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| | Museum Pieces: |
 | | Beginning before and beyond the modern university, museums of natural history are essentially attempts to collect all of the world's facts, as artifacts, specimens or examples, and then classify, organize, and interpret their meanings in an effort to answer Kant's questions about humanity's knowledge, action, hope, and, implicitly, identity. |
| | Its collections are the definitive point of classification, documentation, and interpretation by which a modern nation-state reimagines all other forms of human community--groups, bands, tribes, races, cultures, civilizations--in grades of growing complexity, sophistication, and power. |
| | Indeed, the ontologues at work in accumulating, archiving or articulating any given museum's collection of objects and subjects struggle to capture as many of the representations by which men and women live in order to center their new museumic representations at the core any collective understandings of this life. |
| www.cddc.vt.edu /tim/tims/Tim530.htm (9930 words) |
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