NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUMS, NONHUMANS & THE ANTHROPOCENE: EXPLORING HUMAN-NONHUMAN RELATIONSHIPS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

Since the emergence of natural history museums during the Enlightenment they have studied and displayed the biodiversity of the Earth system. Today, this biodiversity and life on Earth are threatened by the destructive agency of humankind that caused numerous environmental challenges, as well as habitat loss and extinction of many creatures. The recognition of the irreversible impact of humanity on its environment has given rise to the term Anthropocene as naming for the current geological epoch but also as a conceptional term that gathers challenging implications of scientific, social, and cultural relevance. The related discourse is drawing attention to the importance of a profound re-thinking of human-nonhuman relationships and questions the wholeness and adequacy of modernist dualistic perspectives to tackle current environmental issues. This master thesis explores how this new discourse has entered natural history museums, by analyzing the way museum professionals reflect on humans, nonhumans, and their mutual relationship in the context of the main concepts of the Anthropocene discourse. In-depth insights of curators, directors and public engagement managers of thirteen natural history museums have been gathered through semi-structured interviews The findings of the research show that the Anthropocene discourse noticeably shapes the current presentation of and reflection on human-nonhuman relationships in natural history museums. Museum professionals increasingly start to consider social, political, and ethical questions where previously natural history display waslimited to the field of natural science research. At the same time, the study has found that there are inherent characteristics of natural history museums and the way they approach human-nonhuman relationships – such as the notion of conceptual equity of all creatures - that hold a great potential to contribute to the Anthropocene discourse themselves. Even more, their position at the intersection of science and the broader public makes natural history museums important advocates for a mutual and respectful relationship between human and nonhuman beings.