"Outlandish-Fruits": Commissioning Nature for the Museum of Man

Abstract

In simple antiquarianism ... the past does not have to justify its claim of interest on us, nor do its monuments have to present their credentials as proper research subjects . . . . One is tempted to say that this position solves the problem of the relationship between present and past by the simple gesture of abolishing the present as such, and that its emblem might well be found in Melville's late consumptive usher to a grammar school [who] loved to dust his old grammars; it somehow mildly reminded him of his mortality. -Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Historicism'-