Articulating dinosaurs : a political anthropology /
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 fic...
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Toronto ; Buffalo :
University of Toronto Press,
[2016]
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| Summary: | 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 crosscurrents 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. |
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| Physical Description: | xiii, 491 pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 9780802096968 0802096964 9781442627055 1442627050 |