Transplanting a rain forest: Natural history research and public exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution, 1960-1975

Twentieth-century natural history exhibitions from the Smithsonian Institution and other natural history museums are analyzed for the source of their authority as scientific and public representations of nature. This study contrasts naturalists' place-specific evolution-based conception of nature to the abstract system-oriented paradigm of ecologists. It renders problematic assumptions about the ease of transferring formalized knowledge from the technical sphere into the public domain.;Between 1960 and 1975, exhibit-making at the National Museum of Natural History shifted from the traditional curator-controlled system to one dominated by professional writers and designers. This was accompanied by a shift in exhibit content from interpreting objects to portraying scientific concepts, and a growing interest in systems ecology over systematics. Simultaneously, design aesthetics derived from mass communication and World's Fair exhibitions changed from realistic to more abstract.;Manuscripts, correspondence, and oral histories are used to interpret extensive visual evidence. The analytical tools of the social studies of science and technology are applied to these primary sources.;The successive meanings given the tropical rain forest demonstrate its interpretive flexibility, suggesting that no single meaning exists against which the rest can be judged. Tacit knowledge encoded with the inscription devices used to construct a habitat group shows that the more realistic a representation appears to be, the more interpretive work has been required to create it. Abstract exhibits stand as an independent rhetorical strategy incommensurable with, not parasitic upon, the genre of realistic representation.;Examples from the Denver Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History during the 1930s-1950s outline the historical overlap between natural history exhibition and research. The central case at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History traces the transformation of a tropical rain forest habitat group first planned for a botany hall in the early 1960s into an example of an ecosystem in a projected ecology hall. The rain forest group was finally constructed as a symbol of fragile habitat in an environmentalist exhibition in the 1970s. Present-day exhibitions connected to the historical context come from the British Museum (Natural History) and the National Zoological Park in Washington, D.C.;It is concluded that the representations of nature inside natural history museums are culturally compelling and authoritative, both for scientists and the public, because they retain a concrete physical basis that the products of laboratory science do not.