Presented at the Third Annual Arlington

Nothing in life is a given. Everything instead must acquire a more fixed state of "givenness, " and museums serve as some of the most giving institutions in this process of drawing out the for-grantedness of our ontological contracts in the New World Order. Giving knowable qualities to everything requires all things to be pieced apart, albeit in some clearly aesthetic manner, so that the play of power through discourses of holistic knowing can piece these parts together again, granting us fixity in our reality's givenness. In a hyperreal time, when models precede meaning and maps come before terrains, museums function as critically important modelling agencies and mapping centers to meld ontological meanings with cultural terrains. So we are not surprised anymore to learn that there are over 7,000 up and running in North America, and one or two more open every week (Belcher, 1991: xiii). And, if there is one museum on this continent, which might singularly represent all of these tendencies, then it is the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Indeed, the American Museum has done much over the past 125 years to define and popularize the nature of humanity's place in Nature for all Americans. From its early days as a material sign of New York's Gilded Age philanthropists to its current activities as an erstwhile defender of biodiversity, this private scientific institution has been a central site for giving modern 2Americans their understanding of Nature, history, museums, and even America itself since it first opened its doors to the public on Central Park West during 1877. In many ways, the American Museum of Natural History also is the most well-known and highly regarded of any museum in the United States. Other municipal museums in Boston, Charleston and Philadelphia are older, Chicago's Field Museum is nearly as impressive and innovative, the Smithsonian's many museums contain larger collections; but, the American Museum of Natural History sits in New York, and many of its collections have been gathere