Re-basing Scientific Authority: Anthropocene Narratives in the Carnegie Natural History Museum

Abstract

Natural history museums legitimate and motivate social and political actions through their representations of science-society relations. The Carnegie Natural History Museum has brought narratives of the Anthropocene into its museum spaces, offering novel representations and understandings of human-nature and science-society relations. As a contested concept, the Anthropocene entails at least two tensions in how it might be represented, encouraging different kinds of social and political projects: the Anthropocene may encourage new political formations and opportunities as well as new, better relations between science and society. Motivated to engage with the Anthropocene out of commitments to affirm a strong and pronounced social role of the scientific community, museum actors defend scientific authority through appeals to reflexive scientific processes and science's necessary relations with other modes of thought. Reflexive scientific processes allow scientists and scientific institutions to manage their social and political values, while science's relations with artistic and ethical thinking legitimizes the use of science in responses to explicitly political and social problems. The Carnegie Museum enacts these bases for authority through its Anthropocene narratives, re-drawing the boundaries of scientific authority to include political questions while simultaneously making the boundaries between legitimate, scientific knowledge and other modes of thought less salient.