Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)
TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management
alities of a pot are present in the object itself. You can collect pottery in a sense that does not readily apply to science. You can't collect science. 29 At one level, this is patently false. Yet, there is a sense in which the museum does not collect "ideas", but rather physical manifestation. In conclusion, I should like to suggest how this interpretation represents particular problems for the public understanding of science. In the museum, as in the classroom, science is typically presented as a text, the outcome of a process of organised, regulated consensus - open knowledge, if not openly arrived at, then openly shared. Lecturers take natural knowledge to be progressive, and apolitical. The new "American Science" exhibition at the Smithsonian manages to suggest there, is a politics, and there is a science, but that whatever the effects of one on the other, there is no implicit politics within science itself Experience suggests that, leaving aside the everyday and banal politics accredited to scientific institutions over the last two centuries, the whole of science as an organised enquriy into nature, drawing upon natural phenomena as laboratory objects, derives from a political medium, whether it be Occidental or Orientalist, European or Islamic, Polynesian or Popperian. Borrowing again from Bacon, science museums have much to learn about these relationships of "knowledge and power". The presentation of objects, historically considered, sequenced, and interpreted, prompts reflection on alternatives, as well as outcomes, and of course messages about political control, class and gender. Whether exhibiting cladism or cosmetic chemistry, curators face enormous hurdles in learning and representing alternative routes of understanding nature and applying that knowledge to human purposes. Today, it would be naive to neglect the fact that these pressures are magnified bu the realities of sponsorship. As the long history of the American Science "show" at the Smithsonian will one day reveal, science museums can rarely avoid presenting the technological object as a social "good". And where curators of science museums are left to wrestle with the contradictions of commodityworship, so too, by analogy, in natural history museums, where individual animals and minerals have been construed as "commodities", now the environment as a whole is being commodified. There are few easy choices in the use of nature. But how many curators construe themselves as political economists? If the asnwer is "few", the fact is that many remain disingenuous, and unable to reflect realities which carry implicit political messages. A personal anecdote may help make the point. Many museums and science centres have interactive games which invite visitor to test their ability to make decision on, say, the sound management of mineral, floral and faunal resources. At the Australian Museum, I played such a game, three times.
