Author: Elizabeth Carnegie
E-mail: e.carnegie@sheffield.ac.uk
Institution: University of Sheffield
Title: 'An Espionage Sortie in the American Culture Wars': Exploring the Imagined
World of 'Reasons Late-Modern Other'
Abstract:
Christianity, once so embedded within the value systems that underpinned Western
ways of ordering the material world has been subsumed through the process of
secularisation of the state. Thus, museums, and in particular science museums, as
rational and often pro-Darwinist spaces supporting ‘serious leisure’, rarely overtly
reflect religious standpoints. Creationists in conflict with, and excluded by this
worldview, may picket sites as a form of resistance against state sanctioned
imagined ‘truths’ which they cannot endorse, or seek only leisure spaces that reflect
their beliefs. This paper explores the ways in which the ‘Answers in Genesis’
Creation Museum, Kentucky, a key example of a growing number of rebuttal
museums and visitor attractions which construct the world as Bibleland, allows
visitors who adhere to creationist principles to feel included. This museum, by
providing a family day out to for example Amish, Mennonite, and Southern Baptists
communities, allows them to be tourists within a space which imagines for them the
‘real’ world within otherwise ‘alien soil’. Ironically, as this paper will highlight, this
museum also attracts a number of critics, academics and non believing
tourists/visitors who then become the outsiders uncertain of how to respond to the
confusing cultural messages and antiDarwinism reasoning. Ultimately, this paper
explores the fluid nature of museums as knowledgeshapers and constructed ‘truth
givers’ and discusses how this imagined articulation of a ‘Young Earth’ destabilises
perceived world views and also destabilises the role of the museum as a
‘postmodern space in a relation of permanent critique’ constructed to shape and
reflect societal values.
Author Bio:
Elizabeth Carnegie: Research areas include museums and audiences and public
memory, and religion and cultural identity. She is currently researching the role of
contemporary faith in society and the shaping of cultural and religious identities
within Diasporic communities. She currently lectures in arts and culture at the
University of Sheffield and holds a PhD in representation (Edinburgh) and an M.A in
Museum Studies (Leicester). A former curator, she has participated in a number of
high profile and award winning projects including being a member of the team
devising the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art, Glasgow (1993).