40 W hen the exhibition, Darwin, opened at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) on November 19, 2005 there was a certain amount of trepidation in the air. One com- mentator noted “It isn’t very often that a mere visit to an exhibition counts as a political act, but that’s certainly how it feels these days as you mount the steps of the American Museum of Natural History.” 1 Indeed, this sense of controversy and heightened politics ensured that the Museum failed to get any corporate sponsorship to support the exhibition and its development. However, anticipated picket lines, hate mail, and sabotage within the gallery failed to materialize publicly. Shortly after the exhibition opened, Judge John Jones ruled, against a school Board of Trustees in Dover, Pennsylvania, that it was unconstitutional to teach intelligent design as scientific theory in public schools, in turn success- fully pushing aside serious legal consideration of Intelligent Design theory as a rival to Evolutionary theory in explaining the order and diversity of the natural world. Rather than framing a controversy between sacred and secular knowledge, the Darwin exhibit at the AMNH asks a fundamentally different and difficult question: How do you display science qua science? If objects are the central tools that curators use to tell stories, what objects do you choose when displaying a scientific theory? This review seeks to ask how exhibitions such as Darwin produce, as well as represent, ideas about science as a particular kind of enterprise and practice, one dedicated to the progressive accrual of objective knowledge, able to transcend political tensions between sacred and secular knowledge in the present day.The review has emerged from a graduate seminar in the Program in Museum Studies at New York University,entitled Anthropology in and of Museums. Each member of the class visited the exhibition with a particular theme, problematic or issue in mind, which we then brought together during our seminar discussions and edited together into a single review. We aimed to use the tools available to us as museum anthro- pologists to critically unpack some of the structures of thought, display strategies, broader contexts, and experiences of the exhibition. Our themes interro- gated the exhibition from a number of different directions, asking what the exhibition could illumi- nate for us about the culture of science in the mid– 19th century and today; the practice of science and of scientists; and the impact of spectacle, collections, materiality, and technology (e.g. the museum com- plex) on both the production of science and its public representation. However, rather than undertaking intensive background research into these issues, we privileged the exhibition as a site of knowledge pro- duction—asking how the particular configuration of objects, images, text, and space facilitated our understanding of these issues. Darwin, curated by Niles Eldridge of the AMNH’s Division of Paleontology, traces Charles Darwin’s life as a scientist, moving from his progressive childhood, though his Cambridge education, to the formative stimulation of his journey through the Galapagos Islands, back to London, and eventually to Down House, his family home and laboratory. At the entrance, visitors are introduced to Darwin by a large text panel linking Darwin to other Great MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 40–45, ISSN 0892-8339, online ISSN 1548-1379. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals. com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/mua.2007.30.1.40. Review Essay: Darwin on Display Haidy Geismar, Lindsay Anderberg, Miranda Appelbaum, Jamieson Bunn, Cristina Diaz-Carrera, Robert Forloney, Sarah Malaika, Erin McLaughlin, Kristen Olson Eckman, Kathryn Osborn, Laura Potts, and Regina Richter