Mario Cedeno Response 3/30

After visiting the AMNH’s culture halls, I often thought that viewers would get a better sense of a culture if they were to be immersed in it rather than simply looking at its material artifacts behind glass. Margaret Mead attempted to do this in the Hall of Pacific People in the AMNH. Her goal was to create a space that immersed the viewer through the senses of the environment from which the artifact came. She did this by using space, light, and sound to create an ambience in the hall that was intended to mimic the ambiance of the Pacific. In “The fate of the Senses in Ethnographic Modernity: The Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific People at the American Museum of Natural History” the author, Diane Losche, identifies reasons why Margaret Mead’s ideas, when brought into fruition, ultimately left viewers with a sense of failure for the exhibit. She argues that Mead failed to notice the differences that separated different realms such as writing and architecture, and the actual Pacific environment from the museum gallery in New York. Losche argues that the ultimate failure of the Hall of Pacific Peoples was “ that the very immersion in the environment fragmented knowledge, and viewers were frustrated in attempts to gain panopticonic view over the Pacific” (Losche, 241). She goes onto argues that the want to see over a whole area and therefore get a panopticonic view of a culture stems from our modernist desires and can only be achieved when “a viewer is placed in a particular and distanced vantage point from that which is able to be seen” (Losche, 241). Margaret Mead’s Hall of Pacific Peoples left viewers with a feeling of knowing only fragments of a culture and not the culture as a whole.