Keynote Talk

Shifting the Concept of the Philippines' Natural History Museum: Reorienting the Position of 'Man and His Environment' in the Museum to Focusing on a Nation's Heritage of Geology and Biodiversity

Jeremy Robert M. Barns

Director and CESO III, National Museum of the Philippines

The first of its kind in Southeast Asia, the proposed Philippines National Museum of Natural History (PNMNH) is scheduled to open fully in April 2018. Our intention is to feature the unique natural heritage of the country in a heritage building that has been designed to adaptive reuse. The PNMNH will be that last of the three buildings that is part of the Masterplan for the National Museum complex in the Rizal Park area.

Unlike its European and North American predecessors, this natural history museum will divest itself of the colonial shroud that is bore since the early 20th century in which anthropology is heavily implicated, where human beings intervene, process and ultimately exploit the natural world. Rather than a human-centric perspective, the truly natural history museum (rather than encompassing the world) will celebrate and presage the conservation needs of our environment through interdisciplinary approaches.

The Philippines is recognized internationally as a site of mega biodiversity. The shallow, warm seas surrounding the country support the richest coral reef communities on the planet and are regarded as the epicenter of Southeast Aisan and southwestern Pacific marine diversity. Despite the desire to convert the former Department of Tourism building in 1998 and fulfill the National Museum Masterplan, several impediments curtailed its possibility until 2011.

In this paper, I will be discussing the motivations as well as aspirations for a museum to become a marker for a nation to provide better quality of life for its project mainly local visitors. Rather than presenting the ideal situation, I will be showing the challenges in the process of developing a museum in this context of seemingly unlimited resources, within the framework of the increasing important of a National Museum to provide to its visitors leisure services, facilities and sites of knowledge.

The importance of the Museum, to quote the former Philippines President Benigno Aquino III, is "not just as a showcase for the richness of our natural resources and biodiversity, but as a place of research and education to help build a more scientifically literate society."