Habitat Dioramas and the Issue of Nativeness

Habitat dioramas are museum exhibits of stuffed animals set in an imitation of their natural environment. Below the surface of the diorama's illusionistic naturalness, socio-political agendas can be identified. The focus of this article is on the Biological Museum in Stockholm, with its spectacular array of Nordic landscape reconstructions, and I argue that it constituted an archetypal example of the instrumentalization of the diorama exhibit for nationalistic purposes. Exclusively shown were landscapes of territories to which Sweden laid hegemonic claims, and the exhibited animals were turned into Swedish species, making them part of a common cultural and national tradition. Museums in other European countries also constructed dioramas that imparted to the museum visitors the unspoken message that animals are not merely distributed according to zoogeographical provinces, but can be thought of as naturally belonging to national territories. Thus the notion of biological nativeness became invested with political meaning.