While debate continues as to when the Anthropocene epoch was born, collectors of nomological emblems of still living collectives and other fans of the Necrolithic era will celebrate its 21st birthday come December:
and canonizing now dead individuals as nomological emblems of still living collectives in Nature and History. An anatomo-politics of human and non-human bodies is sustained by accumulating and classifying such necroliths in the museum’s observational/expositional performances.
-- Timothy W. Luke :
“Museum Pieces: Politics and Knowledge at the American Museum of Natural History”
Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997).
Natural history museums, like the American Museum, constitute one decisive means for power to de-privatize and re-publicize, if only ever so slightly, the realms of death by putting dead remains into public service as social tokens of collective life, rereading dead fossils as chronicles of life’s everlasting quest for survival,
-- Timothy W. Luke :
“Museum Pieces: Politics and Knowledge at the American Museum of Natural History”
Australasian Journal of American Studies (December 1997).
