); Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963); CP Snow, The Two Cultures (1959).

Secondary: Michael Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes (1992); Victoria Alexander, Museums and Money: The Impact of Funding on Exhibitions, Scholarships, and Management (1996); John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, eds, The Cultures of Collecting (1994); Paula Findlen, Possessing Nature (1994); Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (1992); Susan Pearce, Museums, Objects, and Collections: A Cultural Study (1992); Douglas Preston, Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History (1986).

Dying Planet

Book Title, in Full Glory: Dying Planet: Mars in Science and the Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)

Author: Robert Markley, English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Interests: “Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Literature; Media and Cultural Studies; Literary Theory; Gender Studies; the Relations between Literature and Science; and Science Fiction.” Much of Markley’s other work is Anglocentric. Other books: The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600-1730 (Cambridge University Press, 2005); Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660-1740 (Cornell University Press, 1993); Two-Edg'd Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (Oxford University Press, 1988) (yeesh!).

Argument, in 150 words or so:Markley argues that because so much about Mars has yet to be proven, ideas about the red planet, both in scientific and literary manifestations, have instead centered around humanity’s anxieties about ecology, use of resources, and the end purpose of the human race. Mars and Martians have represented utopian (Mars as a place where beings have learned to cooperate to share scarce resources) or dystopian (Martians as “the skull beneath the skin” [206], or the specter of full-scale war during times of scarcity) imaginings of an alternate future for the human race and planet Earth. Of course, says Markley, these fictions fluctuated depending on the historical and social events of the zeitgeist. Meanwhile, science’s continuing fascination with the possibility of life on Mars is a good example, says Markley, of the way in which scientists’ objectives and goals are shaped by their cultural locations.

Engages with: Critics of science fiction (Suvin, Franklin, Hayles); Latour; Derrida; Carl Sagan (more as a primary source, though).

Chapter-by-Chapter:
1. "A Situation in Many Respects Similar to Our Own": Mars and the Limits of Analogy: Eighteenth and nineteenth century speculations about Mars. These ideas focused on questions of habitability - can the inhabitants of Mars perform agriculture? Western criteria for what counts as "intelligent life" are established: "'intelligence' is defined implicitly and explicitly in terms of resource extraction, agricultural production, and energy consumption" (32). Examined: Daniel Defoe; Johannes Kepler; other early astronomers; ends with Schiaperelli's introduction of the idea of the "canali".

2. Lowell and the Canal Controversy: Mars at the Limits of Vision: Percival Lowell, a rich-man astronomer operating in the US in the late nineteenth century, bought himself a site in New Mexico from which he believed he could see Mars like no one else. He believed that Mars was crisscrossed by canals, which, when combined with the theory of Martian polar ice caps, spoke to him of intelligent life on the planet which had banded together in a desperate struggle for survival. Lowell was highly contested by other astronomers of the time, including Alfred Russel Wallace, but the public loved his theory, in part, Markley says, because people were trying to figure out what exactly Darwin meant to them - and to process information about disastrous famines in India and China (see Mike Davis, Late Victorian Holocausts). Some people saw the canals as evidence of need for socialism and more equitable resource distribution, but Lowell believed that the canals were proof that Martians had gotten over the pesky drive to help the downtrodden and let their elite take over matters in order to save the planet.

3. "Different Beyond the Most Bizarre Imaginings of Nightmare": Mars in Science Fiction, 1880-1913: Martian science fiction in this time was "a favored site for thought experiments about sociocultural evolution" (115). H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds was a dark vision, but there are also feminist utopias (Alice Ilgenfritz Jones and Ella Merchant, Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance, 1891) and utopian socialism (Politics and Life on Mars, anonymous, 1883; Alexander Bogdanov, Red Star, 1905, and Engineer Menni, 1913).

4. Lichens on Mars: Planetary Science and the Limits of Knowledge: The end of the canal theory comes, courtesy of photography, but, as Markley says, there are still significant portions of the public who believe in life on Mars despite the disproving of Lowell's pet idea. Also, "a good deal of the scientific literature...of the period discloses a nostalgia for the possibility of intelligent life on Mars and a hunger for hard data that might answer questions about the planet once and for all" (151).

5. Mars at the Limits of Imagination: The Dying Planet from Burroughs to Dick: The bulk of the chapter examines Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom series, and its complicated Mars, "a heroic version of the vanishing American frontier, but one interlaced with strains of chivalric medievalism, technological romance, social Darwinism, Lowellian planetology, and sword-and-sorcery adventure" (183). Also examines Mars in pulp fiction. Makes links between Depression-era Dust Bowl scarcity and nightmare images of Martian desertification. Ends with Philip K. Dick's political criticism of 1950s technological triumphalism, then a section on Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, a bestseller highly critical of human ecological practices.

6. The Missions to Mars: Mariner, Viking, and the Reinvention of a World: The Mariner missions, which were flown in the 1960s but didn't successfully land on the planet until 1976, and the Viking missions, which were flown in 1975, reveal very little hope of life on Mars, but do provide interesting material for geologists to analyze. The bureaucratic establishment reacts by ceasing funding to Martian exploration (public support is not there, without the possibility of discovering life). Some scientists continue to try to prove the existence of possible past life on Mars, in some distant past or in some radically diminished form (terran "extremophiles", or forms of life which thrive on extremely little subsistence, are used as possible evidence of lurking Martian microbes). Major theoretical problems exist: how do you use Earthly chemistry to test for Martian life forms?

7. Transforming Mars, Transforming "Man": Science Fiction in the Space Age: Nostalgia for non-dead Mars proliferates. "Mars assumes a paradoxical significance in science fiction between 1960 and 2000: it is both a dead world that resists human efforts to understand, colonize, or transform it and the site of humankind's next giant leap in its technoscientific, and even spiritual, evolution" (270). Included: Philip Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968); Robert Heinlein's brawny, masculinist Stranger in a Strange Land (1961); Luduk Pesek's pessimistic juvenile fiction, The Earth is Near (1975); Paul Verhoven's terraform fantasy "Total Recall" (1989).

8. Mars at the Turn of a New Century: Scientific questions about Mars remain open. The search for life continues to drive experimental strategy. The question of water and its possible past (or present, in the form of subareological seas) existence on the planet takes primacy. Also covered: the Pathfinder mission (1997) and the Mars Global Survivor (1996) and Mars Odyssey (1998). The Mars Direct group, which wants to get to Mars ASAP and begin possible terraforming or colonization efforts, operates under a "new frontier" ideology which sees Mars as a great outlet for humanity strained to the breaking point by capitalistic needs for expansion.

9. Falling into Theory: Terraformation and Eco-Economics in Kim Stanley Robinson's Martian Trilogy: KSR's books are examined as a complex middle point between exploitative utopian terraformation last-frontier ideology and dystopic visions of humanity's destruction of Mars. Markley sees the novels as heavily promoting the concept of eco-economics, or the theory that ecological impacts should be figured into cost-benefit analyses when planning development, and using Mars as a platform for developing this idea.

Reviews (significant flaws, strengths?): A Jstor search turns up no reviews. Hopefully this doesn't mean that this book got unfairly passed over. Highly ambitious in its correlation of scientific advances and the literary imagination. Provocative ideas about public desire to engage with issues of ecological scarcity, resource depletion, and environmental destruction - either by using Mars as a cautionary tale, or by employing the planet as an escape valve or imagined new front for resource exploitation, a la the Mars Direct project. Effectively historically grounded - through the lens of Mars-thought, Markley follows the evolution of human ideas about the end purpose of the human race from post-Darwinian anxiety through the nuclear age through the era of supposedly enhanced environmental awareness.



New words (linked defs from OED, password needed): Areology (the study of Mars); areography (guess what?); exobiology (occuring or working outside the atmosphere); maieutic ("relating to or designating the Socratic process, or other similar method, of assisting a person to become fully conscious of ideas previously latent in the mind"); regolith ("the unconsolidated solid material covering the bedrock of a planet"); spectrograph ("An instrument used for photographing a spectrum. More widely, any apparatus for producing a visual record of a spectrum (optical or otherwise)" -significant in this book because astronomers of the late 19th century, like Lowell, used the spectrograph to make assertions about the constitution of Mars' atmosphere); suborn ("to bribe, induce, or procure (a person) by underhand or unlawful means to commit a misdeed"); terraform (to make something more like Earth).

Facty bonbons: Firstly, people in the 1960s used to use the word “grok” to mean “get” or “understand,” because that was what supposedly superior Martians in the 1959 book Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert K. Heinlein, did instead of speaking. “To grok was to experience, believe, and know simultaneously” (275). Secondly, the Pathfinder expedition, landed in 1997, had a little foot-tall mechanical robot that it sent out to gather data about Mars’ surface. Name of the rover? Sojourner Truth (311). Thirdly, author Alexander Bogdanov died in 1928 after exchanging all of his blood with that of a student suffering from malaria and tuberculosis (to prove that blood transfusion works) (136).

Books to follow up on:

Primary: Philip K. Dick - Martian Time-Slip, Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch; Luduk Pesek - The Earth is Near (juvenile fiction from the 1970s); the works of Kim Stanley Robinson; Donald A. Wollheim – The Secret of the Martian Moons (juvenile fiction from the 1960s, cited p 218); genre of early 20th-c sci fi produced texts called "edisonades", which focused on human technological advancement and superiority, a la Thomas Alva (see Suvin, below).

Secondary: H. Bruce Franklin – Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century; Katherine Hayles – How We Became Posthuman; Kim Stanley Robinson, ed. - Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias; Darko Suvin – Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On The Poetics and History of a Literary Genre.