Ivory's Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants by

Elaborately carved Renaissance triptychs . . . intricate Chinese puzzle spheres . . . rounded Paleolithic Venus figures . . . mounds of Victorian-era billiard balls . . . richly decorated horns from Benin. These are the images that excite my imagination at the outset of reading Ivory’s Ghosts: The White Gold of History and the Fate of Elephants by John Frederick Walker. Walker does such a thorough and evocative job of describing the allure of ivory through the ages – its unique physical properties, its exotic origins, and its incredible beauty – that the exhibition developer in me can’t resist imaging them displayed to full effect. In my mind’s eye I can just see this array of treasures resting on fabric-covered pedestals, artfully lit in their vitrines. But that’s just the first third of the book. Continue reading, and the incredible environmental, social and political costs of our millennia-long global obsession with ivory become abundantly clear. And that’s when the exhibition developer in me fully understands that this book could serve as the basis for a major exhibition, one of those comprehensive exhibitions that takes a single topic and spins it out to tell an important and even larger cultural and environmental story. Museums have mounted exhibitions inspired by books: think of the Los Angeles County Natural History Museum’s 2004 exhibition,COLLAPSE?, inspired by Jared Diamond’s book of the same name and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s 1991 Seeds of Change exhibition, inspired by a book by Henry Hobhouse. With Ivory’s Ghosts, Walker has created the ideal background paper for a case study of how a commodity can be a source of artistic inspiration, the focus of a brutal global trade, a symbol of power, an impetus for industrialization, and an important lesson in the importance of wildlife conservation. There would be many challenges to putting together such an exhibition, and I can just imagine a few of the interesting and important conversations that an exhibition teamwould have. You’d have to show some ivory artifacts, as they are part of the troubled history of the commodity and, frankly, part of the public allure of the topic. And all of the items on display could very well be borrowed from the collections of the Smithsonian’s nineteen museums and research centers, as well as notable collections like those of the Walters Art Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, Rosenborg Castle in Copenhagen, the Alaska State Museums, and many others. As Walker describes in the first third of his book, ivory’s tactile qualities, its increasing rarity, the difficulty of obtaining it, and the symbolic value assigned to it made it a valuable global commodity for societies dating