Notorious: Introduction to the special issue

Lion Attacking a Dromedary (LAD) is an extraordinarily controversial example of 19th century taxidermy and storytelling that brings into focus the challenges of museum operations as inclusive spaces in the 21st century. Recently commemorated in objects such as snow globes and coffee table books, this diorama has been on continuous display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in the USA since it was acquired at the turn of the 20th century. While the diorama has undergone small changes and moved across multiple locations, the values and beliefs of museums, their users, and detractors have changed radically. This issue revisits a very specific example of a controversial asset that includes human remains to consider the complexity of representation and artifact for the 21st century.

The diorama was originally created in Paris, France for the 1867 Exposition Universelle by the Verreaux brothers, heirs to the 19th-century Maison Verreaux taxidermy studio. The 1867 Paris Exposition Universelle was a typical world's fair, a festival where a host country like France could display its might, wealth, cultural values, and status as an imperial global power. Like many other world's fairs in the industrializing western world, the Paris fair displayed what was considered at the time to be the finest art and most advanced technology from Europe and the United States. World's fairs were considered a celebration of modernity and progress.

These world's fairs and exhibitions, frequently displayed depictions of other cultures and peoples that the dominant settler cultures of Europe and the Americas viewed as uncivilized or primitive, relegating them to an exotic “other.” The peoples depicted through this lens were frequently Indigenous peoples of Africa, the Americas, and to a lesser extent, Asia. As an example of this exotic fictionalization of human/animal relationships, this diorama claimed to illustrate the North African world (Figure 1).

The diorama depicts an exaggerated scene of what we take to be a North African man riding a camel that is being attacked by a male lion. The man wears clothing that is a combination of multiple ethnic groups, creating an appearance that audiences from the mid-19th century would read as a non-culturally specific “Arab type.” A female lion lies dead at the camel's feet, presumably having lost the initial conflict with the rider. Though DNA analysis of these types of taxidermized skin is not conclusive, the lions are likely Barbary lions, members of a subspecies of Asiatic lion extirpated from North Africa in the mid-20th century due to over-hunting and habitat destruction.

The mid-1800s witnessed a rise in imports from Asia and the Middle East as imperial colonial nations expanded trade in the early industrial era, leading to a fetishizing of Asia and North Africa as part of an “Orientalist” fashion arising throughout Europe. Despite being characterized as Arab Courier for decades, the diorama's rider's clothing bears little resemblance to any specific culture from the Arab world. Rather, the display mounted by the Verreaux brothers is a fictional assemblage of cultural references—presenting an exoticized orientalist vision that would appeal to the Parisian audiences of that era.¹

The year following the Exposition Universalle, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) purchased the diorama for their own displays. By 1898, the diorama was deemed unscientific by the AMNH staff and bound for destruction. In 1899, Andrew Carnegie purchased it for $50 (about 10% of the average annual salary for an employed white man in the USA, and 40% of the salary of an unskilled female working full-time). Carnegie also paid the $45 shipping fee from New York to Pittsburgh so it could be presented in his newly opened museum. While it has remained on display at CMNH since 1899—the diorama has changed locations multiple times, eventually landing in the Hall of African Mammals in the 1980s, where it was the only wildlife display in the museum to include a representation of a human.²

The diorama has undergone a number of small changes and restorations, including adding and removing a desert background, replacing the figure's hands with the cast hands of Carnegie Museum's preparator, changing the position of the rider to hide a rip in the camel's hide, and the addition of a fallen rifle, to heighten the scene's drama. During a 2017 restoration and reinterpretation, it was discovered, through a CT scan, that the figure's head contained the skull and jawbone of an individual of unknown origin. At this time the diorama was also moved to its current location, a place of prominence near the entryway of the museum.

At the publication of this special issue of the journal, archival records had not revealed the identity of the individual whose remains were used to build head of the figure. The historical record does confirm that the Verreaux brothers were comfortable with objectification of human remains for their work, suggesting that the acquisition of this individual skull was most likely illicit and quite possibly considered unethical in an era where some classes of people were considered owned objects. There is even suspicion that some of their “acquisitions” may have been the fruit of violence. Clearly the moral codes of the time did not consider acquisition to be necessarily criminal for Parisians on expedition. Records from family expeditions to Africa and Oceania describe multiple incidences of the Verreaux family robbing graves. Those records include taking the remains of individuals recently killed in imperial wars in order to bring bones and bodies of African and Oceanic men back to Paris for experimentation. The results of these experiments included other examples of human taxidermy—like the individual known as “El Negro of Banyoles” who was on display in a small museum in Catalonia until it was repatriated to Botswana in 2000, where his remains were interred and formally recognized as a national monument.

The bystander filming of the extrajudicial murder of Black American George Floyd at the hands of police officers, and the subsequent national outcry increased focus on the USA's reckoning with racism and racial injustice in the summer of 2020. (See Curator: The Museum Journal, Issue 63.3, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/21516952/2020/63/3; Cole et al., 2020). The social unrest inspired a renewed interest on behalf of the museum to take stock of the diorama, its violent history, and problematic depictions of race and colonialism in natural history more broadly. Before this reevaluation, Lion Attacking Domedary had been displayed almost as a curiosity, with interpretations that highlighted its drama alongside critiques of the display as a representation of French Orientalism. As we noted earlier, Orientalism was popular in paintings prior to the Paris Exposition, with many artists depicting the Arab World as an exotic, primitive, and sensual place. Common scenes presented Arab men as lazy and languid, while women were portrayed as sexually available—often on display for the predominantly male French audiences. These illustrations of life masqueraded as realistic representations, often considered as validated accounts by artists who had visited North Africa and Western Asia. Orientalist painters removed any markers of modernity from the scenes they depicted—presenting a notion that these colonized regions were less developed than Europe at the time.

Representations of violent human/wildlife conflict, like Lion Attacking Dromedary, thrust forward a narrative of imagined natural struggles of life and death in exotic locales. Creating a dominant cultural representation of other distant lands as primitive; as cultures lacking overt markers of European civilization or culture. The essays in this special issue delve into what we can now understand about these museum objects, arguing that the problems we encounter with this specific diorama are much deeper, more insidious, and may even threaten the museum enterprise as it claims to present and understand aspects of our culture.

These troubling histories present robust curatorial challenges. From a pedagogical perspective, Lion Attacking Dromedary affords opportunities for the museum community to discuss the fraught history of natural history collecting and display as tools of Eurocentric colonial power. Like many of its counterparts still on display at museums around the world, this diorama solicits strong reactions from the public and visitors. Some love the diorama as a quaint piece of Pittsburgh history, while others vociferously condemn it as a monument to white supremacy that must be dismantled.

We use this special issue to convene an interdisciplinary community of scholars to interrogate the complicated histories that lead to the problem of Lion Attacking a Dromedary today. Authors consider the disturbing narratives surrounding its creation and display, the symbolic value of the person and nonhuman animals displayed, and the actual human–animal stories embodied in the diorama. Working at the intersections of the environmental humanities, museum studies, natural history, art history, animal studies, and visual culture studies the articles in this issue will interrogate the intertwined problems of imperialism, biodiversity loss, institutional racism, and the politics of representation and display. We hope that this issue allows museums a guide for considering the troubling histories of many of their historic displays and artifacts, those that bring our enterprise into disrepute, and to develop strategies for truth and reconciliation with these troubled pasts.