Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology

by Brian Noble

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.

Genres: Nonfiction, Dinosaurs, Science

512 pages, Hardcover

First published April 29, 2016

Reviews

[Clare O'Beara · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all know what dinosaurs look like, though we have never seen one. We have seen fossilised skeletons and reconstructions, imagined scenes and technical wizardry. Why do dinosaurs interest anyone beyond scientists, to the point that money, entertainment and politics are associated with dinosaurs? Brian Noble who is an anthropologist, studies humans by studying how we relate to dinosaurs in this detailed factual look at ARTICULATING DINOSAURS.

Authors in the past have frequently portrayed a 'lost world' scenario in which dinosaurs can still be found; the film industry has followed suit. We seem to like the concept of the terrible lizards, massive and varied life forms which roamed and ruled the earth for longer than humans have been human, only to go extinct through natural calamity. We admire their size, power and in some cases, predatory skills. They make sedimentary geology exciting, and excite generations of young biologists to discover morphology, ecology and evolution. Not only that but we like imagining them and how they lived. Noble explains that the process of recreating for book or film not only requires study but contributes to and informs the ongoing scientific process. Arthur Conan Doyle's 'Lost World' is referenced in sociological terms as the plateau of saurians in South America is seen as a manly challenge by the protagonist who leaves the world of women behind in order to explore. 'King Kong' contains a dinosaur scene in the original film and the remake. Of course, there is the 'Jurassic Park' series in recent times.

Photos include early models, assembled skeletons in museums and some of the people involved in the research or presentation of the beasts, including Conan Doyle. Computer modelling and better photography and film techniques have allowed us better to decide how the giants must have walked, eaten and run, and debate whether they were good mothers. This book is not written for popular consumption which is why I am not giving a better rating, but those concerned with the scholarly research and techniques of dinosaur representation may well give it more stars.
I downloaded an ARC from Net Galley for an unbiased review.

[Fantasy Literature · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 stars from Bill, read the full review at FANTASY LITERATURE

I have to confess that Articulating Dinosaurs (2016) by Brian Noble wasn’t quite what I’d expected, though that was certainly more my fault for not reading the description closely and in its entirety. Basically, any author/publisher has me at “dinosaurs,” so everything after that is just so much superfluous verbiage. So yes, I can’t say I was at all fully prepared for the academic/critical theory nature of the work, though it didn’t take too many early references to Lacan or Foucault before I figured out my misperception and readjusted my expectations. It’s been a few years (OK, decades) since my crit days, and I can’t say that even when I was reading critical theory that I was wholly enjoying or comprehending it (I do recall doing a lot of back-and-forth page-flipping re-reading with Lacan, for instance. Plus, I’m pretty sure there was swearing). Those memories didn’t quite encourage me to go back and ground myself more fully, so I just forged ahead with Noble’s work, cheerfully acknowledging my ignorance of many of his referents, and you know what — and here’s the key for those of you already thinking you’re moving on — it didn’t matter.

Because while a good amount of abstruse terminology reared its sometimes ugly/intimidating/annoying head (or, for those better versed in such things, its informative/insightful/thoughtful head), I still thoroughly enjoyed Articulating Dinosaurs for its arguments, its real-world concrete examples of points (especially in the form of the lengthy case study of a specific museum exhibit), Noble’s lucid prose (despite the inherent fogginess of some of the critical language), and the way the work places dinosaurs in a sociological/cultural context. ...read the full review at FANTASY LITERATURE

[Ilana · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extraordinary anthropological investigation dealing with the old good dinosaurs, so present in our everyday life, from the children imaginary world to the Hollywood. It goes through the complicated academic layers by using an accessible language with many interesting conclusions not only for the academic but for the wide public as well. A massive anthology based on an encyclopaedic approach for understanding a very important issue for the history of our culture and civilization.
Disclaimer: Book offered by the publisher via NetGalley.com in exchange of an honest review

[thebookiereviewer · Rating 5 out of 5]

An incredible book. A fantastic anthropologic study at the hand of none-anthropologits. It does not present dificulties at the time of reading and understanding.



Disclaimer: I got a copy from netgalley for my honest opinion

[J Earl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Articulating Dinosaurs by Brian Noble is a dense yet accessible work that crosses and brings together several disciplines. The work is challenging but rewards every bit of effort put into understanding Noble's ideas.

I have been unsure how to write this review, mainly because there is so much information I found interesting and so many connections I found illuminating. As a result I am going to primarily speak in generalities about what I personally took away from the book. When I write a review like this, I want to make clear that any misunderstanding or overreaching will be mine. Also, the goal of this approach is not to argue for what I took away so much as to give an idea of the types of thoughts the book generated in my case. Your reading will certainly lead you down different avenues of thought so my hope is that my thoughts will simply give some inkling of what types of thoughts you too may have.

When we go to a natural history museum we largely expect to see and learn about creatures of both the past and the present. As such we tend to think of what we take in as simply facts presented as facts. Yet that is a naive assumption since in presenting anything there have to be decisions about how and what to show or highlight. Taking this a step further, those decisions are also a reflection of the times during which they are made. This book uses two specific examples of dinosaurs displayed on opposite ends of the 20th century. Noble examines the actual remains, museum and social ideas that shaped the display of these remains and the various ways in which these displays were perceived by the public at large. All of this is very interesting in and of itself and Noble draws some important conclusions from this.

Yet my biggest takeaway was actually from the period after I first finished the book. I am curious about how this same process plays out in so many other fields we take for granted. My own background used advertisements and other sources to do similar things but these areas are almost obvious for such treatment. That doesn't make them less valuable just because they are more obviously a reflection of their historic periods. Now, however, I want to know where else we can look, other specialized areas that we might think of as separate from the whims of popular opinion or culture making. That type of research and analysis is what this work makes me want to find, do or at least ponder.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in museums (both casually or looking toward curatorial information), dinosaurs, social anthropology and even history in general as told through objects. The book is not a breezy read but is very accessible to anyone willing to look up the periodic specialized word.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

The published version of this review appears in the August 2017 issue of American Ethnologist, 44 (3): 543-544 (2017).

Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology. by Brian Noble. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 512 pp. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12531

While the technical study of dinosaurs and other fossil organisms belongs strictly to the field of paleontology, Brian Noble argues that because it is humans who articulate them, we need to explore the individuals, institutions, and cultural practices that create visions of and impart meanings to these awe-inspiring inhabitants of a lost Mesozoic world. He successfully demonstrates the complex nexus of technoscientific, political, and sociocultural threads that animate dinosaurs as cultural artifacts. By examining the narratives that paleontologists, writers, filmmakers, museum exhibit specialists, and toy designers tell about the nature and meaning of dinosaurs, his anthropological analysis reveals much about changing notions and competing visions of human natures and cultures.

In the first of the book’s two very distinct sections, Noble looks at paleontological research, fantasy literature, graphic novels, and Hollywood movies to describe a particular and very influential 20th-century picture of Tyrannosaurus rex as the archetypal king of the tyrant saurians—the solitary hunter and fearsome carnivore. This version of dinosaur nature derives both from the fictional lost world imaginings of authors like Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Rice Burroughs and from the colonial and eugenic evolutionary race fantasies of paleontologists like Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History. Influenced by naive Darwinian (and Lamarckian) notions of struggle and competition in nature and society and inspired by Madison Grant’s paean to Nordic superiority and plea for a eugenic future, Osborn depicted dinosaurs as powerful and decidedly masculine rulers of the Mesozoic world. Noble uses the trope of performativity to describe the manner in which Osborn’s and Doyle’s descriptions of the Mesozoic world and the political and cultural nature of dinosaurs meshed to become a dominant worldview for much of the 20th century. Greatly influenced by Bruno Latour’s science studies and Donna Haraway’s postmodernist take on primates and cyborgs, he argues that dinosaurs can be seen as both cultural and political beings: cultural in that they reflect (and contribute to) aspects of the dominant culture and political insofar as they influence (and reflect) human political concerns. Rather than proposing simple dichotomies, he sees dinosaurs and their reproductions, animations, and articulations as fully enmeshed and reciprocal relations of human natures and cultures that transcend older, simpler models of nature versus culture in anthropology.

In the second section, Noble shifts to a focus on the articulation practices used to represent dinosaurs to a modern audience through an ethnographic analysis (from 1997 to 1999 with occasional follow-ups between 2000 and 2012) of the sometimes uneasy collaboration among curators, technicians, and design and marketing staff during the planning and execution of a major dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto. Articulation practices refer to all the various activities connected with the collection and excavation of a specimen (i.e., removing it from the ground and preparing it in the lab) that result in the specimen becoming an object of scientific investigation at a museum and, ultimately, a public exhibit or spectacle with a story to tell about— among other things—the nature of the lost world of the Mesozoic.

This extremely successful and highly influential exhibit was called Maiasaura: The Life and Times of a Dinosaur. Its centerpiece was a single specimen of Maiasaura peeblesorum, a mostly complete skeleton found in the early 1990s by Native American Sherry Flamand on Blackfoot Nation tribal land in Montana and purchased from the tribal council by the museum. Through interviews with the curator and a staff of museum technicians, animators, computer graphics specialists, and marketers, Noble describes how the nature of this dinosaur was created in direct opposition to that of the earlier tyrant king, and he compares these changes to the previous lost world narrative—for example, meat eater versus plant eater, solitary versus social, male versus female. Maiasaura peeblesorum, the “good mother lizard,” performs an alternative kinder and gentler version of the Mesozoic lost world, a version of what Noble refers to as the “specimen-spectacle complex” (17) expressed in many modern museum displays, Hollywood movies, and theme parks. The Osborn-Doyle nexus that brought us T. rex as the archetypal masculine, marauding, meat-eating “terrible lizard” is juxtaposed with what can be called the Horner-Spielberg nexus, which describes Maiasaura and other duck-billed dinosaurs of the Cretaceous as peaceful, female, herd-living plant eaters that provide parental care to their nest-dwelling offspring.

As all vertebrate paleontologists—and most dinosaur loving 12-year-olds—know, this revised lost world is to a large extent the result of the scientific work of MacArthur Award–winning paleontologist Jack Horner. For the Steven Spielberg connection, think of 1988’s animated Land before Time, with its idyllic Great Valley populated by large herds of peaceful herbivorous dinosaur families (including duckbills like Maiasaura), rather than Tyrannosaurus or Velociraptor from the Jurassic Park franchise. Thus a new age articulates a new kind of dinosaur and a new vision of the Mesozoic world.

Noble is convincing when he suggests that we can learn much about human cultures, natures, and politics if we examine the stories we tell about dinosaurs. However, the book is weighed down by its reliance on an unwieldy and off-putting terminology, and some of its arguments seem thin. I’m not convinced that the description of the Cretaceous world in the exhibit can really be considered an exercise in orientalizing, in Edward Said’s sense, nor do I think that the description of the different dinosaurs that shared the Cretaceous world with Maiasaura might be “an analogy to everyday human life in Toronto, a city touted as one of the most ‘multicultural’ in the world, a place of care and concern for difference” (299). Despite these shortcomings, I found this volume engaging and provocative and look forward to my next paleontology museum visit.

[Garret · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a dinosaur enthusiast I've read many books about paleobiology and paleontologists themselves; but this is the first book I've read (or seen) that explores the relationship between the two.

It took me a few chapters (and several visits to Merriam-Webster) to understand some of the underlying anthropological principles, but I'm glad I stuck with it. The book gives a lot of insight to how we have constructed (articulated) our representations of dinosaurs and what players have impacted this view. It also does a very good job at explaining the current state of museums and how their need to generate public interest impacts their curatorial decisions.

This book is a good read for anyone interested in dinosaurs, museums, or anthropology in general.

[Marjolein (UrlPhantomhive) · Rating 3 out of 5]

Full review to come!