Lost Knowledge

The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City is a quick bus ride from my place -- it's not too far from the Jazz Bakery -- and is right across the street from one of the rare city parks (below) in the area.



When I asked the attendant at the tiny museum's entrance/gift shop to describe the scope of the collection in one sentence, he said it is a natural history museum with a focus on technology. Nature, history, and technology...how could a geographer not be interested? The two-story house converted into a museum was recommended to me by great friend, art historian, and special collections librarian at the University of South Florida Keli Rylance. After touring the museum's text-rich exhibits and upstairs Russian tea and cookie room (complete with Russian people) I would describe the place as a spooky collection of lost ontologies that leaves you seriously questioning the Enlightenment scientific endeavor. Not because the endeavor is wrong but because imagining it's death as the guiding way to interact with the world becomes easy. Soon science as we know it will have its corner of the museum along with all the other lost truths about health, animals, God, and the universe. Next to the 21st century science exhibit will be one that tells us how angels move mountains, or one that explains in excruciating detail how eating whole dead mice and toast together cures one of the consumption, or one that pictures the anatomy of lost species of mammals, or one that explains how building a tower to the Moon would cause the Earth to topple out of its orbit and crash into the Sun. Among many others these are all real exhibits in the museum, and they put you in a space somewhere between art and science, where cold hard facts cannot exist. Living in that space is important for the advancement of peace. Truth can rarely be known, intention is always murky, and reactions based on these slippery assumptions can only lead to hurt.



Imagine that we connected the Moon and the Earth with a big steel beam. The Moon would not orbit the Earth as it does now -- and for at least half the globe there would be no Moon in the night sky ever again. Technology would trump cosmology. I think this is an excellent way to think about the geographer's project. It is a hyperbolic example to demonstrate that we live in a universe whose functions are interconnected in complex ways and though certainly human technology is one of those functions there are actions we are capable of taking that jeopordize our place in the universe. A social geographer would ask "who decides who gets to see the moon from now on?" "How did they acquire that power?" "At whose expense?" a cultural geographer would ask about the meaning of the moon to future generations. What stories will they tell about it to make sense of the world? When we leave this imaginary field and apply this thinking to an observable earthly activity such as agriculture the direct consequences for human life are more poignant. What kind of food is being produced and why? What are the problems with denaturalizing the process of growing food and folding it into the political-economic, for-profit system?