In the Theatre of Nature : Analysis of Natural History Exhibitions and Films from the Perspective of Cultural and Environmental Sociology

This thesis is a study of constructions of reality in visual and textual representations in current exhibitions in the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm with comparisons to the Natural History Museum in Gothenburg and minor excursions to other museums. The study also includes seven giant screen films in Cosmonova: an IMAX theatre which is part of the Swedish Museum of Natural History. The study consists of three parts: I. Historical and theoretical contextualisation: The emergence of museums is understood as an aspect of modernity and nature, and analytical concepts from semiotics, deconstruction and discourse analysis are presented and discussed. This part also includes a discussion of anthropomorphism and andropocentric stereotyping and a study of the emergence of the environmental question in society, science, museums and in the disciplines of sociology and cultural studies. II. Empirical analysis: Starting with questions what stories modern exhibitions in museums of natural history tell and how animals, bodies, humans and the environment are represented in the exhibitions and films I discuss different aspects of the dualism of nature and culture in relation to other dualisms such as animal/human, nature/society and ecology/economy. The dualism nature/culture that is expressed in exclusions of conventional signs for human culture is problematic from an environmental perspective. I pose the question of whether or not the marginalized phenomenon of the cabinet of curiosity that combine both “naturalia” and “artificialia” and displays phenomena classified as abnormal, can provide a key to narratives about co-evolution, environmental issues and variations in morphology and behaviour. III. Discussion: The potential for transcending the dualism of nature and culture, both theoretically-and practically-speaking, and particularly in relation to the environmental question, is discussed, as is the possibility that museums can be(come) reflexive sub-political arenas for dialogues between politics, science and people