Noble, Brian E. (Author)
University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division
Physical Details: 512 pp.
Language: English
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.
...MoreReview Mareike Vennen (2018) Review of "Articulating Dinosaurs: A Political Anthropology". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 876-878).
Similar Citations
Book
Richard Fallon;
(2021)
Reimagining Dinosaurs in Late Victorian and Edwardian Literature: How the ‘Terrible Lizard' Became a Transatlantic Cultural Icon
Book
Sanz, José Luis;
(2002)
Starring T. Rex! Dinosaur Mythology and Popular Culture
Article
Brinkman, Paul;
(2006)
Bully for Apatosaurus
Article
Brinkman, Paul D.;
(2005)
Henry Fairfield Osborn and Jurassic Dinosaur Reconnaissance in the San Juan Basin, Along the Colorado-Utah Border, 1893--1900
Thesis
Brinkman, Paul David;
(2005)
The Second American Jurassic Dinosaur Rush, 1895--1905
Article
Sommer, Marianne;
(2007)
The Lost World as Laboratory: The Politics of Evolution between Science and Fiction in the Early Decades of Twentieth-Century America
Book
Davidson, Jane P.;
(2008)
A History of Paleontology Illustration
Book
Mark P. Witton;
(2018)
The Palaeoartist’s Handbook: Recreating Prehistoric Animals in Art
Book
Gabriele Ferrari;
(2023)
Polvere e ossa. Edward Drinker Cope e Othniel Charles Marsh, due paleontologi a caccia di dinosauri nel Far West
Article
Brinkman, Paul D.;
(2010)
The Second Jurassic Dinosaur Rush and the Dawn of Dinomania
Article
Maddalena Cataldi;
(2016)
Inventing the Menton Man. Rivière's Discovery as Reflected in the French Media
Article
Glendening, John;
(2009)
“The World-Renowned Ichthyosaurus”: A Nineteenth-Century Problematic and Its Representations
Article
Jordan D. II Marché;
(2019)
“Giant Birds of Old”: An 1837 poem by James Dwight Dana (?) on the supposed makers of the Connecticut Valley's fossil trackways
Article
Nieuwland, Ilja;
(2010)
The Colossal Stranger. Andrew Carnegie and Diplodocus Intrude European Culture, 1904-1912
Book
Andrea Tenca;
(2020)
Dinosauri, demoni, operai. Una storia culturale del sottosuolo tra scienza e letteratura
Article
Adelene Buckland;
(2021)
Charles Dickens, Man of Science
Article
Gorp, Baldwin Van;
Rommes, Els;
Emons, Pascale;
(2014)
From the Wizard to the Doubter: Prototypes of Scientists and Engineers in Fiction and Non-Fiction Media Aimed at Dutch Children and Teenagers
Article
Wardhaugh, Benjamin;
(2007)
Poor Robin and Merry Andrew: Mathematical Humour in Restoration England
Article
Gepper, Alexander C. T.;
(2012)
Extraterrestrial Encounters: UFOs, Science and the Quest for Transcendence, 1947--1972
Book
Messier, Gilles;
(2012)
Our Own Devices: Stories of the Machine Age
Earth Sciences History: Journal of the History of the Earth Sciences Society
British Society for the History of Mathematics Bulletin
Centaurus: International Magazine of the History of Mathematics, Science, and Technology
Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology
History and Technology
Be the first to comment!