{"id":16637,"date":"2020-03-01T23:13:39","date_gmt":"2020-03-02T05:13:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/?p=16637"},"modified":"2020-03-01T23:13:39","modified_gmt":"2020-03-02T05:13:39","slug":"a-visit-to-the-field-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/janetheactuary\/2020\/03\/a-visit-to-the-field-museum.html","title":{"rendered":"A Visit to the Field Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"
The Field Museum; https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/photographingtravis\/41600203020<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

So last weekend, when hubby and the boys were all at a Boy Scout outing, I took advantage of the warm weather and the museum \u201cfree day\u201d to go to the Field Museum.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a funky sort of museum in that it\u2019s a combination of a true \u201cnatural history museum\u201d (dinosaurs, animals) and what the Europeans would call a \u201cmuseum of ethnology\u201d \u2014 and my interest generally lies in the ethnology side.\u00a0 (The evolution\/dinosaurs display has a recreation of a prehistoric rainforest which frightened my then-preschooler when we attempted to view the exhibit some time ago; since then, I went back and walked through the whole thing but it wasn\u2019t the sort of thing that I wanted to return to again and again.)<\/p>\n

In particular:<\/p>\n

the museum has a substantial display on Africa<\/a>.\u00a0 It starts with a feature about a holiday in Dakar, Senegal, then takes you to the Bamum and Tuareg cultures, explains metalworking in Ethiopia, and so on, with various artifacts.\u00a0 (There\u2019s also a section on animals and the environment, which I skipped.)\u00a0 It\u2019s quite nice, even though it\u2019s also getting a bit long in the tooth \u2014 that is, the \u201cfamily in Senegal\u201d part has black-and-white photographs where it seems it could be easily updated, since it\u2019s not meant to be historic but present-day.<\/p>\n

What I hadn\u2019t remembered was that after viewing all these exhibits, you end up in a section on the slave trade (explaining that Africa was vulnerable to European colonization because of the loss of its people through slaving) and the life of slaves in the Americas.\u00a0 I am inclined to think that this was new, though I can\u2019t say for certain.\u00a0 At any rate, it didn\u2019t really seem to fit \u2014 it was no longer \u201cethnology\u201d but American history (for which, to be sure, there is no dedicated museum in Chicago, only the Chicago-specific Chicago History Museum and the African-American-specific DuSable Museum).<\/p>\n

I then walked through parts of the Ancient Egypt<\/a> exhibit, which always strikes me as something of an anomaly in the way it displays actual human corpses, but since these are \u201cmummies,\u201d we think of them as somehow \u201cnot real people,\u201d I guess.\u00a0 But the exhibit is an interesting combination of mummies and information\/artifacts related to this, and a considerable amount of information on daily life.<\/p>\n

Up next:\u00a0 I went upstairs.\u00a0 I skipped the \u201cAbbott Hall of Conservation: Restoring Earth\u201d and the website<\/a> certainly indicates I didn\u2019t miss much: videos and photographs and \u201chands-on learning tools\u201d which generally mean computer displays, no?\u00a0 The Tibet display seemed smaller than I remembered it and \u2014 grrr \u2014 the Cyrus Tang Hall of China appears to have upgraded the exhibit on China at the costs of requiring an additional ticket, making it the second \u201cextra charge\u201d permanent exhibit at the museum (the first being a children\u2019s exhibit about bugs).\u00a0 Why this, of all the exhibits, requires an extra charge, isn\u2019t clear to me.\u00a0 Is it as simple as supply and demand and expecting that, as the newest exhibit, people will choose to pay the upcharge ($8 for adults, or $6 if you\u2019re upgrading from one ticketed exhibit to all) so that this is a revenue boost win?<\/p>\n

At any rate, I continued on to the Regenstein Halls of the Pacific<\/a>.\u00a0 Unlike the African and Egyptian artifacts, which were just acquired in an anonymous sort of way, here the exhibit starts with a story: in the early 1900s, one man travelled throughout the Pacific islands collecting objects:\u00a0 masks, wood carvings, instruments, and the like.\u00a0 We are told that he bought them with trade goods such as machetes.\u00a0 And it really is a massive collection, with explanations of what the rituals were in which the objects were used.<\/p>\n

Now, that\u2019s only half the exhibit \u2014 the other half is, quite honestly, much less interesting, featuring a bit on the geological history of the islands (volcanos, etc.) and some bits about present-day occupants (a recreation of a Fiji market).<\/p>\n

Then it\u2019s back downstairs, and then, well, it all gets a bit Woke, with the Robert R. McCormick Halls of the Ancient Americas<\/a>.\u00a0 As an incidental comment, the entire display of the, well, non-Ancient Americas (except the Northwest Coast & Artic Peoples) is being completely re-done.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a surprise, I guess, given that this was one of the oldest parts of the museum, and the last time I was there, consisted of display cases with clothing, tools, etc. But the emphasis now seems to be on \u201cpeople think that Indians disappeared and we are still very much here,\u201d and, quite honestly, if the exhibit becomes focused on modern day life, well, a bunch of video clips and text with a sort of idealized picture of native culture would, let\u2019s face it, be of interest to very small numbers of visitors.\u00a0 (And, what\u2019s more, this emphasis on \u201cpeople think we no longer exist, but we do\u201d strikes me as a bit weird.\u00a0 The Ancient Egypt exhibit has no interest in telling us what life is like for modern Egyptians, for example.)<\/p>\n

But anyway, back to the Ancient Americas.<\/p>\n

The exhibit is organized based on the development of societies into increasingly more complex communities, from the first archeological signs of arrowheads, to the development of farming, pottery, villages, and then eventually to empires.\u00a0 And here are there bits of text:<\/p>\n

\"\"
Field Museum; own work<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Was hunting and gathering \u201ca great way to live\u201d?\u00a0 This display tells only a small part of the picture.\u00a0 Farming became widespread for reasons other than just the stupidity of those who invented it.\u00a0 The notion that hunters and gathers \u201crespected\u201d children misses that, to my understanding, infanticide was common if a woman gave birth and still had a child who needed to be carried as they moved from place to place.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Field Museum; own work<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

And this is another one:\u00a0 we should all still be hunters and gatherers.<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s the third piece of text that had me SMDH:<\/p>\n

\"\"
Field Museum; own work<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The text?<\/p>\n

Many of us honor sacrifice in our religious beliefs today.<\/p>\n

Sacrifice has played a role in the religious beliefs of many people throughout history and in all parts of the world.\u00a0 Even today, many religions \u2014 maybe even your own \u2014 honor the sacrifice and bloodshed of key figures or incorporate sacrifice of some kind in spiritual practices.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Did the author of these sentences really fail to understand the difference between the belief that a religious figure undertook self-sacrifice or that believers should do so (Jesus, martyrs, the Lenten sacrifices of Christians), and the killing of prisoners in the name of appeasing the gods?\u00a0 Is it not generally understood that part of the reason that the Aztec Empire fell so easily to the Spaniards is that their treatment of their subjects, including the seizing of victims for sacrifice, meant that those subject peoples were willing to ally themselves with the Spaniards?\u00a0 Or was it simply deemed necessary to whitewash this aspect of the Aztec Empire, all the more because of the exhibits constant linking (via text and videos) of these ancient peoples to their modern day distant descendants (or perhaps not descendants at all, but simply people whose ancestors occupied similar territory, since, after all, we\u2019re talking ancient history, that is, prior to the \u201ctribal\u201d structure with continuity to modern times).<\/p>\n

I should also add that, in the same manner as the Africa exhibit ends with the slave trade, so, too, the Ancient Americas exhibit ends with a room that functions as a sort of memorial to the cultures ended and lives lost over the centuries after European contact.\u00a0 Maybe that will eventually be moved over to the non-Ancient exhibit, when that\u2019s complete; maybe the intention really is for the two exhibits to have a divide of 1492, and for the new exhibit to tell a story very much with a lens of loss due to the Europeans.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s when it really struck me: \u00a0 this whole narrative is incomplete.\u00a0 In each of the three exhibits, the Europeans are the outsiders who come in and upend everything (even though that narrative isn\u2019t as stark, and more incidental in the case of the Pacific Islands).\u00a0 But nowhere is there any sort of exhibit in which the Europeans have any sort of culture other than that of conqueror and slaver.\u00a0 Heck, there are multiple explanations of how the Europeans ended up the more technologically advanced conquerors.\u00a0 There\u2019s Jared Diamond\u2019s explanation (it was all geography, both in terms of domesticatible animals\/plants and the large land mass of Eurasia enabling technological exchange over time) and, dangit, it seems to me there was another book out not too long ago that basically said it was all cyclical and bad luck that the Chinese fell behind.\u00a0 Even if there\u2019s a degree to which they\u2019d need to put up disclaimers of \u201cthis is all one interpretation\u201d wouldn\u2019t that be worthwhile to explain?\u00a0 And wouldn\u2019t it make sense to give the Europeans a culture, other than just swarming aliens?<\/p>\n

So that\u2019s my museum-ing for the time being.\u00a0 What do you think?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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