Up from Africa: Natural history museums and the making of ancestral meaning

How do museum visitors relate to natural history museums and to the narratives of human evolution that they contain? This work explores the ways human evolution exhibitions are often contextualized within teleological narratives of progress from Africa to Europe, a Victorian progress motif that fixes Africa in static evolutionary prehistory. My project contends that this conceptual rationale remains fundamental to how diverse museum visitors come to understand their African evolutionary heritage. Through case studies of American, British, and Kenyan museums, my research investigates a variety of exhibition media and reconstructive images and probes, through quantitative and qualitative methods, the diverse ways museum visitors envision their evolutionary origins. The four natural history museums included as case studies are: the Natural History Museum (London), the Horniman Museum (London), the National Museums of Kenya (Nairobi) and the American Museum of Natural History (New York City). I also consider the histories and historical inter-relationships of the museums, as well as the position of each in the larger museum and anthropological community. My dissertation reveals five insights: (1) it reveals the complex ways human evolution exhibitions and their museum visitors work to co-produce anthropological ideas about Africa, a product of dynamic interplay between museum iconography and popular folklore that continues to stigmatize Africans as evolutionary relics; it also considers how these ideas are fundamentally linked to historical socio-evolutionist discourses; (2) it exposes the ways that cultural and national identity mediate museum visitor perceptions of ancestral Africa, as well as the persistent meaningfulness of African ancestry and "heritage" to communities; (3) despite this, the dissertation also reveals museum visitors, interconnected by socioeconomic status, mobility and cultural elitism, as a burgeoning transnational cultural elite defying traditional senses of cultural and national identity; (4) the work also considers how museum visitor perceptions are produced, mediated and performed in the museum context, and reconsiders approaches used to uncover audience perceptions of cultural products; and (5) it reveals the natural history museum as an institution whose public image is intricately bound to race, class, culture, and history---a political matrix that affects the museum visiting experience, engaging some while alienating others.