Articulating Dinosaurs A Political Anthropology

About this book

In this remarkable 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 re-composed 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 (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.

Contents

1 / Can there Really be an Anthropology of Dinosaurs?

Part One / Animating the Tyrant Kingdoms
2 / Materializing Mesozoic Time/Space
3 / Land of the Fear, Home of the Bravado
4 / Animating Tyrannosaurus rex, Modelling the Perfect Race
5 / Politics/Natures: All the Way Down
6/ Vestiges of the Lost World: Recirculating the Tyrant Nexus
7 / Phantasmatics in the Systematics of Life

Part Two / Articulating the Good Mother Lizard
8 / Articulating Maiasaura peeblesorum
9 / “A Real Sense of a Dynamic Process”
10 / A Really Big Jurassic Place
11 / Need to Say, Need to Know
12 / The Difference a Lab can Make
13 / A Perfect Time for Raising a Family
14 / Technotheatrical Natures
15 / Mirabile dictu!
16 / “Just Trying to Be a Scientist”

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Biography

Brian Noble is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University.