Performing Speciation: The Nature/Culture Divide at the Creation Museum

Abstract

This essay concerns the historiographic constructions of time, space, and matter as produced and performed by Answers in Genesis, a non-profit Christian apologetics ministry, in its Creation Museum, “[a] state-of-the-art 70,000 square foot museum” in Petersburg, Kentucky. The museum “brings the pages of the Bible to life”¹ by steering its visitors through slick displays and interactive exhibits, effectively mobilizing visitors’ bodies to “bring to life” the story of young-earth creationism, a literal interpretation of Judeo-Christian scriptures that maintains the earth is only a little over six thousand years old. Creation Museum visitors find not only biblical simulations with animatronic dinosaurs sharing the garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, they also encounter a reconstruction of “Lucy,” the hominid fossil scientists identify as an early ancestor of contemporary humans (figure 1.1). Rather than standing upright like an early human, however, the Creation Museum’s figure hunches in a simian pose, knuckles dragging, spine parallel to the ground. Through exhibits like Lucy, the museum, while recognizing the existence of fossils as evidence of life forms that no longer inhabit the earth, positions itself against science’s view of the earth as billions of years old, and of the earth’s life forms—especially human beings—as the current state of millions of years of evolutionary change.