Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future 9781782386612

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Figures
Contributors
Acknowledgements
1. Introduction: Academic anthropology and the Museum. Back to the Future
Part I. Anthropological encounters with the post-colonial museum
2. The photological apparatus and the desiring machine. Unexpected congruences between the Koninklijk Museum, Tervuren and the Umistà Centre, Alert Bay
3. Picturing the museum: photography and the work of mediation in the Third Portuguese Empire
4. On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts
Part II. Ethnographic museums and ethnographic museology ‘at home’
5. Anthropology at home and in the museum: the case of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris
6. ‘Does anthropology need museums?’ Teaching ethnographic museology in Portugal, Thirty Years Later
Part III. Science museums as an ethnographic challenge
7. Towards an ethnography of museums: science, technology and us
8. Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum, London. Knowing, making and using
Part IV. Anthropologists as cultural producers
9. Unsettling the meaning: critical museology, art and anthropological discourse
10. Inside out: cultural production in the museum and the academy
11. The art of exhibition making as a problem of translation
Part V. Looking ahead
12. Why post-millennial museums will need fuzzy guerrillas
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

ACADEMIC ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE MUSEUM

New Directions in Anthropology General Editor: Jacqueline Waldren, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5

Volume 6

Volume 7 Volume 8 Volume 9 Volume 10

Volume 11 Volume 12 Volume 13 Volume 14 Volume 15 Volume 16 Volume 17 Volume 18 Volume 19 Volume 20

Volume 21

Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism Edited by Jeremy Boissevain A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and Community in Rural Ireland Carles Salazar Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and Reality in Mallorca Jacqueline Waldren The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town Miguel Vale de Almeida Communities of Faith: Sectarianism, Identity, and Social Change on a Danish Island Andrew S. Buckser After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe Edited by Ray Abrahams Immigrant and Bureaucrats: Ethiopians in an Israeli Absorption Center Esther Hertzog Venetian Life on a Lagoon Island Lidia Sciama Recalling the Belgian Congo: Conversations and Introspection Marie-Bénédicte Dembour Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit Eyal Ben-Ari The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel Dina Siegel Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System Edited by Italo Pardo Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future Edited by Mary Bouquet Simulated Dreams: Israeli Youth and Virtual Zionism Haim Hazan Defiance and Compliance: Negotiating Gender in Low-Income Cairo Heba Aziz Morsi El-Kholy Troubles with Turtles: Cultural Understandings of the Environment on a Greek Island Dmitrios Theodossopoulos Rebordering the Mediterranean: Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe Liliana Suarez-Navaz The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley Jaro Stacul Foundations of National Identity: From Catalonia to Europe Josep Llobera Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus Paul Sant Cassia

Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a ‘Model’ Bulgarian Village Deema Kaneff

AC A D E M I C A N T H RO P O LO G Y AND THE MUSEUM




Back to the Future

Edited by

Mary Bouquet

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

www.berghahnbooks.com

© 2001 Mary Bouquet Reprinted in 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berghahn Books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Academic anthropology and the museum : back to the future / edited by Mary Bouquet. p. cm. ISBN 1-57181–825-1 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-57181-321-7 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Anthropological museums and collections--History. 2. Museum exhibits-History. 3. Museum techniques--History. 4. Anthropology--Philosophy. 5. Anthropology--Study and teaching (Graduate) I. Bouquet, Mary, 1955– GM35.A33 2001 069'5--dc21 00-051932 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 1-57181-825-1 (hardback) ISBN 1-57181-321-7 (paperback)

C ONTENTS




List of Figures

vii

Contributors

x

Acknowledgements

xiii

1. Introduction: Academic anthropology and the Museum. Back to the Future Mary Bouquet

1

Part I Anthropological encounters with the post-colonial museum 2. The photological apparatus and the desiring machine. Unexpected congruences between the Koninklijk Museum, Tervuren and the Umistà Centre, Alert Bay Barbara Saunders

18

3. Picturing the museum: photography and the work of mediation in the Third Portuguese Empire Nuno Porto

36

4. On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts Eric Venbrux

55

Part II Ethnographic museums and ethnographic museology ‘at home’ 5. Anthropology at home and in the museum: the case of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris Martine Segalen

76

Contents

6. ‘Does anthropology need museums?’ Teaching ethnographic museology in Portugal, Thirty Years Later

92

Nélia Dias

Part III Science museums as an ethnographic challenge 7. Towards an ethnography of museums: science, technology and us Roberto J. González, Laura Nader and C. Jay Ou

106

8. Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum, London. Knowing, making and using

117

Sharon Macdonald

Part IV Anthropologists as cultural producers 9. Unsettling the meaning: critical museology, art and anthropological discourse

142

Anthony Shelton

10. Inside out: cultural production in the museum and the academy

162

Jeanne Cannizzo

11. The art of exhibition making as a problem of translation

177

Mary Bouquet

Part V Looking ahead 12. Why post-millennial museums will need fuzzy guerrillas

200

Michael M. Ames

Bibliography

212

Index

231

vi

L IST

3.1

3.2

3.3

4.1

5.1

5.2

5.3

OF

F IGURES




‘Native Chiefs Gallery at the History Room of the Dundo Museum’ Negative number 8.439/958; Arquivo Fotográfico dos Serviços Culturais da Ex-Diamang, Museu Antropológico da Universidade de Coimbra.

44

‘Prof. Paulo Cunha visiting the Dundo Museum Native Village’. Negative number 19.738/961 Arquivo Fotográfico dos Serviços Culturais da Ex-Diamang, Museu Antropológico da Universidade de Coimbra.

45

Mural Photograph in the Folklore Room of the Dundo Museum, in: Dundo Museum Annual Report 1973 (without negative). The caption reads ‘Repairs inside and outside the museum’.

47

Baldwin Spencer’s reconstruction of two Melville Island graves at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne. The set of old posts on the left hand side had been repainted by Tiwi people (Courtesy Museum Victoria).

64

Wax models and scènes de genre in the Salle de France at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. (Photo: courtesy of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, Paris).

78

Georges Henri Rivière during fieldwork in Aubrac with his friends and informants, Jean-Marie and Josephine Girbal, in 1964. (Photo: courtesy of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, Paris).

83

A buron d’Aubrac as reconstituted and presented in the galerie culturelle of the MNATP (Photo: courtesy of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, Paris).

84

vii

List of Figures

6.1 Cabinet of Anthropology, Museum of Natural History, University of Coimbra. Permanent exhibition. General view of one of the ethnographic galleries. Photographer: A Bobone, Lisbon, n.d., M.A.U.C., negative number 58.8.

94

6.2 Permanent exhibition. General view of the Ethnography Room, taken from the eastern side of the gallery after it had been refurbished in the mid-1940s. College of St. Boaventure, Rua Largo à Rua dos Lois. Photographer: Alvaro da Silva e Sousa, c. 1945, M.A.U.C., negative number 90.28.

100

8.1 Defined Space: Flight Gallery in the Science Museum, London. (Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library).

121

8.2 Addressing the Visitor: Who am I? in the Wellcome Wing, Science Museum, London (Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library).

137

9.1 Kinyozi. The art of African hairstyles, 1994. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph by Anthony Alan Shelton.

152

9.2 Fetishism, 1995. Nkisi Against Rubber. National Touring Exhibitions, the South Bank Centre with Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. (Courtesy of The South Bank Centre).

154

9.3 Fetishism, 1995. The Curiosity Cabinet. National Touring Exhibitions, the South Bank Centre with Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. (Courtesy of The South Bank Centre).

155

9.4 Ghana I (African beeswax, acrylic and perspex on board. Mounted on wall), and Tanzania (brass wire and brass plaque, constructed as two spools). Two works by Shirley Chubb from Hold, 1995. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph by Shirley Chubb.

157

9.5 Charmed bodies, 1996. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph by Sally Payen.

158

9.6 Charmed bodies, 1996. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph by Sally Payen.

159

11.1 Diagram of the staircase of the University Ethnographic Museum, Oslo. Drawing by Marianne Brochmann. Reproduced by kind permission of Marianne Brochmann, Oslo.

184

11.2 Ann Christine Eek’s arrangement of the fourteen wax heads in glass boxes on the staircase in Oslo. Photograph: Ann Christine Eek. Reproduced by kind permission of the photographer and the Universitetets kulturhistoriske museer, Oslo.

186

viii

List of Figures

11.3 Cross sections from architect Toril Mugaas’ sketch design for the exhibition Sans og Samling, showing levels 1, 3 and 5, which were positioned vertically from 1, at the bottom, to 5 at the top of the staircase (Etnografisk Museum, 11.12.95; 01); level 2 (02) and level 4 (03), which were positioned one above the other – level 4 being on the opposite side of the upper landing from gallery 5. Reproduced by kind permission of Toril Mugaas, and the Universitetets kulturhistoriske museer. 190–192 11.4 Diagram showing the phases of concretising an exhibition, drawn in the process of making Sans og Samling in Oslo, 1995–1996.

194

12.1 Guerrilla Girls ponder museum practices. © Guerrilla Girls.

208

ix

C ONTRIBUTORS




Michael M. Ames, Ph.D. Harvard University, Emeritus Professor of Anthropology, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada) and Adjunct Professor of Cultural Heritage, Curtin University (Perth, Australia). Served as director of the University of B.C. Museum of Anthropology 1974–1997. Research in South Asia, Canada and Australia. Received the Order of Canada, October 1998. Mary Bouquet, Ph.D. Cambridge University, works at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam. She established and taught a course on Cultural Anthropology and Museology at Utrecht University, 1998–2001. She has made exhibitions and taught anthropology in several European countries. Her publications include Melanesian Artefacts/Post-modernist reflections (1988, with Jorge Freitas Branco), and Reclaiming English Kinship (Manchester, 1993). Jeanne Cannizzo is a Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at Edinburgh University, where she teaches about material culture. Her latest exhibition, for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, is ‘O Caledonai! Sir Walter Scott and the Creation of Scotland’ on the construction of ethnicity and the nation. Nélia Dias is professor of Anthropology at the University of Lisboa. She is the author of Le Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro (1878–1908). Anthropologie et Muséologie en France, (1991), and several essays on the history of anthropology in France. Roberto J. González is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. His interests include the anthropology of science, indigenous agricultural systems, and the history of anthropology. He has conducted field work among the Zapotec people of southern Mexico and in the United States. Laura Nader is a Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. She has published many books and articles on topics

x

Contributors

including the anthropology of law, the ethnographic study of elites and bureaucracies, and controlling processes. Her most recent book is entitled Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge (Routledge, 1996). Laura Nader has conducted field work in Mexico, Lebanon and the United States. C. Jay Ou is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley. His interests include the anthropology of science, transnationalism, political economy and labour issues. He is currently conducting field research in Indonesia and South Korea among factory owners and managers. Jay Ou has also done work among Native Americans in the United States. Sharon Macdonald is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology and Sociology at the Department of Sociological Studies, Sheffield University, UK. Her publications include Theorizing Museums (ed. with G.Fyfe, 1996, Blackwell), Reimagining Culture (1997, Berg) and The Politics of Display (1998, Routledge). Nuno Porto is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnographic Museology at the Department of Anthropology, University of Coimbra, Portugal. He is currently completing his Ph.D. on the scientific culture of Portuguese colonialism, 1940–1970, through a case study of the Dundo Museum, property of the Diamonds Company of Angola. Barbara Saunders (Ph.D. Utrecht 1992), Senior Researcher at the Higher Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven, Belgium, also affiliated to the Anthropology Department, is working primarily on aspects of colour, in particular recent developments in the Berlin and Kay theory, but also publishes on museums and museum anthropology, as well as on the ethnic and national politics of the Kwakiutl (Kwakw’aka’wakw). Martine Segalen was head for ten years (1986–1996) of the Centre d’ethnologie française, a CNRS research group associated with the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires. She is now Professor at the University of Nanterre (Paris X), where she teaches anthropology and sociology. Her recent work has been mainly devoted to the study of kinship in contemporary, modern societies. Anthony Shelton has taught museology at Sussex University, and non-western art at East Anglia University and Loughborough College. He has been a curator (American collections) at the British Museum, and Keeper of Anthropology and Head of the Green Centre at the Brighton Museums. He is currently Head of Collections, Research and Development at the Horniman Museum, London. He has curated many exhibitions and published extensively.

xi

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

Eric Venbrux is a research fellow of the Dutch Royal Academy of Sciences (K.N.A.W.) based at the University of Nijmegen. He is author of A Death in the Tiwi Islands: Conflict, Ritual and Social Life in an Australian Aboriginal Community (Cambridge, 1995). His main current interest concerns indigenous material culture and its interrelationship with the wider world over time.

xii

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS




This book started life in cyberspace, which is in many ways an apt location for taking stock of (some of ) the relations that are developing between university anthropology and museums today. Rieke Leenders first suggested to me that I might edit a special issue of the Dutch journal Focaal, Tijdschrift voor Antropologie on this topic. Having just set up a course on Cultural Anthropology and Museology at the Department of Cultural Anthropology of Utrecht University in 1998, the idea held considerable appeal. The need for an accessible sample of the wide range of exciting work on museums being undertaken by anthropologists, in a variety of capacities, was a very actual one. The contributors, who include some of the leading figures in this field today, rose to the occasion and I am indebted to them all for their inspiring input to this volume. I am grateful to the editors of Focaal for inviting me to act as guest editor for the journal, for helpful editorial comments and for permitting republication of articles originally published in the special issue. Special thanks are due to Richard Staring, Hans Marks and Herman Tak. Although there has been some revision and rewriting, the basic structure of this volume remains the same. Committed as Focaal is to the ‘simultaneity of ethnography, processual analysis, local insights and global vision’, that is as it should be. I should also like to express my gratitude to colleagues at the Department of Cultural Anthropology at Utrecht, and in particular Wim Hoogbergen, for the insight I have gained through teaching museum anthropology there. The pleasure of exploring the museum world with Utrecht students provided the motivation for the volume. At the museum end of the equation, I am grateful to my colleagues at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, and Susan Legêne and the project group on Dutch Colonialism in particular, for providing such a stimulating work environment. The welcome given to visiting groups of students as well as to individual students undertaking research in the Tropenmuseum is exemplary. Jackie Waldren identified the manuscript as a worthy addition to her ‘New Directions in Anthropology’ Series with Berghahn Books. Publisher Marion Berghahn skilfully guided me through one or two potential thickets in the process of preparation. I am grateful to Diana Roberts for her careful copy-editing and xiii

Acknowledgements

Sean Kingston for enthusiastically seeing the manuscript into production. Henk de Haan facilitated the whole operation at home base; thanks would be an understatement. Mary Bouquet

xiv

1 I NTRODUCTION : A CADEMIC

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE MUSEUM . B ACK TO THE FUTURE

Mary Bouquet




...the moderns suffer from the illness of historicism. They want to keep everything, date everything, because they think they have definitively broken with their past. The more they accumulate revolutions, the more they save; the more they capitalize, the more they put on display in museums (Bruno Latour 1993a: 69).

The museum boom, with its accompanying objectification and politicisation of culture, finds its counterpart in expanding social scientific interest in the musealisation of culture. There is ample evidence that anthropologists are among those whose imaginations have been fired by the museum, over the past fifteen to twenty years.1 However, this current of anthropological interest in museums is fairly recent (see Ames 1992), and it is certainly not evenly distributed around the academic world. Away from the mainlands of museum anthropology, there are still remote islands that appear to be untouched by these developments (cf. Gerholm and Hannerz 1983). The (re-) invention of museum anthropology, by which I mean a renewal of interest – along different lines – after a period of neglect,2 presents a series of challenges for academic teaching and research, as well as for the work of cultural production in contemporary museums. Even if interdisciplinarity characterises much current academic interest in museums (see Svašek 1997), the specificity of contemporary anthropology’s stake deserves exploration. 1

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

This book is concerned with the relations between a particular discipline, anthropology, and museums. That relationship is often couched in historical terms: anthropology started out in the museum in the nineteenth century, but academic anthropology sloughed off its material residue to become a fully-fledged social or cultural discipline in the universities after the fieldwork revolution of the early twentieth century (Stocking 1990: 722). Fieldwork became the trademark of modern, university-based anthropology (Van Keuren 1989: 26), with museum anthropology slipping ever further into the background and reaching an all-time low around mid-century (Ames 1992), or the mid-1960s in France. The result was that the social and the material parted company so radically (in some places) as to produce a kind of knowledge gap between historical collections and the intellectuals who might have been expected to work on them. This conventional reading of history is of course difficult to rhyme with the kindling of critical interest in museums, exhibitions and material culture more generally that has taken place over the past fifteen years or so. This makes it important to examine both what museum anthropology is now, and how it differs from what it was, say, thirty or fifty years ago. The connection between anthropology and the ethnographic museum often seems to be almost taken for granted and therefore not a subject for explicit comment. How do present concerns – theoretical, pedagogical and praxiological – upset both the automatic association between a discipline and ‘its’ museum, and the ‘pastness’ that all too easily hangs about museums when they are assumed to belong to the history of anthropology? Time, as Latour (1993a: 75) has observed, gets thoroughly mixed up in museums, and the pastness or nearly pastness (Stanley 1998) of their contents has already become an issue for many of anthropology’s traditional subjects. Moreover, if the production and consumption of culture is characteristic of all sorts of museums, that must affect the discipline of anthropology and the practices of anthropologists. If the neat chronological categories of past, present and future, together with the disciplinary boundaries assigning sorts of museums per academic discipline, now seem thoroughly confused by contemporary museum frames, what does that mean for anthropology’s return to the museum? How should museum anthropology be taught, and what do students need to know?

A puzzle This volume started life as a puzzle about the changing nature of the relationship between academic anthropology and the museum in the particular context of the Netherlands.3 That point of departure is retained here since it has the advantage of de-centring an exclusive preoccupation with the Anglo-American tradition, which is sometimes identified with anthropology as a whole. Setting up a course on cultural anthropology and museology at Utrecht University in 1998 meant thinking about how to interest students in a subject for which they were reputed to have 2

Introduction

none.4 The ethnographic collection belonging to the Institute of Cultural Anthropology at the University of Utrecht, founded in 1913, was dispersed at the end of the 1960s when, according to Schoonheym (1986: 68), ‘The cultures of former colonies together with the study of material culture receded into the background, and it became taboo in student circles still to be interested in material culture. The ethnographic collection was scarcely used any more. Since no one was interested in the collection, it was more or less abandoned as an object of curation’. This example illustrates how an image of museology as one of those fusty subjects concerned with the past tense, rather than anthropology today, was still alive in some universities in Europe at the end of the twentieth century (see also Bouquet 1996). The stuffy image inherited from the past sits uneasily with the explosion of museums – throughout the world (see Macdonald 1996) – and with the growing interest for museums in some areas of academia. It is in fact astonishing that anthropologists could fail to be interested in an institution that they may encounter anywhere from Highland New Guinea to north-eastern Angola; from the Kunsthal in Rotterdam to the north-west coast of Canada. Students in Utrecht express surprise at the scope of contemporary museum anthropology and the sense of a world that they did not know about opening up for them. This sense of having the scales taken off one’s eyes or, as Nélia Dias puts it, gaining an apprenticeship in seeing, can very well lead (as Ames 1992 suggested) to undertaking anthropology in the backyard (Bouquet 2001b). The Netherlands, which has the third highest density of museums per head in Europe, after Denmark and Switzerland (De Haan 1997), is a case in point. It is strange that these local cultural circumstances and their implications seem, with few exceptions, to have escaped anthropologists. While material culture, art and collecting have all been topics of recent special issues of Dutch anthropological journals, the explicit relations between museums and academic anthropology have not.5 This underdeveloped interest in museums stems perhaps from their perceived separation from everyday life, as repositories of the past, outside the boundaries of proper anthropology. That perception has had serious consequences for the status of museum anthropology and its place in the academic curriculum in several different contexts, as a number of contributions to this volume show. One aim of this book is to sample current anthropological work on and in museums, and to use these different accounts to reflect upon the relationship between academic anthropology and the museum. The original invitation to contribute was sent to some twenty-five scholars, and the five sections into which this volume is divided give an idea of the breadth of anthropological work now being undertaken in museums. There is, of course, much to be said about the post-colonial ethnographic museum, including the new connections between former centres and peripheries (Simpson 1996, ICOM 1997). While the severing of ties between the discipline and its collections opens up the museum world for much broader exploration, exactly that sundering may also lead to the rediscovery and reinterpretation of historical collections by contemporary anthropologists. How3

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

ever, anthropologists need no longer limit themselves to ethnographic museums in the former narrow sense of the word. Museums of all kinds – art, ethnographic and science – are increasingly part of the culture industry, in increasingly multicultural societies. The commodification of culture and the politicisation of identity are broadly recognised as major issues, making museums much more dynamic places than they seemed to be fifty years ago. Among the essays presented here, two (González et al., and Macdonald, this volume) seek to extend the range of anthropological analysis to include science as well as art museums. If anthropologists’ former role in ethnographic museums was rather narrowly defined, the crisis of curatorship (see Kavanagh et al. 1994) that accompanied many fundamental institutional changes (such as privatisation) has also altered the working relations, authority, and the relative importance of the collections vis-à-vis (their presentation to) the public. Anthropologists are now going into museums of all kinds, both to observe the changes going on behind the scenes and the much broader public who are now being targeted, but also to develop exhibitions and to work in the educational service. Few sever their ties with academia, and quite a number seem to operate somewhere in between museum and university. This breaching of the boundary between academic and applied anthropologies is another significant trend in the relations between universities and museums. This new situation raises questions about how academic anthropology is responding to the challenge with which museums present it; and how it can re-engage with museums in a way appropriate to the twenty-first century? If the conventional role of curator is being deleted, and new roles (such as commissaire d’exposition, and interpreter) are being created, what constitutes appropriate anthropological scholarship concerning museums for the present and future generations of students? What skills can academic anthropologists bring to museums (not just ethnographic ones), and what skills do they need to learn in order to work in museums? Contributors to this volume were invited in an open-ended way to draw upon their experience to comment on the dynamic interconnections that are developing between academic anthropology and the museum. Although by no means exhaustive, this collection of essays provides a kind of cross-section of the diverse involvements of anthropologists in museums: some are very close, others more distanced. All, however, reflect the intense nature of engagement in and with museums, which should banish any lingering doubts about the fustiness of museums and bring home their immediacy to contemporary anthropology.

Overview The contributions divide readily into five main topics, although, of course, there are many interconnections between articles that fall under different rubrics. Part I begins with anthropological encounters with the post-colonial museum; Part II considers ethnographic museums and ethnographic museology ‘at home’; Part III 4

Introduction

explores the ethnographic challenge of science museums; Part IV attends to anthropologists as cultural producers; and Part V is an exercise in looking ahead.

Ethnographic encounters with the post-colonial museum Anthropological encounters with the post-colonial museum are one of the ways in which the ethnographic museum has reappeared on the anthropological agenda, making it increasingly difficult for students of general anthropology to ignore. Part I begins with this renewal of anthropological interest in museums from the field. Museums, on what was conventionally seen as the periphery of the museum world, were the focus of Kaplan’s (1995) volume. The three cases presented here connect centre and periphery (cf. Newton 1995), and properly complicate them by taking into account the role of scientific knowledge (including academic anthropology) in constructing cultures (Barbara Saunders discusses the Boas-Hunt legacy); in print colonialism (Nuno Porto examines the significance of printed materials including photographs in the Diamang Company’s internal and external relations); and in reconsidering the effects of Baldwin Spencer’s collecting earlier this century, as the Tiwi now attempt to re-appropriate historical objects for their own museums (Eric Venbrux, this volume). Anthropologists are increasingly confronted by local museums or cultural centres in the field – sometimes in a form that seems remarkable: ‘the Onga Cultural Centre seemed to have very much the atmosphere that traditional Western museums are conventionally supposed to possess: slightly musty, a place apart from normal social life’ (O’Hanlon 1993: 74). Saunders’ (1997a) analysis of the differences between the Northwest Coast U’Mistà Centre and the Kwagiulth Museum, leads her to contest James Clifford’s (1991: 225) distinction between majority museums and tribal museums. She makes a theoretical exploration of the connections between two apparently quite unrelated post-colonial museums (the U’Mistà Centre, British Columbia, and Tervuren Museum in Belgium). Porto, by contrast, started his research at home in the museum archive at Coimbra, made one brief visit to the post-colonial Dundo Museum in north-eastern Angola, to which he is prevented from returning by war. His fieldwork is therefore carried out within a network that stretches (by cybernetic means) from the Dundo Museum and Angola, to former Diamang Company employees now living in Portugal. The refashioning of fieldwork to include the museum, is also present in Venbrux’ work, which evolved from his original research among the Tiwi of the Bathurst and Melville Islands in northern Australia into the European museums where Tiwi collections are held. Thus the reconfiguration of anthropological research, taking into account the museum as a key institution in the globalisation of national society (Prösler 1996), is one of the principal themes in Part I. Whether dealing with the fate of potlatch regalia, the photographic archive of the Diamang Company Museum, or scattered 5

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

Tiwi collections, museums at both ends of the former centre-periphery divide clearly represent key contemporary field sites. They are indeed ‘contact zones’, in Clifford’s (1997) sense. Saunders’ article concludes with a strong plea for ‘careful and inspired empirical research in dialectical engagement with theory’. Both Porto’s and Venbrux’ articles provide significant responses to the challenge of engaging in such theoretically informed empirical work in the post-colonial museum. Porto’s focus on photographs as museum artefacts, on the multiple uses of the same photo, and on the agency behind the Dundo Museum archive, shows that ‘photographs are much less an intentional, authored subjective visual statement, than the product of a network of interests’. Drawing upon Latour’s actor-network theory, he shows that they ‘may be seen as the material result of negotiations between personal skills and exogenous conceptions, pursued under the specific constraints of the bureaucratic structure of an enterprise to which the museum belonged, despite its internal autonomy’. Ultimately, ‘the relevance or indifference of photographs to the museum was a function of how it cultivated an image for the outside world’. Porto’s study of a particular photological apparatus underlines the importance of specific empirical studies, to illuminate the distinctions within Portuguese colonialism as well as differences with other colonial regimes. Photography, as Porto argues, was crucial to the attempt at cleaning up the image of the Third Empire. The analysis of the work of the Museum photographer provides subtle insight on the human/technical dimension of this instance of colonial photography. The history of ethnographic collections is a central area of anthropological interest in museums (see, for example, Pomian 1990; Elsner and Cardinal 1994; Legêne 1998; O’Hanlon and Welsch 2000). Venbrux’ essay on the pre-museum history of an ethnographic collection focuses on collecting as a process of cultural exchange. Venbrux analyses Spencer’s collecting activities as an integral part of both his fieldwork and his work as a colonial administrator. The circumstances of collection, and particularly indigenous agency in the business are, he argues, of critical interest to our understanding of this key figure (with Frank Gillen) in twentieth-century anthropology. Although social anthropologists are more familiar with his studies of Aboriginal social organisation, re-reading Spencer in terms of museum anthropology connects with contemporary developments among the Tiwi and other Australian groups, and brings to light exciting material in terms of the history of anthropology. Venbrux tracks the complex ontogeny of Spencer’s collection through a close reading of his publications. Access to the artefacts in question was (at the time of writing) impossible due to complete refurbishing of the Melbourne Museum in which the collection is held. How the Tiwi artefacts will be presented in 2001 – both in terms of their significance at the time of collection, and as a major component of an Australian museum in the throes of re-vamping its public exhibitions – remains to be seen. Elucidating the invisible networks of relations behind Aboriginal collections is surely one of the ways in which anthropological scholarship will impact upon the process of refashioning the Australian past (see Bennett 1995: 162) as it is presented in museums. Aboriginal groups such as the Tiwi not only 6

Introduction

have their own museums, but consider collections – all around the world – of artefacts made by their ancestors of great relevance for their history and identity. Analysing the complexities of the post-colonial museum involves rethinking conventional notions of the field (which is both here and there, ours and theirs) and the fieldworker. The historical examples of Boas and Spencer show that the physical removal of material objects out of their original contexts proved to open a fresh chapter rather than closing the ethnography. Furthermore, the museum effect as ‘a kind of attentive looking at crafted objects’ (Alpers 1991) persists, as Stanley (1998) has shown, in ethnographic theme parks world wide, where it conditions relations between local populations and tourists in significant ways – in heritage sites, ecomuseums and local cultural centres, as well as conventional museums. Elucidating the complex interrelations between members of different populations during and after (and sometimes before) the colonial period, as they are congealed in museum objects, ought to be a vital part of the general study of anthropology.

Ethnographic museums and ethnographic museology ‘at home’ Ethnographic museums are currently being reinvented in a number of western European countries: from the Horniman Museum in London to the Museum voor Volkenkunde in Rotterdam (see Reedijk 1998), from the Museu de Etnologia in Lisbon to the University Museums of Cultural Heritage in Oslo. This upheaval produces challenges of various kinds for anthropologists, especially where ethnographic museology has disappeared or been marginalised in the academic curriculum. The divergence between museum and academic anthropologies was not uniform in different national traditions of anthropology. Particular institutional histories underwrite the dynamic and politicised character of contemporary museums explored in Part I. If these latter represent one of the cutting edges of contemporary anthropology, and a major empirical challenge, precise national institutional histories and experiences are equally important. Accustomed as we tend to be to taking Anglo-American history as the standard, it is instructive to consider other national university/museum traditions. Part II comprises two studies which focus on the connection between anthropological research and teaching, and museum collections and displays, in France and Portugal. Martine Segalen’s history of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (hereafter MNATP); and Dias’ account of teaching ethnographic museology in two Portuguese university departments. The late nineteenth century French museum model was influential in the formation of the anthropological museum at Coimbra University in Portugal. The Portuguese Estado Novo was relatively indifferent to having a national museum for exotic anthropological collections; however, local museums of peasant culture started to thrive (like the French eco museums) with the demise of the cultural groups concerned. 7

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

Segalen considers the critical relationship between research and museum presentations in France through a fine-grained history of the MNATP, which was the seat of anthropology at home for thirty years – exactly when museum anthropology elsewhere was in serious decline (Ames 1992, Shelton 1992). She discusses why the centralised French state was relatively late in founding national museums of anthropology, when it was so early in founding public art museums (cf. Duncan 1995). She shows how the ‘exotic’ and the ‘peasant’ were initially thought of together: the Musée du Trocadéro, founded in 1878, included a Salle de France complete with scènes de genre. Anthropological research and museum work (collecting and preparing exhibitions) were closely connected in the two national museums of anthropology established on the site of the former Trocadéro, after the 1937 Paris Exhibition. The exotic collections were installed at the Musée de l’Homme, whereas the French ones were housed temporarily at the Musée des Monuments Français, during and after the war. Although her focus is on the latter, Segalen shows how partially connected institutional arrangements were to have profound implications for anthropology at home in France. This area of research was firmly tied to the MNATP from 1937, when G.H. Rivière became the Director, producing an almost seamless fit between research, collecting and exhibiting. The situation underwent dramatic change in the late 1960s, just as the MNATP moved to its new building and opened to an enthusiastic public. The 1970s crisis within this unified research/museum model occurred after Claude Lévi-Strauss founded the laboratoire d’anthropologie sociale, changing the definition of anthropology at home in the process. From then on, anthropologists at home were expected to study the same kinds of problems as colleagues abroad: kinship, religion, witchcraft, beliefs, and identities displaced material culture. Since museology was not on the university curriculum, the divide between curators and social anthropologists increased. There was something of a turnabout during the 1980s, with the combination of the heritage (patrimoine) movement and the rise of eco-musées. The reorganisation of the French museum landscape during the 1990s prompts Segalen to argue (like Saunders) that anthropological research should be a critical input to contemporary museum displays. Both Segalen and Dias refer to the new ethnographic museum landscapes in France and Portugal. In taking up Sturtevant’s (1969) question about whether anthropology needs museums, Dias, like Segalen, suggests that museums may very well need anthropology. She does this through a reflexive account of teaching ethnographic museology at two Portuguese universities: ISCTE in Lisbon, and the Department and Museum of Anthropology in Coimbra. If ethnographic museums are going to require trained anthropologists to reinvigorate them, the question is what constitutes relevant training and how can it be taught at university level? Dias’ account of teaching ethnographic museology at Lisbon and Coimbra universities, illuminates several didactic quandaries. 8

Introduction

If in one respect (an optional course on) ethnographic museology seems practical and provides a complementary perspective on social anthropology for undergraduates at ISCTE, its popularity decreases at Masters’ level due to poor articulation with other courses and what seems an over-critical approach. The contrast with Coimbra, where the class could literally go into the depots to locate concrete museological examples, is striking. The Coimbra Anthropology Department was founded in 1992, with the innovative aim of connecting teaching with research on the Museu e Laboratório Antropológico collections. Even if this aim has been transmuted and to some extent failed in recent years, the experiment seems in other respects to provide exactly the material link that Dias identifies as missing for the ethnographic museology course in Lisbon. However, many university departments (such as Utrecht) have severed their links with their collections. This means that those teaching museum anthropology are forced to consider new ways of accessing museum collections with students – which may include visits to museums, exhibitions and depots that belong neither to the university nor to the discipline of anthropology (see Bouquet 2001b). The persistent marginalisation of museology in Portuguese universities within a curriculum that is otherwise dominated by social anthropology (see Dias, this volume), is reminiscent of the post-1970s situation in France (see Segalen, this volume). The appointment of curators who are expected to carry out research on collections at the new Musée du quai Branly in Paris attempts to redress the situation. It will be interesting to see what initiatives are taken for training such curator-researchers, given the institutional terrain analysed by Segalen, and the relative absence of museological reflection in France noted by Dias. Despite her – frank – review of the difficulties with teaching ethnographic museology, Dias nonetheless affirms the benefits for students of an apprenticeship in seeing, and the appreciation of the difference between textual and visual representation that the course cultivates. These are topics to which the chapters in Part IV return. The challenges that new kinds of museum represent for anthropologists is matched by the need to be able to look at old museums and collections in innovative ways. University courses that respond to this conjuncture are as vital to the future of museums as they are for anthropology itself.

Science museums as an ethnographic challenge If anthropologists’ professional attention was once almost exclusively vested in ethnographic museums housing collections of non-western (or peasant) artefacts, recent developments in museology have encouraged some of them to enter other kinds of museums – in various capacities (see, for example, Handler and Gable 1997). The reclassification of masterpieces from existing ethnographic collections (see Segalen, this volume), and the recognition of indigenous art (see Venbrux, this volume) as art (cf. Morphy 1994), has significant implications for the diagnostic 9

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

disciplinary fault-lines inherited from the nineteenth century (cf. Bennett 1995). These changes are not limited to art. The category of exotic rarities and curiosities, later transformed into specimens and used systematically to represent other peoples was, as Svasek (1997) argues, a precondition for the development of European High Art. The timeless Other was also a good foil against which to display industrial progress and civilisation, as the great exhibitions did from 1851 onwards (see Bennett 1995, Grevers and Waaldijk 1998), and festivals of folklore continued to do at the end of the twentieth century (Price and Price 1994). The category ‘art’ is being redefined (see Morphy 1994), becoming more inclusive as the art market penetrates new areas of production (see Kingston 1999a and 1999b). What of science? Just as display in public art museums and galleries confers the status of art, involving networks and contestation in the process, so too do science museums constitute as much as they represent public understanding of science. This can turn them into highly controversial places, perhaps partly due to the uncertain status of scientific knowledge after Kuhn (1962, see also note 7). Part III comprises two essays on the ethnography of science museums. Roberto González, Laura Nader and C. Jay Ou review the historical transformations in the relationships of anthropologists with museums, seen mainly from the perspective of American anthropology. The authors argue that there has been a shift of focus from the almost automatic assumption that anthropologists are mainly interested in anthropological museums (meaning non-western peoples’ material culture), to a new concern with science museums. They argue, furthermore, that a new kind of anthropology at home, conducted in science museums, recasts the lay public as Other. González et al. examine the politicisation of public culture in ethnographic and science museums, by comparing Lubicon Cree Indian contestation of the Glenbow exhibit, The spirit sings, and Shell’s double involvement (sponsoring the exhibit and a vested interest in Lubicon Cree land), with the way interested lay people (including guest curators) may try to present science in a new light for the general public. They focus on the case of the Science in American life exhibit, organised under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and held at the National Museum of American History. González et al. end their chapter with a plea for ethnographic studies of science museums, analogous to that of Saunders. Sharon Macdonald’s chapter gives an account of conducting just such ethnographic fieldwork at the Science Museum in London. Like Porto, Macdonald argues in favour of going behind the scenes at the museum, instead of assuming that the most adequate approach consists in reading off dominant class, race and gender interests from already completed exhibits. Macdonald’s aim is to chart the complexity of what goes (and what does not go) on display; failures, she observes, can be as culturally revealing as successes. The Gallery plan was an ambitious attempt in the late 1980s to rewrite the Science Museum. The chapter makes a case for studying museums of science and technology as much for what is assumed to be their objective and neutral symbolic significance, as for their practical one. Going backstage at the Science 10

Introduction

Museum enabled Macdonald to chart the way science becomes culturally and physically constituted in the public space of museums, and how this involves debates and struggles about the nature of science, objects, professional identity and visitors. That the end result may, for complex reasons, only partially reflect the plans, does not cancel out the creative agency of those who work behind the scenes (cf. Porto, this volume). Macdonald’s analysis of the Science Museum illustrates one of the complex permutations of Saunders’ opening assertion about a museum being the performative naturalisation of objective relations between a state and its culture or master narrative of descent. One of the problems facing the Gallery Planning Group, for example, was the declining position of Britain as an industrial nation. The purchase of globally significant acquisitions had become financially prohibitive, and limitation to national products threatened to reflect the decline of Britain rather than industrial progress. The planned thematic reconfiguration of the galleries drove a wedge between the curators and their collections, with the interests of visitors invoked as part of what Macdonald and Silverstone (1991) refer to as the ‘cultural revolution’ at the Science Museum in the late-1980s and early-1990s.6 These chapters, then, elucidate aspects of both the theoretical interest and the practical conduct of anthropological research in science museums, beyond the more familiar fieldwork sites of ethnographic and art museums. The arguments would apply equally well to science centres, heritage sites, eco-museums and cultural centres. However, such a broadening of ethnographic horizons will entail training anthropologists to study the museum world, rather than limiting themselves to ethnographic museums, as they might have done thirty to fifty years ago.

Anthropologists as cultural producers An anthropological-ethnographic perspective facilitates recovery, as Macdonald shows, of both a degree of agency for museum staff, and some of their critical and informed reflexivity. When museum staff are also trained anthropologists, their critical reflexivity holds special interest for an understanding of the relationships between academic anthropology and the museum. Their double involvement in making knowledge puts them in a complicated position where theory and practice converge. If Macdonald’s essay made visible the workings behind the scenes at the Science Museum using ethnographic techniques, Anthony Shelton contextualises his own involvement in cooperation between the Brighton Museum and Sussex University between 1991–1995 in the landscape of critical museology. He does this by first reviewing the development of critical museology in Britain, where it was detached from academic anthropology and yet shared many of the concerns of critical or new anthropology in the 1970s. Shelton argues that by de-privileging the disciplinary method (fieldwork as access to unmediated social facts), critical 11

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

anthropology came to focus precisely on western mediation of otherness. In so far as each ethnographic encounter generates meanings that are never more than contingent and specific, anthropology has come to share the uncertain status of art.7 If the crisis of representation (the muddle over subject and object) has left anthropology with this uncertain status of art, art faced its own epistemological crisis, with some avant-garde artists engaging in what they called fieldwork and producing discourse on their own work (cf. Sayre 1989). Praxiological museology, going back to the surrealist movement and pursued by artist curators such as Peter Greenaway, deliberately tries ‘to deconstruct … the working of dominant forms of cultural, economic or political expression and, in the process to reconfigure the specific meaning ascribed to things in the natural theory of value, to produce new contingent meanings generated through the process of assemblage and reassemblage’ (Shelton, this volume). The unsettlement created in museums, partly resulting from the past clashing with the present (Macdonald, this volume), is one that is readily accommodated in the kind of critical museology both advocated and practised by Shelton. There are some remarkable similarities between the planned third floor ‘Knowing’ section of the London Science Museum, and the Brighton arrangement: the Cultures Gallery (juxtaposing the familiar and the exotic), the Green Gallery (insights on collecting), and the temporary exhibits gallery (an experimental area used to explore issues and make them explicit – and concrete). The involvement of artists, on the one hand, and students and faculty members from Sussex university on the other, turned the museum into a place of creative exploration: a new-style cultural laboratory. Culture, for Shelton, is no less than interpretation itself, so that anthropology, ‘art and critical museology are as much a part of the world’s enchantment as they are sceptical of it’. Just as anthropologists who go behind the scenes do not always study major revamps of museums, so can the work of anthropologists as guest curators be on a more temporary basis. Indeed, the new managerial regimes in many contemporary museums depend upon contracting in personnel for projects, including guest curators, designers, project managers and others. The new museology is clearly not immune to these changing organisational arrangements. Jeanne Cannizzo uses her work as co-curator of the exhibition David Livingstone and the Victorian encounter with Africa, to consider ways in which academic skills both complement and clash with the exhibitionary process. If there is little sense of disagreement in Brighton, Cannizzo’s account of working as part of an exhibition team, and in broadcasting, demonstrates why the ability to cooperate with others is one of the transferable skills imparted to students taking her ‘Objects and Others’ course at Edinburgh University. Guest curators have little opportunity to change the microcosm in which they work, which makes a candid assessment of the parameters essential. Cannizzo discusses the negotiable and the non-negotiable aspects of the Livingstone exhibition: the fact that the show was held in the National Portrait Gallery in 12

Introduction

London and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, and that her cocurators were art historians, conditioned both the focus (on the individual) and approach (mainly biographical) taken by the exhibit, although there were significant differences between the two locations. Cannizzo could nonetheless use objects from Livingstone’s collection to illustrate his complex interrelations with three other populations (Africans, Swahili traders and other Europeans), and thereby illuminate the cultural and ideological assumptions built into collecting. She therefore harnessed the local connection to work for a critical historical exploration of this famous colonial figure,8 thereby subverting ‘Great Man’ history (see Macdonald, this volume). Cannizzo’s emphasis on working as a member of a team or project group is pursued by Mary Bouquet in her essay on the art of exhibition-making as a problem of translation. She also shares Shelton’s emphasis on the contingent nature of the exhibitionary encounter, which is even more transient in the case of project-based temporary exhibitions. She considers some of the parallels between exhibitionmaking and ethnographic fieldwork as processes of translation. If ethnographic fieldwork has always involved translation, this has mainly been understood by anthropologists in terms of written ethnography. However, translation interpreted in the broader terms of cultural production might be extended to include the exhibition as a composite artefact or network. The close cooperation between concept-maker, photographer, designer and other technical staff in the intensive and rapid process of translating concept into design in temporary exhibition making, constitutes a form of cultural production. The ethnographic method combined with the techniques required physically to design and make exhibitions, is also a way of exploring the contents of scientific museums; and it can be harnessed as a didactic instrument. This combination was tried out at the Institute and Museum of Anthropology at the University of Oslo (1995–1996), using the exhibition Bringing it all back home as a concrete case for discussion in a lecture series. Seen in this light, the special status of anthropology within the social sciences, to which Foucault (1970) drew attention, gives its double involvement (observant and participant) in museums a particular edge. The renewal of interest in museums on the part of academic anthropology need not limit itself to textual analyses: academically trained anthropologists working as cultural translators (between experts in various fields and publics of various kinds) could yet prove to be the missing link in museums of all sorts. Such a scenario will clearly depend partly on the way museum studies are (re)integrated into the academic curriculum. If the theoretical range of interest is broad enough (no longer ethnographic museums in the narrow sense, but teaching students to see all museums as a kind of ethnographic exercise), and if it includes the ability to recycle and reinvent the classic disciplinary techniques of fieldwork and translation into theoretically informed and practically competent cultural production, then the reformulation of relations between anthropology in the universities and in museums holds considerable promise. This implies that departments of anthropology need to 13

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

widen their horizons regarding the place of museums in contemporary life: as nothing less than an intrinsic part of general culture. They need to develop a broader comparative approach to museums and museum-related phenomena, as an integral part of the undergraduate curriculum, thereby enabling a new generation of anthropologists to engage with this area of cultural production using the specific input from our own regenerating disciplinary past.

Back to the future The coda to this volume is reserved for Michael Ames, a pioneer in the anthropology of museums, consultation between indigenous peoples and museums holding collections made by and appropriated from them, and in universitybased museum anthropology (see, for example, Ames 1986, 1992). Ames analyses three possible future scenarios for museums in the year 2015, as imagined by twelve museum professionals participating in a long-distance internet seminar (discussions by email) as part of the experimental Museum Studies Certificate course at the University of British Columbia. The scenarios were borrowed from Ramsey and McCorduck’s (1996) The future of women, scenarios for the 21st century, and applied to museums: they range from the most negative (backlash) to the best of all possible worlds (Golden Age of Equality), through a mixture (two steps forward and two steps back). The political constraints on these possible futures are clear from Ames’ analysis. The ability to make intuitively reasonable assertions about the future depends of course, as Ames observes, upon the extensive shared (work) experience of the participants – in other words, upon having a past to share. Concern with the past, as this volume shows, is part and parcel of an intense engagement with the present and involvement in the future. ‘Back to the future’ captures this seeming paradox, this mixing of times, which is so prevalent in museums. However, unlike the passengers in Keith Hart’s (1998: 22) bus, who are looking out of the back window and unable to bring themselves to look ahead, those who work between contemporary universities and museums are forced to look in all directions. The specificity of anthropology’s stake in museums stems from its comparative, empirical approach to culture. The rediscovery of the museum within anthropology has taken place at least in part through fieldwork – the very practice that was supposed to mark the watershed between the museum period and the university period. The musealisation of culture, the framing and investment of both objects and practices with new or extra meaning (see Vaessen 1986), is (or should be) a matter of central concern to anthropologists. While the former narrow, almost automatic connection between anthropology and the ethnographic museum no longer seems to work, the ethnographic approach seems patently well-suited for analysing other kinds of museum. Thematic muse-

14

Introduction

ums, such as New Metropolis in Amsterdam, or the new Musée du quai Branly in Paris, also contribute to eroding disciplinary boundaries. New sorts of museum (eco-museums, heritage sites, theme parks and local cultural centres), as well as new approaches to old collections focusing on mediators (including indigenous peoples, collectors, anthropologists) and mediation (the culture of collecting), alter the way in which objects are seen and understood. Concern with the entertainment as well as the educational value of exhibitions, has profoundly changed the internal organisation of many museums as well as external relations. These developments must affect the way museum anthropology is taught, although institutional arrangements for training tend to lag behind and impede teaching arrangements in a number of national contexts. Anthropology departments and museums (of all sorts) could and should strengthen their ties to their mutual advantage. Museums, as custodians and producers of culture, are places where academics can gain essential concrete insight on a whole range of contemporary cultural issues. Museums are also places where some anthropologists engage in reflexive cultural production, so breaking down the old division between academic and applied anthropologies. Many museum practitioners, however, are hard pressed to find the time for theoretical reflection. Museum studies should afford a rich contact zone between the practical and the theoretical – a place for learning as well as doing, through interchange instead of segregation. A great deal of what goes on in contemporary museums is literally about planning the shape of the future. Making culture materialise involves mixing things from the past, taking into account current visions, and knowing that the scenes constructed colonise the future. The complexity of these operations, behind the scenes and in the public space of the museum, inside out, and worldwide, makes culture in this highly concentrated and artificial form a central issue for university anthropology. If the constraints (institutional, historical, political) upon introducing social anthropology to this new museum landscape are clear from a number of chapters of this book, the value of doing so is obvious from all of them. This volume therefore tries to contribute to informed international discussion of both the potential and the problems involved in the current articulations between academic anthropology and the museum world. It also provides food for thought and discussion at more local levels where the (re)integration – and the futures – of museum and academic anthropologies are being played out.

Acknowledgements Grateful thanks to Nélia Dias, Martine Segalen, Michael Ames, Eric Venbrux, Barbara Saunders, Roberto González, Michael O’Hanlon, Henk de Haan, Richard Staring and the editors of Focaal, Tijdschrift voor Antropologie for their comments on earlier drafts of this introduction.

15

Academic Anthropology and the Museum

NOTES 1.

2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

The landmarks include: Stocking (1985), Ames (1986), Clifford (1988), Karp and Lavine (1991), Karp, Kreamer and Lavine (1992), Kaplan (1994), Macdonald and Fyfe (1996), Macdonald (1998). If Frese (1960) contains issues later taken up by Karp and Lavine (1991) and others, the fact that it took thirty years for them to achieve wider circulation is certainly significant. There are of course many more such landmarks with non-anthropological authors, which have inspired anthropologists, these include, Clifford (1988), Lumley (1988), Vergo (1989), Bennett (1995), Duncan (1995). The renewal (or reinvention) of kinship studies (see Franklin and McKinnon 2001), which fell from favour in Anglo-American anthropology after the 1960s, deserves comparison with museum anthropology. Originally published as a special issue of the Dutch journal, Focaal, Tijdschrift voor Antropologie (34), 1999. This remark is not, of course, meant as a generalisation. I am grateful to Eric Venbrux for pointing out that in Nijmegen, for example, a studies collection and the future Nijmegen Ethnological Museum were actually started in 1960 by Professor Richard Mohr. Some students have made exhibitions as well as writing MA and Ph.D theses on their fieldwork. For example, Etnofoor, 1996 ‘Words and things’; Focaal, 29, 1997 ‘Visual art, myth and power’; Etnofoor, 1998 ‘Collecting’. Cf. Vaessen (1995) for an account of the verzelfstandiging (privatisation) of the Dutch Open Air Museum in Arnhem. Threatened closure of the museum led to fundamental internal reorganisation, including reformulation of curatorial power. Roberto González has pointed out to me that the uncertain status of scientific knowledge since Thomas Kuhn’s (1962) The structure of scientific revolutions – fed a broader uncertainty that swept many disciplines. In the aftermath, artistic influences became stronger in some anthropological circles, while others became even more fixated on ‘hard science’. The tension is visible in the approaches taken by science and art museums – pedagogical and aestheticising respectively – although there are increasing indications that these divisions are also breaking down: educational services (Walkman tours, videos, explanation of techniques and so forth in art museums [see Cannizzo, this volume]), and art installations in science museums (for example, in Naturalis, Leiden). This approach might be an appropriate way of dealing with Stanley at the Tervuren Museum? (see Saunders, this volume).

16

I Anthropological encounters with the post-colonial museum

2 T HE

PHOTOLOGICAL APPARATUS AND

THE DESIRING MACHINE .

U NEXPECTED

CONGRUENCES BETWEEN THE

KONINKLIJK M USEUM , T ERVUREN AND THE U’ MISTÀ C ENTRE , A LERT B AY Barbara Saunders




One feature1 of a museum is the performative naturalisation of ‘objective’ relations between a state2 and ‘its’ culture or master narrative of descent, through changing, and sometimes deceptively diffuse and decentralised means (Duncan and Wallach 1980, Hooper Greenhill 1992).3 A museum’s task is to construct a shifting multiplicity of tableaux vivants as facets or dimensions of the state.4 The Israel Museum in Jerusalem is exemplary:5 science and evolution validate the narrative of descent and warrant the cultural-historical blue-print. The cradle of civilisation is presented through archaeology, sacred texts6, history, contemporary art, and prestigious travelling exhibitions.7 Exhibits convey a sense of factuality and unbiased realism and appeal too to the sensibility of high culture and art. To the extent it compels, the means whereby state power is secured, is obscured. Yet the state uses this universal particular to distinguish itself from its neighbours and to create and emphasise a putative historic kinship of myths, symbols, memories and values which are carried in forms and genres of artefacts and activities (Calhoun 1993). The role of a museum then is to display such artefacts and enact its performatives with sufficient efficacy for the nation to feel itself at home, to resonate imaginatively to exhibits and displays, to unite in sorrow, to identify with pride, and for neighbours and visitors to acknowledge authenticity.8 In the Israel Museum factuality and realism are the load-bearing structures, though such devices are not strictly necessary and may be inappropriate. For example at Yad Vashem, com18

The photological apparatus and the desiring machine

memorating the Jewish holocaust, the children’s memorial conveys its poignancy not by realism and factuality but by poetic transcendence (a cave of ‘darkness’; five candles mirrored to infinity; victims’ names and countries enunciated). To achieve its purpose (performing state power), a museum becomes a photological apparatus (Baxandall 1991). Like a photograph, a museum display is photological – the normativity of the photographic image, however sophisticated – providing ideological structuration: an ocularcentric display, a ‘likeness’ to what is represented, a certain kind of scopophiliac observer, the object to be gazed at, contemplatively or inquiringly (Baxandall 1991). A museum provides a place where a large part of what occurs is monological ‘looking at’. In a tradition stretching back to Hellenic thought, it relies on the ‘noble sense’ to provide unbiased knowledge and equates truth with eidos. If ‘looking at’ is analogous to the workings of a camera, then it is that mechanism that is replayed in the museum.9 The photological apparatus itself transcends such utilitarian and literal standards into an ethic of aesthetic ‘truth’, the purpose of which is to ‘move the soul’, through pleasure, wisdom or instruction. First and foremost however its purpose is to nourish ‘the eye’, the scopophiliac observer behind ‘the eye’, and the nation behind the observer. Just as cuisine extends from scavenging to art, and a palate can be more or less educated, so too with ‘the eye’. With regard to ‘the eye’ the photological apparatus crucially relies on the ‘beholder’s share’. This is constituted by the museum set – a sense of the museum as a treasure house, an educational instrument, a secular temple, an appropriately tuned sensibility and a determination of visual-intellectual judgements (Baxandall 1991: 33). Presupposed is a regard for ‘the eye’ as itself photological and the display as an eternal verity (however fleeting and transitory its embodiments). This scientific attunement and its myth of the ‘given’ undergirds a museum and its attendant museum set. This underlying but non-explicitly acknowledged framework means that the exhibits, celebrations and performances seem to uphold their own weight – to be self-explanatory, to speak for themselves. The problem is that ‘the eye’ is in fact a ‘period eye’ – a socio-historical configuration. Not only is ‘looking at’ itself an ideological structuration of viewer and object, but a change in circumstances reveals that received rules for visual interpretation no longer guarantee ‘correct’ or ‘objective’ interpretation. For example, shifting valencies of colonialism expand the complexities of ‘looking at’. Colonialism, essential to the early development of capitalism, may be regarded as a desiring machine (see Deleuze and Guattari 1977, Young 1995), an apparatus whose momentum led empire to be regarded as the great engine of democracy, and capitalism10 to be the determining motor of colonisation. This desiring machine does not belong to the Freudian11 but to the Hegelian-Marxist corpus. For Hegel, desire is the permanent principle of self-consciousness signifying, by its reflexivity, the necessity to become other to itself in order to know itself (Butler 1987).12 In the context of imperialist capitalism this becomes the drive towards expansion for expansion’s sake, setting the pattern for global conquest, globalisation 19

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and the constitution of one ingredient of twentieth-century totalitarianism (Canovan 1992). The desiring machine individuates and replicates social elements and processes for its own purposes. These elements do not pre-exist the process that articulates them; rather, they select, characterise and invent their own components. Such components are not developmental but a succession of singular, self-sufficient operations, analogous to a series of random draws from which an emergent vector can be traced (Deleuze 1986: 92, Pottage 1998: 20). One such process is the desubjectified flow of desire that structures authority. This operates not just at the individual level (as in the Oedipal story), but at the level of society in general. The colonial subject was thus machined into existence by such elements. The elements themselves became phenomenal reality, and were reproduced as the basis for normative experience. Two forms of authority were instituted under colonial rule: civil power (speaking the language of rights) and customary power (speaking the language of tradition). Native Authority enforced an official version of custom and Custom became the language of domination: it became tautologous that what was customary was what Native Authority decreed (Mamdani 1996). Such tautologies were replicated wherever Native Authority was instituted – India, Africa, Canada – constituting a form of neo-traditionalism (Jameson 1998). At home, however, another set of operating conditions were aufgehoben into culture, to legitimise the colonial enterprise, to depict it as destiny, to display it in museums, and reconstitute the nation’s cultural, symbolic and moral capital. Within a colonial museum the interlocking machines – the photological apparatus and the desiring machine – create a force-field of massive complexity. The Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika at Tervuren, Belgium, is exemplary in this respect. Once a royal propaganda machine for the Congo, it now drives a high modernist vision of the exotified and scientificised Other. The U’mistà Centre at Alert Bay on Cormorant Island, located between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia, ensnared by the tautologies of Native Authority and misprision for whites, asserts its right to the universal particular – to represent a nation. Ostensibly positioned in opposing sections of the force-field, as we shall see, both museums are shaped in remarkably similar ways. The academy is central to their maintenance. The Koninklijk Museum, required in post-colonial times to present itself as an archive or research institute, has received the stamp of approval of the academy, its prime consumer in this regard, and silent, passive partner in replication. In contrast, the U’mistà Centre, encouraged by such luminaries as Clifford, and a variety of other institutionally powerful sponsors and patrons from august institutions, serves to confront the Canadian nation on its own terms. It allows the Canadian self-image of fallenness and spiritual reduction to be redeemed and expiated through the religion of advocacy. More particularly, it allows the authentic voice13 of the Other to be heard. Collusiveness with the academy has been pivotal: reneging on their own moral imperatives, anthropologists and cultural critics have served repeatedly to perpetuate the concealment of replicating structures rather than open them up to 20

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critical regard. This is one way in which the academy has loyally served the mythmaking apparatus of state.

The Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika: no desire? Introduction The Association Internationale Africaine was founded at a conference of geographers in Brussels in September 1876.14 Its aim was to open Central Africa for Civilisation (‘die als doel had het openstellen van Midden-Afrika voor de beschaving’),15 and emphasised the importance of doing moral good, of raising up the Natives, of modernising. Leopold II confirmed the moral mission by claiming, ‘To open up to civilisation the sole portion of the globe to which it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness which still envelopes whole populations is .. a crusade worthy of this century of progress’ (quoted by Flynn 1998: 191).16 On 25th November 1878, Leopold called a meeting at which Henry Morton Stanley,17 the adventurer-explorer who had sought Livingstone throughout 1871 and 1872, was present. The Comité d’Etudes du Haut Congo, which was an outcome of that meeting, revealed the real motivation that lay behind the venture, namely, economic exploitation. Stanley, as Leopold’s emissary, was charged with a mission to ‘peacefully conquer and subdue’ this area (Flynn 1998: 191). In 1882 the Comité’s name was changed to Association Internationale du Congo (International Association of the Congo), emphasising more clearly the political nature of the enterprise. At the Colonial Conference of Berlin in 1885, the Congo Independent Free State (Etat Indépendant du Congo) was recognised and Leopold was granted permission by the Belgian parliament to declare himself sovereign King: the only connection between the kingdom of Belgium and this new territory was allegiance to the same king. The great Colonial Exhibition at Tervuren in 1897, aimed at generating economic and scientific interest in Central Africa, surpassed all expectations, and the following year Leopold decided to build a permanent museum to commemorate the endeavour, to further its success and to consolidate its cultural form at home. A plaque on the outside wall of the Tervuren museum announces: Royal Museum for Central Africa. On the initiative of Leopold II, this neoclassical building was erected between 1904 and 1908. It was designed by the French architect Charles Girault, and inaugurated as the new Congo-Museum in 1910 by King Albert I18

Girault, who had designed the petit palais in Paris, drew up extensive plans for the new museum, although only the central building and two pavilions on either side, and the gardens, were realised.19 Set in wooded landscape, the building, a mélange of neo-Baroque and Rococo themes and styles, an embodiment of ancien regime 21

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sensibilities, might, from a Whiggish perspective, be regarded as eccentric. At a time when Berlage’s Stock Exchange in Amsterdam and the Rue Franklin apartment block in Paris had been completed, when the Stocklet House in Brussels and Gaudí’s Casa Milá in Barcelona were under construction, when Garnier’s Cité Industrielle was being conceived, and a mere two years before the Steiner House of Loos would be built in Vienna – the Tervuren museum nonetheless captured vividly the popular structure of feeling of Leopold’s colonial endeavour. Its completion coincided with the transfer of the Congo as a sovereign colony of the Belgian state. Henceforth the museum’s distinctive mission was to persuade the Belgian public of the richness of resources and diversity of species-types, and to appeal to economic and scientific motives and discourses to replicate a new cycle of interest and investment. At the Koninklijk Museum culture supervened on the conjuncture of colonialism and domesticity, becoming the privileged site where the colonial imagination was transmuted into respectability. For women ‘at home’ safeguarding family and morality, the colonial endeavour was reified – seen, named, identified, translated (Dias 1998: 36) – by the photological apparatus. This version of the colonial imaginary turned the negativities of the colonies into feminised respectability, class identification, and symbolic and moral capital. A sanitised colonial reality was produced by photography, simulacra (taxidermy, dioramas), incorporation (ivory tusks), art (paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture) and salon items (ivory candlesticks, piano-keys). At the same time an iconological programme conveyed Leopold’s edifying and philanthropic rhetoric.

The iconological programme Following Duncan (1995), I take the Koninklijk Museum to be a stage set prompting and inviting visitors to enact their beholders’ share. My beholder’s share focuses on issues of racialisation, gender and class formation as jointly constructed by the photological apparatus-cum-desiring machine. The visitor20 approaches the Koninklijk Museum through its front façade which opens onto a park landscape in French-chateau-style. Built around an inner quadrangle, two wings are linked by a large rotunda topped by a thirty meter high dome. Upon entering, beneath the dome, the visitor is confronted by a number of golden allegorical figures placed high on the walls, of unmistakable ecclesiastical iconography.21 They declare the relation of Belgium to Midden-Afrika22 and provide the museum’s ideological plan. Designed by A. Matton (1873–1953), the four I am concerned with represent (from left to right), i. Belgium donating civilisation to the Congo (‘België schenkt de beschaving aan Congo’); ii. Belgium lends its support to the Congo (‘België schenkt zijn steun aan Congo’); iii. Slavery (‘De Slavernij’); and iv. Belgium dispenses prosperity to the Congo (‘België schenkt de welstand aan Congo’). Below each has been placed a larger-than-life-sized carving of a black fig22

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ure (by H. Ward). These are (left to right), i. an Artist; ii. the Chief of the Tribe; iii. the Tool or Idol Maker; and iv. making fire (with two sticks). Each represents the debased species-type that Belgian civilisation will redeem. Only Slavery disturbs the iconographic symmetry. In contrast to the others, this figure depicts the savage Arab slaver grasping the beautiful naked black girl, violently wrenching her upwards and backwards away from her slain infant’s side. Iconologically this image locks the ideological programme in place. Transformed by the photological apparatus, this spectacle of eroticism and race, this eidos of Freudian desire, is presented for the edification of the Belgian kingdom and as justification for its colonial enterprise. Leopold had sold his Congo enterprise to the political and business worlds both at home and abroad through two interconnected themes: lucrative trade through privileged access to resources and markets, and the highly publicised philanthropic commitment to abolish Arab slavery. For the entrepreneurs, convinced of their humanitarian mission, anti-slavery legitimised economics and politics.23 The allegorical figure of the Slaver, replaying images of Pharisees and Infidels, and interlocking with the collusive gaze of the spectator (orthogonally directed upward, into the black female body – the re-inscription of sexual exchange at the heart of capitalism),24 carries the moral justification for Leopold’s endeavour. It was this image that could be carried to Midden-Afrika by the philanthropist-entrepreneur. By universalising the particular as a humanitarian and compassionate mission, erotic/ racialisation was served to middle-class sensibilities,25 to provide the raison d’être for the museum, and to confirm the virtue of Leopold’s enterprise. Are modern visitors required to re-enact this performance? Or are alternatives provided?

Autonomous art? One clue to the contemporary self-perception and re-enactive intent of the Koninklijk Museum might be found in the emphasis on art. Since the independence of the Congo in 1960, the role of the Koninklijk Museum, hitherto replicating at one remove the colonising spirit, became ever more problematic. The colonial project was remoulded into commemorative mood, its flip-side being a scientific research centre with regional focus and earnest and dispassionate study of the Other. The museum’s programme was transposed into the great modernist dichotomy of Art/Science, philanthropy directed at development, and overt ties to capital severed. No mention was made of the ethnocaust – the conflagrations in which millions perished. No questions were raised about new scrambles for Africa, nor were there attempts to highlight the violence. In particular no questions were raised about the relation of the Koninklijk Museum to new configurations of Midden-Afrika. The post-independence low-profile of the Koninklijk Museum is well exemplified by the selection of prestigious West African masks from the Barbier-Mueller 23

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Collection in Geneva, temporarily on view during 1998.26 Sufficient time has elapsed for the new image and its agenda to consolidate. This exhibit of choice pieces presents a unique opportunity to grasp the Koninklijk Museum’s optic, for it captured in nuce bewitchment of Freudian desire and absence of reflexivity. To view this exhibit of West African masks is to re-enact one foundational myth of modernism – the ritual of aesthetic contemplation, the scopophilic practice of specular privileging, the consumption of aesthetic sweets. Long spoiled by passive spectatorship, the visitor is invited to ever more consumption. On display, like so many eternal odalisques, are exquisite West African masks, authored by the unknown craftsman, stripped bare of tatty appendages to emphasise their sensuality, the exhibition is the quintessence of elegant pornography.27 No texts to distract, rather minimalist labels (voorhoofdmasker, Mossi, Burkino Faso; pendantmasker, Benin) accompany the ritual. Discrete television screens present brief videos, add counterpoint and a didactic touch. One video replays a two-minute film, ‘Confrontations’. Klee, Kandinsky, Modigliani and Miro pass the review to be confronted with samples from the collection. No word is uttered, eidos is all. It is as if the ‘Primitivism’ exhibition and the controversy it generated, never occured.28 Another video, ‘De Opslagplaats’ (Storage Area), insistently displays the white-gloved hands of a curator, returning masks to their storage place revealing, as he slides open the storage walls, the hidden spoils. Not just one mask of type X, but hundreds – perhaps thousands – piled up any-old-how. This is a visitor friendly exhibition: no presentational challenges, no intellectually taxing texts, easy on the eye, all anodyne discretion and designer comfort. The photological apparatus-cum-desiring machine is reconfigured as the modernist sublime, behind which stands the metaphysical entity, the Platonic Form, legitimising the project of Primitivism/Art. So have all allegiances with commerce and industry been vanquished, leaving culture to its own sphere of being? Has culture gained autonomy from complicity with market laws? Alas, no, that complicity is alive and kicking. When I visited the museum, the rotunda, its adjacent halls and the inner quadrangle were being rigged out for a large reception, replete with bongo-drums and jungle-inspired drinks stalls. Loudspeakers were being tried out, and the floor cleared for dancing. Trolleys piled high with wine bottles were strategically placed, and functionaries with badges declaring ‘Pharmacia-Upjohn’ (the pharmaceutical multinational) were beginning to assemble. This conjuncture of post-colonial culture and late capitalism is producing a new iconography in which old mutualities, never truly severed, are reconfigured, and the purity of Art, the autonomy of Culture, and truth of Science are revealed for the performative contradictions they always were.29

Value-free science? Another clue to the kind of performance the Koninklijk Museum invites its visitors to enact is found in the appeal to science. The register shifts notably to 24

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instruction and awe. The galleries at the back and to the left house the Natural History collections, and the Guidebook (Royal Museum for Central Africa, 1992) reassures visitors that back-stage scientific authority is in charge. The science displays call on the iconographic tradition of the nineteenth-century Natural History Museum, with each discipline/domain in analytical or diagnostic focus (Macdonald 1998: 11). All cues assure the viewer that this is the realm of objectivity. The tableaux and dioramas are presented with edifying realism, accompanied by models of sensitive ecology and benevolent economics. The visitor is informed of relevant projects: prevention of rain erosion, rationalised crop-plantation, and optimised crop yields, practised with due milieu respect. There is a reminder too that Midden-Afrika has supplied Belgium with uranium, diamonds, gold, copper and cobalt amongst other desirables of the desiring machine. Collaboration with research and analytical laboratories, as well as with the Free University of Brussels, endows respectability.30 Tabulated specimens (pinioned corpses of locusts, praying mantises, butterflies, mosquitoes and wasps among ‘some 12,000,000 specimens’) speak to the eye and convey collecting praxis. This classification and enumeration – the technology-in-action of the desiring machine – renders such images the beginning of wider networks of social, economic and political control. They deliver raw, naked, empirical truths whose authority is difficult to contest. In so far as they are identified with (samples of ) what they represent, the use of such images in the service of Scientific Realism (the State) is their raison d’être. Such image networks help mould the scientific eye of the neophyte and sanctify the practices of Science. In addition to displays of Natural History, there are various scientific research departments. Here is one crucible of museum-academic engagement that invites development. The Ethnosociology and Ethnohistory departments focus on the history of African societies, applying the methods of historical research to the ‘peoples without history’. Linguistics and the Centre for African Languages ‘research into the languages and oral traditions of the African continent’, work that is ‘gradually adapted for use in the modern world’, and complementing Prehistory and Archaeology, which are concerned with ‘the origin and evolution of anthropoid cultures.’31 In the research departments, what enters the record as data, what moves in and out of intentional recording from siftings, determinations and selections, to create the collectivist vision of reality, is what advances humanity. In this philanthropic endeavour, colonial presence, conspicuous by its absence, is revitalised, for the notions of economic expansion and the notion of ‘science’ as truth and progress mellifluously flow together. The rituals of science – extracting data from the flow of life, cleaning it up, compressing it into new space-time configurations, deducing generalities and laws, performing demonstrations, searching for completeness, density, accuracy, precision, the presentation of coherence and the exploiting of the apparently unmediated and perspicuous presence, serve to determine in advance the way the facts relate to one another, to the observer and to the object of knowledge (Edwards 1998, Saunders 2000). This too is the desiring 25

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machine in action. It produces a classificatory description reducing all items and practices within a domain to the same status, thereby enabling their transfer to their new setting at home (research department/laboratory).

Conclusion Belgium – so complicit in the events unfolding in Central Africa – Rwanda, the Congo – has its own version of temporality and truth nowhere more equivocally inscribed than in Tervuren. Its laminated structure simultaneously affirms the desiring machine and cancels Hegelian desire. The absence of connection between what the museum displays/performs/enacts, what the public face of its scholarship presents, and what can be gleaned from modestly reliable information sources about events and configurations in Midden-Afrika is some kind of akrasia.32 Irrespective of what might be going on behind scenes, this public face presents the visitor with no sense of moral connection, let alone urgency, in engaging with the post-colonial, post-Mobutu Congo or post-genocide Rwanda as they struggle to redefine themselves. This raises the question of what public purpose the Koninklijk Museum could now serve.33 The eidos which art and science once underwrote, so prominently enacted in the Koninklijk Museum, is radically severed from Midden-Afrika truth (if by truth one means genocide, military coups, civil and moral chaos, and stalemate in the African solution to the historical problems). Yet ironically nowhere have the issues with which the Koninklijk Museum is implicated received so much attention as in the recent controversies of post-colonial theory and the newly developing field of museum-studies (e.g., Young 1995, Macdonald and Fyfe 1996, Moore-Gilbert 1997, Barringer and Flynn 1998, Born 1998, Macdonald 1998). Clearly their public impact is negligible. Only if, in its public presentation, the Koninklijk Museum were to indicate that there is no collecting that is not a facet of colonial infraction, that the history of Midden-Afrika is simultaneously a history of Belgium, that the inscription of unwritten languages34 is collusive with globalisation/re-tribalisation, that value-free Science is a myth, and that the Platonic Form that sustains High Art is in decay, might a dialectical process begin. It might then question whether any museum can be merely ‘cultural’ and/or ‘scientific’, and whether a line between the material and cultural can be drawn. Anthropologists have sought to explain how the cultural and the economic became established as separable spheres, and how the institution of the economic as a separate sphere is the consequence of an operation of abstraction initiated by capital. To examine as honestly as possible this enduring effect of the desiring machine, might constitute a point of engagement between the Koninklijk Museum, the academy, and the public, as well as a step towards re-engaging in an effective way with the modern Congo, Rwanda and other regions of concern.

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The U’mistà Centre: inverted desire Introduction In this section my concern is with the consequences of the co-optation of the photological apparatus-cum-desiring machine by those who were formerly subjugated to it. In focusing on the U’mistà Centre, Alert Bay, off the east coast of Vancouver Island (one of two Fourth World or Aboriginal museums situated on Kwakwaka’wakw territory),35 my concern is with the nature of its performatives. By inverting desire the U’mistà Centre embodies reified, monadic ‘culture’, enters the global mechanism of tribalisation, and constructs the scopophiliac observer as essentially liberal, relativist and white. U’mistà has gained renown in Anthropology and Cultural Studies as a result of Clifford’s (1991, 1997) influential publications. Like the Kwagiulth Museum on Quadra Island, it was erected to house the ‘repatriated’36 Potlach Regalia, confiscated in 1922 under an ambivalent interpretation of the 1884 anti-Potlach law. This event became the palimpsest upon which national-ethnic feeling would be engraved. U’mistà now asserts itself as a fully self-conscious oppositional museum articulating standard utopian discourses of freedom, autonomy, authenticity and nostalgic return. To legitimate these claims it uses the photological apparatus and self-insertion in the desiring machine.37 In contrast, the Kwagiulth Museum and Culture Centre on Quadra Island, situated halfway between Vancouver and U’mistà, belongs fully to the Fourth World. Marginalised and neglected by the centre, bullied, exploited and intimidated by U’mistà, unprofessional in organisation and self-presentation, it seems unable to marshal either a localised/tribalised discourse or get a grip on the photological apparatus. It survives – just – in the midst of criss-crossing contradictions. Notwithstanding their significant historical and political differences, Clifford (1991, 1997) describes both U’mistà and the Kwagiulth Museum as ‘tribal’.38 This characterisation forms an elegant stylistic conceit against which to set discussion of the majority museums: the Museum of Anthropology (MoA) at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, and the Royal British Columbia Provincial Museum (RBCPM), Victoria. The majority museums concentrate on synoptic displays of indigenous Northwest Coast Culture/culture emphasising ceremonial objects and such elaborately carved items as masks, house-posts and totem poles. A slight difference in emphasis divides them: at MoA indigenous productions are cast as High Art, at the RBCPM as History, Contact and Ethnology.39 My understanding of the four museums differs significantly enough from Clifford’s to impel me to interrogate his typology.40 Bringing the notions of photological apparatus and desiring machine to bear, I suggest there are three majority museums and one indigenous (not ‘tribal’) museum – the Kwagiulth Museum. One reason for re-classifying U’mistà as a majority museum lies in its blend of photological apparatus-cum-desiring machine and Native Authority to 27

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which cosmopolitan museum goers (influential opinion-shapers such as cultural critics, anthropologists, linguists, museum personnel and art historians) are instantly attuned. Another reason is that U’mistà seems significantly disconnected from the realities of the neo-colonial Fourth World to bear only the most tendentious, selective and contested relation to the past (this being one source of grievance with the local community). For it fabricates an exotic image of Otherness the white audience wishes to see. It is a panegyric to an image of Boas-the-cultural-relativist,41 to his informant Hunt, and to Hunt’s descendants – the instigators and founders of the museum.42 It is the embodiment of this latter day notion of culture which is most slippery of all, for this notion is conceptually the ‘Other’ of race. The HuntCranmer family (who run both the museum and politics at Alert Bay) have moulded the sequestered Potlach Regalia into the essence of Kwakwaka’wakw culture on the basis of tendentious interpretations of the Boas-Hunt corpus, colonial typographies and territorial definitions. In presenting this image the museum severs all relations with the community it purportedly serves, mystifying its relation to the neo-colonial powers, by whose grace, and on whose terms (recognition, grants, patronage, technology and so on) it depends. In contrast, the 1970s modernist interior of the Kwagiulth Museum functions almost as a tabula rasa for an anti-museum. Resisting structures of power inherent to museums, refusing modes of photological knowledge, though tangentially touching the desiring machine – directly through the gift-shop, indirectly through lack of powerful sponsors – the Kwagiulth Museum contributes to its own contradictory nature. For undoubtedly – on one level at least – it tries to be a museum. In so doing it appears to place itself, wittingly or unwittingly, in a position open to the contradictions and antagonisms of its historical situation. For example, nation-building is not sublated to utopian resistance, liberation or return, as at U’mistà, but rather confines itself to local entrepreneurial projects (not always successful) and filling the historical record. For unlike the tribes of Northern Vancouver Island, the ethnography of the Lekwiltok Kwakiutl was not inscribed by Boas.43 Within the local political economy however, the sheer existence of the Kwagiulth Museum raises questions about U’mistà’s version of reality.

Clifford’s typology Clifford (1991: 225) asserts that a majority museum ‘articulates cosmopolitan culture, science, art, humanism – often with a national slant’, in contrast to a tribal museum which must express ‘local culture, oppositional politics, kinship, ethnicity and tradition’. I consider this characterisation denigrates the agency of a people who have been debased, and perpetuates the exotic image of oppositionality dear to the heart of the liberal intelligentsia. Specifically it exotifies the alienated identities that took shape under colonialism, and which defined indigenous people by constrictive and negative criteria. It is with these 28

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exotified identities and their defining conditions, presented as primordial, and testifying to the endurance, survival and continuity of culture, that Clifford is complicit. Much of the difficulty with the rhetoric of U’mistà resides in the problematic interpretations of the Boas-Hunt corpus taken as the charter of authenticity. Dependence on this interpretation of (pseudo-Boasian culture) produces an essentially inaccurate relation to the world. To erect on this basis the authoritative and unchallengeable voice of the Kwakwaka’wakw, is to be engaged in recycling debates concerning race and nation imported by the tendentious notion of culture. These debates – particularly those concerning language, culture and territory – seamlessly merge with the photological apparatus. While anthropologically this could be regarded as interesting per se, politically, recourse to this discourse obscures the nature of Native Authority and filters a data-base to verify U’mistà’s claims. This serves to flatter observers, confirms an exotic image of Otherness, and tugs the heart-strings and conscience of the post-colonial liberal. Yet at the same time, on an invisible level (at least to outsiders), it invigorates local politics (often using esoteric knowledge culled from the Boas-Hunt corpus) in combat with the Kwagiulth Museum and surrounding community. While Clifford is sensitive to the possibility of local politics, he fails to understand how U’mistà obscures relations both inside the Kwakwaka’wakw communities and with the Canadian state. Rather, his reading of the museum is located in and seen through that very device – photological knowledge – that created the image of the Other in the first place.

The U’mistà Centre That the U’mistà Centre is to be viewed by a white audience rather than an indigenous one is evident. It embodies the double movement of Native Authority: absorption of anthropological processes, and their replay through the photological apparatus. The ideal visitor to U’mistà would have the receptivity to High Art, the discernments and discriminations of aestheticism, and conscience of post-colonial, educated, Euro-Americans. The display presupposes the perspectival viewpoint of the modern, metropolitan museum-goer for whom art and the art market have structured the museological experience for their own purposes. Specifically, the Christian discourse of sacred and profane is activated when the viewer enters the exhibition space.44 The emotional register is shame and guilt, the correct demeanour religious awe, the museum re-enacting ancient ceremonial practices of votive offering – as in a temple – or of relic worship, as in a cathedral. The original conditions of presentation – uneven, flickering, in motion – and its own conditions of reception in a ceremonial, are removed. That these objects are genealogical identifications, embodying efficacy, and recapitulating ancestral power, is denied by their re-presentation as museological specimens and symbols 29

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of tribal pride. In this way Kwakwaka’wakw culture is made visible as a national work of art, consumed by outsiders as post-lapsarian guilt, and understood as the sovereign expression of Culture/culture. How does the white viewer emerge from this display? The correctly choreographed response is Clifford’s (1991: 240): ‘We encounter an informing and a shaming discourse. Any purely contemplative stance is challenged by the unsettling melange of aesthetic, cultural, political, and historical messages. The history forces a sense of location on those who engage with it, contributing to the white person’s feeling of being looked at.’ Resonating to the cues of oppositionality, Clifford (ibid.: 240) continues, ‘I was not permitted simply to admire or comprehend the regalia. They embarrassed, saddened, inspired, and angered me ...’ Then the following aperçu appears: ‘What stories do these objects tell and retell? I know very little about how this exhibition instructs and implicates a diverse Native American audience’ (Clifford 1991: 240). Perhaps sensing the sensitive ground he is on, he adopts the open-minded liberal stance of refusing to make judgements or take sides. This anodyne correctness in fact says: they are not my kind: I can’t understand their conflicts: my norms don’t apply to them. All of which, of course, is the political replay of pseudoBoasian ‘culture’.

Omissions from the U’mistà story New vistas open when the Native American audience is asked what stories the objects tell. Many who know details of the confiscation and return of the Potlach Regalia refuse to go to U’mistà, claiming the vision it presents is false. Indignation at the manner in which U’mistà was established colours the judgement of others. Many contest the power of the dynasty that has controlled U’mistà since inception. Suspicion abounds that whoever fills memory, will coin the concepts, and interpret the past, and thereby win the future. This fuels the fear that history will be inscribed according to U’mistà. Through the illusion of authenticity and return to primordiality (filtered and re-framed through pseudo-Boasian encomiums), the Kwakwaka’wakw are reconstituted as a unified national community – an autonomous tribe with U’mistà as face and voice. With the patronage of the academy – museum curators, anthropologists, art historians, linguists – U’mistà, ventriloquating the language of ‘culture’ plays a crucial symbiotic role in Canadian mythology, which views its destruction of indigenous society as its original sin. The U’mistà Centre therefore creates a redemptive space – a space of pilgrimage – for the Canadian nation. In this sense it might be considered an indigenous museum fully assimilated to the universal and intellectual premises of Canadian national mythology. So a gap opens: a socalled indigenous museum deploys white museological devices (the photological apparatus) to refashion itself in the guise of religio-aesthetic, post-colonial Oth30

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erness; yet those very deployments are the object of contestation in the indigenous community whose interests the museum purportedly serves.

Conclusion The charter to which U’mistà refers is the colonial discourse of Otherness replayed through the cultural relativist discourse of culture.45 This discourse has ensured the success of U’mistà which, arguably, has entered Ginsburg’s (1991; 1995) Faustian Contract. Like the African Native Authority, the Faustian Contract essentialises traditional culture and customary law. At U’mistà, it is precisely the carefully crafted features of traditional culture/customary law that are presented through the photological apparatus. The realities thus constructed are the result of the management of meaning, a resource sui generis fundamental to the exercise of power, in which anthropology, nostalgia and exoticism reassuringly confirm one another. In consequence a stunningly sophisticated image of self as Other is portrayed through the inverted lens of Empire. If the typology of museums as either majority-cosmopolitan or minority-tribal is retained, then U’mistà is not a minority-tribal museum at all. It does not express local culture, kinship, ethnicity and tradition (assuming that is what a tribal museum should do). U’mistà does not belong to the Kwakwaka’wakw in the way perhaps the Kwagiulth Museum does. Rather it is an embodiment of pseudo-Boasian culture; indeed it is the exemplar in which culture and racial typologies are two sides of the same coin. Not surprisingly Clifford (1991; 1997) felt ‘looked at’. He fails to discern the virtuosity of U’mistà that resides in the specular reflection of the liberal, white observer seen through the photological apparatus. It is the conversion by the photological apparatus of the exotic image of Others-as-ourselves (and ourselves as Others) that so disturbs him. Clifford is disconcerted because he is unused to being on the receiving end of the aggressive and dominative desire to know and master the Other.46

Postscript Overtly the configurations of the Koninklijk Museum and the U’mistà Centre could not differ more. Yet this is illusory. The former is the centre defined by the periphery, the latter the periphery defined by the centre. This does not mean they are the same thing, but that their programmes are linked and congruent. Their self-evidence draws on the same kind of deeply buried presuppositions. For example, both present such aggressively absolutist conceptions of self to the public that it is difficult to know how the academy might re-engage dynamically in the twenty-first century. 31

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I suggest that museums are rapidly becoming one microcosm of key issues with which anthropology/cultural critique are engaged – in particular with the notion of culture and its cognates (race? see Visweswaran, 1998), the relation of culture to the photological-apparatus-cum-desiring machine, and the necessary historiography of the museums. Perhaps in interactive, dialectical engagement museums and the academy have the potential to challenge pernicious dualisms, cease thinking about others as Other, transcend false choices between universalism and relativism, learn to think processually not substantively, insist on the agency of those they study, recognise the structurations of agents in specific circumstances, reject the notion of cultures or groups or individuals as integral monads, acknowledge the past and its temporalities, attend to historical and cultural embedments, abandon the illusory facade of neutrality, and engage with others (Fay 1997). How can this be done? To reconnect in a fitting way, I suggest these museums invite what anthropologists do best. They offer opportunities to exercise the skills of fieldwork – to tack back and forth between the museum and its supposed referent, to expand the possibilities of the photological apparatus, to question and refract its monolithic performances and assertions, to produce a mass of counternarratives – a series of portraits, or likenesses, or analyses – in which the way things were/are is referred to not in one way, but with varying registers, intensities, densities and inflexions, and to rethink memory in terms of an ever open edge, not as a sedimented archive. The aim might be the complexification and production of rivalrous and coexistent versions and varieties of internal/external dynamics, and a more confident grasp of the enframements of the desiring machine. In other words, a great deal of careful and inspired empirical research in dialectical engagement with theory, is required to tease out the complexities of these museums. Despite the upbeat mood of this final theoretical point, I will end on a note of pessimism. Given the inertia of the photological apparatus-desiring machine, given the inexorability of its replicating structures, museums will stand or fall with their referent – none being more vulnerable than the Koninklijk Museum and U’mistà. Since that referent – the nation – is revealed as a temporal and contingent configuration that may mutate or fissipate in or out of tune with the desiring machine, so too will these museums.

NOTES 1. Clearly there are other features, too, not least configurations surrounding class sensibilities and reassurances, the social semiotics of particular exhibitions, self-betterment and leisure activities – though in this article I am less concerned with exploring them. 2. See Saunders (1997, 1997a) for accounts of how the reifying ideology of ‘culture’ obscures the politics of the nation-state. 3. The kind of deceptive diffusion I am referring to is the apparently neutral designation of museums as ethnographic, natural history, science, medical, moving picture or art. This kind of

32

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15.

16.

taxonomy itself is a denial of enframement and evidence of collusion with certain kinds of national ideologies (cf. ‘national’ galleries of art). Similarly the narrative structure of an exhibit which may overtly set out to subvert taxonomies, on another level may confirm the basic relation to the nation. See for a recent example, Mascia-Lee (1998). Deceptive diffusion is often a result of several different nationalisms which claim to represent the same nation at the same time. They offer different definitions of their nation’s identity and purposes, often conflicting, as in multiculturalism debates. I would extend Duncan’s (1995) suggestion (that a museum offers ritual experience) by politicising it and insisting that the ritual belongs to the religion of the nation-state. Similarly, plans to renew the British Museum are concentrating on British history. Especially the Dead Sea Scrolls. In December 1998 the private Merzbacher Collection (masterpieces of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) was given a rare viewing in a temporary exhibit titled The joy of color. Celebrations of ‘cultural difference’ or ‘multicultural performance’ call on the same basic structure. This is too cursory a summary of one of the deep, hidden presuppositions of modern subjectivity, as something isolated in the imprisoned soul. It is a notion of the psyche as inhabiting a dark room, illuminated by inwardly projected images. Haraway’s (1989) discussion of the links between museums, capitalism and science makes similar points. In so far as psychoanalysis has a (gendered) dependence on photological metaphors and complicity with the Idealist tradition of equating truth with eidos, it is useless for examining museums. Hegel talks of historical formations of consciousness in terms of what such formations take to be authoritative for themselves. The reflective form of life, instanced by developing practices for reflecting on and evaluating the authoritativeness of their grounds of belief (concerning the fulfilment of aims), can generate self-undermining sceptical doubts about what a form of life takes as authoritative for itself. Various grounds can be seen to clash irresolvably, practices can fail to satisfy certain criteria, aims can come to be unfulfillable and provoke tragic clashes. All these conditions, and more, are maximally exacerbated and manipulated by colonialism (see Pinkard 1995). Another way of putting this is to talk of different orders of beliefs-desires. First order beliefs-desires are just reactive; second order beliefs-desires produce self-consciousness – a reflective creature scrutinises its own perceptions, wants and opinions, and the bases on which these are formed. A reflective creature might evaluate second order beliefs-desires on the basis of third order ones (it might demand its ideals be justified in some way); it might too entertain fourth order beliefs-desires about its third order ones, proposing for example, a novel conception of justifiability (the latter two being typically forms of philosophical reasoning). See Fay (1997). It could be argued that the ideology of authenticity is a kind of fundamentalism. At the International Geographical Conference in Brussels in 1876, the Association declared its aim to set up stations in Midden-Afrika. Subsequently the Belgian Committee organised five expeditions between 1877 and 1885. Unless otherwise indicated, all citations in Flemish are taken from captions in the Tervuren Museum. The most recent account of the history of Belgium’s Congo is Hochschild (1998), a work that succeeds in portraying vividly the regime of terror, mass murder and other obscenities that make it one of the major killing fields of modern times (all, it need hardly be said, perpetrated in the name of Leopold’s philanthropic venture). It also includes many references to the scholarly literature. Leopold’s masculinist discourse, intended to reinvigorate Belgian manhood, received its’ feminised equivalent in the discourses of decorative arts, notably in the use of ivory, for candlestick holders (schouwgarnituur) and especially for small-scale representations of the female nude (Flynn 1998).

33

Academic Anthropology and the Museum 17. As a young reporter, in 1867, Stanley had accompanied expeditions against the Kiowa and Comanche Indians in North America. By 1897, he had been knighted and had joined Parliament (1895–1900), though he continued to be an adventurer, notably in South America. 18. This plaque is in Dutch, not French, although the present Koninklijk Museum regards itself as bilingual. 19. Plans also included a Chinese and Japanese museum, a ‘world school’ intended to be a major international and national educational institute, as well as a concert hall and restaurant. 20. My beholder’s share and the reading I give the Koninklijk Museum is very strictly from the visitor’s perspective – from what is presented publicly. To pronounce on policy, directives, curatorial decision-making and so on, would require a different kind of approach. 21. There are several more such statues in the entrance hall, but the ones I discuss form the heart of the programme. 22. I use the notion of Midden-Afrika to convey the nature of this imaginary. 23. Though the declining indigenous slave-trade actually received new impetus from the lucrative ivory trade of the Belgians (Flynn 1998: 193). 24. See Young (1995: 19): at the heart of the colonial experience, as Marxists, feminists and colonial theorists have pointed out, lies the political economy of sex. The womb situates woman as an agent in any theory of production (however problematic the notion of production) and necessitates revising normative estimates of the position of women in any sociocultural theory, particularly in colonial theory, so that the reconstruction of the colonial subject can simultaneously be grasped as the construction of the site of the womb. 25. Both colonialism and nation-building, as feminist authors have shown, were carried on by exclusion of women from the public sphere, refusing to acknowledge them as full members of the realm. See Eley and Suny eds (1996) and Duncan (1995) on the modern art museum as a man’s world. 26. Josef Müller (1887–1977, Swiss) began collecting in 1908 with Courbet, Renoir, the PostImpressionists, van Gogh, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Kandinsky, Léger, Miró, Rouault and others, to form one of the most important private collections of early twentieth-century European art. In 1923 he began acquiring African sculptures, and from the 1930s when the prices of European art had risen, concentrated on ‘Negro Art’. His son-in-law, Jean Paul Barbier took over the collection in the 1950s. The Musée Barbier-Mueller, Geneva, was opened to the public in 1977 (Hahner-Herzog et al. 1998) 27. In a different context, Oguibe (1993 passim) describes this structure of feeling as ‘high-modernist vulgarism’, ‘a body of processed epistémé,’ ‘disguised colonial-ethnography-as-the-new-art-history.’ 28. Primitivism’ in 20th-century art: affinity of the tribal and modern (1984), New York, Museum of Modern Art. Of this exhibition Hal Foster(1985: 202) famously said, ‘The Other is becoming the same; the same is becoming different’. 29. As Born (1998: 225) points out, the social relations of cultural institutions are microcosmic of a wider, if local social structuring of knowledge and power. 30. ‘The sheer number and quality of the samples extracted from the rich copper and cobalt strata of Shaba and the rare and dazzling secondary uranium minerals from the same Zaïrese province, are the reason for the excellent reputation the museum has in the international scientific community’ (Royal Museum for Central Africa, 1992: 43). 31. (Royal Museum for Central Africa, 1992: passim). There is in addition a historical archive concerning the exploration, expansion politics, and independent Congo Free State during the era of colonial administration and de-colonisation. Illustrated in the Memorial Hall, the display ‘deals primarily with Belgium’s part in the penetration and colonisation of Central Africa in the second half of the XIXth and first half of the XXth century’, vividly characterised by relics from expeditions and armed forces. We are told that a third of the territory of the Congo Independent State was in the hands of the Arabs and Swahili who had settled in 1863 in Nyangwe on the Lualaba from East Africa, via Tabora and Ujiji. ‘Their occupation was essentially ivory trade and slavery’ (ibid.: 20). Paintings illustrating the point line the walls.

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The photological apparatus and the desiring machine 32. Weakness of will – a form of self-deceit. Though certainly not ignorant of contemporary conditions in the Congo and Rwanda, the Koninklijk Museum seems to deny any concern with or responsibility for these conditions. 33. There are in fact a few-behind-the-scenes initiatives – a university-museum programme, seminars, lectures and other activities. Unfortunately none of this is evident in, or seems to have reached the public domain. 34. There are important debates in linguistics about just what a language is and what is going on when a putative language is being inscribed. See, for example, Fabian (1986). 35. See Saunders (1995, 1997, 1997a) for the background to these museums. 36. Since Feest’s (1995) intervention on repatriation-as-newspeak, I hesitate to use the term. 37. U’mistà markets Aboriginal Art on the Web; an associated theme-park has been built in California, as too has an Indian village at the Dolfinarium at Harderwijk, in the Netherlands. See U’mistà Cultural Society (1998). 38. The Kwagiulth Museum (founded 1979) and the U’mistà Centre (founded 1980) were intended to house the Potlatch Regalia, split between the two centres, and represent new configurations of Kwakwaka’wakw settlement. U’mistà however appropriated most of it, pressurising the descendants of former owners to place their Regalia at U’mistà. In 1980, crates of Regalia whose owners were undecided where they should go, were inadvertently delivered to U’mistà and a large part placed there, in contravention of an agreement with the Kwagiulth Museum. In 1995 the Regalia of two lineages, Hanuse and Charlie, was removed from the Kwagiulth Museum and transferred to U’mistà. 39. See Saunders (1997) for an explanation of why native consultants have not disputed the workings of the photological apparatus-desiring machine. Briefly, (i) its ideology has not been made explicit; (ii) any sort of ‘recognition’ provides a better negotiating position than none at all. 40. Based on fourteen months fieldwork (1989–90), visits to the Canadian Museum of Civilization (Hull, Quebec), and the National Archives (Ottawa, Ontario) (1993), and six weeks fieldwork (1995). 41. Conventional anthropological wisdom has followed the interpretation of Boas as a ‘relativist’, following criticisms of White, Wax and Harris, and fed by the Natur vs. Geisteswissenschaften interpretation of Stocking. I am unhappy with this interpretation, regarding it as a creation of a pseudo-Boas. The real Boas was developing ideas more in line with James, Dewey and Mead. See Lewis (2000 forthcoming). It is the pseudo-Boas, of course, who is the avator of U’Mistà. 42. Clifford is aware that U’mistà is, amongst other things, a family shrine. 43. Though the cultural/political value has yet to be realised, Curtis (1915 passim) wrote about the Lekwiltok. 44. See Saunders (1997a) for a description of the interior of U’mistà. 45. See Harris (1996) for a very different historical account. His account suggests that the survival of the Kwakwaka’wakw was the result of being least affected by disease-related depopulation. Consequently, they were perhaps more receptive to the changing technologies of transportation and communications that brought more and more of the resources of that area into contact with the capitalist world economy. 46. Clifford fails to propel anthropology into post-exoticist and post-colonial directions precisely because he is unable to come to terms with the contradictions of his own unexamined liberal preconceptions. See too Geertz (1998).

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3 P ICTURING

THE MUSEUM : PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE WORK OF MEDIATION IN THE T HIRD P ORTUGUESE E MPIRE

Nuno Porto




Photography and museum studies have recently entered into dialogue, as historians and anthropologists begin to deal with that peculiar class of museum artefacts: the photographic archives. Roughly three types of approach can be distinguished. First there is the approach that sees photographic collections as the basis for historical discourse on a specific social group at a specific point in time, such as Geary’s (1988) work on Bamum. Then there is the line that sets out from the transformation of views about a specific group, constructed through time by several different authors, who may or may not have known about each other’s work. Faris’s (1996) work on the Navajo, for example, relies on different, dispersed collections, achieving unity through its central theme. Thirdly, studies focusing on the disciplinary production of images: from what the camera has registered to the knowledge that sustained photographic practice. Edwards’s (1990, 1992) works on ‘types’, Gordon’s work on the Bushmen as constructed by the Colorado Expedition (1997), or Ryan’s (1997) work on the visual construction of the British Empire, share this approach.

Photography and museum studies These approaches, roughly grouped as they are here, raise parallel issues to those brought to bear in museum studies. For instance, in the art/artefact debate (Mirzoheff 1998 on Schildkrout; Keim 1998 on Mirzoeff ); in criticism about the 36

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politics of Western representation of others (Coombes 1994, Faris 1996, Gordon 1997, articulating photography, collecting and exhibiting); the role of representation as constitutive of cultural categories it is supposed to mediate (Edwards 1990, Ryan 1997). Common to all these approaches is the attempt, pioneered by Tagg (1988), to surpass an essentialist view of photography, which may parallel a broader critique of modern knowledge. The distinction might be framed under Latour’s opposition, between what he calls an intermediary, an object void-in-itself, and a mediator, which is “... an original event and creates what it translates as well as the entities between which it plays the mediating role” (Latour 1993a: 78). I take these debates as the background for this paper, which aims to deal with relationships between museum work and photography, through the issue of mediation. My suggestion, however, is to take a step back: instead of only looking at pictures as they are published in books, in exhibition catalogues or hanging on exhibition walls, I suggest that one should pay attention to the process of their production. The purpose of this endeavour is to articulate the production of visual mediators with backstage museum culture, assuming that photography is one of the most laborious museum artefacts, both in past and present times. The fact that photographs have been, and are being dislodged from the boxes where they rested, seems to testify to their material condition. This fact alone relates to the ethnography on which this text is based: work in progress related to the Dundo Museum materials of the cultural patrimony of the ex-Diamang. The Dundo Museum was a colonial museum owned, from 1936 to 1975, by the Diamang, The Diamonds Company of Angola, which operated in a concessioned area covering the northeast Lunda district of Angola. After Angolan independence in November 1975, the Company was nationalised and its former Portuguese headquarters closed. In the late 1980s, the Archives from the Cultural Services, which ran the museum from Lisbon, were purchased by the Anthropology Museum of Coimbra University. Part of this material includes some 4,000 photographs which comprise the Photographic Archive. There are also photographs, probably even more numerous, illustrating the museum section’s monthly and annual reports for the period between 1936 and 1975. Finally, there are a few other photographs that became scientific evidence through publication in the Dundo Museum Cultural Publications (in the fields of ethnography, archaeology, botany and biology), as well as in books and articles related to work undertaken at the museum and published elsewhere. The photograph as an archive item, as a work report illustration, and as scientific evidence, could have been made from the same negative. In each of these settings it becomes an entirely different object in terms of its production, circulation and consumption. This implies that choices were made along the way, and goals were pursued and negotiated in the face of predictable and less predictable constraints. The kind of choices, objectives and negotiations that underlie the production of photographs as mediators has been thoroughly neglected. The 37

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replicable, non-autonomous nature of the photographic image, the non-existence of an original, obscured the way each image can find its way into quite different contexts. Yet, museum photographs, regardless of their theme as image, cannot but be about the museum itself, its historical contingencies, its internal organisation and its relationships with external parties. Perhaps more than any other object, museum photographs show how the museum sees itself. I therefore propose looking at the Dundo Museum, through its photographs.

Photography considered as material culture Photographs as things The very possibility of entering Coimbra University’s Anthropology Museum depot, opening boxes and scrutinising photographs produced at the Dundo Museum until 1975, rests upon an elementary fact: that photographs are things. They are made, used, kept and stored for specific reasons which do not necessarily coincide. They are things, in the sense that they can be transported, relocated or dispersed; or damaged, torn and cropped; and because viewing implies one or several physical interactions. When considered merely as image, as imprinted representation, photographs turn into photography, and tend to be analysed as a semantic problem. In fact, representational imprint would be a much better term than imprinted representation. The print is an object, while representation rarely is. My proposal is that photographs might be considered, following the by now classical approach devised by Reynolds (1986), through their material constitution. The material system of photographs includes other artefacts, conceptions governing their use, and the organisation of procedures, knowledge, materials, and agents engaged in their production, circulation and consumption. Hence, the same photographic image in the same social setting at a given moment, may disclose different material systems, according to variations in one or more of the elements sketched above. I now turn to some of the variations in the material system of photographs at the Dundo Museum during the 1950s. I hope to demonstrate that this approach facilitates the articulation of inner, backstage aspects of museum work with more public, visible domains. Printed materials form an integral part of this articulation and are, therefore, central to this approach. One of the main characteristics of the Portuguese Third Empire (compared with Portugal’s Far Eastern and Brazilian Empires) is the way printed materials worked in mutually constructing metropolis and colonies, and indeed the colonial process. I suggest that photographic images, in particular, played an indispensable role in what could be termed, after Anderson (1983), ‘print-colonialism’. The organisational structure of the Diamang provides an arena for studying this articulation, which I approach from the perspective of one of its photographers. 38

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The office of photographer (Agostiniano de Oliveira)1 Taking the photographer as an agent of one of many organisational offices (rather than, for instance, as an author) underlines photography as part of the complex bureaucratic work structure of the company which had, by the mid-1950s, over 20,000 employees. This was the bureaucratic environment in which the material system of photography evolved at the Dundo, and upon which it depended both for its raw materials and other means of production. These were not stable procedures since they had to take into account technical changes going on elsewhere, as well as internal requirements that were modified through time. Agostiniano de Oliveira held the office of company photographer between 1948 and 1964. Oliveira had arrived in the colonial government capital of Luanda in 1946, and it was there that he first worked as a photographer – the profession he had learned in Portugal. Since he was already in Angola, Diamang hired him on a salary basis, as opposed to a contract basis – a major distinction (among the company’s white employees), both in terms of wage and fringe benefits.2 Company employees, apart from those at the top of the organisation – and the company photographer – were strictly forbidden to possess or use a camera. Photography was therefore denied, both as practice and product, to most of the population. However, photography was crucial to the work process from the company administration’s perspective, and was extensively used to provide visual information for the work reports that provided the basis for taking new decisions. The photographer had four main tasks: photographing company activities; developing and printing film in the laboratory; classification and choice of prints, according to their technical quality, and archiving in different departments; and, more generally, the maintenance of equipment and laboratory premises. Daily or weekly agendas were set by the organisational structure of the company and replicated in the hierarchies of the different departments. Commissioning photographs followed standard procedures: the department responsible would issue a service request to the local administration, which would then be registered by the secretarial services, which would in turn send a service order to the photographer’s desk. However, requests issued by the Prospecting and Mines Services, as well as those from the Services for the Furtherance and Assistance to Indigenous Handwork (SPAMOI), Urbanisation Services and, finally Representation Services, took priority over everything else, including the museum, regardless of when they actually entered the administrative system. This did not mean that other requests were left unattended, only that they sometimes had to be postponed. After reports had been written by their respective service director, they were delivered to the company’s general director in the Lunda district. Once accepted and commented on by him, they were forwarded to the director general in Angola at Luanda who, in turn, repeated the whole procedure and sent them to the company headquarters in Lisbon. Here they received further comments and were used to take decisions concerning future company steps, which would then be 39

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transmitted all the way back through this network to the Lunda. Photography was taken seriously because of its crucial role in splicing centralised bureaucratic control over the company. The photographer was permitted to travel virtually anywhere and to see all the different parts of the company’s intricate fields of activity. The office was associated with a degree of knowledge that was denied to his equals in the bureaucratic structure, akin to the view over the company’s activities held by the administration. The photographer was, in this respect, the company’s remote(ly controlled) vision.

Bureaucratic environment It is thus not surprising that the photographer was directly answerable to the director general in Lunda, who was responsible for securing every component of the photographic process. Hence, even if cameras, lenses, tripods, lighting, magnifiers, timers, film, paper, chemicals and all the remaining panoply of instruments, components or materials involved in the production of prints were not available in Lunda, they could be obtained through Company networks. Any item made in the United States or England, and later in Germany, could be obtained through the local general director’s desk. Since the photographer was accountable for his work, and since his work was embedded in the functioning of the company at its various departmental levels, he had a reasonable bargaining position. Such negotiations were one-to-one and mainly concerned with so-called technical issues, although they might also be about more social questions. Negotiations of both sorts, about a whole range of events, were crucial to Oliveira’s career with Diamang.

Bureaucracy and agency When Oliveira joined the company in 1948, to replace their retiring photographer, he faced very unprofessional working conditions, especially regarding the laboratory. After some months’ work, he reached the conclusion that it would be impossible to discharge his duties without proper, mainly technical, working conditions. An excellent laboratory was installed in the local administration headquarters by 1951, with the full support of the then director general of the Lunda district. It included a large darkroom, a studio, a room for classifying and storing prints, and a storeroom for paper, film, chemicals and equipment. New 35mm and 6x6 cameras were also acquired, as well as accessories for the existing 9x12 Linhoff camera. The company never, in fact, denied him equipment, paper, film or chemicals, or even training in new techniques with specialists in Portugal or other European countries. It was an altogether different story, however, when it came to what were seen as claims about social conditions. The big issue here was Oliveira’s salaried con40

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tract. After a couple of years of hard work he came to regard this situation as unfair, and asked his superior about having it reviewed. Instead of the usual prompt response that he got when requesting technical devices or work conditions, he had to wait six months for an answer to arrive from Lisbon. Although his request was approved, he nevertheless felt that the administration was not being as cooperative as usual, which he explained in terms of (not) having the personal links needed inside the company in order to progress. Since promotion (in career, salary or benefits) depended more on personal relationships with superiors than on the quality and amount of work produced, it seems clear that several sorts of interests permeated administrative links. Negotiations with superiors, whether for so-called technical or social reasons were, from the photographer’s point of view, strengthened by the fact that his work was needed to keep the bureaucratic wheels turning. However, this strength could easily turn into weakness since the slightest misunderstanding with any departmental chief with whom he had to cooperate could put him at a disadvantage. So, in the end, a good relationship with his immediate superior was his best defence.

Routine and exception Besides the usual tasks he had been specifically hired to perform, the photographer also had to respond to the less specified events and unpredictable episodes of colonial community life. Whenever there were any private celebrations, such as baptisms or marriages, he was called on unofficial duty. This was also the case with collective celebrations not directly sponsored by the administration, such as those organised by the colonial community in the Personnel House for such annual highpoints as Carnival, Easter, Portugal Day and New Year’s Eve. Besides these publicly acknowledged events, he also went on duty if there were major thefts of diamonds, when the camera was used to collect evidence. On these rare occasions, the Diamang Investigation and Prosecutions’ Service acted in complete secrecy. No service requests or orders were issued to the director general’s secretary. Instead, the director general himself would conduct the investigations, set out the tasks to be undertaken, which were neither acknowledged nor commented upon outside the investigation team. The photographer’s task basically involved taking photographs that showed the modus operandi of the theft and, on one particular occasion, the technically demanding but ultimately successful attempt to produce photographs of the perpetrators’ fingerprints.

Photographs not-as-images This outline of the Diamang photographer’s experience shows that photographs are something significantly more than images. In an industrial setting, such as the 41

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Diamang, the production, circulation and consumption of photographs relates to and reveals the threads of a complex bureaucratic structure. This is not, of course, specific to photographs, since any object could lead to diverse aspects of the company. However, because of the way photography articulated with nearly all the Diamang departments, and because of the special status associated with the office of photographer – combining specific empirical knowledge of the territory and the company’s activities – these threads are different and richer than those emanating from, say, the clerk’s typewriter. The constitution of archives was a by-product of the main purpose of company photography. Every month there were hundreds of negatives to be stored and no centralised archive for doing so, since each department filed its own negatives and prints. It was thus as a company department that the museum, its exhibits, performances and visitors came to be photographed systematically, especially after 1950, when the new museum building was finished. This work was carried out during a period of growing international pressure over the Third Portuguese Empire. Picturing the museum became a means of propaganda, publicising the company’s self-acclaimed cultural achievements. Museum photographs consisted in the construction of a photographic register of each museum item, extensive use of photographs in exhibition rooms, as well as in the Dundo Museum Cultural Publications (Publicações Culturais do Museu do Dundo).

The museum and its photographs The museum as a company department The completion of the museum building in 1950 ushered in the second phase of its development, which was to be more international in character (cf. Dundo Museum Annual Report [hereafter DMAR] 1951).3 The museum had been set up in 1936, after the recovery of full production capacity by Diamang following the 1930–1931 international stock market crash. The Portuguese Colonial Exhibition, held in Oporto in 1934, was another important domestic benchmark for the Diamang museum. The Diamang employee responsible for making ethnographic collections from the Lunda and Cokwe peoples who lived in the immediate vicinity of Dundo, was nominated director of the museum in 1942. The museum was provisionally installed in one of the Dundo accommodation houses. Four years later, biology, botany, archaeology and history sections had been added to ethnography, becoming the main sections of the museum. Scientists specialising in these subjects were either hired in Portugal, or transferred to the museum from other company services to which they had been formerly attached.4 The delegate administrator of the company sketched the museum programme in Lisbon. Having realised the need for international cooperation in order to produce first rate work, 42

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he sponsored partnerships between the museum and European and American museums and universities in the different areas. The result was that the Dundo Museum became a sort of frontline laboratory for the international partners. These were, in return, committed to publishing their work related to the museum collections in the Cultural Publications, which came out in English, French or Portuguese, and were distributed free to selected libraries worldwide.5 The museum had its own photographic equipment, mainly used during ethnographic campaigns, which was also available at the museum premises whenever the photographer was not there. Developing and printing film was however carried out by the photographer, who delivered the negatives and prints to museum staff. The photographer’s work at the museum, although following the same procedures as any other department, could be dubbed as technically specific.

Photographing objects The museum collections grew and diversified from its inception until the 1950s. The ethnographic part alone, the museum’s main section, comprised two important collections in addition to the objects collected locally by museum staff. The Baumann Collection was named after the Berlin Volkerkünde Museum ethnographer, who had produced the most consistent work on the Lunda, and who returned as a Dundo Museum associate in 1954. He travelled mainly to the south, making a collection of some 1,200 objects which were placed in a special room at the museum. The other was the African Art collection, assembled among European and North-American antiquarians, museums and auctions, by Diamang delegates acting on the instructions of the delegate administrator. This room was to provide the African art context for the Cokwe and Lunda artefacts. As the notion of organising an operational archive for the museum developed, it became associated with using photography to identify each object. Hence the photographer was called in, each time new acquisitions were classified, to produce a picture that would later be stamped on the reverse side of the object’s file card. These photographs were context free, in the sense that they had no other purpose than depicting the formal characteristics of each artefact. These were studio photographs of artefacts, with a neutral second plan and uniform lighting. Tripod and artificial lighting were usually used with the 6x6 format Rollei camera. These photographs were not intended to do anything more than identify each object, whose card was commonly referred to as its ID card – a telling metaphor about the purpose of the picture as well as the capacities attributed to the medium. Some specific objects, usually the most valued, were subjected to several different photographs, conveying every detail. The technique was mainly developed with an art historian from the Tervuren Museum, who came to the Dundo in the late 1950s to study Cokwe art.6 By trying to respond to her requests about minor details, and by studying published Negro art catalogues at the museum library, 43

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the photographer developed his own procedures to attain the intended formal results: perfect visibility of the object, evenly distributed lighting and, at the same time, a soft picture.

Photographing the museum Another area of his work were the pictures of displays in the museum rooms. These photographs were not only intended for museum work reports, but also for eventual publication, which occurred in three different instances.7 There were no constraints imposed on this sort of image, since they were mainly intended to show how things were at a specific moment. This gave the photographer a certain liberty to take time and pleasure in his work. The Linhoff camera was used for this kind of photograph, with the photographer in full control of the image. The Linhoff is a large, heavy, impractical camera, built with a bellow objective that allows for perspective correction before exposure of the 9×12 negative, which has to be set in place for each photograph. (Perspective correction could also be made, although to a more limited degree, during the printing process). These charac-

Figure 3.1 ‘Native Chiefs Gallery at the History Room of the Dundo Museum’ Negative number 8.439/958; Arquivo Fotográfico dos Serviços Culturais da Ex-Diamang, Museu Antropológico da Universidade de Coimbra. 44

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teristics made the camera useless for action pictures, but perfect for still objects. The photographs of the museum rooms, even some of those taken for work reports, were made using this camera. These photographs were supposed to show the environment, as the photographer put it, rather than the tiny details of objects. They were intended to bring alive the scene for the viewer.

Photographing performances Other photographs, considered important by the photographer, were also taken using this camera, even in outdoor situations. One of his regular consignments for the museum was to make photographic reports of important visits to Diamang, which usually ended at the museum anyway. When, in 1954, the president of the Republic visited Diamang, and the museum, the Linhoff was chosen for the job. The president was photographed in the scenario prepared for him, completing a composition in which the photographer had invested considerable time and energy. The much more manageable 6x6 Rollei camera, together with a 35mm camera, were usually used for this kind of work, as for most reporting. However, when the results were intended for publication, the Linhoff could be considered for use.

Figure 3.2 ‘Prof. Paulo Cunha visiting the Dundo Museum Native Village’. Negative number 19.738/961 Arquivo Fotográfico dos Serviços Culturais da Ex-Diamang, Museu Antropológico da Universidade de Coimbra. 45

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Visitors, especially those regarded as distinguished guests, were usually treated to folkloric performances by the museum dancers and musicians, on the folklore ground of the museum native village. Music, dances and all sorts of performances called for the apprehension of the instant: the flow of composition, meaningful action, body or facial expression. This required the photographer’s full engagement which, as he recalls, made this kind of photographic session exhausting. The sometimes diminished quality of prints obtained with these cameras was compensated by the spontaneity of the frame. These spontaneous pictures could be distinguished from those composed for the camera: the photographer could do both.

Portraits These principles did not apply to portraits, which were his favourite theme, since portraiture implies understanding the person and bringing that understanding to the image. A portrait is one thing, a photograph of a person quite another. The photographer did both when working for the museum. Several photographs concerning ethnographic characteristics of Lunda, Cokwe or other natives, such has hairstyles, tattoos or physical types, belong to this last category. A commission from the museum, on instructions from Lisbon, to make a photographic gallery of native chiefs and elderly company workers worthy of being remembered, was his major exercise in portraiture. The photographer’s personal involvement in this work was entirely different from the motivations of either the company delegate-administrator or the museum director. For the company administrator this gallery, installed in the History Room, had clear political motivations. Photography was used here to reify the desired model of native cooperation with the company, engaging the museum effect of distinguishing specific subjects, either native chiefs or native employees, which follows a well known use of the medium (cf. Sekula 1986). Devised as a memorial, it implied not only the existence of native culture and representatives under Portuguese local history (the guideline for the room being the Lunda area under Portuguese exploration and occupation), but also placed them in the past or identified them as company/Portuguese subjects. As such, it provided visitors with a model of their place in the endeavour. The gallery worked as a local racial chart for the museum director, on the other hand, since it was thought that chiefs represented the purest specimens of each native race (see figure 1).8 None of these considerations were of any importance for the portraits made by Mr. Oliveira. He knew most of his photographic subjects since he was always wandering around the concession area. The process of portrait making involved conversation, conviviality and negotiation of how the portrait would be made with each of his subjects: whether standing or seated, with or without European clothes or any other ‘alien’ implement; whether staring at the camera or posing in three-quarters, and so on. Technical details regarding composition, pose or illu46

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mination, and interaction conducive to the subject’s good humour, overruled other considerations.

Photographic murals Finally, part of his work involved taking photos depicting the ethnographic context related to museum artefacts. These photographs could either have been originally intended for exhibition (and produced in a similar fashion to the Portrait Gallery), or selected from the museum archive, in which case they were involved in a different material process. What distinguished these from other photographs, from the photographer’s point of view, were again technical features in this case related to the scale of the prints. The museum director had, in fact, devised what he called photographic murals for this purpose. Photographic murals were supposed to act metonymically as visual emblems of the museum rooms, to attract the visitor’s attention. The intention was to reinstate inert objects with the lived dimension and environment of their use.

Figure 3.3 Mural Photograph in the Folklore Room of the Dundo Museum, in: Dundo Museum Annual Report 1973 (without negative). The caption reads ‘Repairs inside and outside the museum’. 47

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The major problem for the photographer, however, was to create a technical routine that he could follow each time a mural photograph was commissioned, given the dimension of the print, which could be as large as 6 × 2.8 m. (DMAR 1950: 17–18).9 Since the printing paper was only 1.20m, he had to join several sheets together, pinning them side by side on the studio wall. Then, after magnified exposures that were so long that they had to be interrupted to prevent the negative from frying, he would spray developer and fixer using agricultural insecticide pumps – his own imaginative and effective solution. Next, each sheet was unpinned from the wall and washed outside the studio using a hose. Finally, the studio had to be cleaned up from top to bottom after the ordeal, since both developer and fixer were highly toxic.

Photography as technical problem solving The Diamang photographer’s experience indicates that there was little difference between his work at the museum and that in any other company department, except for themes which he personally preferred, such as portraiture. Even then, however, the photographer tended to look at his work, not so much in terms of the visual product commissioned, but rather as the best, or possible technical solution, for the pictures he had been asked to make. Problems arising from his work were dealt with under the notion of ‘working conditions’, which could refer either to technical needs or to his rank and salary position within the company’s structure. The 1950s proved, in this respect, favourable. From a salaried situation, unprofessional means of production and complete isolation in doing his work, the photographer was given a contract, an excellent laboratory and three native assistants to accommodate the production requirements for photographs. These assistants were assigned some of the photographer’s non-official tasks, such as photographing private celebrations, darkroom work and classifying the Diamang archives once this programme had been set up at the museum. The Cultural Publications Series, which began in 1946, and the new museum building, which opened in 1951, brought more work with them to which the photographer had to respond. This activity was directed, moreover, beyond the local picture, relating to international pressure on Portuguese colonial practices in Africa, particularly those concerning native working laws.10 The museum, as the public image of the company’s social concerns, was subject to intense development during these years. From the perspective outlined so far, photographs are much less an intentional, authored subjective visual statement, than the product of a network of interests. They may be seen as the material result of negotiation between personal skills and exogenous conceptions, pursued under the specific constraints of the bureaucratic structure of an enterprise to which the museum belonged, despite its internal autonomy. Variations in the material systems of photographs indicates, in this sense, their museological construction. The relevance or indifference of photographs to the museum was a function of how it cultivated an image for the outside world. 48

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Variations in the material system of photographs There is a major distinction to be drawn between photographs that portrayed the museum like any other company department, and those which mediated museum work through exhibits or publications. The main distinction, as I shall try to show, was about the ways in which photographs were circulated and used, and how they were valued accordingly.

The museum as a company department. Photographs for internal circulation and use; the index Photographs produced to illustrate museum work reports are generally indexical images in that they are singular, bringing testimony to what they show, and designating their object visually (cf. Dubois 1983: 65–77). Their main theme is the museum building (inside and outside) and its visitors. They rarely include isolated artefacts as evidence of the completion of some commission. The main characteristic of such photographs is their short validity, the way they arrest time, which articulates with their serial, periodic production. Since they are about physical, visible transformations, they work in sequences. The flow of time being continuous, they have to be kept in production, punctuating and reconstructing this flow. Hence they are narrative in the sense that they describe events in time, allowing the viewer to go back and forth without ever leaving the structure with which they are endowed. A significant part of the process that leads these photographs to play this role, springs from the fact that their audience – typically the company delegate-administrator himself – was familiar with the objects, actions, places or persons depicted.11 For such an audience, the photographs were representations of an already familiar object, accessible through personal experience, to which the photographs brought further information. They did not constitute that experience, they were merely added to it. It could be said that viewers had the off-frame picture of the photographs they were looking at. Hence the referent was made present by the photographs through their sequence and accumulation in time. Photographs were important for museum work reports whenever changes (in relation to previous images) took place: the new building, essays for displays, the reorganisation of rooms. Photographic relevance was reduced whenever things stayed the same. Photographs are a token of museum developments, as well as a sign of the bureaucratic instances accomplishing their proper work. Since the museum’s general shape was directed from Lisbon, the photographs worked as a surveillance device, confirming (or not) that orders had been carried out, and work accomplished.

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Photographs as museum artefacts: mediating science and culture Three different material systems seem to have been operative in museum work regarding photography. All of them supposed some kind of public circulation and consumption: photographs exhibited in museum rooms were available to the general museum public. Photographs printed in Cultural Publications (Publicações Culturais do Museu do Dundo) circulated worldwide. Those belonging to the museum archive, of diverse origin, and could be channelled into both the former uses.

Exhibiting photographs Photographs were intended to prevent the museum from becoming a mausoleum, bringing the artefacts to life for the visitors. Since they were intended for collective viewing, size mattered. They were supposed to explain the use of artefacts and so they were mainly chosen for their expressive content. The combination of physical dimension and appealing content, produced a sort of dialogic viewing process, which involved objects also in the room. As exhibited objects, photographs become a concentrate of the work of transformation that all objects undergo when turned into ethnographic objects (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1991). The process of amplifying the photograph, which is the last intervention before it is exhibited, recapitulates the preceding processes of selection, recollection and classification. Hanging on the walls, photographs worked by analogy or by metonymy. In both cases, they abruptly reduced the meaning of the artefact to which they referred by objectifying its use. The object in the photograph is entangled in a specific context, captured (as the metaphor goes) at a specific point in time and space. The question is whether indeed it ever leaves it; and whether it makes for a permanent association, especially for the viewer, who has seen neither object nor object-photographed-in-context. Mediation in this instance constitutes the representation, which is what the viewer will carry away with him. (See Figure 3.3: the detail of the mural photograph shows objects displayed in the room, such as the drums and the marimba, in use).

Published photographs Photographs used as discursive elements in scientific texts effect the visualisation of concepts. The time and place of a photograph’s production becomes irrelevant. The photograph becomes set as a mediator, in which capacity it is acknowledged. As relations with time or space are detached from the image, they are embedded in the discourse, remote from the moment imprinted by the camera shutter. Inasmuch as representation is thus constituted in the process of mediation, 50

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photographs do not mediate but re-represent, that is, they materialise what was, until then, a strictly conceptual element (cf. Latour 1993b: 164–66). The sort of image involved in this process might, in formal terms, be of virtually any kind. Although formal recurrences may be found (for instance, a simple referent such as measurement), what matters in the process is the layered reduction, to the point of concision, of what it stands for, which is not given by the photograph. Hence the restricted public to which these images were addressed, and the active viewing process they imply, when seen in terms other than those of a formal exercise.

The archive The museum photographic archive changed during this period, as consequence of the growing volume of museum work, collections and connections, from the byproduct of an accumulation of museum photographs in which it had originated, to an end in itself. The archive came to be conceived as the visual register of museum activities and collections. There is a central distinction between the photographs of objects and photographs of events. Photographs of objects seem to place them beyond any social or historical relationship, allowing for permanent retrieval. Photographs of events, by contrast, are endowed with the function of memor(ial)ising time. Since it organises photographs according to specific subjects, the archive is both a classificatory and an analytical device creating its own associations between items, but simultaneously proposing the autonomy of each from the other to achieve that effect. As such, the archival photographs are generally icons of their referents, available for retrieval and further uses that might, or might not, redress their meaning (cf. Bouquet 1991: 334). Another important issue concerning the museum photographic archive, is the way it corresponds with the catalogue for artefacts in the different museum sections. Working procedures, involving photographs, were mainly internal but could also play a role in cooperation with other museums, scholars and authorities, mobilising the archives and personnel of different sections.12

Print-colonialism One specific element of the Third Portuguese Empire (as compared with its predecessors in the Far East and Brazil), concerns the role of printed media, channelled through both private and public circuits, in disseminating the notion of empire. As Anderson (1983) has shown, the imperial project relates to the metropolitan consolidation of notions of nationality and nationalism based on political objectives. This is even clearer in the Portuguese case, where a consistent imperial policy arose with the Estado Novo, putting an end to the social and 51

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political turmoil of preceding decades through the institution of an army-based totalitarian regime. International and internal objection to the colonial Estado Novo policy – over labour laws and practices similar to slavery – was also contested through printed materials, soliciting public support for political issues. The Portuguese Estado Novo association between nationalist ideology and imperial endeavour did not neglect the printed dimension, which parallels the shift from occupation to other forms of legitimation for the colonial presence such as ‘scientific domination’. Periodical publications contributed to manufacturing popular consensus about Portuguese colonial policy. These periodicals had been associated with governmental departments or missionary societies since the 1930s, neglecting corresponding material within the scientific field. This kind of publication only came into existence through the precedent set by Diamang with the Dundo Museum.13 Paraphrasing Anderson, the notion of ‘print-colonialism’ could, perhaps, convey this process whereby the diverse colonial territories become abridged and contiguous at the turn of a page. In the Portuguese case, Mozambique, Saint Tome and Prince, Cape Verde, Angola and Guinea Bissau succeeded Timor and Macau. ‘Print-colonialism’ refers to the practical relationships by which conceptual frames (for nature, people, places or events) are translated into printable form that together actually constitute and integrate multiple topographies. The terms whereby these diverse elements are galvanised into the idea of Empire are both creative and normative. The place of photography within these practices has been seriously neglected, and not only in the Portuguese case. The approach sketched here, underlining the agency behind the production and circulation of photographs in a colonial museum context, is a step towards redressing that neglect.

Acknowledgements Work in progress as part of the research project ‘Science as culture in the LusoAngolan colonial situation: the case of the Dundo Museum 1940–1974’, funded by the Ministry of Science and Technology, project Praxis XXI PCSH/P/ANT/41/96, supervised by Prof. Nélia Dias, ISCTE, Lisbon. Associated with the doctorate programme in anthropology at the Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, University of Coimbra, supervised by Prof. Nélia Dias (ISCTE, Lisbon) and Prof. Manuel Laranjeira Rodrigues Areia (FCTUC). I am grateful to both my supervisors for their discussion of this text, although responsibility for any shortcomings is obviously mine.

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NOTES 1. The following section is based on more than six hours of interviews with Mr. Oliveira, held in Lisbon in May 1998. Although I have edited what he said, this section of the text is indeed co-authored. 2. The Diamang work contracts for Angola were produced in Lisbon. These were three-year contracts for a period of two and half years, with a six-day working week, and a vacation of six months in Portugal that concluded the contract. When going to Portugal, workers had to empty their house in the Concession area, since it was part of Company policy that no one should have any personal belongings in that area. They were given a month’s notice of whether their contract had been renewed or not. If they agreed to return, they were rarely assigned a new house. Apart from the house, food, furniture, equipment and sometimes personnel, were also part of the contract. The type of house and its location were related to position. Salaried workers earned about half the contract workers’ wage, had no paid holidays and no priority regarding housing, which meant they had to be ready to move house at any time. 3. The museum director states that: “The Dundo Museum has come to the point where two elements are defined: the conservation of its artefacts, which is simple work that can be done by anybody, as long as they are honest. And scientific work, which can only be accomplished by highly specialised personnel, of the same standing as the museum itself, and the superior quality of its scientific productions, such as the Cultural Publications”. The marking of this new phase continues throughout the 1950s with specific demands, such as the making of an anthropological section related to ethnography. 4. Thus whereas the biology laboratory director was recruited in Lisbon, the director of the archaeological section and his assistants were all transferred from the Prospecting Services on their own consent. Similarly, doctors, nurses and nearly all of the Company’s sections sometimes cooperated on museum work, by sending to it any object found during their own work. (Prospecting workers were compensated whenever they produced any archaeological item, SPAMOI services conducted a Mission for the collection of Native Music, etc.) 5. This became the first Portuguese-based scientific publication on colonial issues, to the despair of the Ministry of the Colonies, which only managed to launch a similar project in the 1950s. The story of what the Minister said when he heard that they had been pipped at the post by “those grocers from the Rua dos Fanqueiros” (the street where the Diamang had its headquarters in Lisbon), became a standing company joke. Diamang, which had no license to trade in any other goods than diamonds, produced a journal. The basic network for its worldwide distribution was triggered by the young biologist responsible for the biology laboratory (from the Faculty of Sciences of Oporto), who had been shelved by Salazar’s regime, and who is still acknowledged as a leading Central Africa entomologist. 6. Who became a leading authority on Cokwe art. Marie Louise Bastin worked as assistant researcher at the Belgian Tervuren Museum, with Prof. Olbrecht. She first went to the Dundo in 1956. 7. These were Oliveira, José António de, 1954, Uma Acção Cultural em África, s/ed, Lisboa; Breve notícia do Museu do Dundo, s/d, Companhia de Diamantes de Angola, Lisboa; this 12 page publication was distributed to museum visitors; Museu do Dundo – Flagrantes da vida na Lunda, Publicações Culturais no. 37. Besides these, all the leaflets that related to museum exhibitions elsewhere (Paris in 1958, Salvador da Bahia and Marseille in 1959, Köln in 1961, Madrid in 1962 and Wien in 1965) used his photographs. 8. The project was devised in 1942, when the delegate-administrator visited the Dundo. The next year, commenting on the project, the museum director wrote: “This production should become very interesting, not only for the great appreciation that natives have for being photographed, but also due to the historical side of the matter. Usually, gentile chiefs (by blood), are the most exact representative of the anthropological type of each ‘race’. Whether because they descend from the central line of their tribe, or because they tend to be elected by the most pure of its groups” (DMAR 1943: 3–5).

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Academic Anthropology and the Museum 9. These large mural photos were destined for the principal rooms at the four corners of the museum: the Honour Room, the History Room, Musical Folklore and Religion. 10. The problem of forced labour, denounced by the Bureau International du Travail, was particularly embarrassing for the company since its contracts with the Angolan Colonial Government, established that a part of the workers needed by the company were supplied by the government. Administrative change that led, in 1950, to colonies (as fundamentally different entities from the metropolis) becoming Overseas Provinces (part of the nation, only not territorially contiguous), was a clear reaction to the growing pressure. 11. In November 1997 the Dundo National Museum still had a Kodak Camera with the following label: “Camera used by the delegate-administrator, Commander Ernesto Vilhena, on his visit to the exploitation area in 1922”. Most of the memoranda from the Cultural Services to the museum concerning photography, are signed by his son, Dr Júlio de Vilhena who, from the mid-1950s, directed the services. Last (and least), according to Mr. Oliveira, the delegateadministrator hated being photographed. When unable to avoid it (as during public ceremonies) he instructed the photographer to view him from below. Mr. Oliveira interprets this perspective distortion as a means of correcting the delegate-administrator’s short stature. 12. Describing the criss-crossing of archival procedures, the museum director concludes: “…the system of the photograph in an independent file card offers better possibilities of use for the following reasons: a) it serves identification; b) it serves its documentary function; c) it remits to any other system, if it were, afterwards, suitable; d) it implies a much reduced number of photographs (documentary ones) that may be augmented until it equals the totality of objects (identification photos). In sum: 1st: The file card to ethnographic objects is produced with some comments explaining the model; 2nd: The photographic file card is studied and one applies the photo to the object file card or to an independent one. 3rd: let us say one decides that the photo in an independent file card is more practical; If so, the File of the Ethnographic collection is indeed a double file composed of descriptive file cards and photographic file cards. Now, to begin working on this matter we shall start by the descriptive file cards. In what concerns typography, card thickness, colour and number of cards to order, we shall return to the subject on which we have already exchanged ideas with the director general. The file card must have enough surface so that any change might be introduced before one prints it. And many other details must be judged. (…) Some registers cannot be supported by only one file card, while others only require a few lines. In these terms we have chosen a model of medium dimensions which, for special cases, can be used once, twice or three times, depending on the quantity of text. Regarding the photographs of remarkable objects, or those requiring amplification for observing details, one might obtain larger prints from the archived negative. Faced with a choice between glass or film negative, we should use film, because it’s not so fragile. We do not think, for this purpose, that the negative should be larger than 6x9 cm. Some objects may be photographed in different positions” (DMAR 1950: 32–33). As these remarks clearly show, archive photographs mobilise the print, the general director, considerations of volume, surface, colour, resistance, written text, the quality of artefacts, the artefacts’ archive and so on. 13. These are O Mundo Português (The Portuguese World), o Boletim da Agência Geral das Colónias, (Bulletin from the General Agency of the Colonies), directly dependant on the Overseas Ministry, and, from the missionary side, Portugal em África (Portugal in Africa). Concurring with these, with a more selective public with scientific interests, was the older Boletim da Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa, (the Bulletin from the Lisbon Geographical Society). The journal, which came to cover scientific interests in Portuguese Colonies (which became ‘Overseas Provinces’ by the 1950 Administrative reform), was Garcia de Orta, the first issue of which dates from 1952, and was named after the Portuguese Naturalist. This publication was issued by the Junta das Missões Geográficas e de Investigações do Ultramar (Commission for Geographical Missions and Overseas Research).

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4 ON

THE PRE - MUSEUM HISTORY OF B ALDWIN S PENCER ’ S COLLECTION OF T IWI ARTEFACTS

Eric Venbrux




I suspect that most ethnographic collections contain much more of an indigenous ordering than their contemporary reputation – as having been assembled according to alien whim and ‘torn’ from a local context – often allows. Michael O’Hanlon (1993: 60)

In December 1994, the Tiwi Land Council, representing the ‘Traditional Owners’ of Melville and Bathurst Islands in northern Australia, paid a considerable amount of money for an old spear and club at a Sotheby’s auction. The Tiwi artefacts were purchased to be put on display in a local museum on the islands (Tiwi Land Council 1995: 10). The reappropriation of indigenous objects raises the question of how early collectors obtained them, and what they then meant in terms of cross-cultural exchange. At the turn of the twentieth century, European scholars considered the Australian Aborigines an outstanding example of ‘primitive society’. Hence, the case of the Aborigines was of prime importance for building of theories about cultural evolution and elementary forms (Hiatt 1996, Kuper 1988). In order to demonstrate that Aborigines, as Baldwin Spencer (1922: 13) puts it, ‘may be regarded as a relic of the early childhood of mankind’, they were (selectively) represented by their artefacts in ethnographic collections in the Western world (Morphy 1988). A number of anthropologists engaged in the collection of objects from Aborigines at that time. ‘Aboriginal reactions to this attention from collectors are difficult to access’, writes Jones (1988: 152). However, it is becoming increasingly clear that, if we want to understand how collections came into being, we cannot circumvent 55

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indigenous agency (cf. Thomas 1991, O’Hanlon 1993, Schindlbeck 1993, Küchler 1997, Herle 1998). The actual processes of artefact collecting, and the artefacts themselves, may provide insight on the heterogeneity of the colonial encounter (Thomas 1994).1 Ethnographic museums will probably continue to keep extensive collections of indigenous objects with only a small percentage of the artefacts ever put on display. The research potential of historical collections is an important reason for academic anthropology to re-engage with museums (Feest 1993; Cannizzo, this volume). As Rankin and Hamilton (1999: 12 ) point out, ‘in many instances, the objects collected to assert colonial dominance today offer the possibility of speaking in rich and nuanced ways about the history of the colonized.’ Furthermore, Schindlbeck (1993) argues that collectors’ instructions, their diaries and other writings, can be telling about the interactions with the people from whom they collected artefacts, and thereby reveal something about the objects’ local meanings and indigenous agency in the making of collections. Spencer (1860–1929) was an early collector of artefacts from Melville and Bathurst Islands. The work of Spencer and Gillen on complex aspects of Aboriginal culture (such as kinship, ritual and cosmology) was influential in twentieth-century anthropology. This complexity is, however, often contrasted with Aboriginal material culture on the basis of a widespread belief that it would be ‘simple’. It remains to be seen whether this dichotomy can be maintained, particularly since anthropological understanding of ‘material culture’ has been broadened. Rather than dealing with aspects of Spencer’s ethnographic work that made him rightly famous, I am interested here in his collecting of (Tiwi) Aboriginal artefacts. My aim, in focusing on Spencer’s writings, is to unravel some aspects of his artefact collecting to illuminate dimensions of indigenous agency and heterogeneity in the colonial encounter that are difficult to detect in any other way. Spencer’s anthropological fieldwork in the islands, in 1911 and 1912, went hand-in-hand with artefact collecting. Back home in Melbourne, he received additional supplies at the National Museum of Victoria from his agent on Melville Island. I have to content myself here with using Spencer’s writings since there has been no external access to his collection since mid-1997, and it was to remain closed until at least late 2000, due to major redevelopment of the Melbourne Museum. First I shall introduce Spencer and the circumstances under which he worked. Next I recount his visits to the islands and the aftermath. In the discussion I will relate Spencer’s experiences to those of other collectors, who obtained artefacts from the islands at about the same time, when the islands opened up to the world.

Melville Island attraction ‘I had always wanted to see Melville Island’, writes Spencer (1928: 641). It is not difficult to understand his desire to go there: Melville Island was one of the ‘very 56

On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts

few parts of Australia now left in which it is possible to study the aboriginal in his natural state’ (Spencer 1914: 41, cf. Basedow 1913: 291). Only Aborigines ‘untouched by civilisation’ could, in his view, provide the evidence badly needed to resolve the most pressing issues in evolutionary theory (Spencer 1928: 157–158). Furthermore, he convinced the government of the need for anthropological research in developing its policy towards Aborigines (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985, Wolfe 1999). Spencer’s artefact collecting had a function in the service of both science and the colonial administration. The Tiwi was ‘[t]he one tribe which offered consistent, uncompromising resistance to European intrusion ‘ (Reid 1990: 97), until the eve of the twentieth century. Melville Island became the site of the first British colonial settlement in northern Australia, in 1824. Fort Dundas, a military and trading post, turned out to be a failure. Within five years the fort had to be abandoned (Campbell 1834). By the end of the nineteenth century, more peaceful relations had developed with some crews of Asian ships that frequented the islands’ waters (Pilling 1958: 17). In 1905, a white buffalo shooter, named Joe Cooper, re-established himself on Melville Island with an armed workforce of Aborigines from the Cobourg Peninsula, to which young Tiwi men were added. Spencer (1914: viii, cf. 1928: 657–658) notes that due to Cooper’s presence and influence, ‘white men can now land, with impunity, on Melville and Bathurst Islands’. Most of these visiting white men, including the anthropologists Hermann Klaatsch (in 1906), Herbert Basedow (in 1911), Baldwin Spencer (in 1911 and 1912) and Henry Kenneth Fry (in 1913), collected indigenous artefacts. Sam Green, a white saw miller, was also based on Melville Island from 1909. Father Gsell, a French missionary of the Sacred Heart Order, established a small mission station on the southeast point of Bathurst Island, opposite Cooper’s camp on Melville, in 1911. He had four Filipino employees with him. Spencer and his friend John Gilruth (appointed Administrator of the Northern Territory in 1912) were instrumental in securing the positions of both Cooper and the missionary; Cooper facilitated Spencer’s research and collecting on Melville Island. The Melville and Bathurst Islands were the only place in northern Australia, according to Mulvaney and Calaby (1985: 269), where Spencer conducted fieldwork in both dry and wet seasons. They add, ‘Melville Island became the venue for some of Spencer’s most important movie filming and ethnographic collecting’. He already had experience of museum anthropology, having assisted Henry Mosely and Edward Tylor with labelling and preparing General Pitt Rivers’ ethnological collection, in 1885, for transfer to Oxford (Chapman 1985: 37, Marrett and Penniman 1932: 160). Two years later, he was appointed Professor of Biology at the University of Melbourne. In 1894, towards the end of a scientific expedition to central Australia, Spencer met with Frank Gillen (1855–1912), the postmaster at Alice Springs, who was on good terms with Aborigines. Spencer and Gillen’s collaboration made a significant contribution to the development of twentieth-century anthropological fieldwork methods, and produced very influ57

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ential books on Australian Aboriginal culture and religion. From 1899 onwards, Spencer was Honorary Director of the National Museum of Victoria. He was also directly involved in museum work, ranging from collecting to curating and exhibiting. Spencer presented a great many of the Aboriginal artefacts he collected to the museum (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985; Mulvaney 1987; Mulvaney, Morphy and Petch 1987). Spencer’s humanitarianism was clothed in the paternalistic attitudes of Europeans of his time. He could not free himself from Social Darwinism, as Mulvaney and Calaby’s (1985) biography of Spencer elucidates in a fair and measured way. Spencer published accounts of his visits to Bathurst and Melville Islands in 1912, 1914 and 1928.2 The section on the Melville Islanders in the 1912 publication, entitled ‘An Introduction to the Study of Certain Native Tribes of the Northern Territory’, is a preliminary account, later revised (see Spencer 1914: viii). Spencer’s books, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia (1914) and the second volume of Wanderings in Wild Australia (1928), contain more extensive descriptions. Spencer’s work is illustrated with photographs taken in the field, and also contains detailed descriptions and numerous images of the objects he collected for the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne. Spencer further presents a typological description of artefacts from Bathurst and Melville Islands in his Guide to the Australian Ethnological Collection exhibited in the National Museum of Victoria (1922). Besides illustrations of the objects, the guide shows two photographs of Tiwi artefacts on display in the Melbourne Museum. The displays, designed by Spencer, appear to have remained unchanged until the 1950s (Mulvaney 1987: ix). Since then, many of the ethnographica, those in the realm of ‘decorative arts’ in particular, have come to be seen as fine art. Morphy (1998) credits Spencer, an artist himself and benefactor of European-Australian art, with making major early collections of Aboriginal art. Tiwi art, ‘particularly as expressed through mortuary ceremonies’, is a theme of a new exhibition currently prepared by the Melbourne Museum (Michael Pickering, pers. comm.).

Spencer’s visits to the Melville and Bathurst Islands ‘Passing across from Darwin to Melville and Bathurst Islands you come into what feels to be like quite another world of aboriginal life as compared with that on the mainland’ (Spencer 1928: 695). He was particularly impressed by physical features of the men and by the mortuary rituals, which he counted ‘amongst the wildest I have seen in the whole of the Northern Territory’ (Spencer 1914: 23). He perceived the landscape, cultivated by means of grass burning, as wilderness. Spencer paid three visits to Bathurst and Melville Islands in 1911–1912. He was greatly assisted by Cooper, although reluctantly obliged to do without his close companion Gillen, who was seriously ill. Matters changed, however, when Spencer became the leader of the Commonwealth Preliminary Scientific Expedi58

On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts

tion to the Northern Territory in June-August 1911. His task was to advise the Federal Government, which had taken over administration of the Territory from South Australia, on policy with regard to Aborigines. Spencer subsequently returned as Special Commissioner for Aboriginals in 1912. He took charge of the Aboriginal Department as Chief Protector, succeeding Herbert Basedow, who had left the new job after one month in August 1911. The non-Aboriginal population of the Territory, a huge area of over half a million square miles, was a mere 2,800 including 1,200 Europeans, against an estimated 20,000 to 50,000 Aborigines (Reid 1990: 196). During his 1911 expedition, Spencer made a short visit to the Islands, accompanied by J.A. Gilruth (a veterinary expert) and Joe Cooper. In March 1912, he made a lengthier stay of three weeks at Cooper’s camp on Melville Island. Finally, another white buffalo hunter, Paddy Cahill, accompanied him on a short visit to the islands towards the end of November.

The visit of four days in June-July 1911 Towards the end of June 1911, Spencer and Gilruth crossed from Darwin to Melville Island, accompanied by Cooper, in a boat chartered from a skipper in Chinatown. The small boat was packed full with the three white men, a Chinese skipper of mixed descent, his Japanese crewman, and an Aboriginal man of mixed descent, named Sheperd. When they anchored off Cooper’s camp on Melville Island, around a hundred Aborigines came to the beach ‘to welcome us, or rather Cooper’ (Spencer 1928: 642–643). Spencer and Gilruth first ate their midday meal at Cooper’s camp, before going into the bush to visit a nearby grave surrounded by sculptured posts. Spencer (1928: 643) notes, ‘We had a whole bevy of natives with us, and of course we carried revolvers and a rifle or two. The natives are apparently quite friendly, but even Cooper never moves away from camp without being armed’. Cooper thus also took care to be accompanied by his mainland employees. Although the latter were mainly adult men, both Cooper and Spencer used the derogatory term of ‘boys’ for them (see Mulvaney and Calaby 1985: 270–271). Gilruth and Spencer slept close to Cooper’s wooden house. Spencer describes the scene with over thirty campfires nearby as ‘wonderfully picturesque’, even more so when darkness fell, and ‘some two hundred natives – men, women and children performed corrobborees in honour of Cooper’s return’ (Spencer 1928: 645). The following day, Gilruth went out hunting with Cooper, but Spencer stayed in the camp to obtain ethnographic information concerning the islanders’ social organisation (cf. Spencer 1912: 14–17, 1914: 200–201). His main informant was Cooper’s ‘best boy, who spoke both the Melville Island and Port Essington dialects, and also English fairly well’. Spencer told this man and a few others ‘things’ about mainland Aborigines. He also showed them photographs of mainland ceremonies. Immediately, ‘they became interested and helped me as much as 59

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they could. With short intervals for mid-day meal and numerous smokes, I grafted hard with them until sunset, by which time we were all rather tired’ (Spencer 1928: 647). The next day, Spencer worked with the same people until early afternoon when the hunters returned to camp. They went on to observe a postfuneral ritual at a woman’s grave, between one and two years old. Spencer (1928: 647–652) mentions that they, the white men, did not know what to expect. He describes the proceedings, songs and dances, body decorations, ceremonial attributes, such as stringy-bark armlets worn by the women, circular disks and small spears used, and the erection of newly painted posts at the grave. The dancing went on for quite a while. When the ritual was finished, the white men returned to Cooper’s camp. The following morning was taken up by ‘gathering things from the natives’. It seems that people expressed what they wanted to have in return for the artefacts: ‘What they liked most, apart from tobacco, was red-turkey-twill that they use as a diminutive skirt or loin-cloth’ Spencer (1928: 652–653) and again interviewed selected informants for several hours. The things were then packed onto the boat, which took Spencer and Gilruth via Bathurst Island (where a Roman Catholic Mission station had been established a few weeks earlier by Father Gsell), reaching Darwin by nightfall.

The three-week field period in March 1912 Spencer’s second visit to Cooper’s camp, in March 1912, lasted three weeks. He was by then Chief Protector of Aborigines for the Northern Territory. During his ‘most interesting time there’ (Spencer 1928: 653), he witnessed a seasonal yam ritual, including a portion of the initiation proceedings and another postfuneral ritual involving the erection of grave posts. With Cooper and his crew of three Aboriginal men, Spencer set sail from Darwin for Melville Island aboard Cooper’s lugger, the Buffalo. Spencer was well equipped for ethnographic, zoological and botanical collecting. His luggage included photographic materials, still and movie cameras, a quantity of goods for trading with the Tiwi, ‘to establish friendly relations on behalf of the Department and to secure from them a number of their very interesting weapons and ceremonial objects that are quite different from any used by the mainland tribes’ (Spencer 1928: 653). The journey was somewhat delayed due to bad weather. On arrival at Cooper’s camp, the Aborigines came to the beach to present Cooper with ‘a very picturesque welcoming dance’ (Spencer 1928: 654–655). Spencer describes the camp as ‘a most friendly and picturesque community’, although he notes that ‘for the sake of safety’ Cooper’s wooden-log house lacked windows. Members of Cooper’s ‘bodyguard’ of mainland Aborigines lived in bark huts to one side of the extensively cleared area (Spencer 1928: 656). Cooper was de facto ‘king of the island’, although he never went out hunting without ‘his 60

On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts

bodyguard’. Cooper’s wife Alice, likewise, had considerable say over the women. Spencer lodged on the veranda – enclosed on all but one side – of the couple’s house. ‘At nightfall, every evening’, Spencer (1928: 657–658) writes, ‘the natives went away: the house was closed up and I had the verandah to myself, always keeping a revolver close handy’. He could hear the waves, and songs being performed in the Aboriginal camps. Shortly after this, on March 9th, the islanders started with a yam-cum-initiation ritual. ‘At first we were both quite in the dark as to exactly what they were doing and who were the chief actors, but, with the aid of Cooper, I gradually found this out’ (Spencer 1928: 658). He gives a detailed account of what went on: the ritual acts, body decorations and paraphernalia, lyrics and dances, and so forth. Spencer did his best to keep track of the proceedings, taking notes and, now and then, photographs, as well as firing continual questions. The ritual performances carried on day and night, concluding at noon on the 11th of March. Even so, they did not get to see the end of the second phase of male initiation, which would only take place in September after several intermittent rites (Spencer 1912: 29–31, 1914: 92–115, 1928: 664–676). Spencer pays special attention to the ceremonial artefacts used in his thick description of what happened to the female and male initiates. Although he was able to observe how male initiation proceeded during a mortuary ritual three days after the yam ceremony, he relied for information about those performed after his departure on a female agent. The same went for artefact collecting: ‘My informant, one of the natives, was present and secured for me the various ornaments’ (Spencer 1914: 111). It becomes clear from the 1928 version that Spencer’s reference to ‘one of the natives’ indicates ‘my friend Alice’, that is, Alice Cooper. What is more, the collection of artefacts met with islander resistance. Spencer (1928: 675) notes that, ‘though it was very difficult to persuade the natives to part with them, [she] managed, through her influence with them, to secure for me all the articles used in connection with this initiation ceremony’. And of the ornaments that were supposed to be left to decompose on a platform in a tree: ‘by special permission of the old men, the ornaments were removed by Alice, but, under ordinary circumstances, no one is ever allowed to touch them and they remain in the tree until they rot away’ (Spencer 1928: 676). Spencer was thus able to add the artefacts to his collections on a revisit in November. On March 13, Spencer and the Coopers tried hard for three hours, to little avail, to learn more about the yam ritual from some senior islanders. The informants received flour, tea and sugar to take back with them to their camps. Later Spencer took a stroll in the Aboriginal camps, ‘with a good supply of tobacco in my pockets which was judiciously distributed amongst the older men and women, much to their satisfaction. Also it served for the purchase of a few native articles, but there was not much to be had’ (Spencer 1928: 676–677). The next day, Cooper and Spencer went with four Aboriginal men in a dugout canoe to the south coast of Melville Island, where they walked a few miles inland to an old gravesite. The posts 61

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were in an advanced state of decomposition. After three hours on foot, they came across two other burial places and, later, an apparently new grave without posts. The Aboriginal men in the party, in marked contrast to their indifference to the grass and undergrowth covering the old graves, immediately cleared the site. On returning to Cooper’s camp, Spencer spent the rest of the day in observing ten grave posts being painted by men, seemingly without age restrictions. The designs appeared to him to lack any specific meaning (Spencer 1914: 399–400, 425, 1928: 677–680). Spencer and Cooper set out on another trip to see burial sites a few days later in Cooper’s lugger. Together with ‘seven boys’, they sailed along the island’s south coast and went some five miles inland up a river. From there, they walked a few more miles into the forest, nearing a swamp, to find ‘two special old graves that the natives knew of ’. The ochre paints had faded away from the eleven and thirteen posts at the respective graves. Spencer attributes a certain indifference on the part of the Aboriginal men towards the graves, to the fact that they were old ones and that the appropriate mortuary rituals had been performed. The acquisition of these posts turned out to be another big coup for him as a collector: ‘With the full consent of the old men, who seemed nothing loath to part with them in return for a goodly supply of tobacco, knives and tomahawks, I secured them’. Spencer photographed the graves and numbered the posts to enable a later reconstruction at the museum in Melbourne. The posts were shipped to Cooper’s camp, where ‘the natives cheerfully renewed the decoration on one set’ (Spencer 1928: 681, cf. 1914: 231–232, 1922: 125). On March 17th, a brief mortuary ritual, including the tossing of male initiates, took place late in the afternoon. The women, Spencer writes, ‘are only too eager now to wear anything that they can get from a white man, but, fortunately, can usually only secure a little piece of red-turkey-twill or a bright-coloured handkerchief, to use as loin-cloth’. Cooper’s one roomed house was filled with stores. Hanging from the ceiling were ‘bundles of native spears’. The cycle of mortuary rituals resumed early in the morning. Spencer hurried to the dancing grounds, observed male initiates climbing trees and passing through a smoking fire. During an extended dance performance, which Spencer filmed, he remarked that ‘one old lubra, a terrible-looking old hag, the mother of the dead person, ... persisted in getting in front of my camera’. At the conclusion of the postfunerary ritual, the posts were erected around the grave, and the participants mourned loudly (Spencer 1928: 686–688). Elsewhere, Spencer relates that when the ritual was over, and he was making a drawing of the painted designs on a man’s head to mark the colours as a key to a photograph, another man wanted to have such a sketch made from him too: ‘They both took themselves very seriously and evidently thought that they had made a strong impression upon us, which as a matter of fact, was quite true, because they looked about as wild and fearsome as human beings well could’ (Spencer 1914: 235). The planned absence of a number of Aboriginal men, as well as Spencer and Cooper, to fetch a load of cypress pine logs from a saw-mill, may have influenced the 62

On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts

timing of the final mortuary rituals mentioned. Their departure was delayed by heavy rain. Just as the lugger was sighted in the northern Apsley Strait, Tiwi in six bark canoes came from Bathurst Island, opposite Fort Dundas on Melville, to meet Spencer and Cooper. Spencer (1914: 398) obtained one of the canoes from them on this occasion. Back in Cooper’s camp, he crossed the strait to the Roman Catholic Mission on Bathurst Island. There, Spencer had discussions with the founder, Father Gsell, and two resident priests, who told him that they attempted to understand the local ways and language before starting to save souls. Then, on March 26th, Spencer returned to Darwin aboard Cooper’s lugger (Spencer 1928: 689–694).

The final visit in November-December 1912 Spencer returned to Melville and Bathurst Islands towards the end of November, to retrieve the ornaments collected for him by Alice Cooper. A large group of Tiwi, from northern and southwest Bathurst Island, gathered for the performance of postfunerary rituals in early December, camping separately. Spencer filmed the rituals, although he considered them to be less spectacular or ‘wild’ than those he had seen on Melville Island. Again, Spencer added ornaments worn in the ritual to his ethnographic collection (Spencer 1914: viii-ix, 46, 229–230, 236, 239, 415–416). This short visit was Spencer’s last field excursion to the islands. His year as chief protector had ended.

Aftermath Spencer put the grave posts from the interior of Melville Island on display at the National Museum of Victoria. After his return to Melbourne, he ‘set them up side by side in the Museum so as to represent as nearly as possible the two original graves, but it is impossible to realise their real impressiveness unless one sees them in their natural setting far out in the primeval forest’ (Spencer 1928: 681; cf. 1922: 125). Visitors to the museum could walk around the exhibit of graves, which were reassembled on a raised platform (Spencer 1922: Plate 25 facing p.124). Other artefacts, such as clubs, spears (although for one series there was a separate case) and the bark canoe, were fitted in with typological arrangements in other cases of Aboriginal objects. Spencer labelled one case ‘Objects used by the natives of Melville and Bathurst Islands’. Bark baskets and other ornaments used in the initiation and mortuary rituals were also on show, including the initiation objects acquired with some difficulty by Alice Cooper. At least twice, Alice’s husband, Joe, sent crates of artefacts to the museum in Melbourne. In addition to the baskets and curios, came the news that Ted – ‘your or our interpreter’ – had died in Darwin Hospital, and that the Aboriginal 63

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Department had ordered him to take all his ‘mainland Boys’ off the Island. Cooper expected that it would soon be his turn to leave Melville Island, which was why he had decided to send Spencer the goods.3 In 1912, Spencer had appointed Cooper sub-protector of the Aborigines. He also ordered the deportation of Aboriginal offenders from Darwin to Cooper’s camp, where they were added to the workforce as part of their ‘reform’. Sam Green, the white saw-miller visited by Spencer and Cooper in March 1912, employed workers provided by Cooper for obtaining timber. However, Cooper’s action of forcefully abducting an Aboriginal woman from Green’s camp, which led Green to complain to the government about past and present ill-treatment of Aborigines, was to result in the removal of Cooper’s mainland workers from Melville Island. When asked for advice, Spencer said a number of things in Cooper’s favour. However, he made it clear that he considered the uncontrolled possession of firearms by Cooper’s workforce to be wrong. This led to an official investigation – the Melville Island Inquiry. The matter brought tensions between the white colonisers in Melville and Bathurst Islands to a head. The Head of Police, Nicholas Waters, suggested that Green had an axe to grind with Cooper, since he was losing the competition for Aboriginal workers. A third party, the white missionaries on Bathurst Island,

Figure 4.1 Baldwin Spencer’s reconstruction of two Melville Island graves at the National Museum of Victoria in Melbourne. The set of old posts on the left hand side had been repainted by Tiwi people (Courtesy Museum Victoria). 64

On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts

gained more influence after Cooper’s departure. It seems likely that Green also acted for humanitarian reasons. In the recorded statements of the Aboriginal witnesses to the inquiry, Ted’s name figures prominently in connection with murder and serious bodily harm to other Aborigines in earlier years.4 Cooper and his ‘bodyguard’ ruled Melville Island to some extent by means of their rifles and carbines, but they could only do so because the Tiwi themselves were divided. Mainland employees raided other territorial groups in the islands to capture women, at the instigation of Tiwi youths working for Cooper (Pilling 1958: 333–336). The mainlanders – Jiwadja, but called Turula (‘shotgun’) by the Tiwi – thus got involved in the dynamics of islander politics. There were animosities (occasional raids still occurred in 1911) and mistrust on the one hand, and coexistence and cooperation on the other. The Jiwadja and the increasing number of Tiwi staying in the Coopers’ vicinity always kept their camps separate, as did Tiwi territorial groupings. Mainland Aborigines introduced the Tiwi to new aspects of material culture, such as rifles, loincloths, and ‘message sticks’. They mediated the introduction of many aspects of a new life style, including different foods, goods and the use of Pidgin English. Some mainland men obtained Tiwi wives in raids but also in return for blankets, steel axes, and so forth.5 The mainlanders adopted a Tiwi dance about the British at Fort Dundas in the 1820s (Poignant 1996).

Discussion: colonial collecting and indigenous agency Schindlbeck (1993) has argued that a collector’s interactions with the people visited are important for an understanding of collections. In Spencer’s case, the circumstances under which he worked affected his relations with the islanders. Graburn (1999: 345) has put it as follows: ‘We now realize that practically all the objects in our ethnographic collections were acquired in politically complex, multicultural situations. Furthermore, we can state unequivocally that unless we include the socio-political context of production and exchange in our analyses we will have failed in our interpretation and understanding’. Mulvaney and Calaby (1985: 270–271) draw attention to Spencer’s lack of concern about how the information he obtained via Cooper and his mainland Aborigines might be distorted. Spencer did not take the disruptive impact of ‘Cooper’s regime’ on Tiwi society into account. Some of the hidden tensions, amongst Aborigines as well as Europeans, surfaced in the next few years. Spencer’s work on Melville Island, both as the Chief Protector and as an ethnographer, depended on Cooper (Spencer 1928: 664). The trade goods that Spencer brought with him in March 1912 served both to obtain artefacts and to improve relations with the Tiwi. The Cooper era, from 1905 until 1916, formed the initial phase of sustained contact with Europeans; Cooper did not really succeed in total ‘pacification’ of Melville Island. 65

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Collecting artefacts Most European visitors, including several anthropologists, collected Tiwi artefacts, and a pattern emerges from their (and Spencer’s) experiences. Collectors worked through settlers with established contacts and networks. Tiwi youths were crew members on Cooper’s small vessel (Klaatsch 1908: 584). Intermediaries, trade goods and medical treatment helped to create trust and goodwill. Harmless boats came be expected at certain places, which became in effect ‘contact zones’. Tiwi people were usually present on the beach ‘to see if they could get tobacco’ (Gsell 1956: 47). Tiwi often performed dances as a gift upon a new or renewed encounter (Basedow 1913: 305), and these dances were spectacular, energetic and impressive. Tiwi also came out to meet approaching ships by canoe. There were several ‘contact zones’: Cape Gambier in southwest Melville Island; and the area around Papiau beach, in northeast Bathurst Island. It was here that Spencer acquired a bark canoe. Other collectors, such as Fry (in 1913) and Conigrave and Hill (in 1914), were led to a little inland and shown the production of bark baskets and some ‘freshly painted’ spears (Conigrave 1936: 167–70, Fry 1950); ‘[t]hese, and many baskets and other objects of native arts and crafts, we took in barter, and we soon had a full cargo for the dinghy’ (Conigrave 1936: 169). This suggests that Tiwi anticipated their arrival. The independent Papiau camp on Bathurst and the Tiwi camps associated with Cooper on Melville Island seem to have been production centres. Visiting collectors, such as Spencer, were shown the making and painting of bark baskets, spears and grave posts. Communication with Aborigines was mostly in Pidgin, although Spencer and others gained some understanding of the local language. The Tiwi clearly expressed what they wanted in return for artefacts. Steel axes, which had already replaced the stone ones, ranked high amongst the desired goods. However, tobacco was the main currency used by Spencer for obtaining goodwill, services and small artefacts. The ‘relative value of things’ was quickly understood, and for anything of ‘special interest’ a double issue of tobacco was requested (Conigrave 1936: 138). The bundles of spears at Cooper’s house undoubtedly provided him with extra income.6 His stores and Spencer’s trade goods further indicate what the Tiwi got in return. The red calico or ‘turkey-twill’ woven into ceremonial armbands and waist girdles (cf. Graebner 1913), collected in the Cooper era, illustrate the ‘indigenous appropriation of European things’ (Thomas 1991). Some Tiwi youths acted as stranger-handlers, specialising in guiding European visitors. Mariano and Kapatji were well known in this capacity on Bathurst Island. Hart (1954: 247) felt he was ‘appropriated’ by Mariano, while Conigrave (1936: 157) says that Mariano behaved towards other Tiwi ‘as if he had the full force of “white fellah gub’ment” to support his every order’. Kapatji was one of Fry’s main informants. They spent several days in Kapatji’s father’s camp in northern Bathurst Island. Fry acquired most of his artefacts from Kapatji’s older brother and other relatives.7 In this respect the collector was also guided (cf. O’Hanlon 1993: 59–60). 66

On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts

White visitors frequently had ‘boys’ from other Aboriginal groups with them because the ‘mistrust these boys have of “wild blackfellas”, mingled with the fear of aggression, is in itself a guarantee for their watchfulness in times of necessity’ (Basedow 1926: 97). Spencer’s company on his short visit in 1911 was certainly a heterogeneous one. There was clearly a complex balance of power at the buffalo shooters’ camps, where Cooper facilitated the collection of Tiwi artefacts by his European guests. He offered them protection, transport, guidance and an interpreter. Spencer ate at Cooper’s house and conducted interviews with Aborigines there. Such local European agents were thus of crucial importance. Although Spencer gathered information about the Tiwi and the mainland (‘Port Essington’) Aborigines as two distinct groups, that distinction is often lost in his use of the term ‘natives’. Collectors often obtained preliminary information, directly or indirectly, from earlier visitors. They behaved predictably, revisiting places where earlier visitors had been. There was a kind of ‘culture of collecting’ (Elsner and Cardinal 1994), and it articulated with the local economy.

Performances Spencer’s ‘good luck’ with ceremonies being held as soon as he arrived may not have been mere coincidence. It happened to one collector after the other. Staging (welcome) dances for visitors was one thing, flexibility in the schedule of planned rituals another. The timing of the collector-attended rituals can be seen as a way of generating an instant collection of artefacts. Artefacts with the potential for commoditisation (Kopytoff 1986) were spears, clubs, bark baskets, various body ornaments, grave posts, songs and dances, which could also serve as (re)payments in Tiwi mortuary rituals. The postfuneral rituals provided an important context in which this Tiwi wealth could be exchanged, and were simultaneously occasions for which the artefacts were produced. The lapse of time between a funeral and the final postfuneral ritual ranged from several months to about two years (cf. Spencer 1914). The timing depended, among other things, on when the organisers were able to make the necessary payments. It seems likely that white visitors were prepared to give something for the dances performed in the ritual context (as they did for the welcome dances).8 The second-hand, desirable ‘authentic’ objects (with the exception of the new grave posts) could be transacted with the visiting collector. Sometimes pre-arrangements were made. Spencer repeatedly states that he ‘secured’ ritual objects for his collection. In March 1913, Fry learned that the performance of a yam ritual was cut short for his benefit. This meant that Fry could already obtain some of the artefacts used in the postfuneral rituals that immediately followed. Afterwards, the collector bartered for the remainder of available artefacts.9 For Spencer, Tiwi mortuary rituals belonged to ‘the wildest’ he observed in the Northern Territory. Their performance gave testimony to a ‘pristine’ culture, yet 67

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‘uncorrupted by civilisation’ (cf. Povinelli 1993: 76). Hence, the Tiwi provided a contrast with ‘the Arunta tribe, which is now, unfortunately, decimated in numbers and hopelessly degenerate in customs’ (Spencer 1914: x). Like many early collectors, Spencer faced a dilemma: ‘even as the exotic Aboriginal subject was being recorded for Western readers, he or she was participating in European trade. To record was to engage in a cultural and economic exchange that undermined the recording project’ (Povinelli 1993: 75). For Spencer, the romantic ideal of ‘wild Aborigines’ was still intact, albeit coming to a close. The historical moment of the anthropological encounter is presented as the one in which ‘history’ is compressed into being. Barter with indigenous people was not completely concealed since in some cases it heightened readers’ awareness of a timeless world on the verge of disappearing. Spencer’s frequent use of the word ‘picturesque’ is linked to his attempts to ‘secure’ as complete a visual and material record as possible, however he provides few hints on Tiwi responses to his visual recordings.10 Conigrave’s description of a ‘photographic salon’ at the Papiau camp, in November 1914, illuminates how posing for photographs was a performance in itself. He writes, ‘our subjects very quickly seized our anxiety to take them full face and profile. If when the former had been taken, a native was slow in turning for his other portrait, he was given some ‘hurry-up’ by those looking on, and when the focal plane shutter went off with a snap, there was satisfied clicking of tongues against their cheeks that seemed to assure us that we had done our job well’ (Conigrave 1936: 170). Spencer had taken similar photographs at Cooper’s camp on Melville Island. However, when ceremonial events were in progress, he tried to register them with minimal interruption. Speeding up the commencement of postfunerary rituals gave the Tiwi involved an opportunity to perform for collectors in other respects, too, namely with regard to the production and display of artefacts. It was, in fact, an effective indigenous strategy to bring together a collection of ethnographic objects.

Initiation ornaments One of the conventional strategies of collectors was to distribute articles such as tobacco, coloured fabrics, beads and pocket-knives in Aboriginal camps, paying special attention to senior people (cf. Basedow 1926: 100). Spencer could not always claim unmitigated success, and his tactic certainly failed in the immediate wake of initiation proceedings. Precisely how Alice Cooper managed to obtain the unprecedented ‘special permission’, months later, to remove untouchable initiation ornaments, is unclear. Fry reports that he had to stand ‘a native trial’ (he was acquitted) as a result of mentioning such an ornament, which had been earlier shown to him ‘in great secrecy’ by a male initiate (Fry 1950: 167). Somewhat similar objects, used in mortuary rituals, could be freely bartered, but not the ‘singularized’ (Kopytoff 1986) ones connected with the initiation of individuals. That at least was the case until Alice Cooper managed to retrieve these items for Spencer in September 1912. 68

On the pre-museum history of Baldwin Spencer’s collection of Tiwi artefacts

In April 1913, Fry met with some reluctance on part of the Tiwi, but after much discussion was allowed to see the ceremonial removal of the initiate’s ornaments. The artefacts used were given to Fry in exchange for wool and beads (Fry 1950: 168). The two events show that collectors were able to influence Tiwi practices, although it can be argued that the initiation objects were still made to disappear from Tiwi society.

Bark baskets Bark baskets were produced in the wet season when the bark could be easily removed from the stringybark tree. The baskets served as carriers and containers for water, foods and small goods in daily life (Basedow 1913: 299, Conigrave 1936: 166). Tiwi women also made somewhat larger baskets, painted by the men, for ritual purposes. The larger, decorated baskets carried ornaments in the form of gifts or material payments in return for services (including making grave posts) in mortuary rituals. They could also be gifts themselves (Goodale 1971: 307). At the conclusion of the postfuneral rituals, decorated baskets were placed upside down atop grave posts. Baskets were once central to a seasonal ritual called the muruntika (meaning ‘basket’) in the home camps. Numerous large, decorated baskets were lined up to store the mash of cycad nuts, the wet season staple food, prepared in the ceremony. The baskets were hung on a tree, and the mash would last for months on end (Venbrux 1999b: 96–98). The ritual gradually discontinued at the time when sufficient introduced foods (such as flour and rice) could be obtained, and Tiwi learned to appreciate buffalo meat (Klaatsch 1907: 676, Venbrux 1999b: 97). Such foods became directly available to the Tiwi associated with the Cooper camps (cf. Spencer 1928: 687). Food rations could also be obtained at Green’s camp and the Mission Station. There was also an influx of old clothes, blankets, pieces of cotton fabric, empty bags, bottles, wooden boxes, discarded tins and so forth (cf. Klaatsch 1908, Pilling 1958). In other words, introduced materials and objects could substitute the bark carriers and containers. The need to prepare the traditional wet season staple food also diminished. However, the practice of making large quantities of baskets continued, as the reports and acquisitions of collectors attest.11 A new ‘commodity context’ was thus created for the baskets. Almost all of those collected appear to have been painted. The designs not only added value for the makers (and reflected that the male collectors mainly dealt with men, who did the painting) but were greatly appreciated by collectors: they were ‘objects which lend themselves most to the display of decorative art’ (Spencer 1914: 419). Back home in Melbourne, Spencer received additional baskets from Cooper, who seems to have been able to obtain baskets not produced for external exchange, and also to commission them to size.12 Fry and Conigrave found that Tiwi in the north of Bathurst Island also made baskets for exchange with collectors. Not only the distinctive decorated baskets, but also the barbed spears and the grave posts appealed to European collectors of Aboriginal artefacts. 69

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Barbed spears Intricately carved and painted spears were part and parcel of any ethnographic collection made on the islands, in the early twentieth century. They were collector’s items.13 The spears were considered trophies, but also served as markers of Tiwi distinctiveness. The heavy multi-barbed ironwood spears, tokens of their owner’s prestige, could be commoditised by the islanders because of their use as payment in mortuary rituals, or in marriage deals. Under the new conditions, spears could also be exchanged to establish friendly relations with whites. In European perception, spears were a clear sign of reputed Tiwi hostility (cf. Hingston 1938). They lost their effectiveness as weapons with the introduction of high-powered rifles (Powell 1988: 124), which were intended for buffalo shooting but also used in raids. When Basedow spent nine days on the islands, in 1911, his party was not attacked with spears, as earlier ones (prior to 1905) had been. On the contrary, ‘When we met with men, hunting in the bush, and they had been convinced of our bona fide intentions, they would approach us in groups from two to four, and deliver up their long spears to us’ (Basedow 1913: 306). The giving up of spears may be seen as a response to the process of ‘pacification’. Spencer acquired the spears in large quantities. He admired their beauty, and even states that every barb is ‘a work of art in itself ’ (Spencer 1928: 707). He describes the arduous work of cutting the spears with a shell, and was surprised that the makers ‘parted with these spears for a stick or two of tobacco’ (Spencer 1914: 363). Such exchanges may reflect an unequal balance of power between the transactors. (Spencer, a powerful representative of the government, was Cooper’s honoured guest. Cooper’s influence may have curtailed the spear-makers’ demands.) Furthermore, an increase in their production, resulting from collectors’ demand and the availability of iron tools, probably also made the distinctive Tiwi spears less rare. This may have affected the level of prices in barter and inflated returns to the indigenous producers. From a Tiwi perspective, the spears had great symbolic value, embodying a senior man’s prestige. This leads me to consider these spears as ‘rhetorical goods’ (Appadurai 1986), rather than denoting capitulation to European power or just commodities being handed over on the cheap. Spencer’s donation of a little tobacco perhaps only gave substance to a new relationship, instead of sealing a purchase. The Tiwi men concerned may have viewed the exchange in terms of ‘tournaments of value’ (Appadurai 1986): a way of telling that they wanted to negotiate on their terms (cf. Morphy 1983), that is, to establish a relationship with a powerful ally.14

Grave posts The collectability of grave posts, as Spencer understood, depended on the phase in their life cycle. Close relatives of a deceased person commissioned them, negotiating 70

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a ‘price’ with the makers which was paid, if still in agreement after the erection of the posts, at the conclusion of the postfuneral rituals.15 On completion of the rituals, they were left to the elements. Each post was a unique and original work. When white collectors showed interest in old grave posts there was nothing to prevent them from becoming commodities again. This time, it was not necessarily the makers who had rights in the posts. Old posts were repainted for Basedow and for Spencer. In the case reported by Basedow, the collector-intended restoration involved more than just making repairs to the damaged or faded designs. ‘Having persuaded the natives to repaint the designs on the tomb-posts, in places where they were defective or missing they set about to work with enthusiasm and did not rest until they had repainted the whole of the surfaces’ (Basedow 1913: 319). Total repainting, including the application of entirely new designs (cf. Hoff 1988: 8), suggests that the European appropriation of old posts was not always unconditional in the local arena. The sale of used posts probably involved internal negotiations and backstage redistribution (as in current practice). It can be inferred that the Tiwi who had initially commissioned – and paid for – the posts could make a strong claim. Spencer first needed permission from senior men in order to obtain the two sets of grave posts, and he paid them compensation. Before the exchange could finally take place, other Tiwi had to relinquish their rights in the old posts, and their total repainting could be part of the procedure.

Conclusion Collectors of Tiwi artefacts have been saying since the beginning of the twentieth century that the objects had to be saved before they were lost forever. In other words, matters were seen as coming to a close. By the end of the twentieth century, the people of Melville and Bathurst Islands themselves adopted such strategies of salvage ethnography as recording oral histories and practices, and collecting traditional artefacts in their museums, with a view to retaining their culture (Tiwi Land Council 1995, Cole 1996, Tungutalum and Cole 1996, Venbrux 1999a: 72–74). However, numerous Tiwi artefacts dating from the early twentieth century are kept hidden in the storage rooms of ethnographic museums around the world. Tiwi people now consider these objects, made by their ancestors and information about them, important for their history and identity. Merlan (1998) shows that past-oriented anthropological representations clearly have an impact, also as a constraining force, on the daily lives of Aboriginal people today. She makes a plea for an ‘intercultural anthropology’ instead. Such an approach is also apt with regard to the collection of artefacts in colonial times (cf. Thomas 1991; O’Hanlon and Welsch 2000). Studying the process of collecting and the artefacts themselves, can be an avenue for looking at that past in novel ways and reassessing the anthropological record. If Spencer became famous in twentieth-century anthropology for his field studies of Aboriginal ritual, cosmology and social organisation, his collecting activ71

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ities are likely to prove equally significant in the context of contemporary interest in material culture and museum studies. In this chapter I have examined the pre-museum history of Spencer’s collection of Tiwi material objects, and tried to tease out information about the process of collecting from Spencer’s written accounts of his visits to Melville and Bathurst Islands in 1911 and 1912. Comparison with the accounts of other collectors show that in the initial phase of sustained Tiwi contact with Europeans, a pattern emerged in this type of intercultural exchange. The analysis brought out the calculative dimension of indigenous agency. The transactional space appears to have been limited to a number of established ‘contact zones’. Tiwi also influenced when, what and from whom things were collected, although relations of power also had their impact. The performance of postfuneral rituals entailed an accumulation of indigenous artefacts, and visiting collectors did not have to wait long in order to see one. The staging of performances, including demonstrations of ‘primitive’ technology and arts and crafts, the rescheduling of rituals for the sake of visitors, and the production of certain artefacts, were all accommodations to the emerging ‘curio’ trade. The European appropriation of old posts was not always unconditional in the local arena. The barbed spears became props in ‘tournaments of value’ with the visiting European power holders. Tiwi dealings with visiting collectors instigated a transformation of exchange in the islands during the period under discussion. Local European agents, such as Cooper in Spencer’s case, played their part in this, as did mainland Aborigines. Resistance to the collection of initiation ornaments, for instance, was given up after a precedent had been set. An examination of the collected artefacts themselves, when they become accessible to external researchers, will no doubt reveal more about the intricacies of Tiwi engagement with the wider world, rather than their exclusion from it.

Acknowledgements I am grateful to Mary Bouquet for her editorial care and helpful suggestions. I acknowledge the Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) for supporting my past fieldwork in the Tiwi Islands, and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for the fellowship that enabled me to study the interrelationship between Tiwi material culture and the wider world. My thanks to Janet Sullivan, Australian Archives, Canberra; Philip Jones, South Australian Museum, Adelaide; Jeremy Coote, Elizabeth Edwards and Alison Petch, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, for access to archival materials. My chief debt, of course, is to the Tiwi people from Melville and Bathurst Islands.

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N OTES 1. Cf. Thomas (1994: 3): ‘Colonial discourse has, too frequently, been evoked as a global and transhistorical logic of denigration, that has remained impervious to active marking or reformulation by the ‘Other’; it has figured above all as a coherent imposition, rather than a practically mediated relation’. 2. He published almost all his fieldnotes (Mulvaney and Calaby 1985). 3. Letters from Cooper to Spencer of 27 November 1913 and 10 December 1915, Sir Baldwin Spencer Papers, Box IV, Archives, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. (A list of the artefacts, mentioned in the 1913 letter, is missing.) 4. Charges made against R.J. Cooper and Melville Island Inquiry, A3, N.T. 1916/245, Australian Archives, Canberra. 5. Letter from Cooper to Spencer of 10 December 1915, Sir Baldwin Spencer Papers, Box IV, Archives, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. Evidence collected in relation to the Melville Island Inquiry suggests that in the latter case some force (the threat or exertion of violence) was used in a number of instances (Melville Island Inquiry, A3, N.T. 1916/245, Australian Archives, Canberra). 6. One of his clients was D.M. Sayers, who made a collection for the South Australian Museum in Adelaide (Philip Jones, pers. comm.). 7. Fry Papers, Anthropology Archives, South Australian Museum, Adelaide. 8. ‘The advent of the due date was accelerated by a liberal distribution of tobacco’, when nine Europeans on a short visit to Bathurst Island in 1920 desired to see the performance of a Tiwi postfuneral ritual (Murphy 1920: 79). 9. Fry Papers, Anthropology Archives, South Australian Museum, Adelaide. 10. Spencer (1914: 41), however, does describe the performance of an Aboriginal person ‘who, after posing a few natives for the purpose, imitated by means of three sticks for a tripod and a sheet of paper bark for a focussing cloth, the actions of a very excitable photographer he had watched’. Whether this happened in Melville and Bathurst Islands or elsewhere remains unclear. 11. For Klaatsch (1908: 587), the highlight of his visit (in September 1906) was two days in the buffalo shooter’s camp in the island’s interior, where he ‘obtained a large collection of the baskets made by young Melville Island girls’ 12. Around 1913, the London-based dealer W.O. Oldman offered, and illustrated, a large bark basket from Melville Island in one of his monthly catalogues. Other Melville Island artefacts included a woven basket or ‘dilly bag’ (Oldman 1967[1903–14], catalogue no. 110). Both type of artefacts had been observed (and possibly collected) at a burial place in the vicinity of Cooper’s camp by W.S. Campbell in 1911 (Spencer 1912: 48). Not the Tiwi, but mainland Aborigines used to make dilly bags. As the two Oldman baskets appeared in one lot, it may be expected that at the other end of their trajectory Cooper had been the source. 13. In 1914, Henry Balfour, curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, obtained ‘a number of fine Melville Island spears’ in Darwin, on his way home from a visit to Melbourne. ‘Nothing like your magnificent series however’, he writes to Spencer (Letter from Balfour to Spencer of 7 June 1915, Sir Baldwin Spencer Papers, Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford). See Spencer (1922: 38–40) for Spencer’s typology and description of his ‘series’ of Tiwi spears (in case 8) in the museum at Melbourne. 14. Later on in the twentieth century, it became practice for Tiwi leaders to present barbed spearheads to visiting Anglo-European dignitaries. The spear also figures on the recently designed Tiwi flag, ‘as a symbol of our courage and determination to guard our integrity’ (Tiwi Land Council 1995: 9).

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Academic Anthropology and the Museum 15. In a small ritual those commissioned to make the posts were given an axe. An accompanying song, composed by the organisers, formally expressed the deal. Reference to a sharp axe (sometimes an axe with a good handle), in contrast to a blunt one, meant that the makers of the posts had to do a good job (large or many posts with striking designs) and would be well-paid (Venbrux 1995: 198–199).

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II Ethnographic museums and ethnographic museology ‘at home’

5 A NTHROPOLOGY

AT HOME AND IN THE MUSEUM : THE CASE OF THE M USÉE N ATIONAL DES A RTS ET T RADITIONS P OPUL AIRES IN PARIS

Martine Segalen




France has two national museums of general anthropology: the Musée de l’Homme, which covers the cultures and civilisations of the world; and for France, the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires. These are in addition to specialist museums such as the Musée Guimet, which is devoted to oriental art. Anthropological museums seemed poised, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, for a new future. After long debate, a new Musée des Arts et Civilisations comprising the ethnographic collections of the present Musée de l’Homme (at Trocadéro) and Musée des Arts Africains et Océaniens (at the Porte Dorée, on the edge of the Bois de Vincennes), has been formally scheduled to open on a new site near the Tour Eiffel in 2004. The Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires will probably evolve into a different project, which will not be based in Paris but in Marseilles, the regional capital of the South of France. By absorbing the European collections of the former Musée de l’Homme, and enlarging its non-French presentations through exchanges with other southern European museums, it is planned as the Musée des Civilisations de l’Europe et de la Méditerranée, thereby counter balancing the developing ethnographic museums of northern Europe. This reshuffle of national museums puts an end to a lengthy crisis, one component of which is the critical relationship between research and museum presentations. This chapter presents a brief history of these museums, showing the 76

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historical, institutional and sociological specificity of the French case. Why were national museums of ethnography so slow to develop when France had been such a pioneer of art museums? Although analysis of the socio-historical context helps to understand part of what is at issue, there are many institutional aspects distinctive to museum organisation that also account for the crisis of national museums during the final thirty years of the twentieth century. The relation between art and ethnography is part of the problem. Last, but not least, the singular relationship between anthropological research and the museum is part and parcel of the history of this crisis.

The late development of national anthropological museums France has been a centralised country since the time of the French Revolution (some historians would argue even before). Modern France developed against regions and their specificities. When, for example, French administrators discovered to their dismay the extent of local languages in 1794, they endeavoured, without success, to eradicate them in order to turn peasants into French citizens. The French state was only concerned with free and equal individuals, ignoring local cultures. Regionalism never embodied national unity as manifest in museums such as the Louvre or, later, in monuments such as the Eiffel Tower. This is quite unlike the history of Scandinavian countries where national identity could be embodied in the collection of rural houses. Norway, for example, which was a Danish colony until 1814 when it formed a union with Sweden, only gained national sovereignty in 1905. The Norwegian collection was part of the Ethnographic collection until 1907, when it was consigned to a special Folk Museum. The connections between desire for and achievement of national sovereignty and the location of ethnographic collections are thus numerous (Bouquet 1996). Norwegian national identity came to be built upon the log houses which, in their construction, symbolised the skills of the people. Skansen, a large openair museum that opened in Stockholm in 1891, rested on a similar ideology: rural buildings were used to embody national character, rather than showing geographical diversity in a systematic manner. These presentations bore closer resemblance to the romantic ideas held by elites about the peasantry than a realist presentation of rural life (Frykman and Löfgren 1987: 61–2). Thus, in contrast to other European countries, France was characterised by the very slow emergence of a national museum of anthropology. Though the origins of the Musée de l’Homme and Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires are connected and their fates comparable, I will focus here on the latter.1 The study of peasant cultures as embodied in objects and artefacts began in the early nineteenth century among various Sociétés savantes, whose goals were to collect local languages, legends and the like bearing witness to the past traditions of France, which were being rapidly destroyed by the development of industries and 77

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cities. Collections of objects, costumes, implements and tools were also made, from about 1860 onward. Folklorists continued to collect whatever was considered typical (and archaic-looking) of a region until the end of the nineteenth century (Collet 1987: 70–71). There were several unsuccessful attempts, during the Second Empire, to open technical and science museums, which were supposed to display old and new machinery so as to demonstrate the technical progress of civilisation. A few regional museums did, however, open during the 1890s in areas where local culture was being reinvented: these included the Musée Breton and Musée Arlaten. The emergence of a national museum – however slow – was characterised by the parallel treatment given to ethnographic collections made by military personnel, priests, civil servants, dealers and others engaged in the French colonies, and the objects collected in rural France. The savage and the peasant were thought of together (Jamin 1985). Ethnographic research (or folklore, as it was also called) sought the rustic and the ordinary, but also what could be considered peculiar to a particular area. The process gained momentum through the Universal Exhibitions held in Paris in 1867 and 1878, at which objects collected in the colonies were on display. The Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro opened in 1878 to house and present the collections after the Exhibition closed. The Salle de France opened in 1884, next to the Salle d’Asie and the Salle d’Afrique, displaying collections of popular art enriched by Armand Landrin. The most archaic objects were presented in the scène de genre style.

Figure 5.1 Wax models and scènes de genre in the Salle de France at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. (Photo: courtesy of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, Paris). 78

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Although the museum did not play a pedagogical role during these years, its scientific purpose is clear from the room available for scholars wishing to examine the collections more closely. Research was then thought of in terms of the objects. The Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro thus presented the exotic and the picturesque on an equal footing; it stressed the role of rural France as a repository of tradition, presenting an idyllic portrait of a vanished golden age (where the peasantry personified the values of French national genius, in an image that persisted into the Vichy period), but also a place of inspiration for popular art. This museum, and regional ones even more so, provided forms and styles which inspired local cabinet makers and other artisans to produce in the dauphinois or bigouden styles. They thereby made a significant contribution to the invention of artistic local stereotypes (Glück 1992: 207–208).

Ethnological research and the creation of national museums Collecting and research developed after the First World War at the Institut d’Ethnologie (close to the Musée du Trocadéro), under the auspices of Marcel Mauss from 1926. This was in contrast to what happened elsewhere in northern and central Europe where chairs of folklore or volkskunde were established in universities. Thus the French school of anthropology founded here combined fieldwork and theoretical research with collecting. Anthropology turned its back, from its beginnings between 1925 and 1935, on evolutionary theories, defining its goal as that of showing the dignity of cultures. Paul Rivet was appointed head of the Musée du Trocadéro in 1928 where, surrounded by a team of non-professional anthropologists (since there was no formal training in the discipline), he theorised a new museology in which objects were intended to show the variety and genius of non-European cultures. Impetus for the scientific study of traditional French peasant society, which was then the definition of anthropology at home, came from various sources and broke with the rather narrow view prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century. The diversity of peasant houses would become an important domain of research among human geographers: Albert Demangeon’s thesis on the variety of rural habitats dates from 1905. The new school of history associated with Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, and the journal Annales E.S.C. focused attention on economic and material aspects of rural life. Arnold van Gennep, who is rightly considered the founder of French scientific anthropology (although he always used the term folklore) was also very influential, although, with respect to the history of museums, he was more interested in social facts and their cultural expression than in artefacts and objects, which he rarely collected.2 Thus, when the time was ripe for a national museum, both for non-European cultures and for regional and peasant France, important collections had already been assembled, which could be deployed thanks to a carefully thought-out theo79

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retical position regarding both cultures and their museological expression. The former Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro was closed in 1928 and demolished in 1935 to make space for a new one, following the 1937 exhibition. Two imposing buildings, crowned with statues of dashing horses, were erected on the Trocadéro hill facing the Tour Eiffel: on the right was the Musée de l’Homme, and on the left was the Musée des Monuments Français. The French collections were separated from the others in 1937 with the creation of a new national museum devoted to French anthropology under the aegis of Georges Henri Rivière. Rivière, who was a nephew of the regional painter Henri Rivière, had trained as a musician and was a self-taught specialist on pre-Columbian art when he was recruited by Rivet to help prepare the new Musée de l’Homme. Rivière was one of the organisers of the famous Dakar-Djibouti Mission, in which Marcel Griaule and Michel Leiris also took part, and for the financing of which he went as far as to arrange a boxing gala with the world champion Al Brown in 1931. Rivière started his career as an aesthete and ended it as a champion of scientific rigor. The Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires was founded in 1936, at the time of the Front Populaire, but it took another thirty years before the collections were exhibited in the new premises. The museum’s name reflects the political circumstances of its creation: it was to be popular, a museum for and about the peuple. Formerly artisanal objects were supposed to be elevated to the prestigious status of art, through incorporation into a national museum whose goals included preserving and transmitting national heritage to future generations. The inclusion of art in the title was circumstantial, moreover, in that Rivière decided that the museum should be placed under the Direction des Musées de France, so becoming part of the embryonic Ministère de la Culture, whereas the Musée de l’Homme was assigned to the Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, part of the Ministry of Research and Universities. These administrative decisions entailed serious consequences: first, in the divergent attitudes of the two ministries during the crisis of the 1970s-1990s toward their respective museums. Second, the affiliation of a museum of anthropology to the Direction des Musées de France, which deals only with museums of fine art, made the collections susceptible to criticism that they comprised objects of no aesthetic value.3 Rivière later admitted that he loathed the name and would have preferred the title Musée Français. Under Rivière’s influence, the museum became better known as the ATP, so that in the course of time the antiquated and passé connotations of the full title were attenuated.

The creation of the Musée des ATP (1937–1960) Research and museum were thus thought about and dealt with together. Contrary to the histories of anthropology in other European countries, the birth of scientific anthropology at home in France was associated with the creation of the ATP, 80

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as is demonstrated by the first congress of folklore held in 1937, and the creation within the Ecole de Louvre (the training school for curators) of a chair of Ethnographie de la France. The museum undertook important anthropological surveys during and after the Second World War. The Musée was, at the time, without premises and situated in the basement of the Musée des Monuments Français, where the expanding collections were stored, until it moved to its present location in the Bois de Boulogne near the Porte Maillot. The scientific intent of the museum can thus be seen in the way that it launched important and extensive surveys of popular music in Brittany, rural architecture, rural furniture and artisanal techniques. The aim was to expand and scientifically document the collections, beyond the legacy of objects that had been collected under the auspices of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. However, collecting and museum exhibitions were conceived of in parallel. The revolutionary nature of Rivière’s scientific conception and presentations is still clear today (1998). The museum did not have as its goal the celebration of a national identity that would summarise all regional and local identities. It deliberately refrained from presenting Breton, Basque, Alsatian or Auvergnat sections, opting instead for in a wide scientific frame that combined material culture with a structuralist perspective. The historical vision that had been associated with an evolutionary scheme was rejected, which explains the emphasis given to placing objects in their social and cultural contexts. Objects were considered to be both signs and evidence of the cultures they represented. They were supposed to speak for the specific culture from which they came. The scènes de genre were rejected, and the wax models were expelled from the new museological displays. The galleries were darkened, with blackouts covering the windows, with the entire focus on spot lit objects. Rivière also invented the concept of ensemble écologique (using the adjective long before the ecology movement), presenting a whole sociotechnical system. The ensemble was collected in situ and reconstituted in its original form with ad hoc comments: this might include a forge, or a traditionally furnished living room from Brittany, or a buron (summer pasture building) where cheese is made in the pastures of the Auvergne. This new museology was acclaimed for its elegance and refinement.4 If the general layout of the displays – from techniques to society and culture – was planned by Rivière in cooperation with Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose words greeted visitors at the entrance to galleries, most exhibitions owed much to a school of anthropology still devoted to the study of material culture. Objects had been collected in the previous century and until the 1930s, with an encyclopaedic goal. Following one of the many avenues opened up by Mauss, scientific anthropology later endeavoured to study objects as they were produced in their original contexts. One had to look at the technical chain of production, from the hand that made the object to the hand that used it or, in André Leroi-Gourhan’s (1943, 1945) words, to follow the chaîne opératoire from the material to the production and consumption of the object. Apart from this great pre-historian and anthro81

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pologist, André Georges Haudricourt, Mariel Jean Brunhes Delamarre5 and Charles Parain were among those who inspired the layout of the galleries. While the museum was waiting impatiently for its new premises, a number of temporary exhibits gave a taste of the new institution to come.

A musée-laboratoire in the Bois de Boulogne (the 1960s) The collections were eventually moved to their brand new building in 1968. It was the first new museum to be built after the war, and was designed by the famous architect Dubuisson, under Rivière’s supervision. The spatial organisation of the building reflects the tight link between museum galleries and scientific research. The horizontal part was devoted to exhibition displays, while the vertical part housed workshops for restoring objects, archives, the library, curators’ rooms, administrative and research offices. Although the building also included two large auditoriums, no regular, institutionally based teaching was ever done there. One of the problems, then, lay with the skills of the team surrounding the head curator, and with training curators in ethnological methods and concepts. Fine art museums were and are staffed by fine art specialists, trained in the history of art at university departments and then recruited through a national competitive exam. They are curators of their collections and commissaires of the exhibits they organise; their work is completely consistent with their professional status. There was no such staff for the only anthropology museum within the Direction des Musées de France. Thus, between 1939 and 1965, the social anthropologists who worked with Rivière were affiliated, for the most part, to the then expanding Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), which had been established after the war especially for disciplines that were absent from the universities: such was the case of social anthropology. The team surrounding Rivière in 1970 comprised eight CNRS personnel, plus five curators from various disciplines who had positions in the Direction des Musées de France. There was no divide between research and museum presentations then, and coherence was possible due to complete agreement about the scope of the discipline: the study of vanishing rural society, the material and cultural productions of which were to be presented to the public. Whatever their status, everyone did fieldwork, collected objects and did preparatory work for either temporary exhibitions or permanent galleries. Fieldwork methods also coincided with the museum’s goals: extensive surveys with questionnaires were to reveal cultural boundaries, local and regional identities that could be directly used by the museum in the form of graphs and maps, such as the one illustrating the distribution of various kinds of cooking fats, such as butter, pork fat and olive oil – a topic that had been addressed by Lucien Febvre. The exhibit appeared as the normal end product of the research programme, due to the focus on techniques and technology.6 82

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The scientific character of the institution was enhanced by the creation of a research centre. It was baptised ‘laboratory’ to give it more of a hard science connotation. Rivière thus created the Centre d’Ethnologie Française in 1966, which is an institutional structure associated with the Musée that continues to this day. The most characteristic expression of the musée-laboratoire, integrating research, collections of objects and museum exhibitions, as well as voluminous scientific publications, is the Aubrac research programme. This programme, taking place in the years 1963 to 1966, can be seen as the apex of the museum and the most representative project of the period during which research fuelled the museum. It was a grand design that collapsed immediately afterwards. Aubrac is an area of central France, including parts of three departments: Cantal, Lozère and Aveyron. The area was renowned for its highland pasture cheese-making system. The entire Musée team, together with linguists, sociologists, agronomists and historians, went to do fieldwork there in what was seen as the ultimate interdisciplinary research. The modernity of the research lay not only in studying a traditional technical system in the process of disappearing, but also in observing and to some extent helping local stockbreeders to reorient themselves to new markets generated by the newly founded European Economic Community (EEC). Research guided fieldwork and the collection of objects came second to the scientific goal of understanding the contemporary (that is, in 1963) functioning of a local society, in its technical and cultural aspects. The museum collections were greatly enriched by the Aubrac venture, with objects, artefacts, collections of tales and songs that were and still are in the gallery. The research provided material for a nine volume series that presents all facets of the Aubrac

Figure 5.2 Georges Henri Rivière during fieldwork in Aubrac with his friends and informants, Jean-Marie and Josephine Girbal, in 1964. (Photo: courtesy of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, Paris). 83

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Figure 5.3 A buron d’Aubrac as reconstituted and presented in the galerie culturelle of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (Photo: courtesy of the MNATP, Paris).

people, their villages, their migrations, their homes and their history (Rivière, 1970–1986). The survey not only delivered classical social anthropological material, such as ethnomusicology, but also opened up new avenues. These included a study in urban anthropology, and a historical study that revealed buron cheesemaking as an activity not dating back to time immemorial, but rather one that developed only a century ago (Segalen 1988).

When social anthropology leaves the museum: the 1970s crisis It is highly significant that the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, headed by Lévi-Strauss, was created in the same year (1966) as the Centre d’Ethnologie Française, while the Département d’Ethnologie et de Sociologie Comparé of the Université de Paris X-Nanterre, led by Eric de Dampierre, was created in 1967. Just as the Musée was opening its permanent galleries and temporary exhibitions to an enthusiastic public in the 1970s, the shift in themes and methods became patently clear. Under Lévi-Strauss’ influence society and culture were to be studied through kinship, religion, witchcraft, beliefs, identities and the like, 84

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and no longer through material culture. The anthropologist working at home had to replicate the attitude of the anthropologist doing fieldwork abroad, as Malinowski had taught: through intensive study of a small community, getting involved with people and activities, rather than the extensive research programmes of which the Aubrac was more or less the last example. Consequently, the sovereign status of objects was shaken. A wedding dress is not as telling in relation to marriage processes and strategies as a plough is in relation to agricultural techniques. The attitude towards material culture shifted dramatically. Objects were no longer taken to be signs of culture, as they once were when technological analysis dominated the discipline. Collecting objects was no longer the goal, certainly not for researchers attached to university institutions. Conversely, the new items of interest, delineated above, did not lend themselves easily to exhibits, and this created a further division between research and museums. The ATP had been organised in departments dealing with different aspects of material culture during the 1960s: agriculture, transportation, household and domestic life, music, and so on. Everything that did not fit into this scheme was assigned to a vague category dubbed coutumes et croyances – customs and beliefs. Suddenly ‘customs and beliefs’ dressed in modish new terms, as symbols, religions and representations, had become central to research instead of peripheral as they had been at the museum. This development, together with the Annales school of the sub-domain of historical anthropology, also led researchers far from the objects accumulated in collections and showcases. The ATP, which had been the sole seat of anthropological research at home, was suddenly faced with a burgeoning of other Parisian institutions, as well as some more slowly emergent regional ones (in Strasbourg, Brest, Toulouse and Grenoble), most of which had little interest in material culture. The divide was felt within the musée-laboratoire itself: Rivière was forced to retire in 1968, and together with the new curator, Jean Cuisenier, researchers arrived who were more attuned to sociological research than anthropological subjects and with little connection to objects. While the galleries remained untouched,7 young researchers recruited by CNRS were dealing with the subjects described above, and did not feel much involved with museum affairs. The topics of urban anthropology, contemporary identities, industry and migration slowly emerged, increasing the distortion between the domain embodied by collections and contemporary fieldwork. The museum, for its part, recruited statutory curators who devoted themselves to the study of collections. Paradoxically enough, however, continuity was not ensured. Unlike fine art museums where if, for example, when an Egyptologist retires he is replaced by another Egyptologist, this did not happen at the ATP, where curators (as well as researchers) carried on their own specific and particular interests. While Rivière had the (probably fleeting) impression that all topics of social anthropology could be dealt with by a specialist, this was clearly not the case for the next generation, which abandoned entire fields – notably those con85

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cerning techniques. The problem also lay with the kind of social anthropology that was being taught. Courses at the Ecole du Louvre (on regional furniture or regional houses) looked rather narrow by comparison with the courses taught at Nanterre University or the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, which encompassed every social and cultural domain, from religion to kinship, and from medicine to aesthetics. Rivière was so caught up in his tremendous national and international activities that he taught very few courses in museology and the topic was absent from university curricula.8 As a consequence, when a new process of selecting curators at the Ecole du Patrimoine began in 1992, most of the (very few) recruits knew far more about art history than about social anthropology. The hiatus between what is taught at university and the requirements of the Ecole du Patrimoine exam is a good illustration of the complete control exercised by the Direction des Musées de France, dominated by art history, over a museum whose requirements it does not understand. The divorce of research from the ATP was vague, and it has not been clearly assessed as, for instance, was the case with Scandinavian anthropology which rejected museum collections and where, significantly, university departments changed their names, for example in Sweden, from Folklivforskning to Etnologia Europaea (Löfgren 1996). Although the divide was not as dramatic as in the by then decaying Musée de l’Homme, where curators eventually managed to expel the CNRS researchers, the ATP was completely shaken by these multiple oppositions. The field of anthropology was suddenly less clear than it had been, and the place of art was more ambiguous than ever. While some of those doing research on beauty queen contests, for instance, thought it legitimate to collect Miss France’s bathing suit, scarf and crown, or those studying the Chinese community in Paris thought it legitimate to collect the Chinese dragon that danced outside the Galeries Lafayette on the Chinese New Year, some curators were outraged by their views. They preferred to keep on collecting popular iconography (such as Epinal prints) in which art could be more clearly identified. The question of what to collect was never addressed directly, although there was much discussion about contemporary popular objects. The 1970s crisis within the museum itself can thus be summarised as follows. There was a blurring of the field of social anthropology at home, where the study of traditional peasant culture by then belonged to history rather than to social anthropology, which became more preoccupied with studying what is going on right now. An institutional divide was created by a statutory body of curators, who assumed responsibility for guardianship of the collections and the exhibition of objects. Moreover, the status of objects regarding the past as well as future collections became uncertain. The result was that social anthropologists abandoned the collections that had been accumulated in the name of their discipline. This crisis became more acute with the development of eco-museums and the patrimoine movement, which characterised the 1980s.

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The eco-museums and musées de société Although Rivière had officially retired in 1968,9 he was extremely active both in international organisations (ICOM) and as the father of a new generation of museums: the eco-musées. Rivière was of course familiar with the Scandinavian open-air museums and the Heimat museums of Central Europe, but he was opposed to the idea of houses torn from their original habitat. The project of eco-museums stems from another trend, notably the creation of regional parks aimed at protecting fragile and natural areas of France. The term was coined in 1966, and the suffix ‘eco’ was to meet with great success in the wake of events which took place in France after 1968 and were to be dubbed ecological. The idea was to make an in situ presentation of some interesting buildings, kept in their original state on their own home ground, showing how the local population worked in their local surroundings to make a living and a culture there. The eco-museum was conceived and run by a team comprising both specialists and members of the local population who were supposed, in Rivière’s words, to mirror itself in the exhibition, and then to offer this mirror to the visitor. The museum was no longer a place of aesthetic delectation or knowledge, but had a social goal to fulfil, in helping the locals to understand their past in order to better control their future. A very ambitious and very different goal was therefore set for these museums that were to sprout up all over France in the wake of the patrimoine (heritage) movement, which swept the country during the 1980s. Many museums were created under the heading of eco-museum, although they did not comply with the original definitions, and they met with an enormous success that was constantly contrasted with the declining number of visitors to the ATP by the mid-1980s. The ATP was described as a mausoleum by then, or compared to a huge liner anchored aimlessly in the Bois de Boulogne. A particularly damaging article by a reviewer for Le Monde was entitled ‘La chute de la maison Rivière’ – ‘The fall of the Maison Rivière.’10 The success of the original or copied formula of the eco-museum coincided with a social movement originating in the profound changes the French society was undergoing in the late 1970s: France was at the end of the trente glorieuses (thirty years of unfailing economic progress), and profound transformations to the industrial fabric of the country were taking place. France’s industrialisation process was characterised, in addition to large plants, by a large number of small or middle-sized factories scattered throughout the country and employing a local workforce. These plants closed down under the pressure of international competition and factory concentration. People saw the disappearance of what had been their livelihoods for over three generations, along with their culture, which was embedded in the professional group and its know-how: canneries in Brittany, textile factories in western France, and mines in the north. These radical changes upset both family lives and landscapes, leaving industrial wastelands. Local associations developed to salvage what could be salvaged of the past. This was where the patrimoine movement met 87

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up with the eco-museum: a very flexible structure, close to its potential public, the local population. Among the most successful was an eco-museum founded at Le Creusot in 1974, where industrial archaeology was developed. Parallel to what had happened a century earlier with fine arts museums, a movement creating museums in situ developed, with the idea of opening where factories closed and human activities risked being forgotten.

The Patrimoine years: 1980–1995 The patrimoine movement has been presented as a form of social nostalgia, celebrating – in Michel de Certeau’s words – ‘la beauté de la mort’, and constituting a sort of social tool to provide former communities threatened by unemployment and other social problems, with local identities. Although this movement was first and foremost a social one, it had important consequences for French social anthropology at home. French patrimoine had, for two centuries, consisted in the Louvre Palace, Notre-Dame Cathedral, or the Versailles Château. This definition was enlarged to include patrimoine ethnologique, which encompassed all signs of human activity from material culture – houses and factories – to cultures and know-how including all forms of social organisation. Social anthropology became involved in the new definition, since it meant studying the culture and society of ordinary people. The patrimoine movement thus seemed to involve a social movement encountering an old academic discipline, invoked in many ambiguous ways. The movement was in itself a research topic of great interest. Yet at the same time, it needed research to help the new museums prepare and renovate their presentations, since they all retained a scientific goal. The French administration, eager to follow the social movements of its citizens, could not remain deaf and dumb to this museum proliferation. The year of the patrimoine, as 1980 was declared, had immediate political resonance at local and regional levels. The then Minister of Culture declared in 1979: ‘I am convinced that we have managed this year to help patrimoine leave the obscure and fragile domain of administration and extend responsibility for it to all Frenchmen. We have to ensure that this feeling of popular interest and attachment to the patrimoine never weakens. This is why the role played by associations, and consultation with local administrative authorities, set the parameters for the Ministry of Culture’. He spoke of ‘fifty million owners’. Instead of helping existing institutions to extend their capacities, a new entity was created, in the usual French administrative fashion. La mission du patrimoine ethnologique was created in 1979, as a small and dynamic administrative unit within the Direction du Patrimoine of the Ministry of Culture. The Mission has helped both to reinforce notions of patrimoine and to reinforce notions of anthropology at home, since there were very few assignments at CNRS and few teaching positions for anthropology at home during those years. The Mission was 88

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well endowed during the first fifteen years of its existence, which meant that it was able to finance research programmes in the classical fields of social anthropology (kinship, popular culture and so on), as well as launch new research programmes on such themes as identity, urban anthropology, contemporary rituals, consumption and vernacular literature. Mission action was also important locally, where social anthropology was sometimes used as a pretext, rather than a discipline, to sustain certain patrimonial projects. The number of professional social anthropologists increased, since assignments were created for ethnologues en région, who were in charge of patrimonial questions at regional level and who had a say in opening new museums, collecting specific sorts of items, or taking administrative measures to ensure preservation. The relationship between the discipline and museum activities was complex in the association Eco-musées et Musées de Société which was set up by the new museums. A very efficient way to channel research into the museum was to organise a scientific committee for each exhibit that was planned, following the excellent example set by Grenoble’s Musée Dauphinois. The connection between research and exhibit was enhanced by publishing books, often together with the exhibition catalogue, which completed what could not be expressed by the presentation. The best museums launched research programmes that connected with their main theme and fed into their future exhibitions.11 More often, however, museums without any university connection risked being left to their own devices, closing in upon themselves in a narcissistic presentation of their own identity; or forced to expand by the economic logic of its cultural action, risking becoming a kind of Disneyland of past French cultures.

The new landscape at the end of the 1990s When the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires was set up in 1937, art was one of the underlying motivations: it was considered necessary to open a new museum for French popular art. Paul Rivet’s emphasis on techniques, societies and cultures was said to have left little room for the aesthetic component of collections. This was rather short sighted since social anthropologists of the 1930s were in fact well attuned to aesthetic questions: consider for example the connections between African masks and sculptures and contemporary art in those years. Art was more a pretext taken up by Rivière in order to establish his own museum, than a reasoned critique of Rivet’s work. Sixty years later, the question of aesthetics popped up again, with the French President Jacques Chirac insisting on the need, in this post-colonial period, for national display of the collections made by social anthropologists in the symbolically important Louvre. While the Front Populaire wanted the status of French popular art for the former bouseux, cul terreux (disparaging colloquialisms for peasant productions), the Louvre will stress that former savages also have art.12 Social 89

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anthropologists have contested this position, arguing that these objects, however beautiful, are not art in the western sense, but first and foremost signs of religious ritual or social organisation, even if they have obvious aesthetic dimensions. After much discussion, a political decision was taken to display 120 of the most beautiful objects attesting to non-European art at the Musée du Louvre (Pavillon des Cessions),13 with the bulk of the collections in the Musée des Arts et Civilisations MAC).14 There is a double challenge for this new museum, and for the future new Musée des ATP (the final decision regarding the change of name now called for depends on the fate of the European collections). This double challenge involves bringing research back into the museum; and channelling research interest into material culture. The new MAC is planned as a place of research and teaching, and its administrative status will be under the auspices of both the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education and Research. This may help to counteract the rigidities of the Ecole du Patrimoine Concours, mentioned earlier. However, the question of staff remains an open one. The new interest in material culture, which has been quite evident in recent years (Miller 1987, Bromberger and Segalen 1996), is not enough to secure the return of researchers to the museum; the question of the object in and of itself is quite dépassé, the problem nowadays lies with the sort of displays to be presented. The future programmes of these museums cannot be planned, after the year 2000, along the same lines as sixty years ago. The problem is not the one that is so often heard – about exhibiting beautiful collections hidden in the museum depots. Anthropology museums today, whether they present non-European or European collections in Western countries or states that were part of the former European colonies, face the important social task of talking about national cultures and social problems. One cannot imagine the new MAC dealing with African or American objects and ignoring the cultural revival among groups who were, until the end of the colonial period, the subject of social anthropology. French society, for its part, is haunted by questions of citizenship in view of the social problems created by unemployment and the difficulty of integrating second generation migrants from the Maghreb into France.15 Social anthropology at home is very much alive as a discipline at the turn of the century, and capable of shedding light on many aspects of contemporary society. Social anthropologists are regularly called upon by the media to discuss changes in family institutions (concerning filiation and descent, adoption and the new reproductive technologies); they are asked to comment on national events, ranging from the fate of the sans-papiers, to football club supporters and hooliganism (Bromberger 1995); and to explain the extraordinary burst of national identity celebrations which followed the World Cup. If the new museums want to recapture public attention and fulfil the new social role that is expected of them, far from limiting themselves to displaying objects from the reserves, they need to call upon a whole field of research, which is available to illuminate the crucial problems of contemporary societies. 90

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NOTES 1. For the history of the Musée de l’Homme, see Jamin 1985. My account is a distanced one since I am now a Professor at the University of Nanterre-Paris X. However, since I was part of the story I am telling it from the time I joined the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires in 1968 until I left in 1996. I quite admit that my account is a reflection of the positions I held there. I started as a trainee before the Musée moved to its new premises in 1970, worked there as a Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique researcher from 1971 to 1986 in the Centre d’Ethnologie Française, of which I was head from 1986 to 1996, sharing responsibility for the institution with the various curators appointed to head the museum itself. 2. As a matter of fact, he was not associated with the creation of the new Musée. 3. Given the national status of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, all new acquisitions are made by the French state through a national committee that buys all fine art works, sculptures, paintings by great masters, and so on. The head curator of the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires thus had to fight his colleagues who consider a pair of wooden clogs or a rural costume not as pieces of fine art. 4. This museology is severely criticised today, since visitors apparently never became accustomed to the dark galleries, not to mention the guards! 5. Among other important works, they have written the monumental L’Homme et la charrue. Mariel Jean Brunhes Delamarre is the daughter of Jean Brunhes, the famous French geographer, and wife of the sculptor who made the frisky horses on top of the Musée de l’Homme et Musée des Monuments Français. 6. Contrary to the ambiguous sector Coutumes et Croyances (Customs and Beliefs), a sort of lumber room to which everything that did not fit into technical categories was relegated. 7. In some cases, (for example, labelling, audio-visual props) unfinished. 8. All the young curators of eco-museums and museums of society, aged between 45 and 50 today, were Rivière’s students; however, none of them was recruited by the ATP, for purely administrative reasons. 9. Although of course not unofficially, and Rivière kept directing the team that was to organise the presentations he had conceived. Rivière was born in 1897 and died in 1984. 10. Le Monde of 9 January 1992; ‘Faut-il brûler les ATP?’ (Should the ATP be burned?), Le Figaro, 13 July 1991. For an analysis of Press peevishness towards the ATP in those Mitterand and Lang (Minister of Culture) years, see J.R. Trochet, 1993. 11. For example, two of my Masters students did their research under the auspices of museums. Françoise Gay in connection with the Musée des Pays de l’Ain, where she studied changes in foodways and on farms; Marianne Guichoux studied the contemporary social uses of hats, caps and head-dresses for the Musée de la Chapellerie à Chazelles. However, the student’s position is not always easy. The curator wants to see the student within regular office hours in order to keep tabs on the work, whereas the student’s research of course requires the freedom and flexibility of fieldwork. 12. Although there is no room to deal extensively with the topic here, it is clear that the history of social anthropology museums is closely linked to the politics of governmental policy. 13. It is understood that a section of the gallery will also present them in their context, so as to understand their role in social or religious rituals, for instance, or within technical processes. 14. The Musée de l’Homme remaining devoted to biological anthropology and prehistory. 15. The new curator of the ATP, Michel Colardelle (1998: 116), pleads for a Museum of Civilisations of France and Europe, acknowledging the work done by some musées de société and observing that they ‘break intellectual ground when they investigate the status of ethnic minority cultures or contemporary social problems, while mixing, without any hesitation, objects and documents, scenographies and multimedia’.

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6 ‘D OES

ANTHROPOLOGY NEED MUSEUMS ?’ T EACHING ETHNOGRAPHIC MUSEOLOGY IN P ORTUGAL THIRT Y YEARS L ATER

Nélia Dias




The question raised by William Sturtevant (1969), in a provocative and stimulating article on the relationships between museums and anthropology, is still pertinent thirty years later. I do not propose to give an account of the historical and institutional reasons which contributed to separating academic anthropology from museums, having discussed these issues elsewhere (Dias 1992). However, two points are worth noting with regard to the relationships between anthropology and museums today, when compared with the situation at the end of the nineteenth century. First, museums and material culture were synonymous during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; they gradually followed separate paths, with material culture becoming an object of investigation by academics, while museums became part of the curatorial domain. It is interesting to note that the burgeoning of museological reflection during the last decade of the twentieth century took place in the wake of material culture studies. Although it must also be said that museum studies focus on the history of collecting and the culture of collectors, rather than studying objects for their own sake.1 Second, and in contrast to the nineteenth century when the museum was a point of departure for research, the museum today is often merely a site for illustrating research that has been carried out beyond its walls. In other words, the ethnographic museum is currently a space for exhibiting anthropological investigation rather than a site where anthropological knowledge is produced. 92

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Paradoxically few anthropologists have examined the relationships between their discipline and museums. Two articles published in 1954, more than a decade before Sturtevant, broached the issue: one was by Donald Collier and Harry Tschopik, and the other by Alfred Kroeber. Kroeber stressed the close links between natural sciences and museums, pointing out that, in historical terms, the ‘social science’ dimension of anthropology was quite recent. In his introduction to Objects and others: Essays on museums and material culture (1985), George W. Stocking, Jr. pursued Sturtevant’s quest by focusing on the United States (hereafter U.S.) context. Anthony Shelton (1992, 1997) raised some issues concerning, on the one hand, anthropological teaching and museological practice and, on the other, the gap between anthropological research and ways of display in ethnographic museums in Great Britain. Sturtevant’s original question is apposite to the present context in which ethnographic museums in Europe seem to be in some sort of crisis. It is surely not fortuitous that several ethnographic museums are being refurbished (Museu Nacional de Etnologia in Lisbon), or radically transformed (Musée de l’Homme in Paris). It would, of course, be misleading to generalise about Europe regardless of specific national contexts. However, there is certainly a gap between anthropological research and museological practice in both the French and Portuguese cases. In other words, academic anthropology in Portugal and indeed France is, with few exceptions, concerned with topics that are not directly related (theoretically or thematically) to the museum sphere. The parallel between two national traditions, the Portuguese and French, with which I will begin has to do with two different yet related circumstances. First, my own research concerns the history of French anthropology in general and ethnographic and anthropological collections in particular, during the second half of the nineteenth-century. At the same time I have been teaching at the Department of Anthropology of the Instituto Superior de Ciênçias Do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE), since 1986. One of the courses I teach is ethnographic museology, which I have also taught at the Department of Anthropology at the University of Coimbra. Through this work I have been confronted by two different anthropological traditions with a number of points of convergence. Second, French anthropology in the nineteenth century, and specifically Paul Broca, provided Portuguese anthropology with a model. Anthropology in France during the second half of the nineteenth century was considered to be a broad science, a natural history of Man, incorporating physical anthropology, prehistoric archaeology, and ethnography. Such a conception of anthropology, as a broad complex of sciences, soon gave way to a more restricted notion of anthropology as physical anthropology, which meant that the study of cultural facts was subordinated to the biological. A chair of ‘Anthropology, human palaeontology, and prehistoric archaeology’ was created at the University of Coimbra in 1885. This chair was attached to the anthropological section of the Museum of Natural History of the University of Coimbra, which comprised four sections. Portuguese 93

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students would then have studied Broca’s Instructions craniologiques et craniométriques, read Topinard’s publications, and carried out anthropological measurements by means of instruments imported from France. Apart from the theoretical legacy, Portuguese anthropology was also indebted to French anthropology for the links between anthropological chairs and natural history museums. From a quite similar point of departure, French and Portuguese anthropology took different paths during the twentieth century.

Figure 6.1 Cabinet of Anthropology, Museum of Natural History, University of Coimbra. Permanent exhibition. General view of one of the ethnographic galleries. Photographer: A Bobone, Lisbon, n.d., M.A.U.C.., negative number 58.8

‘L’exception Française’ Several ethnographic museums in France, including both ‘exotic’ and European ones, are currently in a state of crisis. The problems facing these museums concern not only how to represent alterity, and the proper role of the museum in a post-colonial context. Notions such as ‘traditional societies’ and ‘popular culture’ are also called into question by the process of globalisation. Ethnographic museums in France have to some extent been impermeable to the shifts and changes that have affected the societies they were supposed to represent. Furthermore, they were unwilling to take into account the theoretical challenges of anthropo94

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logical knowledge. It is as if ethnographic museums have somehow been asleep for several decades and have only just woken up to the gap between their ways of display and the ‘external world’. As Martine Segalen has noted: The rupture between ethnologists and museologists seems to have been consummated in the 1990s. Museums dealing with identity and memory have their own justification, and current research topics are gradually moving far from the museographic expression which was, in part, central to the emergence of an Ethnology of France. Few scholars today work on technological or material culture issues, and moreover those with an interest in these topics deal more with the cognitive aspects than the museological implications (Segalen 1993: 167).

Let us consider one example. The exhibitions’ programme of one of the most important ethnographic museums in France, the Musée de l’Homme, reveals the persistence of monographic exhibits, focusing on a particular culture or specific ethnic group without any cross-cultural comparative and thematic exhibits. The Musée de l’Homme, together with the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, which had been ignored for several decades, are now at the centre of media and academic interest. The growing concern about ethnographic museums is reflected in the quantity of academic meetings, round-tables and seminars devoted to them over the past five years. These have included La Nouvelle Alexandrie. Colloque sur les musées d’ethnologie et les musées d’histoire, organised by the Direction des Musées de France/Collège International de Philosophie, in May 1992; Musées et ethnologie, held at the Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires, in March/April 1997; Regards anthropologiques sur le nouveau Musée de l’Homme, a colloquium organised by the Association pour la Recherche en Anthropologie Sociale (APRAS), in Paris, March 1998; Du musée colonial à... – Centre Georges Pompidou/Musée National des Arts d’Afrique et d’Océanie, June 1998; Le musée et les cultures du monde, Ecole Nationale du Patrimoine, in December 1998. It would be premature to attempt to draw any conclusions from these events since (with the exception of La Nouvelle Alexandrie and the Musée et les cultures du monde meetings) the papers presented have not yet been published. At the same time, there is an almost total absence of theoretical reflection on museology in France. Topics such as museological practice, concepts and ways of display; collecting as a cultural and historical practice; the logic of the collectors; the question of representation and its control; in sum, issues related to what might be called the meta-museological sphere, are almost ignored in French publications and exhibits. It seems that the new Musée du quai Branly (as the Musée des Arts et des Civilisations was renamed in February 2000) in Paris will attempt to fill the gap between conservation/curatorial work and research by creating a category of curators-researchers whose work will be oriented to studying the collections. It will also try to undermine the boundaries between anthropology and aesthetics, by displaying objects according to artistic as well as scientific criteria. The opening of a 95

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section dedicated to a number of chefs d’œuvres belonging to the Musée de l’Homme at the Musée du Louvre in November 1999 testifies to the partly institutional basis of the distinction between art objects and ethnographic objects. This section is conceived as an antenna of the future Musée du quai Branly (Dubuc 1998, Jamin 1998). It has yet to be decided whether this antenna (which is called the Pavillon des Sessions), will be a temporary or a permanent exhibition space. In addition, there is growing concern among art historians about the status of ethnographic objects within an art museum, such as the Musée du Louvre. One of the questions raised by the creation of this Pavillon des Sessions is related to the fact that the Musée du Louvre contains objects dating from antiquity to the 1850s. It is argued that these ethnographic objects, collected during the nineteenth century, would be better accommodated at the Musée d’Orsay – dedicated to nineteenth century art – or in the Museum of Modern Art. It would certainly be a fruitful exercise to analyse these French experiences from an anthropological point of view rather than criticising and passing judgement upon them. Such an analysis could pave the way for what Fred Myers (1998: 96) refers to, in his article on Aboriginal art exhibits in France, as ‘an ethnographic study of cultural production’. This chapter is divided into two parts; the first deals with the institutional situation of teaching anthropology in Portugal, with special reference to ethnographic museology. The second part focuses on the relationships between my own research on the history of ethnographic museums in France, and my experience of teaching ethnographic museology in two departments of anthropology: at ISCTE (Lisbon) and at the University of Coimbra.

Academic anthropology and museums in Portugal This section will draw a thumbnail state of the art sketch of teaching ethnographic museology in Portugal. Two of the four anthropology departments of the Portuguese state universities offer courses on museum issues in their curriculum. The Department of Anthropology at ISCTE has two optional courses for (third and fourth year) undergraduate students, one entitled ‘Ethnographic Museology’ and the other ‘Analysing Objects’, both of which were created in the 1990s. Students are advised to take both courses: first the historical and theoretical approach developed in ‘ethnographic museology’, then ‘analysing objects’ (taught by Jorge Freitas Branco), which is a more ‘practical’ approach to the description and classification of objects and exhibition making. Students are keenly interested in these two courses, and the demand for registration exceeds the number of places available – twenty-five. There are two possible reasons for contemporary student interest in museum issues: on the one hand, the anthropology curriculum is oriented toward social anthropology, which means that these two courses provide students with an opportunity to learn about topics that do not fit into social anthropology in the strict sense of the term. On 96

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the other hand, the courses are perceived by students as being more practically oriented, and leading more directly to the job market. The growth of local museums in Portugal over the past fifteen years has created a demand for personnel trained in history or anthropology. Graduate students often find temporary or indeed more permanent employment in local museums and cultural services. A number of graduate students, for example, are currently engaged on six month training posts at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia (Lisbon), and in other national museums. The development of a Masters course in museology or dealing with patrimony, in several universities, is due both to this ‘social demand’ from students and to the growth of new local museums. At ISCTE, for example, it became possible after 1996 to take a Masters degree in anthropology entitled ‘Patrimony and Identities’, which contains a museological course. Another museological course has also been established as part of the Masters degree in modern and contemporary history at ISCTE. Teaching these two Masters courses has been, from a personal point of view, intellectually stimulating, since it provided me with an opportunity to present my work in progress. However, few Masters students choose to write their dissertation on museology or material culture. There seems to be two reasons for their reluctance to engage with topics involving museums at this level. First, the content of the museological course in the anthropology Masters ‘Patrimony and Identities’ does not articulate adequately with the other Masters courses: these deal with such topics as nationalism, landscape and tourism, and the connections between these various courses seems unclear to the students. Second, the museological course is largely concerned with criticising notions such as heritage, culture, cultural property, tradition and national treasures. Masters students sometimes finish the museological course somewhat disconcerted by its deconstructive nature. This disenchantment is probably due to the short duration (one semester) of the course combined with the theoretical perspective adopted. It could be asked whether a more concretely based course, which focused on specific national contexts and particular museums, might be more positively received by students. In this respect, teaching at the anthropology department of University of Coimbra provides different insight from the Lisbon experience. The anthropology department in Coimbra was established in 1992, and is closely associated with the Museu e Laboratório Antropológico founded in 1885 (cf. Cem Anos de Antropologia em Coimbra, 1985). The guiding principle for founding this department was to connect anthropological teaching with research on collections. As a result, the curriculum contained two annual courses for undergraduate students: ‘ethnographic museology’ and ‘anthropology of art’ (taught by José António Fernandes Dias), together with other courses on topics directly or indirectly concerning museums and objects: symbolic analysis, classification and methods of collecting. Students were furthermore required, during their last year, to write a short dissertation on some aspect of museum’s collections. Some students have 97

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indeed written their final dissertation on a museum curator, or on the history of a particular collection. The museum connection was thus the distinctive feature of the Department of Anthropology at Coimbra, as compared with other Portuguese anthropology departments. Nevertheless, some seven years after the creation of the anthropology department, few students have completed their final dissertation on topics related to the collections, so that the original project to combine academic teaching with museological research has somehow failed. The failure of this project is also related to the fact that the theoretical orientation of the department has changed in recent years; the newly introduced courses mean that museology and the anthropology of art have lost their former privileged position. Finally, the Museu e Laboratório Antropológico has been unable to realise its exhibitionary programme for financial reasons. Thus, for example, the exhibition project on the history of the museum’s collections and on specific collectors, scheduled for 1995/1996, did not materialise. This overview of the relationships between academic anthropology and museums in Portugal reveals that, to a certain extent, museology is considered a minor topic, marginal in a curriculum dominated by ‘theoretical’ social anthropology. The marginalisation of museology probably has to do with the fact that this subject is regarded as a ‘practical’ one; ethnographic museums in Portugal are often considered privileged places for the ‘divulgation’ of anthropological knowledge in the public sphere, and not as research centres. Museology has to some extent yet to achieve academic recognition in Portugal. The absence of scientific publications in Portuguese dealing with museological issues certainly contributes to this marginality. Colloquia and round-tables on museums in general and on ethnographic museums in particular are almost non-existent. The two most recent initiatives date from 1994, when a colloquium was held in Oporto to accompany the opening of the exhibition Memórias da Amazónia. Etnicidade e Territorrialidade, organised by Fernandes Dias; and in 1996, when there was a round table discussion on the question of popular art at the Museu Nacional de Etnologia in Lisbon. Although the Museu de Loures organises annual meetings on the cultura saloia, this event is mainly aimed at curators and cultural agents. As already noted, the introduction of new courses dealing with museology and the analysis of objects at the Department of Anthropology (ISCTE) is quite recent and, as optional courses, subject to limited time and status. Museology will become an obligatory annual course in the new plan for reorganising the curriculum of the Department of Anthropology, so that despite what has been said, the situation is gradually changing. A Masters thesis on the ways of display of two exhibits held respectively in Lisbon and Coimbra was submitted two years ago under my supervision; and two Ph.D. dissertations, one focusing on the former colonial museum of Dundo in Angola, and the other on aspects of material culture in South China, both supervised by me, are nearing completion. Other students are enrolled in Ph.D. programmes at the ISCTE and their dissertations deal with the study of specific museums. 98

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A case study – teaching ethnographic museology My teaching responsibilities at the Department of Anthropology of Coimbra University provided me with an opportunity to work on specific subjects related to my own research. The two semester-long ethnographic museology course facilitated a systematic approach to the relationships between museums and anthropological theory from the 1880s to the 1980s. Furthermore, the Museu e Laboratório Antropológico, located in the same building as the anthropology department, helped to illuminate certain aspects of the history of Portuguese anthropology. My research on French anthropology in the nineteenth century provided a comparative framework for understanding the history of the Museu e Laboratório Antropológico, conceived as it was under the theoretical and methodological influence of Broca. The similarities between the French and Portuguese anthropological traditions were carefully examined with the students; questions such as the spatialisation of anthropological knowledge and its connection to the visibility of racial difference (Dias 1998), the role played by collections in anthropological knowledge, and the nature of the links between museums and academic research, were studied during the course. These questions were not only limited to discussion at an abstract level, but also through illustrative examples of instruments and physical remains from the Museu e Laboratório Antropológico. Curators of the anthropological and ethnographic collections belonging to the museum took the students to the depots and explained the use of certain measuring instruments, the preservation of specimens, and the labelling of objects. In other words, what might be called the more concrete nature of the course, referring to a specific anthropological tradition (the Portuguese), provided students with the means to tack back and forth between theory and case studies. In this respect teaching ethnographic museology in Coimbra was quite different from teaching the same subject in Lisbon. Students in Lisbon have no direct experience of collections and rarely visit museums. The way in which the ethnographic museology course unpacks at ISCTE and in Coimbra deserves comparative consideration. The course was designed to analyse, from an historical point of view, the relationships between anthropological theory and ethnographic museums. In other words, to examine the historical, epistemological, and institutional reasons for the links as well as the rupture between museums and academic anthropology. The course focuses on three national contexts: Great Britain, France and the United States, which were chosen for their theoretical importance to the development of anthropological knowledge. The first part deals with the foundation of the Pitt Rivers Museum and the close links between museums and evolutionary theory; this includes Tylor’s appointment as keeper of the Pitt Rivers Museum, and his reflections on museums. The second national context is France, covering the foundation of the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1878, and the transformation of this museum into the Musée de l’Homme in 1937. It also deals with the separate – institutional and the99

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Figure 6.2 Permanent exhibition. General view of the Ethnography Room, taken from the eastern side of the gallery after it had been refurbished in the mid1940s. College of St. Boaventure, Rua Largo à Rua dos Lois. Photographer: Alvaro da Silva e Sousa, c. 1945, M.A.U.C., negative number 90.28 oretical – development of French ethnology from exotic ethnology (see Segalen, this volume). The focus in the case of the United States is on Boas’ work at the American Museum of Natural History and the shift from museum anthropology to university anthropology (see Gonzalez et al. this volume). Finally, the course also considers some of the nationally characteristic museological developments of the 1980s: the rise of eco-museums in France, heritage centres in the United Kingdom, and ethnic museums in the United States. My theoretical perspective consists in approaching nineteenth and twentieth century visions of anthropology on their own terms, which involves trying to understand what curators and anthropologists meant (or mean) by notions such as accuracy, precision, and objectivity. The ethnographic museology course examines, historically and critically, the classification of objects, and the constitution of such notions as object of ethnography, art object and artefact. It also considers the conception of culture as a material thing, and the distinction between material property and intellectual property. The concept of tradition and the underlying question of what is transmitted are scrutinised. The museum as an institution producing its own culture is also explored. 100

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Students from both Coimbra and ISCTE often express their surprise that anthropologists such as Boas, Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, worked in museums or were interested by museological questions and collecting objects. Certain leading anthropological figures are in this way rediscovered through museology, which means that, far from being a so-called practical field, students come to appreciate that museology is a field permeated by theoretical questions and shaped by contemporary anthropological debates (identities, national and universal patrimony). The concluding lectures therefore examine issues such as museums as sites of authority, the control of authority and representation, the question of authorship of an exhibit, and the questionable assumption that museums are neutral places. My experience in two different anthropological departments has led me to examine the role played by collections and museums in anthropological teaching. There are obviously great differences between the anthropological departments of Coimbra and ISCTE. The former is more recent although associated with a museum, which somehow became a university museum. The fact that the department is located in the same building as the museum is highly relevant. Students could gain direct experience of collections, and become involved in museum projects, such as the one dealing with the history of the collections. The ethnographic museology course in Lisbon, by contrast, was isolated within a curriculum that was geared to social anthropology. Even when students paid a few visits to the Museu Nacional de Etnologia, they were not directly involved with collections and there were no institutional links between the anthropological department and this museum. As a result, ethnographic museology was perceived by students as a purely theoretical exercise, interesting because they were confronted with new perspectives complementary to their training in anthropology. The situation was radically different for Masters students, whose disinclination for this subject appears to be connected with two factors. First, almost all the students enrolled in the Masters programmes already had a profession, either as teachers in high school or as municipal consultants and cultural advisers; few were full-time students. Students were consequently unwilling to explore the theoretical and deconstructive nature of the ethnographic museology course, which they perceived as being too far removed from their ‘real’ needs. It is interesting to note that the majority of the students enrolled in Masters programmes in anthropology do not have a first degree in anthropology. Second, the Masters course in ethnographic museology failed to take account of either students’ previous experience in the cultural field, or their expectations. Students were probably discouraged by the lack of concrete reference to specific museums and absence of direct experience of collections in Portugal in this course. I admit to a degree of uncertainty, at this juncture, about the best way of training students in ethnographic museology, since so much depends on whether or not they have a first degree in anthropology; and also on their ambitions with regard to pursuing a career in academic anthropology. I do, however, believe that critical museology can be a useful tool for students to understand current social and political prob101

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lems and as a means of learning to see. Indeed, students identified one of the main skills derived from ethnographic museology as being an apprenticeship in seeing. Sensitising students to the differences between textual and visual modes of representation, and enabling them to grasp the specificity of presenting themes and topics through objects and exhibits, are perhaps the major achievements of ethnographic museology.

Re-establishing a dialogue between anthropology and museums Ethnographic exhibitions pass almost unnoticed when compared with the huge success of particularly contemporary art exhibits in Portugal. Travelling exhibitions, such as those of Arman and Cindy Sherman that were in Lisbon during 1998, were imported from European and United States contemporary art centres. A similar construction might be envisaged for ethnographic collections. However, I think this would be a wasted opportunity for anthropology and would represent a squandering of ethnographic patrimony. Ethnographic museums in Portugal can play a considerable role in anthropological research. Three points deserve attention in this respect. First, ethnography in Portugal is often equated with popular and peasant culture; few ethnographic and local museums contain objects related to urban groups or social classes other than peasants. Local ethnographic collections were constituted at two specific moments in Portuguese history: during the fascist era, more specifically in the 1930s and 1940s, and after the 25th of April Revolution in 1974. Studying these collections can illuminate certain aspects of Portuguese anthropology, as well as the role played by collections in constructing national identity. This became apparent during a three year project, undertaken with a number of graduate students in anthropology, on ethnographic collections in Portugal. The project aimed to survey both private and national ethnographic collections, and to explain how objects were chosen, collected and displayed. It also tried to elucidate the image or images of Portuguese culture transmitted by these collections.2 The rapid expansion of local museums, conceived as temples dedicated to rural societies at the very moment of their demise and transformation in Portugal. Thus the role of the museum seems to celebrate the ‘beauty of the dead’, by creating and inventing an identity. In addition this research project attempted to call into question the notion of local; how can local culture be defined? Do the defining criteria of the local refer to geographical space or to specific, supposedly stable groups? Second, and with respect to exotic collections, studying the Museu Nacional de Etnologia founded in Lisbon at the end of the 1950s, can illuminate significant characteristics of Portuguese anthropology. This museum’s collections came from the former Portuguese colonies in Africa, Asia and America; and there is also a very important Portuguese ethnographic collection. The museum was desig102

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nated the Museu do Ultramar in the 1950s and is, to a certain extent, a colonial product. Hence the study of its collections could provide a useful way of understanding Portuguese colonial policy. A number of questions could be elucidated by studying the history of the museum. These include the role played by colonial administrators and governors in collecting objects for the museum; and how to explain Portuguese indifference to ethnographic collections, when compared with other major colonial powers. Portugal did not have a national ethnographic museum. In sum, the history of the collections of the Museu Nacional de Etnologia can provide useful tools for illuminating Portuguese colonial history, as well as the ‘culture of colonialism’. Anthropologists in general, regardless of their national contexts, have been reluctant to admit the history of their discipline; museums, and ethnographic museums in particular, rarely take into account the history of their collections. As Mary Bouquet (1996:10) has pointed out: ‘... collectors and the social relations between the museum and the rest of the world are conspicuously absent from most of the permanent exhibitions in the museum. And the absence in the exhibitions reflects the more fundamental lack of scholarship on the historical collections’. Third, the study of ethnographic museums may help to explain why anthropology in Portugal was marginalised despite the fact that the country was a colonial power. The contrast between the development of ethnographic studies on Portugal (Freitas Branco 1988) and the absence of similar studies of the former Portuguese colonies needs to be made intelligible. It remains to be seen whether it is possible to assert that Portuguese anthropology belongs to the category of ‘nation-building’ rather than ‘empire-building’ anthropologies, in terms of George W. Stocking’s distinction (1982). Finally, ethnographic museums could be critical places for examining anthropological and other issues. The commemoration of the ‘discovery’ of Brazil, in 2000, should have been an opportunity for ethnographic as well historical museums to call into question the very notion of discovery, and to propose another approach to these events. When will it be possible to mount an exhibition on a specific geographical area or an historical event which takes several points of view into account: the colonised, the colonisers and the academics? A glance at the exhibitions programme of the Museu Nacional de Etnologia (Lisbon), reveals a classic focus, with topics such as fado, or the demise of peasant agriculture, or the nostalgic dimension of Portuguese colonial history (that is, Goa). If anthropologists have a particular expertise, it resides precisely in the comparative approach, and in being able to make anthropology an exercise of cultural critique. The dialogue between anthropology and museums requires that museums should not only be viewed as sites for the popularisation of knowledge, nor exhibits as merely illustrations of anthropological research carried on outside the museum. The task facing anthropologists consists in conceiving exhibits with objects, in mettre en scène topics, which can only be expressed by and through objects. In sum, it is necessary to consider museums and exhibits as sites for pre103

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senting anthropological knowledge. It must also be acknowledged that an exhibit has as much value as a book, transmitting information by other means. The current assumption about two levels of divulgation of anthropological ideas, the ‘high’ one – in books and journals – and the ‘low’ one – exhibits addressed to the general public and school groups – needs to be re-examined. This re-examination implies that anthropologists will have to acquire conceptual tools and visual training in order to work in museums and to mount exhibitions. In a word, anthropologists will need to undergo an apprenticeship in seeing if they seriously intend to curate collections, write about or mount exhibitions. This is an area to which academic anthropology is going to have to devote considerable attention in the coming years, if it is to do justice both to the legacy of the past and to responsibilities of the future. The multicultural dimension of Lisbon could also pave the way for reflexive work on matters such as racism, diaspora (for example, Indians who moved first to former Portuguese colonies in Africa, and then to Portugal), the arrival of Third World clandestine/illegal labourers to build Expo 98 (with the Oceans as the main theme, and Portuguese discoveries as the subordinate theme), and the gypsies. These are social as well as political issues which, if tackled in museum exhibits, would require anthropological skills. Indeed, one of the main challenges for our discipline may be to demonstrate that museums, whatever the nature of their collections, may need anthropology.

Acknowledgements This chapter has benefited from the thoughtful comments and suggestions of Mary Bouquet.

NOTES 1. See Elsner and Cardinal (1994), Sherman and Rogoff (1994), Schildkrout and Keim (1998). 2. A preliminary report on this project was presented at the European Association of Social Anthropologists conference held in Barcelona in 1996 (Dias 1996).

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III Science museums as an ethnographic challenge

7 T OWARDS

AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF MUSEUMS : SCIENCE , TECHNOLOGY AND US

Roberto J. González, Laura Nader and C. Jay Ou




Recent controversies at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. provoked our thinking about the involvement of anthropology in museums over time and about a revitalised, ethnographically-informed interest in museums and museum exhibits by anthropologists that has been increasingly evident since the 1980s. One of the Smithsonian controversies dealt with the Enola Gay exhibit, which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The second controversy centred around Science in American life, an exhibit located at the National Museum of American History, and will be described in more detail below. Both controversies were addressed by anthropologists, one in a brief commentary on the Enola Gay exhibit by Hugh Gusterson (1995), who spent a number of years studying the culture of nuclear weapons scientists at Livermore, California, and the other in a critical ethnographic examination of the Science in American life exhibit by Sophia Vackimes (1996a, 1996b), an anthropologist interested in science and anti-science debates in the United States. Museums have been critical sites of anthropological research since the modern formation of the discipline in the nineteenth century. Particularly in the second half of the 1800s, museum collections provided anthropologists with artefacts that could be used to support social evolutionary and diffusionist theories of human development. In addition to collections, museum exhibitions also served important functions. They were spaces in which anthropologists could engage and educate the general public, yet they also frequently functioned as sites for the ideological legit106

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imisation of ongoing colonial enterprises and civilising missions. The material culture of ‘savage’ societies graphically displayed cross-cultural differences that could be used to illustrate the supposed backwardness of non-Western subjects. Over time, the forms and functions of museum collections and exhibits have changed, and the relationship of anthropologists to museums has changed as well. In this chapter, we present a historical review of these transformations seen primarily from the perspective of American anthropology. Our inquiry ultimately focuses on the emergence of promising innovative methodological and theoretical directions that have recently been employed by anthropologists doing museum work. Specifically, we argue that the discipline’s emphasis has shifted from a long-standing interest in the anthropology museum as a repository and research centre, focusing on non-Western peoples and their material culture, to an interest in an ethnographically-informed anthropology of museums, where the native Other is the lay public and the focus is upon science, technology and us.1 We are especially enthusiastic about the possibilities that an ethnographic approach to the study of museums holds for anthropology. Such research might potentially link two currents that have often been portrayed as opposite poles of social science analysis: materialism and idealism. Field sites like the Enola Gay exhibit and Science in American life afford anthropologists the opportunity to enter both realms by considering material culture and artefacts (which continue to form the basis of museum exhibitions) while simultaneously addressing crises of representation, cultural interpretation, and issues of conflicting epistemologies (for example, the distinct epistemological positions of curators and critics of exhibits, see Gieryn 1998). Furthermore, as museums have been transformed from sites where non-Western cultures are ‘preserved’ and represented to sites for the ethnographic study of exhibits (and their surrounding social, political and epistemological debates) over the course of the twentieth century, they have increasingly held the promise of contributing to a more engaged, more relevant, and more contemporary anthropology of everyday life (Mintz 1985).

From anthropological museums to an anthropology of museums: historical perspectives Some years ago Eric Wolf (1969) argued that in the United States, the development of anthropology is inextricably linked to the development of American society. Although some took umbrage with Wolf for taking what they thought to be a too simplistic and over-determined position, there is merit in examining our intellectual enterprise as one which operates within a broader social and cultural context. According to anthropologist Nelson Graburn (1991), the history of museum exhibitions might be divided into three historic periods, each of which reflects a particular ideological Zeitgeist: the display of European power and status, the education of the masses, and the empowerment of native peoples and lay publics 107

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through alternative historical interpretations. Graburn (1991: 6) notes that it was ‘not coincidental that the collection of “cabinets of curiosity” took place in the sixteenth-eighteenth centuries, at the very time when Europe was beginning to emerge as primus inter pares among the world’s societies, when subjection to God’s will was giving way to the human subjection of nature through science and of other cultures through conquest.’ Indeed, competition between museums for exotic Others and their artefacts culminated in the era of worlds fairs, where industrial might and dependent peoples could be displayed side by side. Anthropologists were often the organisers of the artefacts arrayed at such fairs. This approach, which was especially pronounced during the nineteenth century, featured collections that were arranged in accordance with dominant scientific paradigms, and a common theme was hierarchy and linear evolution (Haraway 1984). Later, in the first half of the twentieth century (and particularly under the influence of Franz Boas), museum collections often attempted to educate the lay public by representing non-Western peoples in local contexts, or by depicting ideological frames that were more democratic. The third current gathered strength after the 1960s and served the purpose of empowering native peoples (Ames 1986) and museum audiences through innovative techniques for representing historical events and material culture. Although these three currents might be perceived as historical moments in the past, it should be noted that all three continue to exist today (Graburn 1991). Reviews of anthropological writings on museums over the past three decades have emphasised anthropologically centred histories. For example, in ‘Does anthropology need museums?’ William Sturtevant (1969) outlined the history of the relationship between anthropology and its museums. According to Sturtevant, the period from the 1840s to the 1890s could be considered the ‘museum period’ in the discipline because museums were the most important institutional base for anthropologists during that time. The discipline had, for the most part, not yet been introduced in universities. Museums provided jobs and funding for field research and sponsored publications, and its collections served as data sources for research projects. This museum period began in earnest with the creation of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum in the 1860s, which was devoted to prehistoric archaeology and ethnology, and funded by philanthropist George Peabody. As anthropology moved away from museums and toward universities beginning in the 1890s and through the 1920s, funding patterns also changed – from individual philanthropists to foundations such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations. In addition, the theoretical emphasis on culture in the United States and society in England and the emergence of a more behaviourally based anthropology made museums and material culture less and less relevant to the discipline. According to Sturtevant, the low point for anthropology museums was in the 1960s, when there was a general turning away from museums as anthropologists found themselves increasingly capable of carrying out university and foundation sponsored field research. After presenting this historical context, Sturtevant argued that anthropology museums were still necessary and significant for anthropological theory and method. 108

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This advocacy of anthropology museums was articulated during a period in which more general critiques of museums were being made (Washburn 1968). For example, in his 1971 address to the Western Museum Association, Stephen Weil (1983) described three crises in museums – money, power and identity – involving trustees, staff, artists and communities. In ‘The museum, a temple or the forum’, Duncan Cameron (1971) examined the historical development of museums as they became nationalised and publicly owned, and the persistence of their form and function – as a temple rather than the Forum. In ‘The curator-ascanary’, William Burns (1971), then director of the San Diego History Museum, discussed what he considered to be the critical role of ‘curators with a social conscience’. Due to administrative, professional and budget constraints, there were heated discussions of Museums in crisis (O’Doherty 1972), evident in professional journals such as Museum News and Curator. In anthropology, such critiques of museums coincided with interpretivist and post-structural critiques of representation and the purported scientific objectivity of anthropological inquiry. More concretely, the 1960s was a period of heightened awareness of the ongoing legacy of colonialism and anthropology, with calls for repatriating and reinventing anthropology (Hymes 1969, Asad 1973). Critiques came from several different perspectives, and not always from the academy. Nationalist works such as Vine Deloria’s Custer died for your sins (1969) criticised the continuing anthropological enterprise in no uncertain terms. The pan-Indian American Indian Movement took form during these years, and Deloria and others established the framework of Indian legal and political institutions such as the National Congress of American Indians. In the heat of this politicised atmosphere, anthropologist Nancy Lurie pointed out the tensions between anthropology and native Americans (1966) and soon after described the love-hate relationship (1976) between native Americans and museums that surfaced in the late 1960s and continues to this day.

The ‘new museology’ The urgent political and epistemological issues of representation and repatriation invigorated anthropological work on museums. Graburn (1976), Ames (1979), and others initiated the debate on museums seen from the native’s point of view, focusing on the dynamic relationship between the museum and art scenes and non-Western natives. Following Graburn’s work on the arts of acculturation (1976), Ames developed the idea of de-schooling neo-colonialist museums and formulated an anthropology of museums in the process. In calling for a reflexive, self-critical anthropology of museums, Ames drew on the earlier work of Reinventing anthropology (Hymes 1969) and laid these ideas out in Museums, the public and anthropology (1986), an outline for the democratisation of museums. He argued that lay people and those people represented in exhibits should be 109

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active participants in museum display, and urged curators to be reflexive about their work and to examine the effects of museum objects on visitors. Canadian anthropologist Marjorie Halpin (1978, 1983) was also instrumental in developing a general critique of museums and their misrepresentation of native peoples by calling for a reflexive examination of anthropology as artefact. More recently, she reviewed The spirit sings: artistic traditions of Canada’s first peoples, a controversial exhibit at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary that coincided with the 1988 winter Olympics in Canada (Halpin 1988). The exhibit was boycotted by the Lubicon Lake Cree, who claimed that the museum had borrowed or exhibited native artefacts without permission, accepted money from the Shell Canada corporation (against whom the Cree were locked in a land claim struggle), ignored contemporary Cree issues in the exhibit, employed non-native Americans as curators, and claimed political neutrality (Ames 1992: 161–162). The controversy is interesting for several reasons. The Assembly of First Nations, the national political body for Canadian native Americans, supported the Lubicon boycott. The boycott had to be considered by scores of other museums who were lending their artefacts for the Glenbow exhibit, thereby expanding the scope of the debate. The head of the Canadian Ethnology Society also supported the boycott, and academic anthropologists were pitted against museum anthropologists, revealing the continuing tension that Sturtevant first outlined in 1969. This controversy also highlights the predicament of museum professionals as they are torn between the various and sometimes conflicting interests of stakeholders. In this case, the Glenbow Museum continued with the exhibit in spite of the boycott, receiving over $1 million from Shell Canada. A debate between Ames who supported the Glenbow Museum, and Canadian archaeologist Bruce Trigger who was an outspoken critic, was broadcast on a national radio programme and was continued in Culture (the official publication of the Canadian Ethnology Society). On another occasion, Ames had this to say regarding museums and donors: ‘It is perfectly acceptable to complain … about what corporations are doing. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t accept their financial sponsorship. We couldn’t operate without sponsorship anymore. That’s the way the world has gone. I’d love clean money, but there isn’t clean money anymore’ (cited in Halpin 1988: 91). We mention this exchange because of its resonance with recent debates over political correctness and Smithsonian exhibits. For example, in 1991 Smithsonian secretary Robert McC. Adams, an anthropologist, was asked during his testimony to the United States Senate to justify the National Museum of Modern Art’s revisionist exhibition, The West as America, which ‘treated portraits of frontier experience as ideological tracts’ (Karp, Kreamer and Lavine 1992: 10). We shall soon see how the issues raised by a more recent Smithsonian exhibit, Science in American life, were also similar to those raised by the Glenbow controversy. The late 1970s and 1980s witnessed the growth of museum studies in numerous disciplines and cross-disciplinary fields. In The tourist (1976), sociologist 110

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Dean MacCannell argued that museums control and subordinate the past and nature under glass displays. Historian Neil Harris (1978) examined the links between museums, consumer culture and the modernisation of America, and there were others who examined the Museum of Modern Art as a capitalist ritual from Marxist perspectives (Duncan and Wallach 1978). Psychologist Robert Kelly (1987) studied museums as status symbols, and Donna Haraway’s Teddy bear patriarchy (1984) addressed the gendered, racialised construction of natural history exhibits in the early twentieth century. Hans Haacke (1986) discussed the parallel development of museums and imperialism, and Kenneth Hudson outlined the world’s greatest Museums of influence (1987). Anthropologists and others continued to focus on historical aspects of museums and material culture (Stocking 1985), but also began to carry out critical contemporary work as well. In the 1988 American Anthropological Association symposium on objects of culture, curatorial specialists (Jacknis, Parezo and Welsh) and academic anthropologists (Dominguez and Errington) discussed the ways in which a repatriated anthropology might rethink the role of cultural artefacts and taxonomic sciences in the discipline. This work drew on earlier anthropological studies of art and material culture, but also built upon more recent cross-disciplinary work in museum studies. Examples of such collaborative efforts include Robert Lumley’s edited volume The museum time machine: putting cultures on display (1988) and Susan Pearce’s edited volume Objects of knowledge (1990). The ‘new museology’ (Vergo 1989) has clearly benefited from this work, and recent Smithsonian Institution conferences and books on critical museum studies also illustrate this point.2 Other efforts include a collection of essays entitled Theorizing museums (Macdonald and Fyfe 1996) and The birth of the museum (Bennett 1995), a historical exploration of the cultural functions of public museums analysed from a Foucauldian perspective. Anthropologists are also active in this ‘new museology.’ Flora Kaplan’s edited volume Museums and the making of “Ourselves” (1994) provides worldwide case studies on the development of museums with nationalism. Critical reviews by academic anthropologists such as Anna Laura Jones (1993) and museum anthropologists such as Stanley Freed (1991) have pointed to both longstanding and more recent concerns, including the issue of the social relevance of museum exhibits, deconstructionist critiques, critiques of ethnocentric primitivism, authenticity issues, and the politically-charged implications of museum exhibits in contemporary society. The work of Canadian anthropologist Ruth Phillips (1989, 1994, Berlo and Phillips 1992) on museums, anthropology, art history and native American art represents some of the most serious research currently being done in that country. In a different vein, George Marcus’ paper ‘The production of European high culture in Los Angeles: the J. Paul Getty Trust as artificial curiosity’ (1990), although centred in a potentially fruitful site for critical analysis, ultimately assumes the form of a dialogue with another intellectual, Umberto Eco, and examines the personal motivations of J. Paul Getty in creating 111

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the Center. The growing anthropological interest in museum studies can also be witnessed in the establishment in 1991 of the journal Museum Anthropology (by the United States-based Council for Museum Anthropology), the creation of an exhibitions review section in the American Anthropologist (which includes reviews of non-anthropological museum exhibits), and the March 1995 publication of a special issue of Cultural Dynamics devoted to the topic of museums. All of these studies point to the validity of Eric Wolf ’s point that museums do not appear in vacuum any more than anthropologists do. Although these works indicate a reconsideration of museums and their relation to colonialisms or nationalisms, or to ideologies such as Marxism or capitalism, there is a surprising shortage of ethnographic work that analyses specific exhibits in order to ground some of the critical thinking. Halpin’s summary of the Glenbow Museum controversy and the ethnographic reports by Sophia Vackimes (1996a, 1996b) are noteworthy exceptions. In both cases, the political stakes represented by the exhibits are starkly revealed, and the debates are incendiary.

Social drama at the Smithsonian An interest in the science and anti-science debates – in which science issues are discussed in terms of a simplistic dichotomy made up of either pro- or anti-science positions – led Sophia Vackimes (1996a, 1996b) to examine the Smithsonian’s Science in American life exhibit. She reminds us that many of the writers who are locked in these debates often depict so-called anti-science people – those who would question certain aspects of modern science – as savages or ignorant lay people (see for example Gross and Levitt’s 1994 book, Higher superstition). Some of those portrayed as anti-science are scholars in the humanities and social sciences (or outside the boundaries of a narrowly defined science). In a word, these writers are referring to us. Under such circumstances the study of us (interested lay people) and them (the Big Science advocates) becomes imperative as we become the natives struggling for power. The Smithsonian case dramatically illustrates how the struggle between native lay people and those experts seeking to defend science at all costs, plays out in the real world. The Smithsonian controversy is a rich site for delving into the significant political and theoretical issues with which contemporary anthropology has been concerned: displays of power, representation, history and the cultural wars over who gets to write history, symbolic power and the power of material objects, education, public participation, multiculturalism, magic, science and religion, and hegemony.3 Anthropologists would not have attempted such analyses a hundred years ago because as a discipline we had not yet achieved the detachment, the experience, and the critical maturity necessary to undertake them. We first needed to experience colonialism and nationalism, and we needed to problematise the idea of the Other in order to recognise our roles as natives in our own society. 112

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Curator Arthur Molella (1994), in a piece appearing in the journal Science, noted that the Science in American life exhibit was essentially about an extraordinarily complex and evolving relationship between science and society. In a letter in the same issue of the journal, a historian of science (and member of the exhibits advisory committee) noted that the exhibit ‘neither attacks nor celebrates science and scientists, but provides museum visitors with an exciting and informative account of science as a human and social enterprise reflecting the society in which it is nurtured and having important social, economic, and political consequences. Isn’t that what “scientific literacy” should be about?’ (Weiner 1994). The work of the anthropologist in this case was to examine and analyse the social drama created by the cultural battles over what a Science in American life exhibit should be about. Science exhibits, according to Vackimes, usually use one of a series of approaches: to awe the public through the wonders or strangeness of nature, to display man’s conquest over natural forces, or to serve as monuments to great scientists, their discoveries and inventions. She points out that Science in American life was a history exhibit which did none of these things. Instead of illustrating scientific progress, the twenty-two case studies focused on scientific impact and urged the public to think about the deeper meanings of such technologies as the contraceptive pill, the atomic bomb, food additives, scientific education, coal tar products, synthetic fabrics, paints, aspirin and pesticides. Obscure inventors, vaccines and DNA, medical innovations, dyes for blue jeans, radio circuits, and hard water in American communities – these were the curiosities in the Science in American life exhibit. Perhaps the most provocative artefact – and the one that most clearly symbolised the different interests of the lay public and some scientists – was the family fallout shelter. After the war, the shelter was considered a realistic technical fix to the destructive potential of the atomic bomb, but following the development of the hydrogen bomb it came to be considered ineffective. The concern among some scientists on the museums advisory board was that the fallout shelter would stand out as a symbol of scientific evil (Molella and Stephens 1996). The exhibit stimulated as outraged a reaction among members of the scientific community as any representation (or misrepresentation) of the cultures of native peoples. There were implicit and explicit threats to jobs, calls for revisions and reparations, and accusations that science was being demonised. Many members of the scientific community wanted a script portraying the glories of American science and technology, one celebrating the Nobel Laureates. In the minds of some, contextualised scientific representation was considered to be a belligerent act orchestrated by radical anti-science sympathisers. The exhibit, in the spirit of the ‘new museology,’ elicited a public analysis of the meaning of science and progress in American life, which in turn drew blame to the Smithsonian for its alleged attack on the scientific establishment. The case of the Science in American life exhibit at the Smithsonian placed interested lay people in a quite unexpected position – a kind of native or ‘savage slot’ 113

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(Trouillot 1991) perhaps not so different from that of the Canadian Cree mentioned earlier in connection with the Glenbow Museum. The similarities are indeed striking. In both cases, a high-stakes struggle emerged between the natives and a group of experts (sometimes curators, sometimes museum advisory boards, sometimes members of the scientific community) over the representation of artefacts and historical events, and much of the representational power resided with the latter. Furthermore, like the Cree who sought to reclaim control over artefacts displayed without permission, some of the lay people in the Smithsonian case sought to reclaim the representation of what was, in a sense, theirs – technologies and inventions often subsidised by the tax-paying public – and on display in a public space (the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History) that was also theirs. As in the case of the Cree, who argued that The spirit sings might be used as a forum for discussing controversial contemporary issues, the natives in the Smithsonian case attempted to create a space for dialogue about urgent issues affecting the environment, public health and education policy. Finally, both groups of natives challenged the notion that scientific and curatorial experts were politically neutral actors. In summary, the Glenbow Museum and the Smithsonian controversies exposed sharp tensions between natives who formerly had a relatively limited power base, and those experts who would seek to objectively represent them. Viewed from this perspective, the controversies might be viewed as one dimension of a more general crisis of representation in late twentieth-century anthropology.4 What is perhaps most interesting about the Smithsonian case is the fact that it illustrates how the condition of being native may now extend beyond a simple division between Western and non- Western peoples; increasingly, divisions are made between lay people and experts within the boundaries of the United States and other countries. It seems that fluency in the language of Big Science, or a split between Big Science specialists and the lay public, has in some cases become the criteria separating the civilised from the savage. Such cases clearly illustrate the dynamics of boundary creation, power and knowledge (Nader 1996), and the high stakes implicated in struggles over representation. A ‘higher superstition,’ to use Gross and Levitt’s (1994) phrase, may belong to us all, including those who would fervently condemn critics of the modern scientific enterprise. The assumption of the inherent superiority of modern science has become an article of faith among many, but in the meantime anthropology as a discipline has matured. We know that the savage can no longer be considered savage nor the cosmopolitan as cosmopolitan. Furthermore, anthropologists do understand the social organisation of groups, and practitioners of Big Science represent a group separated spatially from lay people engaged in everyday pursuits. Our science museums have been the special depositories for the mystery, majesty and fascination of science, as Vackimes (1996a) points out. The Smithsonian exhibit was housed in the National Museum of American History, in which the curators apparently penetrated the previously impenetrable vault of modern science. It was through these means that Vackimes and the curators have been able 114

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to comprehend the religious workings of the scientific mind. Their work addresses critical issues in our society, a society increasingly harnessed by technological advances and technological problems.

Discussion: the politics of display These cases demonstrate that the ethnographic study of museums offers exciting new possibilities for anthropologists interested in the relationship between material culture, conflicting epistemologies, and the politics of display (Gieryn 1998). Exhibits such as Science in American life, The Spirit sings, The West as America, and the Enola Gay are social dramas that are often hotly contested sites of debate for groups with radically different interpretations of history, and issues of alternative representations of reality come to the fore. Although the epistemological battle lines are frequently drawn most sharply between curators and critics, other groups of differential power are often involved: veterans’ and religious groups, corporate sponsors, trade associations, ethnic minorities, politicians, labour unions, and others may commonly be counted among the stakeholders (Gieryn 1998). In this sense, museums may indeed be seen as ‘contact zones ... the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples geographically and historically separated come into contact with each other and establish ongoing relations, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality, and intractable conflict’ (Pratt, quoted in Clifford 1997: 192). There are a number of reasons that anthropologists might be especially wellpositioned to conduct ethnographic studies of museum exhibits. To the extent that the members of various groups of stakeholders possess similar historical views about a given topic selected for an exhibition, we might describe them as distinct cultures with varying degrees of power. It is at this point that the usefulness of an anthropological perspective becomes apparent, for anthropologists have long attempted to understand and faithfully describe the native’s point of view in their ethnographies. The anthropologist’s familiarity with the principle of cultural relativism, in particular, might be seen as a special skill that could be employed to comprehend the apparently incommensurable worldviews expressed in the power struggles over museum exhibitions. Furthermore, the anthropological experience with issues of power and controlling processes (Nader 1997) is also a vital tool in an emerging ethnography of museums and the politics of display. There are, of course, challenges – particularly methodological challenges – to those embarking upon this venture. The ethnographic study of museums and museum exhibits calls for new ways of collecting and analysing data. Vackimes (1996a, 1996b) and Gusterson (1995) provide us with models: key informant interviews with curators, critics and other stakeholders give critical insights into conflicting epistemological views, as do internal memos, press releases, letters and other documents. An important part of fieldwork in museums typically includes 115

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a ‘textual’ analysis of the exhibits themselves (of both artefacts and the graphic displays or textual explanations accompanying them), which by necessity requires the anthropologist to engage in the problematic but potentially rewarding process of cultural interpretation. Finally, a critical dissection of the dynamic components of power in public museum displays will also need to consider the role of political stakeholders – and the specific mechanisms they employ – in the ideological creation of museum exhibits. Through this chapter we wish to remind anthropologists of what it means to have once served as clients – beholden to the political machinations of others – and how far we have moved towards a true profession of anthropology. The new ethnographic work on museums rises to the challenge put by Sturtevant in 1969 for a museum anthropology that pursues a wider mandate. In pursuit of an anthropology of modern life, anthropologists have increasingly moved attention from anthropology museums to other sites of material culture – like world’s fairs (Benedict 1983), art museums (Marcus 1990), history museums (Vackimes 1996a, 1996b), and national air and space museums (Gusterson 1995). This recent work illustrates how museums might potentially serve as resources or even as new field sites for fruitful and creative research on material culture.

Acknowledgements The authors wish to thank Michael Ames (University of British Columbia) for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.

NOTES 1. See Finn (1990) for a description of the relatively recent appearance of The museum of science and technology. 2. Edited volumes include Jo Blatti’s Past meets present: essays about historic interpretation and public audiences (1987), Stephen Weil’s Rethinking the museum (1990), Karp and Lavine’s Exhibiting cultures: the poetics and politics of museum display (1991) and Karp, Kreamer and Lavine’s Museums and communities: the politics of public culture (1992). The last two volumes were based on Smithsonian conferences in which anthropologists participated. Fischer (1989) has written a summary of the first conference. In their contribution to the second conference, Appadurai and Breckenridge (1992) examine the cultural context of museums in India (see the introductory chapter of Breckenridge (1995) for an extension of their earlier paper). 3. Although Ames (1992: 10) concedes that science and technology museums are also ‘ideologically active environments’ that should be considered by anthropologists, he leaves their critical dissection ‘for another time.’ 4. Those conducting research on visual anthropology and anthropological film are confronting similar issues. See Turner (1990) and Ginsburg (1991).

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8 B EHIND THE SCENES AT THE S CIENCE M USEUM : KNOWING , MAKING AND USING

Sharon Macdonald




Between 1988 and 1990 I carried out ethnographic fieldwork in the Science Museum, London – Britain’s national museum of science and industry, generally acknowledged to be one of the world’s major science museums. Looking back, I can still feel the tremor of excitement I felt on first being permitted to go ‘backstage’ with my own key to use doors – half-hidden by displays – at the back of galleries leading to what seemed initially like a maze of footfall-echoey spiral staircases and further mysterious doors, behind the scenes. The world which I was exploring as an ethnographer was quite literally divided into ‘back stage’ and ‘front stage’ (Goffman 1971), and part of my task was to chart the traffic across that security-warden marked boundary between a most public of front stages and professionally exclusive of back stages. In this chapter, I argue for an anthropological-ethnographic approach to going behind the scenes. Most analyses of museums work back from the scenes – the exhibitions – to read off from them the power relations and processes which may have been implicated in their construction. This is a kind of after the fact theorising (Strathern 1992: 2 ff.) in which the exhibition is both the beginning point and the exemplification of analysis. In its more sophisticated forms, and with good data at its disposal, this kind of reading back can be richly provocative, an epic tale of themes big and small, of contingency, detail and complexity. In its thinner forms, however, it is easily a just-so tale – how the camel got its humps – which takes us from humps to neat origin story, playing on a fairly limited set of narrative possibilities (animal mishap or, in the case of exhibitions, class, race, gender) and back 117

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to humps. The ‘repetitive allegory’ which this easily involves, and which Werbner (1997; see also Howell 1997) sees as characteristic of much analysis within cultural studies, has already defined the important motivating categories of action before it begins: class, race, gender. While these are important, the danger, as Werbner (1997: 45) rightly notes, is that they become ‘stop words which block analysis’, or blind spots which prevent attention to other, perhaps more locally-motivating, categories, practices and actors. In the field of museum analysis, it has led to simple readings-off of ‘dominant’ class, race and gender interests, leaving little room for consideration of museums or their staff possibly working ‘against the grain’ (Rose 1986, see Porter 1996), for their creative agency, or for the ‘contest’ or ‘struggle’ that may be involved in the actual construction of an exhibition. Going behind the scenes also reveals what does not make it across the boundary between back and front stage. In recent years, historians of science and technology have argued for the importance of not just looking at the history of scientific successes. Failures too, they maintain, can reveal principles and practices involved in the construction of science and technology; and highlighting dimensions that are not so evident in the study of successes (Gooday 1997). Failures should not be thought of as unfortunate side-effects to the ‘real’ processes of history, as irrelevant ‘didn’t succeeds’. Failure – or that which never gets materialised into a product – is as socially constructed and as culturally interesting, as is success. So too, with exhibitions. During the day-to-day workings of any large museum, many ideas will be suggested, and perhaps plans drawn up, for exhibitions that never actually get made. So too, within any exhibition, there will be exhibits originally planned which, for one museologically interesting reason or another, never get materialised into gallery space.1 An anthropological-ethnographic exploration behind the scenes can take us into the world of such ‘almosts’, where they struggle with what may become ‘successes’, and into the classificatory battles of which finished exhibitions are an, albeit important and visible, after-effect. This chapter focuses on a particular struggle that was underway in the Science Museum (before) during (and after) my fieldwork. As an ambitious plan to rewrite the whole Museum, it did not succeed insofar as wholesale revision did not come to fruition. However, as with so many such unfulfilled plans and ideas, it did play a part in generating other, smaller, successes – a gallery here, re-use of exhibition space there; and, if not in the grand fashion that the heady discussions first seemed to promise, it did manage to ‘suggest a new vision for the Science Museum as it moved into the 21st century’ (Science Museum 1987). Focusing on this plan enables us to see some of the broader struggles in which the Science Museum (like other museums) was and has since been involved. We can also identify more general dynamics, the mess and contingency, that are also part of the exhibition-making and public-story-telling in which museums are engaged. Anthropological interest in museums has mainly focused on ethnographic exhibitions, with museums of science and industry being one of the least anthropologically-studied museological sites. This chapter also makes a case for the 118

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relevance and interest of looking at museums of science and technology. Science and technology are, for those societies which choose to sacralise them in museums, not just important for their practical implications but also as symbolic and semiotically motivational categories. Science and technology are some of modern societies’ most significant angels and demons – they are categories around which indigenously sacrosanct and emotive meanings and values coalesce. This is despite – or possibly because of – the way science and technology (or technoscience)2 are so often depicted as, or assumed to be, ‘neutral’ and ‘objective’ in themselves. This neutrality is, however, one of the culturally-specific dreams that they conjure up, which is deeply implicated both in a professionally-demarcated world of scientific practice, and in certain conceptions of personhood and ethical and political possibilities. Science and technology are no less amenable to cultural analysis than other aspects of social life, as indeed a recent, burgeoning literature demonstrates (see Franklin 1995 for an overview). In what follows, I describe what was locally known as ‘The Gallery Plan’ attempt to rewrite the Science Museum. This involves looking at the plan’s particular context and the various recursions through which it went, in order to identify the sources of struggle: why was it so problematic? Why did it materialise in a form that was not nearly as grand as had been originally hoped? A parallel aim is to illustrate the culturing of science: the different and contested ways in which science was conceptualised, mobilised and produced during the struggles constituting the ‘Gallery Plan’.

Conception The Gallery Plan was initiated by Dr Neil Cossons who became Director of the Museum in 1986. Cossons was often described in the media with terms like ‘visionary’, ‘guru’, ‘the high priest of museums’, on account of some of his ‘radical’ interventions in the museum world and the high media profile given to his opinions. These opinions tended to inspire rather strong reactions either for or against. Prior to taking up the directorship at the Science Museum, Cossons had set up the Blists Hill site of Ironbridge Gorge Museum – widely regarded in Britain, and indeed internationally, as an important example of an interactive heritage site (see West 1988) – and had then been director at the National Maritime Museum, where he had been the first director of a British national museum to introduce admission charges (previously, no national museums in Britain had levied charges for admission). This he also did at the Science Museum (on the very first day of my fieldwork). This was just one of what were widely expected to be some radical/exciting/worrying (depending on the perspective taken) developments under his directorship at the museum. The ‘Gallery Plan’ was another. Indeed, it could be seen as the central plank of developments in the museum, insofar as its aim was a major reorganisation and revamping of the museum. The 119

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brief, in the words of some of those involved, was to ‘think the unthinkable’: a reordering and recolonisation of the museum space – an extensive reorganisation and re-presentation that would somehow ‘tie the place together’ (as one member of staff put it) or ‘give it an overall logic’.3 The backdrop to this was the then current layout of the museum, which a Science Museum Management Plan in 1987 had described as ‘confusing without much logical relationship of themes to one another’; declaring that ‘this great Museum ... is increasingly out of line with current views on presentation and interpretation’. I return to the perceived problems with the existing layout and forms of presentation – and the difficulties which these raised for reorganisation – below. Staff were first appointed to work on the Gallery Plan in 1987 and, by the time of my fieldwork, some initial ideas had been formulated and sub-groups appointed to work on different aspects of the emerging plan.4 Initially, eighteen staff, chaired by the Keeper of the then Department of Physical Sciences, were selected to work on this highly consequential business. The majority held curatorial responsibility for particular collections within the museum, with representatives of ‘Administrative’ and ‘Design’ staff forming a minority. Selection was not made only on the basis of seniority. The group contained a surprising proportion of less senior staff given the importance of the task and staff consciousness about seniority and appropriate work. As one of the early Gallery Plan documents points out, the staff were almost all from grades B to E, staff being ranked on civil service grades from A, the highest, to G, the lowest. In addition, seven of the eighteen were women, a fairly high proportion. This represented, at least in part, I suggest, an aspect of a then more general managerial policy in the Science Museum to try to effect change by loosening the control of staff whom Cossons referred to as ‘dinosaurs’ in one newspaper interview, replacing them with ‘bright young things’.5 Unlike dinosaurs, with their vested interests in the status quo, bright young things were supposed to be forward-looking, ready to embrace rather than reject change. Age, seniority and gender were articulated to notions of flexibility and dynamism with which this vision of forward movement was invested; youth, juniorness and femaleness were seen as being relatively flexible and open to change (cf. Martin 1994). However, although those chosen to work on the Gallery Plan generally agreed that there was a need for a major revamp in order to create ‘a new, exciting and attractive Science Museum’, there were also plenty of areas of disagreement. Before discussing these, however, I want to turn to the existing Museum and its perceived problems.

How things were The Science Museum came to occupy its present site on Exhibition Road, opposite the Victoria and Albert Museum and next to the Natural History Museum, in 1928. This had partly involved the transposition of ready formed displays 120

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from their earlier location in the Brompton Boilers of the South Kensington Museum and, before that, at the Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 (see Follett 1978). Over the years the galleries had continued to evolve in what the Gallery Planning group regarded as a ‘piecemeal’ and ‘illogical’ fashion, leading to the current ‘confusing’ and ‘dated’ layout (quotations from documents and/or discussion witnessed). Discussions over how to rewrite the museum revealed three main interrelated problems perceived in the current organisation of the museum: (1) its taxonomic, collection-based form, (2) the lack of an ‘overall’ organisation and (3) its presentational style.

Form The layout of the museum that the Gallery Planning Groups sought to tackle was predominantly organised in terms of particular collections. The museum floorspace was mainly chopped up into discrete areas on different subjects relating to collections of artefacts that had been gathered, over many decades, by the museum.

Figure 8.1 Defined Space: Flight Gallery in the Science Museum, London. (Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library) 121

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These subjects included Glass, Optics, Aeronautics, Electricity and Magnetism. Collections themselves were conceptually grouped into larger categories. For example, Transport includes Land Transport and Aeronautics, the former having further subdivisions into Rail and Road. This kind of taxonomic subdividing is typical of a way of organising knowledge that historian of science John Pickstone (1994) calls ‘museological’ or ‘analytical’, which he argues was characteristic of science particularly in the late nineteenth century. It entails a division of knowledge into specific domains and an attempt further to subdivide these into elements that would in theory reveal some deeper level of structure or process. In the Science Museum, however, these categories are sometimes everyday classifications, such as Transport, and at other times more scientific disciplinary ones, such as Earth Sciences. The larger taxonomy is not mapped onto the layout of the museum; although the layout does reveal some logically varied attempts to place related subjects near to one another. For example, Photography and Cinematography is next to Optics; various measuring instruments are adjacent to one another on the first floor; and a selection of marine-related subjects occupy related gallery space on the second floor. This, however, is organisation by proximity without any incursion into the discrete bounded differentiation of the specific collections; and the displays signal their individuality through different design styles and colours. Another important local correlate of collections was that each also relates to a particular member, or members, of staff. Each collection has one or more curators working on it (each with their own area of expertise, continuing the taxonomic logic), and the group as a whole is headed by a keeper.6 The organisational identity and expertise of these curatorial staff is concentrated around the categories/collections. Many curators work on the same collections for their whole careers, building up an immensely detailed knowledge – and often passion for – their collections. The possessive pronoun is part of everyday Science Museum discourse, where particular members of staff are commonly identified by reference by ‘their’ collection: for example, ‘She’s Optics’, or ‘He’s Chemical Industry’. This identification of collections and curators, and the ‘object love’ which many of them demonstrated (I listened to many informative and impassioned accounts of the wonderful details of particular types of plastics, medical instruments or surveying equipment, during fieldwork), was an important dimension of the intra-museum factors shaping both exhibitions and the museum more generally.7 Part of this ‘local’ expectation was that curators would act as advocates for their collections; and one dimension of this was attempting to have their collections on public display (the majority of the museum’s holdings not being on public display and some whole collections being in storage). Having floor space for display was part of a local battle for territory, which itself is enmeshed with issues of professional status among museum staff. Exhibition-making was described by one curator as a ‘jammy job’ – an indication of local prestige. Any attempt to do away with the assumption that exhibitions would be presentations of collections would also be a challenge to an important dimension of local professional identity. This 122

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was presumably another reason for choosing less senior staff, who were not so thoroughly committed to particular collections and the collection-exhibition model, to work on the Gallery Plan.

Layout The presentation of collections in an atomised fashion, combined with professional territorialism, were two reasons for the lack of an overall plan to the Science Museum layout. Which collection had come to occupy which space was partly a consequence of the success of particular curators in preserving or acquiring gallery space; certain galleries had come to be regarded as the inalienable territories of certain collections/curators. The availability of sponsorship was another factor in the evolution of particular subjects into particular spaces at particular times. In order to refurbish any gallery and to mount any major exhibition, the Science Museum had for many decades relied upon some (generally fairly substantial) input from external sponsors. In contrast to exhibitions and performances in the arts, the sponsorship of exhibitions of science, industry and technology is almost always from companies with a direct interest in the subject matter (Kirby 1988). Thus, an exhibition on gas is likely to receive sponsorship from a gas company, one on electricity from an electricity company so that, as one member of the museum staff put it, an ‘archaeology’ of which exhibitions were produced when, is in part a history of which industries were doing well at which times. Thus, in the first example of sponsorship, the original Gas gallery (sponsored by the Gas Council) opened in 1954, Electricity 1975, Chemical Industry (sponsored by the Imperial Chemical Industries) in 1986, Food (sponsored by the charitable trust of a supermarket chain) in 1989. Other considerations involved in the organisation of space within the museum included the location of large and heavy objects, such as beam engines, on the ground floor because of their size and weight (something which we might understand in terms of the agency of objects, cf. Latour 1987, in the network of power relations involved in exhibition construction). There seems to be an implicit idea of progress, whereby higher and more sophisticated technologies go upwards in the museum; thus, land transport and steam power are on the ground floor and aeronautics and optics at the top. The basement was the location of the marginal: the children’s gallery, domestic technologies (seen as the preserve of women) and ‘firemaking’ – one of the few exhibitions dealing with cultural ‘others’. The contingency of available funding, allied with the fact that the expensive business of gallery refurbishment was carried out on a gallery by gallery basis over many years, meant that the museum tended to evolve in a piecemeal fashion, highly constrained by its existing layout. The aim of the gallery plan was to change this and, in so doing, to challenge the atomised collection-based format, while updating the presentational style of many existing galleries. 123

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Style In the documents and discussions related to the gallery plan, the mode of presentation in much of the museum was often commented upon negatively as ‘unappealing to visitors’. The preliminary report stated the revamp was to ‘provide a lively, stimulating and easily digested insight into all aspects of science, technology, industry and medicine’. There was a good deal of disagreement over how this should be done. Part of the problem was that some exhibitions had been in place for many years and had become ‘tatty and dog-eared; others were condemned as too ‘static’, as ‘patronising’ and ‘confusing’. Lengthy labels and ‘poorly interpreted’ object-based displays were singled out for criticism. As Tony Bennett (1998) has described, many museum staff in the nineteenth century were preoccupied with labelling as a means of making science, rather literally, legible or visible; and objects, properly labelled, wereseen as a better means of educating the working classes than were more abstract literary techniques. Moreover, labels were a further aspect of the analytical scientific approach in which individual elements (in this case objects) were to be clearly indicated, the label providing an indication of an object’s place within a taxonomic scheme. This was an approach which gave pre-eminence to sight above other senses (Dias 1998) and to an object’s relational place within its domain above matters such as its mode of operation, social context or use. For the staff involved in the Gallery Plan, however, this kind of approach and information was generally regarded as outdated and, as a mode of presentation defined by a curatorial/scientific logic, not sufficiently visitor-oriented for a museum display in the late 1980s. Rewriting the museum was, then, also a struggle to define new museological styles that would connect to changing conceptions of science and the shifting relationship between scientific expertise and the public.

Re-visioning ‘What the Director would really like is if we could rip it all out and start again kind of beginning in the Stone Age and work through the ages, Industrial Revolution and on, through the whole museum, so that the visitor comes in the front door and follows a single route through the whole history of technology, and out again the other side. A bit like Jorvik on a grand scale – preferably with little cars to keep them moving too!’

This half-joking account was voiced by one of the members of the Gallery Planning Group on the way to a sub-group meeting. Jorvik, a Viking exhibition in York that opened in 1984, was a subject of considerable interest in both the Science Museum and other museums in the late 1980s and into the 1990s.8 Jorvik’s popularity was combined with a very high through-put: it boasted over 500 paying-visitors per day and a higher rate of income per square meter in its shop than the local branch of a large and successful chain-store. Visitors take a twelve minute ‘time-car’ ride 124

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through a brief history about the Viking settlement of ‘Jorvik’ (York’s Viking name). The makers of Jorvik had visited Disneyland to learn about customer management techniques which, coupled with a potentially educational and scientifically respectable subject, aroused widespread interest among staff. Some found Jorvik – with its recreated scenes and smells – a successful attempt to ‘bring history alive’; others, however, regarded it as a crudely commercial enterprise in which ‘real, historical objects’ had been replaced by ‘mock-ups’. Jorvik became a focus for debates in many museums at the time: about ‘making museums more relevant’ or ‘dumbing-down’, about ‘Democracy’ or ‘Disneyfication’.9 These alternatives were also involved in the Gallery Plan negotiations, and were reflected in discussions about what the visitor should be presented with. ‘Rip[ping] it all out and start[ing] again’ was not in fact an option: it would have been too expensive, both in terms of revenue lost by closing the museum and short-term capital costs. The Gallery Planning Group instead proposed a gradual programme of gallery replacement over ten to fifteen years, creating some kind of overall plan to the museum layout and breaking down the atomistic presentational style by, for example, arranging the museum into a ‘story of progress’. The plan was, therefore, created in a struggle against ‘practical considerations’: the existing layout, floors able to bear heavy objects, urgency of refurbishment and funding. The group had to work within an annual budget of no more than £1.6 million, at 1986 prices, which would be sufficient for only two major gallery refits per year. No extra building work, such as a new wing, was allowed. The task – to ‘be bold!’ within tightly defined limits – was a tall order, but one that produced a good deal of creative thinking. Rewriting the museum was not just about reorganising layout. It also entailed inscribing certain cultural visions of science, material culture, professional expertise and visitors. Inscription is a messy, negotiated process, and the visions that it produces are likely to contain ambiguity and even contradictions. However, the repertoire of positions voiced in discussion, and the pre-eminence of certain positions at certain times, is culturally located and not infinite. (Some suggestions were defined out of existence as ‘coming from another planet’). Likewise, the production of certain visions does not mean that visitors will necessarily interpret the exhibition as the producers had intended. I shall first discuss the general outline of the plans that the group came up with, before turning to more specific topics and their implications.

Precepts: visitors and science After the first meeting of the Gallery Planning Group – prior to my fieldwork – four working parties were established to try to formulate some guiding precepts for the more detailed discussions about exhibition content. These groups and their remits were as follows: 125

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1. Function: To look at the declared objectives of the museum, how these are carried out in practice, the constraints which influence the efficient fulfilment of our role, and finally to assess the need for and, if necessary, suggest a redefinition of that role. 2. Medium: To try to reach a better understanding of the exhibition as a medium, what it can (and cannot) do for visitors of all kinds. How can we exploit our medium to its greatest advantage? 3. Visitors: Who are our visitors? Why do they come? What do they expect from a visit to the Science Museum? How do they use their time in the museum and were they pleased they came? What competition do we face from other leisure activities and how should we respond to this competition? 4. Building: To look at this building, its shortcomings and potential and to recommend improvements in visitor access and facilities. Apart from the last group, which reached its conclusions fairly uncontentiously, the other groups all enjoyed ‘philosophical debate ... [which] stimulated heated discussion’ and which made evident that ‘some firmly held and opposing views could not and should not attempt to be reconciled’ (Science Museum 1987). These views continued to be debated in subsequent meetings. Nevertheless, a governing ideal and a number of objectives were agreed at this stage of meetings. The report states: ‘The over-riding ideal of creating a new, exciting and attractive Science Museum with easily understood displays for our visitors to enjoy dominated the groups’ thinking. Specific objectives to achieve this goal were identified ... some representing a marked change from the entrenched attitudes we have inherited from the past’. What is particularly noticeable about this ‘over-riding’ ideal, and the remit of the groups above, is the centrality which visitors are given. Although the first group – Function – does not explicitly mention visitors, they were regarded as central to the museum’s function. This had not always been the case. ‘Visitors has become such a buzz word’, commented one curator. While the Science Museum had, of course, since its inception been defined as a public institution with an educational function, the plural term ‘visitors’ signalled, I suggest, a new twist in its attempt to relate to those coming to the museum not so much as a citizen-mass to be instructed, as a set of varied individuals ‘visiting’ in the active, of their own accord. This entailed a significant shift in the perceived power relations between the museum as institution and those visiting, with the museum coming to be seen as a recipient of visiting and not as the only gift-giver in the exchanges characterising this particular social relationship. Thus indebted to the visitor, the museum could not behave as omnipotent benefactor, but had to try to investigate and provide what visitors might want. Box 1 provides a list of the objectives that emerged from the first meetings and which provided the ground rules for more detailed plans. In addition to the centreing of visitors, the list of objectives highlights some interesting shifts in the 126

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Box 1: Gallery planning objectives 1. That the Science Museum as the world’s pre-eminent museum devoted to the history of science, technology, industry and medicine has a duty to promote an understanding of the history of science and technology up to the present time. 2. Displays should be object-based to ensure that our rich and varied collections are made available to the public. 3. The traditional approach of a one-to-one relationship between collections and galleries should be relaxed. Objects from several collections would be employed together in a more thematic way. 4. The museum cannot (and should not) attempt to be encyclopaedic, but should aim to be synoptic and cover all aspects of science, technology, industry and medicine as defined by the Management Plan. 5. Treatment must be exciting, stimulating and easily understood. The museum should aim to create experiences beyond the mere showing of an object and to challenge the visitor to think about science and technology. 6. Major themes should be arranged logically in the building to enable visitors to select an area of interest from information points to follow it through. 7. The treatment should reflect historical, social, economic and cultural aspects of science and technology, although the extent of this broader treatment may vary according to the subject matter and target audience. 8. Where appropriate the museum should make use of a wide range of supporting material, modern display techniques, reconstructions and live demonstrations. 9. It is vital to make it easier for visitors to find their way around. Improved signposting and the provision of multiple information points must be incorporated into the gallery plan. 10. The programme for gallery renewal must be carefully planned to ensure disruption and consequent inconvenience to visitors and staff is kept to a minimum. 11. The completion of exciting new ventures should be spread over the entire period of redevelopment so that there is a continuing awareness that the Science Museum is changing and that we hold our own against other leisure interests.

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museum’s construction of science. I regard the Museum as one of the sites in which science is constructed for, and indeed by, the public rather than simply presented to it, because I think it is important to recognise that the work of producing the cultural phenomenon called ‘science’ is not restricted to the laboratory. Science is not created once and for all but is in a constant state of creation and recreation. Museums – and especially national museums of science – are one of the sites where this cultural product is made and remade. Having made this analytical point, however, it is also important to note that the kind of cultural work which museums are perceived to do is not universal. In the nineteenth century, many museums were regarded as exemplars of analytical scientific techniques (Pickstone 1994). That is, their very layouts were manifestations of scientific principles; and, partly for this reason, museums were seen as useful for scientific research (many universities established museums in this period, Forgan 1994). Furthermore, in the shift from the earlier mode of legitimising scientific results by reference to the worthiness of their authors to one in which visibility to (at least some of ) ‘the public’ came to be crucial (Shapin 1994, Dias 1998), museums of science had also functioned as spaces for the validation of objectivity and science. During the twentieth century, however, alongside a growing bureaucratisation and professionalisation of science, the validation of science became a more specialised process carried out largely outside the public domain (Pickstone 1994, Shapin 1994). If museums no longer had the same role as validators of scientific process, a new task came to be seen as more pressing in the face of increasingly hidden scientific expertise. This was to inform the public about science – a task that, as science came to be regarded as increasingly complex and esoteric, was seen to require not just ‘showing and telling’ (Bal 1996), but more extensive processes of ‘interpretation’ (objective 5 expresses this in terms of going beyond ‘the mere showing of an object’ and emphasising the harnessing of visitor agency by ‘challenge[ing] the visitor to think’). In many ways the Gallery Plan could be seen as a major attempt by the Science Museum to face up to this problem, and to the dated scientific legacy of its then current exhibitions and layout. A number of other science-related changes also pressed in upon the Science Museum’s attempt to ‘create a vision for the twenty-first century’. Objective 4 notes that the museum should not attempt to be ‘encyclopaedic’, something which had been part of the collecting project of many types of nineteenth-century museum (Sheets-Pyenson 1989), but which, by the late twentieth century, had come to be regarded as too ambitious and indeed impossible. The Natural History Museum officially announced its own decision to revoke its prior aim of cataloguing the whole of the natural world in 1989. This decision was attributed to greater scientific awareness of the sheer number and proliferation of natural species, as well as financial and other practical constraints. Science Museum selectivity about what was to be collected was done in the face of a dilemma over whether to try to collect globally, or to build up a collection focused on national science, industry, technology and medicine. This had been less difficult when, in 128

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the past, Britain was regarded as being at the forefront of scientific, industrial, technological and medical developments. By collecting national products, curators were simultaneously covering globally important developments.10 In the 1980s, however, it was increasingly clear that this was no longer the case, and curators faced a problem over whether to try to collect globally – which could be very expensive – or to collect ‘home-grown’ artefacts which might be of little significance in the ‘big global story’ of scientific progress. Many curators could relate difficult cases of specific purchases that they had faced. There was also an awareness among some curators that the Science Museum might end up conveying a message not of progress, as the ‘Jorvik solution’ implied, but of national decline since the industrial revolution. Another science-related development that surfaced in Gallery Planning discussions, which is reflected in Objective 7, is the growth of social and cultural perspectives on science and technology. Many museum staff were well aware of, and well read in, these perspectives and saw in them interesting potential for challenging exhibitions which would ‘make visitors think’, though others were suspicious, regarding them as potentially ‘anti-scientific’.11 They were also aware, however, of criticisms which could be made of some of the museum’s exhibitions from such perspectives, and this too fuelled the sense of need for revision. How was this to be achieved?

Themes and variations After coming up with the above objectives, the Gallery Planning Group then split into three randomly mixed groups – X, Y and Z – to try to work out how the museum could be reorganised in a way which would meet the challenges and objectives that they had formulated. They recognised a need to move away from the atomised collections-based model (objective 5), implicated as it was in now outdated scientific models. Instead there was to be ‘thematic’ presentation (objectives 5 and 6), which would not necessarily be based on themes drawn from science itself (objective 7). The difficulty was that this had to be done while retaining an emphasis on objects from the museum’s collections (objective 2), which were regarded as the museum’s ‘unique selling point’,12 and without ‘ripping it all out and starting from scratch’ (objectives 10 and 11). Groups X and Y came up with the rather similar idea of dividing the museum into three main themes, though they varied in how they mapped onto the layout of the museum.13 The themes were:

Group X Science and Technology of Everyday Life About Industry About Science 129

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Group Y Industry Investigative Science Science and Technology of Everyday Life As the document reporting this observes, Science and Technology of Everyday Life ‘represents the most radical innovation in the group’s proposals’. It is this theme which most closely relates to the attempt to centre the visitor more thoroughly in the museum’s exhibitions. The report (Science Museum 1987: 4) explains: ‘A large area of the Museum would be devoted to science and technology from the user’s point of view. It is particularly aimed at the visitor with little or no prior understanding of the subject who will find the subject-matter readily accessible because it is related to everyday experiences.’ While the Science Museum has long included exhibits which relate to ‘everyday life’, the idea of making ‘everyday life’ an orienting category is indeed radical (as perceived locally) in that it suggests that the categories of display will be based in ‘everyday experiences’ rather than science or collections. However, although this theme attempts to break down the barrier between science and the public, elsewhere it retains the categories Science or Investigative Science. The traffic seems to be all one-way: from science to the public. The ideas of Group Z, however, won the day with their three thematic categories:

Group Z Knowing – science as a process for understanding the natural world Making – technology as a process for transforming the natural world Using – the use of technology in industrial, commercial and domestic settings Why was this the most attractive option? Its ‘elegant simplicity’ and the ‘clarity and comprehensibility’ of its framework (Science Museum 1987: 7) were partly responsible. Expressed as verbs, these three categories nicely captured the attempt to move the emphasis away from static collections; they are, moreover, fairly ‘everyday’, rather than specialised, words. Despite some similarity with the X and Y schemes, in terms of a separation of ‘use’ (cf. ‘everyday life’), science and technology, this scheme does not work from already institutionalised domains and has what one participant described as ‘the advantage of vagueness’. Knowing could be about both institutionalised science but also common sense and other forms of knowing, and thus a more flexible and even experimental approach. In the meetings at which the three proposals were discussed, and the latter selected, it was decided that each theme should be represented on a particular floor of the museum: Using on the first floor, Making on floor two, and Knowing on the third floor. The rationale given for this ordering was, again, visitor-justified, the argument being that visitors would come first to floor 1 where they would encounter uses of technology, which would be the most famil130

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iar of the three themes to them. Making would take them into the world ‘behind’ this, the creation of technologies; and Knowing would deal with the most potentially esoteric business of processes involved in the creation of scientific knowledge. Thus, also built into the museum would be a kind of hierarchy of different dimensions of the late twentieth-century technoscientific complex on a continuum from the accessible/everyday to the relatively inaccessible/specialised. Three new groups were then formed – Knowing, Making and Using – each with the remit of ‘fleshing out’ the themes and deciding how they would be transformed into exhibitions in the museum over a period of ten to fifteen years. It was in trying to plan this transformation – struggling against the legacy of the existing museum, of timing, of space, of money and of competing ideas – that some major difficulties emerged. I focus here on the Knowing Group, partly because this theme seemed to pose the greatest difficulties for those involved – as they acknowledged.

Showing knowing Like the other two groups, Knowing convened a series of meetings with many individuals writing discussion papers. Meetings were generally extremely lively and the debates highlighted how thoroughly engaged museum staff were with questions about museological display and about the nature of science. The negotiations also highlighted very different perspectives on many of these matters, and differing ideas about putting them into practice. Some participants voiced concern over the very theme of Knowing and its proposed location on the museum’s third floor.

Space, objects and professional identity The constraints of the space which the Knowing theme was to occupy, was a major source of disgruntlement in the group. Museum management made it clear that both a specially built gallery where aircraft were displayed, which took up almost a third of the available floor space, and an exhibition of interactive flightrelated exhibits then in the making, would remain in place. Moreover, another new medical exhibition was also scheduled for the third floor. With nobody arguing that the Aeronautical exhibitions could possibly be construed as part of the Knowing theme, and a very mixed response to the suggestion that the medical exhibition could, the integrity of the idea that the whole floor could be devoted to the theme was severely threatened. As one group member put it: ‘The very thesis of a Knowing floor is undermined’. This problem was compounded by the group’s identification of potential relevance of many collections to the Knowing theme. These included: Astronomy, Geophysics, Geomagnetism, Heat and Temperature, Electricity and Magnetism, George III (a collection of scientific instruments), Chemistry and Biochemistry, 131

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Meteorology, Surveying, Nuclear Physics, Optics. Many of these were ‘objectrich’ collections, with numerous potential candidates for display, many of which were seen as historically important. There was general agreement that objects should retain a central place in the museum’s displays (objective 2), unlike the neighbouring Natural History Museum, where many newer exhibitions consisted entirely of reconstructions and interactive exhibits. However, there was debate about how to show objects, how many, and whether they would be the beginning point of the accounts or just fit into the ‘stories’ or ‘messages’ once these had been decided. The rationale of the thematic approach was the latter, which almost certainly implied relatively few objects.14 This, however, was seen as politically dangerous for two reasons: the Science Museum would have to justify purchasing and storing collections, many of which would never be on public display. Curatorial staff also attempted to retain an input into the creation of public display rather than have this undertaken entirely by non-curatorial education and design staff, as was the case in the Natural History Museum. The distaste for this model and the anxiety that it might be proposed in the Science Museum was palpable. As one curator put it: ‘We have a deep fear of the way that they [the Natural History Museum] do their galleries... We feel very strongly that we’re the ones with the ideas, we’re the ones with the objects, we’re the ones that dictate what happens and part of our great fear, which is also partly why we’re keen to make sure the momentum of the planning for the themes goes on, is that we might go the same way’.

In creating their plans museum staff were also inevitably engaged in writing their own professional identities. Yet, this did not mean that they were attempting simply to hold on to the status quo. Although there were sometimes attempts by particular curators to argue in meetings for the display of their collections (occasionally including certain other curators’ collections because they might be piqued otherwise!), the principle of the thematic approach, with its refusal to acknowledge curatorial boundaries, was generally accepted. They did, however, argue that the concept and practice of ‘collection’ should be retained through the idea of ‘collector’s collections’. These would be specialised collections, housed either elsewhere or on the premises in special ‘visual storage’, available as ‘study collections’ for those with a specific interest in the topic. To the extent that these would require conventional curatorial expertise and labour, the curatorial role would be retained. However, instead of retreating to what had previously been just one aspect of their job, they also argued for a broader remit in relation to display. One suggestion was that curators should become ‘curatorial GPs’ (a GP being a ‘General Practitioner’ medical doctor in the United Kingdom): ‘generalist specialists – integrating, balancing and interpreting the findings of a broad spread of outside specialists – social historians, economic historians, political historians and others’ (personal communication). A similar idea was expressed in the 132

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then new concept of ‘curator-interpreters’, and the more widespread use of the term ‘interpretation’ to characterise the changing role of the former ‘curator’.15 If objects were to be retained, however, there were different ideas about their role and selection. One argument was that many objects exhibited in the museum were ‘small, visually dull and virtually meaningless without a great deal of interpretation’. Selection should therefore give priority to large and striking artefacts with visual appeal. However, this was felt by others to be a renunciation of the role of interpretation. Artefacts should be made meaningful through such techniques as their placing within narratives.16

Visitors and revelation This debate over artefacts and how far they could ‘speak for themselves’ was linked to another concerning what visitors could be expected to grasp, and the problem of conveying the often rather abstract ideas of the Knowing theme. Any museum or exhibition – and indeed any museum or exhibition plan – is inevitably also an implicit statement about its imagined audience. Members of the Knowing group differed sharply in imagining this potential audience as entirely lacking in scientific knowledge, or as reasonably well-educated. Various statistics were mobilised in some heated arguments: ‘One third of our visitors has a degree’, ‘Only one person per thousand in the population has a science degree’. Those arguing for constructing the visitor as relatively ignorant were accused of being ‘patronising’ and of ‘dumbing down’, those who constructed the visitor as more educated faced charges of ‘elitism’ and of being potentially ‘exclusionary’. Visitor interest in science, and specific topics such as history of science, was also much debated and a source of much disagreement: ‘Got to give them some romance’, ‘We need to grab them’, ‘They need something to get their teeth into – not just little snippets’. Invocations of imaginary visitors were also a potentially effective rhetorical strategy for supporting one’s own ideas or dismissing those of others: ‘That’s just not going to be interesting to visitors’, ‘Visitors will never get that’, ‘Visitors are not as stupid as you think: they’re really going to like that’. The fact that little relevant visitor research was available made this kind of ‘visitor hi-jacking’ relatively easy, with many staff (especially those without scientific backgrounds) invoking themselves as ‘visitor substitutes’. This fed into a dynamic between intellectual and lay perspectives in the Knowing group (also observed elsewhere in the museum), with some members employing a ‘bringing down to earth’ strategy of invoking the relatively ‘scientifically illiterate’ visitor, when others were mobilising academic arguments.17 This dynamic also sometimes came into play in debates about how to make visible the esoteric dimensions of scientific knowing. Insofar as Knowing was defined as being about the ‘practice’ of science, some aspects were relatively unproblematic in terms of display: suggestions included measuring instruments 133

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and reconstructions of laboratories. Other matters were perceived as more difficult, in particular, demonstrating the social and economic dimensions of scientific practice, and providing a historical perspective without ‘Whiggishly’ assuming a linear progressive development. One idea for doing this, in a Physics section, was to incorporate social and economic dimensions through the scientists’ biographies. Some dismissed this approach as being too conventional and too much about individual scientists or great white males. A suggestion for conveying the money involved in contemporary science was to exhibit a big pile of (reproduction) banknotes by a laboratory reconstruction, though the counter-argument was that this ‘would not get at the scale of it at all, nor the international dimensions’. The problem was that although there was general agreement that science should be regarded as social, it was far from easy to translate this into physical displays while keeping text to a minimum and objects to a maximum. The museological medium here seemed to run against the grain of the proposed message (cf. Jordanova 1989, Silverstone 1992). The nature of much modern science also contributed to this perceived ‘visibility problem’, with worries about how to deal with modern scientific processes so complex and on such a microscopic scale that representation would be difficult without a very large amount of explanation.18 The danger was that matters would have to be expressed so simplistically as to tell the visitor very little indeed: ‘[The curator’s] best efforts will be bowdlerised until the visitor has to read, with dismay, that “super string theory is a sophisticated concept which allows physicists to organise their ideas on the forces of nature”. If we can only tease our visitors, and not enlighten them, then let us not plunge blindfold into the quagmire … We must always ask ourselves whether museum display is the best medium for what we are trying to achieve’.

Fall-out Despite the problems and worries about whether the Knowing, Making, Using divisions were such a helpful idea after all, the groups were pressed to prepare a document for presentation to the Museum’s trustees making the case for approving the Gallery Plan. At a briefing meeting, the museum’s director called for each theme to devise its own ‘theology’ – ‘an intellectual justification ... that makes sense ... within the accepted canons of history and the aims of the Science Museum’ – which would in turn fit into the ‘total theology’. The task of generating this theology was identified as ‘a creative work in its own right’ and, therefore, one which ‘requires a single person to be appointed to act as synthesiser’ (Science Museum 1988). This strategy was also a reaction to the despair of many staff at getting anywhere given the differences of view within the Gallery Planning Group. A fairly senior member of staff, who had not previously been involved in the Gallery Planning Group, was duly appointed as synthesiser and he produced a 134

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document called ‘Planning for the Galleries’. A member of the Gallery Planning Group also produced an alternative report, entitled ‘Science Museum Gallery Plan’, which he characterised as ‘an intellectual manifesto’, and in which he also sought to construct a ‘theology’ and ‘synthesis’. On the basis of both of these, the Chair and Secretary of the Gallery Planning Group produced a draft report entitled ‘Gallery Development Plan 1989 – 2004’, which was then edited by the group as a whole and the Director and re-titled ‘Gallery Development Plan: Thematic Principles’. This report, as its opening summary states, was ‘concerned to capture the vision behind the planned transformation of the museum’s public exhibitions along three major themes – Knowing, Making and Using’. The very first paragraph of the report notes that ‘Increased emphasis is placed on relating the social and economic context of the collections’,19 suggesting that this should be seen as the major failure of the Science Museum’s current approach. The report goes on to provide a background to the production of the Gallery Development Plan, an account of ‘The Need for Change’, a description of the themes and an outline of what they will cover, and a proposed programme of the first years of implementing the plan. This last section acknowledges that the programme would be extremely costly and notes that fund-raising efforts in recent years had proved disappointing. In a somewhat cryptic comment, which was to prove one of the stumbling blocks for the plan as it went to the trustees, the report (1989: 15) states: ‘Realistically, if we are to be able to guarantee to deliver the new gallery plan within a reasonable period of years a fundamental new approach to the mechanisms by which the trustees are enabled to fund major capital developments of this nature and magnitude may prove to be essential.’ This was then put to the trustees in a meeting in January 1989, which I was not permitted to attend. Indeed trustee meetings in some ways resembled the ‘blackbox’ of science whose workings are invisible, but effects palpable. The trustees, eighteen members of ‘the great and the good’ (distinguished public figures, including a fairly high proportion of industrialists and several academics from scientific disciplines),20 made the following objections to the plan as reported back to the Gallery Planning Group: ‘1. That they did not fully understand the intellectual framework ... and still had no vision of what the Museum would look like. 2. The plan is overwhelming, involving a complete redefinition of the Museum. Is it too rigid, might we come to regret it as the plan is implemented? 3. Is the plan deliverable anyway? Can the Museum sustain the initiative to attract sponsorship and implement the plan?’. They also expressed concern over the disruption that implementation would cause, as well as over a number of more specific issues, such as the ousting of Shipping by a proposed Information Age gallery (a concern that was perhaps related to the presence of an Admiral on the Board of Trustees). Some members of staff also suggested that the trustees were putting a brake on the ambitions of the still newish director in order to assert their authority; while others believed that the director himself had come to dislike the plan – and especially the time it would take to be put into effect – and had, therefore, ‘not pushed it’. 135

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In response to what came to be characterised as the ‘inflexible KMU scheme’, more flexible frameworks were suggested – in particular, ‘the multi-museum concept’, or ‘the museum within a museum idea’. Where the grand narrative of Knowing, Making and Using had sought to try to fit galleries into a pre-defined framework, the ‘multi-museum concept’ involved acknowledging and working with the variety of galleries, topics and styles to try to create, as one manager attempted to promote it, ‘a varied and interesting menu of informational dietary fibre’. Instead of trying to weld everything together into one museum – with one overall logic – this new idea conceptualised the museum more as a set of museums on one site, or, to quote the manager again, ‘shops within a store’: ‘The “menu” we can then offer, and the manner and atmosphere in which we present it, will (as in a large shopping mall, department store, or hotel) vary in approach, enabling us to establish changes of pace, depth of information, and richness of objects displayed according to topic and perceived audience size and level of knowledge.’

Throughout the documents discussing the multi-museum idea is the word ‘flexible’ – a concept which, as Emily Martin has shown, came to be seen as ideal in many areas of late twentieth-century life, from business to the immune system (1994). ‘Flexibility’ has come to be the indicator of responsiveness to a fast changing world, of the ability to adapt. In the case of the Museum, ‘flexibility’ was seen to allow response to opportunities such as new sponsorship possibilities, or incorporating a greater number of faster changing temporary exhibitions, perhaps on controversial or topical subjects. While for some museum staff, the multimuseum idea was an exciting prospect in its potential openness, others suggested that it was, perhaps, an outcome of a ‘lack of direction and vision’, and that it might make the museum more vulnerable to ‘pressures of sponsorship or fads and fashions that come along, thereby abnegating the social role of the museum.

Conclusion A decade on, there are various transformed galleries and exciting new developments in the Science Museum. Although some of these have occurred in the spaces and on the floors which would have accorded with the three thematic principles of Knowing, Making and Using (for example, siting the George III collection on the third floor, or Food for thought: the Sainsbury Gallery on the first floor), the principles have not been used to speak directly to the visitor and to ‘pull the Museum together’ in the way that was originally planned, and various new exhibitions do not fit the scheme at all. Instead, forces from the past (the legacy of the historical formation of the museum) and from the present (the increasingly worrying financial situation, the ‘brake-effect’ of the trustees) collaborated to thwart the attempt to transform Britain’s National Museum of 136

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Science and Industry into a museum which would, in the words of the document presented to the trustees, ‘resonate with our times’ – at least in the ways envisaged by the Gallery Plan. Resonating with the present is a tall order for museums which inevitably – through their collections, their architecture and their role – carry a weight of the past. As the document presented to the trustees elegantly explained: ‘exhibitions are historical signatures of their times’; and this means that any large museum is like an autograph book whose pages have been filled over many years, perhaps containing signatures whose original significance and meaning is now faded or lost on today’s readers. What is involved, as Mieke Bal has observed, is a ‘clash’ of ‘the past ... with the present of which it is also part, from which it cannot be excised although it keeps nagging from within the present as a misfit’ (1996: 15). This creates an ‘unsettlement’ within museums, themselves ‘monuments to settlement’ (ibid.). Perhaps the reflexive strategy of the multi-museum idea – which denies the monumentalisation of settlement – is the most apt way to deal with such unsettlement. The multi-museum idea certainly resonates with our times, although for that very reason it may come to be seen as a signature of its time.

Figure 8.2 Addressing the Visitor: Who am I? in the Wellcome Wing, Science Museum, London (Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library) 137

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The fate of the Gallery Plan highlights how re-visioning a past-loaded space entails particular kinds of struggles, involving the redesign of entities that tend to be fixed or ‘givens’ for museum staff: science, objects, professional identities and visitors. This chapter has charted the unsettling business of trying to rewrite a national museum of science and industry. It has highlighted the cultural work and struggle behind the scenes, and sought to illuminate locally important categories and divisions which motivate that work and struggle. The contested and changing concepts of ‘science’, ‘objects’, ‘professional identity’ and ‘visitors’ are all central to the specificity of the Science Museum as a cultural agency; and indeed relationally contribute to its discursive formation. They do not, however, necessarily all pull in the same direction; and, as the Gallery Plan discussions highlight, tensions between them often fuel debate or drive ambitions to ground.21 The need to be ‘object-based’, for example, may run counter to more currently-resonant conceptions of science as social; or ‘visitor-orientation’ may threaten aspects of curatorial professional identity. Such tensions need to be recognised, and even ‘readings-off ’ from finished exhibitions need to be ready to recognise the potential ambivalence of production rather than reduce it to a set of pre-defined motivations. However, in looking at staff and meetings in the Science Museum, and in identifying some key locally motivating categories, I do not assume that all agency is local nor that museum staff can be understood as authors of the Science Museum. My aim has been to show their struggle within a particular historicalcultural location, thereby showing how wider developments, such as increased competition from other leisure sites or the specialisation of science, are refracted within the particular problem of redesigning the museum. Setting their ambitions against a cultural analysis of the then current museum layout, my aim was to highlight often rather subtle transformations at work or attempted. An anthropological-ethnographic perspective helps to recover not just a degree of agency for museum staff but also some of their critical and informed reflexivity. If exhibitions are ‘historical signatures of their times’, we should be ready to recognise that there may be more than one hand holding the pen – and, indeed, more than one pen. Going ‘behind the scenes’ can, I hope, recover some of that complexity.

Acknowledgement I offer thanks to staff at the Science Museum, London, who so generously allowed me to undertake ethnographic fieldwork among them. The research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and directed by Professor Roger Silverstone, to whom thanks are also due.

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N OTES 1. I discuss an example of this in Macdonald (2001). 2. The term ‘technoscience’ has been adopted in much cultural commentary on science and technology in order to highlight the ‘implosion of science and technology into each other in the past two hundred years around the world’ (Haraway 1997: 50). More generally, the use of the term ‘technoscience’ is intended to broach the conventional distinction between ‘pure’ science and technology as ‘social use’ (Latour 1987). Here, however, I maintain the use of ‘science and technology’ as this distinction is one that is generally (though by no means universally) ‘indigenously’ made in the case which I am exploring: the Science Museum. 3. Inverted commas signify that I refer to the local or ‘indigenous’ usage of terms. 4. Initially there was some reluctance to allow me to attend the Gallery Planning Group as one of the members explained to me: ‘this isn’t an especially happy group at the moment and there are still some fairly strong protagonists and we’re not sure that we’ve actually got sufficiently clear in our minds what out objectives are, so we’re a bit floundering and only doing a bit of stop gap at the moment and we meet occasionally to mop up a crisis and then we go into limbo again’. However, after some discussion I was allowed to attend, though not to tape record. I am very grateful to all members of the groups that I attended, and to the many staff who agreed to talk to me about it individually. 5. I have discussed this attempted classification of museum staff elsewhere in terms of ‘Diggers’ and ‘Flyers’ (Macdonald 1997). 6. This was the case in 1987, as it had been since the museum was created. However, from 1987 on there were various managerial changes which were intended in part to loosen the tight ties between collections and staff. 7. Mary Bouquet has pertinently pointed out to me the relevance here of Baudrillard’s argument that the system of collecting in a capitalist world of signs turns curatorial traits into institutionalised forms of possessiveness. As such, this local intra-museum characteristic – as, of course, with many other such local features – is also part of a wider, more global, system. 8. That Jorvik was ‘scientifically respectable’ and indeed ‘scientifically authentic’ was very important to its makers. When I interviewed one of them he was anxious to tell me about matters such as plans to make the heads on the models still more authentic by basing them on computerised measurements taken from skulls that had been recovered in the Jorvik archaeological dig. 9. Some of the volumes produced about museums at this time reflect this discussion. See, for example, Lumley 1988, Vergo 1989, Hewison 1991, Boylan 1992. 10. This is not to say that the museum only collected national products in the past: it did not. The issue is one of proportions and focus. 11. See Ross 1996 for broader discussion of some of these issues. Macdonald 1998 contains a brief discussion of them in relation to museums. 12. This kind of marketing language was increasingly common in the museum at the time of my research, although it was often used with a sense of irony (see Macdonald 1997) 13. In fact there were four divisions, the fourth being the Wellcome Museum of the History of Science but as it had been decided that this would remain intact in its own wing of the Science Museum I do not discuss it here. 14. Part of the background here too was the acknowledged problem of undisplayed collections – something widely regarded as a major problem for many museums at the time. As part of the gallery planning process, the following calculations were made. In 1925, 75 percent of the Science Museum’s collections had been on display. By 1985, with expanding collections and less ‘object-dense’ means of display, this had fallen to 24 percent (the ‘density rates’ going from 0.8 per m2 to 0.62 per m2). The group projected that this would fall to only 14 percent (0.49 per m2) by 2000.

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Academic Anthropology and the Museum 15. This is broader museological phenomenon: see Gucht 1991. Mary Bouquet (1995) has also discussed it interestingly in terms of ‘brokerage’, and in the context of the Science Museum, Robert Bud also uses the term ‘broker’ and an analysis which draws profitably on Michel Callon’s notions of translation and actor networks (Callon 1986, Bud 1988). 16. There is a good deal of discussion of this subject in the museum literature. See, for example, Vergo 1989a, Saumerez Smith 1989, Bal 1996, Clifford 1997, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998. 17. I call it a ‘bringing down to earth’ strategy because this phrase was used in the meetings. One member in particular would sometimes cut short discussion with the intervention: ‘I’m anxious to bring us down to earth.’ It is congruent with the position that I have characterised elsewhere as ‘digging’ in opposition to ‘flying’ (Macdonald 1997). 18. That ‘making visible’ is an important function of museums, at least since the nineteenth-century public museum, is interestingly discussed by Nélia Dias (1998) in relation to French anthropological museums. 19. No heed was paid here to an argument in one of the Knowing meetings that the term ‘context’ was misguided: ‘It is not that there is science and then a social context around it: science is social’. 20. The trustees meet four times per year to consider any major museum planning work and expenditure. Trustees are self-electing and each member serves for six years. In 1989, there was one female member, and almost all members held honours such as ‘Commander of the British Empire’ (CBE – an award for public service). 21. See Fyfe (1996) for a discussion of countervailing ‘pulls’ in the case of an art exhibition.

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IV Anthropologists as cultural producers

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9 U NSET TLING

THE MEANING : CRITICAL MUSEOLOGY, ART AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL DISCOURSES

Anthony Shelton




‘Well, it’s fascinating. You’re looking at me like someone in a zoo, but why don’t you watch yourself in a mirror and look at yourselves? Maybe one day I’ll come around, get my camera and start studying you people.’ Ephraim Bani1

The crises of representation In The conflict of interpretations (1974), Paul Ricoeur makes a distinction between three types of knowledge based on their different epistemological ascriptions. These distinctions provide a useful starting point for discussion about the variants of anthropological discourse and their relationship with what I have termed elsewhere, ‘the three museologies’ (Shelton 1995b: 7). Briefly, Ricoeur distinguishes between what we might call a culture’s operative discourses, disciplinary regimes of knowledge, and critical philosophy. This latter practice subjects the first two narrative forms to analytical scrutiny or, to use a postmodernist idiom, fields a sustained ‘incredulity to meta-narratives’ (Lyotard 1984: xxiv). It is clear that, despite any claims to the contrary, anthropological discourses cannot be regarded as having any singular relationship or practical or methodological privilege which neatly encapsulates them within any one of these knowledge types. Subsequently, the epistemological basis of the information it collects and presents about the world must by its nature always be subjected to critical scrutiny. Anthropology’s claim to describe unmediated social facts and thereby give direct access to a culture’s operative discourses, while current through much of its 142

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history, is now generally regarded with scepticism. The great descriptive monographs of the founding masters, Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown or Firth, Fortes and Fortune, could never really correspond to a foreign culture’s operative discourse, because they were inevitably mediated through methodological protocols and disciplinary procedures devised by a discourse external to the culture they claimed to represent. Furthermore, the naive empiricism on which much of their work was based ignored the social context of its own production and left itself open to political manipulation and subterfuge. It is too well documented to warrant much discussion, that evolutionary anthropology, a discipline that originated and developed using natural science models in ethnographic and archaeological museums, also served as a master narrative that justified direct colonial intervention and provided classificatory criteria for the incorporation of subject peoples into European empires; while functionalism contributed to providing the basis for a science of imperial domination and administration. Ravenhill (1996: 266), for example, has noted how the concept of ‘tribe’ in Africa was constructed as a device to produce indices of otherness whose divisions could be used to enforce colonial settlement policies. Outside of western discourses, in Africa, racial or geographical criteria were seldom used to distinguish a person’s ethnic affiliation. Language, religion and occupation were of greater importance, but even these acted more like permeable membranes that often allowed people to move freely between one group and another, changing their ethnic identification in the process (Newman 1995: 3–6). Counter positions to functionalism, developing within anthropology in the decades following decolonisation, were largely political critiques that failed to address the discipline’s epistemological basis. Consequently, more often than not, while giving rise to a Marxist anthropology and other forms of social criticism, they simply signalled a change in political allegiances, without challenging the epistemological basis which allowed them to privilege their discourses above others, including those produced by the cultures which they regarded as their subject. Equally, calls for anthropology to develop the study of the culture of western imperialism (Asad 1991: 322) largely fell on deaf ears until the recent emergence of cultural studies. Feit (1991: 109) notes that political ambiguity was present in the very establishment of anthropology. Tylor regarded the new discipline as a ‘reformers science’ by which he envisaged a means through which cultural development could be understood in the interests of propagating a common economic and cultural commonwealth. Morgan, on the other hand, saw anthropology as a means of contemporary social and economic criticism while affirming the superiority of aspects of pre-capitalist societies. In recent years anthropology’s practical contribution to European colonial regimes, even during its ‘expansive moment’, has been played down (Falk Moore 1994, Goody 1995). Though the argument admits that while anthropology might have had little influence on these regimes, colonialism nevertheless had a strong effect on anthropology (Asad 1991: 315). 143

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Against these politicised discourses of anthropology, there emerged in the 1960s a strong methodological and epistemological critique which, although acknowledged as questioning the very grounds for existence of the subject, has been ignored by many of the discipline’s subsequent practitioners. Following a period in the late 1960s and early 1970s when many prominent anthropologists in Britain felt the need to concur with Lévi-Strauss’s gloomy forecasts about the disciplinary friability of anthropology (Leach 1961, Needham 1970, Ardener 1989), the subject has grown at an exponential rate; a development that surprisingly has not stimulated the critical reconsideration it certainly deserves. Epistemological scepticism introduced by anthropologists like Rodney Needham, Edmund Leach, Edwin Ardener, and elsewhere extended by others such as Pierre Bourdieu, Marshall Sahlins, Johannes Fabian or Pierre Clastres, provides the basis for the kind of self-critical anthropology that corresponds to Ricouer’s critical philosophy, and that paradoxically takes as its subject not the representation of others, but the western mediation of otherness. It is a further paradoxical development that this current of anthropology has been fortified not by generating its own contingent of practitioners, but by contemporaneous developments in literary theory and philosophy which have been drawn into the discipline through American cultural anthropology. So strong has this movement become that Sally Falk Moore (1994: 80–81) distinguishes between two different ‘modalities’ in anthropological discourse: ‘... one that speaks largely through the production of ethnographic writings and the other a kind of critical meta-anthropology that speaks through its commentary on the ethnographic writings of others.’ Some members of the older anthropological establishment, including Moore herself, have mounted spirited attacks that make no attempt to hide the increasing hostility between the two camps (Biedelmann 1989: 263–267, Falk Moore 1994: 81–83). The emergence, and the censorious reception of this new tendency, raises questions as to whether part of anthropology is becoming detached from its disciplinary institutionalisation and is beginning to reconfigure itself, together with similar epistemological and methodologically informed discourses, under the rather ill-defined heading of cultural studies or post-colonial theory. This configuration is not, however, as new as we might suppose. As long ago as 1970, Needham (1970: 44) convincingly argued that the ‘end of social anthropology as we know it is (thus) foreseeable’, and recommended that attention be given not to the conditions of a demise he considered almost inevitable, but to our attitude and response ‘in the face of a process of transformation which is already in train’. Ardener, although at the time restricting his notion of the collapse of anthropology to the fall of the functionalist school, imagined a split ‘like a crack in an Arctic ice-floe separating colleague from colleague, department from department’ and spoke of an epistemological break where ‘the old field and the new field form different conceptual spaces’ (Ardener 1989: 46). Later essays and particularly the work of his former students, Malcolm Chapman, Kirsten Hastrup and Maryon McDonald, made clear this was no simple paradigmatic shift to 144

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French structuralism, but to a theoretically self-conscious and reflexive ‘semantic anthropology’ consistent with the disciplinary fissure noted above. This critical or ‘new anthropology’ echoed the simple relationship between the subject and object of study. The problematisation of the very act of perception and the stipulation of causality, fundamentally questioned anthropological method and the construction of people as subjects; a critique later taken-up by writers like Fabian (1983) and Trinh T Minh-ha (1989). If anthropology must lose its methodological privilege, the relationship between it and its subject can no longer be considered pre-determined and must also, in each encounter it describes, be reexamined. It is the nature of that encounter that generates meanings, which can never be anything more than contingent and specific. Anthropology, even more than Evans-Pritchard envisaged in his classical definition of the subject (1951), has no other status than that of an art. The emergence and development of early disciplinary regimes of anthropology and their relationship to museums has been well documented (Koepping 1979, Chapman 1985, Mack 1990, 1998, Shelton 1992, 1999, Dias 1992, 1994). The relationship resulted in the adoption of functionalist and comparativist exhibition genres between the 1960s and 1980s, leading so called museum ethnography to ignore critical anthropology and become almost exclusively identified with what quickly became discredited mainstream anthropological paradigms (Shelton 1992, 1997). However, outside the narrow disciplinary boundaries of museum ethnography, there also emerged some quite surprisingly innovative practices that explored the nature of visual representation and problems of meaning in the museum context (Shelton 1995c). These approaches have severed the relationship between disciplinary and politically compromised regimes of knowledge and placed what has been termed critical museology at the cutting edge of anthropology. Although this development is ignored by most British social anthropologists, it is as important as those ‘cracks’ that Ardener described in the 1970s, and crucial to the wider critique and understanding of the historical decline of the mainstream subject. If de-privileging the discipline’s method has left anthropology with the uncertain status of an art, similar changes in the general epistemological basis of disciplinary institutionalisations and methodological protocols have increasingly problematised the relation in art between the object and subject of pictorial, graphic or sculptural representation (Foster 1995). Some twentieth-century avant-gardist art tries less to imitate than to parody nature, and to parody the relationship between art and the dominant economic and political institutions and elites which act as its patrons (Marcus 1995). In the process it has even embraced what has been described as fieldwork (Foster 1995). By its focus on ephemeral media, public art and non-representational styles to explore the problematic definition and political and economic compromises to which it has been subjected, art has been in a state of perpetual revolution and self-criticism; a process which although having threatened its own integrity, has engendered new avenues of cre145

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ativity rather than overwhelming it. However, as with the ‘soft’ social sciences, art is increasingly unable to distinguish, hierarchically and preferentially, between its object and subject; its representational practices can no longer incontestably appropriate and colonise the semantic worlds of its former subjects. Every cultural encounter is dialectical in which the object and subject are constantly refashioning each other (Rabinow 1977). The dissolution of objective relations between things and their representations; the loss of formal correspondences between signifiers and signifieds; the fall of any naturalised criteria of value or truth propositions, are as much afflictions of art as of the social sciences. So much so that Marcus (1995), discussing New York avant-garde artists of the 1970 and 1980s, opines that the discourses they use to locate their practices are perhaps more interesting than the art that they produce. Such a condition might encourage a Baudrillardian interpretation in terms of a viral simulacra if it did not hide the very complex nature of the reconfigured semantic spaces in which we have been forced to operate. Marcus and Myers (1995: 26), while acknowledging that ‘art and anthropology remain identified by fundamentally overlapping discourse fields concerned with culture and the value-making that is implied by defining culture’, nevertheless try to re-establish an object / subject relationship on the grounds that a critical ethnography is best equipped to disclose the economic and political compromises which constitute the art worlds with which art production is compromised and ‘from which anthropology is relatively distant’.

Museums and slaughterhouses Museology also possesses its own distinctive and sometimes incommensurable discourses. Operational museology as the foundation narrative incorporates the legitimising discourses surrounding the activity of collecting and the value and use of preserving and displaying the categories of the artefacts it values, as well as the codification of practices and attitudes which make up its habitus. The Museums Association, with its regulatory committees, conferences which bring together managers, local politicians, funding bodies and commercial suppliers and designers, accredits courses and sponsors publications in an attempt to create a monopoly over the profession’s pedagogic authority. Even here, there is a disjunction between the views expressed in its journal and the conservatism or perhaps intellectual destitution of its management, which has failed to address the crisis of representation that has waged around it. Critical museology has developed from what Vergo (1989: 3) referred to as the ‘new museology’ but represents far more than a shift from consideration of museum methods to the museums purposes. Indeed, it may owe more to the possibilities inherent in Foucault’s effective history and other currents in critical theory and anthropology than art history. Critical museology fields a relentless incredulity to the meta-narratives of the institutionalised professions, sometimes 146

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with the purpose to democratise museum and gallery spaces, introduce a plurality of practices and develop new genres of exhibitions, which can engage with the panoply of wider critical cultural practices which have stimulated it. Similar critical tides that have washed over anthropology and art have also recast views of museum representations. The de-privileging of anthropological discourse has given it a shared epistemological status with art, and thereby created some intriguing correspondences between their different practices that have important implications for museums. One effect of this epistemological confluence of anthropology and art, has been the development of praxiological museology; practices undertaken by artists assuming curatorial roles through which the process of constructing exhibited knowledge is itself explored and problematised (Shelton 1995b,1995c). Among the earliest of these were the exhibitions, installations, interventions and other works by surrealists such as Breton and Broodthaers. Surrealism worked by using various strategies aimed at de-familiarising the ordinary. In Paris peasant, Aragon described the arcades, boulevards, markets and parks using an exoticising discourse; Ernst used collage and rubbings to conjure his alien landscapes; Belmer played with fragmentation, exaggeration and juxtaposition to create frisson between the normally accepted meaning or use of objects and their new inferred and often disquieting significance; while Breton, like the Dadaists before him, lent his support to active interventions in public spaces to subvert the quotidian. In their anti-colonial exhibition of 1931, La vérité sur les colonies, the inferred superstitious inferiority of the peoples of Africa was countered by images of Catholic saints labelled ‘fetishes’. These subversive juxtapositions produced assemblages which were reproduced in the studios and apartments of their protagonists as signs of a conscious, if ultimately failed, anti-bourgeois difference. Wilson (1992) drew on similar strategies to question the classifications of objects underlying museum exhibitions. Parody, engineered through the logical extension of operative rules and procedures, can similarly provide an erosive strategy in deconstructing the work of museums. Classification and measurement are two ordering strategies employed to create the modern disembodied normalising gaze we commonly share that has been a focus for the work of Peter Greenaway. A zed and two noughts (1986) and Drowning by numbers (1988) both show a fascination with taxonomic order that becomes so pronounced that it sometimes, and increasingly in later films, threatens their narrative content. Similarly many of Greenaway’s exhibitions deny or deconstruct narrative structure to disclose the arbitrary classificatory logics that underlie our perceptions of the world. 100 Objects to represent the world (Viennese Akademie der bildenden Kunste, 1992) attempted such a Borgesian task through the associations conjured by metonymy and metaphor: Object #9, A fallen tree, complete with roots and branches, laid on its side, to illustrate what was vertical is now horizontal, to demonstrate falling and the fallen, to represent trees, 147

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roots, branches, the phrase ‘root and branch’, the metaphor of the branching of species in. Darwin’s understanding of the evolutionary system, the concept of a family tree, an acknowledgement of gravity, the death of the South American rainforest (quoted in Elliot and Purdy 1997: 83).

The belly of an architect (1987), set among the intrigues of Italian politics, amorous duplicity, aesthetic obsession and the encroaching death of its main protagonist, marks the transition between Greenaway’s filmic and exhibition based works. The narrative about an acclaimed American architect, Stourley Kracklite, called to curate an exhibition on the work of his hero, the eighteenth-century Etienne-Louis Boullée, provides a graphic commentary on the political economy of exhibiting which is clarified in Greenaway’s 1996 interview with Elliot and Purdy (1997: 119): ... we must say that museums are deeply subjective, based upon nationalism, particular ways of spending money, guilt at privilege, rapaciousness, competition among academics, and the continuing attitudes, political positions, idiosyncrasies, and opinions of all the curators who’ve been responsible for putting the collection together. And we should include the architects and designers too ... the architect is important in shaping how collections are perceived.

Greenaway is significant here in as much as his exhibitions and films do not relinquish their status as art. As a contemporary exponent of baroque visualism, in films like Prospero’s books (1991), and exhibitions like Flying over water (Fundacion Miro, Barcelona, 1997), he has few equals, but the purpose he gives his work is uncompromisingly archaeological: a sustained and relentless excavation and exhibition of the taxonomies and grammars and their attendant narratives that help construct the apparent faultless surface of reality to perceptual consciousness. Flying over water, for example, explored the West’s passionate fascination with flight through one of the most primordial and ambiguous of myths: the story of Icarus. Greenaway’s films and exhibitions confront us with the tenuous presuppositions and epistemological precepts in whose tissues we commit our faith in a perceived ‘reality’. This is not dissimilar to some interpretations of the effect (if not always the purpose) of anthropological knowledge. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1995: 232) discussing Michael Jackson’s concept of the personal epistemological rupture occasioned by experiencing foreign realities that is the precondition of ethnography’s claim to authenticity, notes that it is conditional on the failure of language and reason which leads to the ‘surrender to ... the embodied character of lived experience’: what Clifford has called ‘the surrealist moment in ethnography’ or ‘that moment in which the possibility of comparison exists in unmediated tension with sheer incongruity’. These exhibitions are considered examples of what has been termed a ‘praxiological museology’: that is an act of curatorship exercised by artists who consciously seek to deconstruct, or excavate and lay bare to an incredulous gaze the working of 148

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dominant forms of cultural, economic or political expression. In the process, they reconfigure the specific meaning ascribed to things in the natural theory of value, producing new contingent meanings generated through the process of assemblage and reassemblage. It is no coincidence that the preoccupations and issues shared by many of these artists are similar to those of critical museologists and anthropologists, since they share an almost common set of problematics inherited from the same contemporaneous field of critical discourses.

Tracing shadows: critical museology by the sea I’ve been thinking about the shadows cast by the objects in the cases. Would it be possible to have access to the inside of the cases so that I can trace these shadows? I’m not quite sure where this is leading, but I suddenly like the idea of capturing the intangible (Sonia Boyce in a personal letter to the author).

Critical exhibitions which combine the kind of anthropology and museology which we are advocating are rare in Europe and almost non-existent in the United States. Their chief exponents have been Jacques Hainard and Roland Kaehr at the ethnographic museum of the City of Neuchatel, who have pursued a comparative epistemological scepticism to bracket, ironise and unsettle Western notions of the common sensical constitution of the world. Mary Bouquet has curated three exhibitions (Melanesian artefacts, Museu de Etnologia, Lisboa 1988; Man-ape ape-man, Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum, Leiden 1993; and Bringing it all back home, Oslo University Ethnographic Museum 1996) which express her consistent deconstructivist project to lay bare the strategies by which values and meanings are repeatedly ascribed to objects by their insertion in specific historical and cultural discourses. In 1998, Kenji Yoshida curated Images of other cultures (National Museum of Ethnology, Osaka) which explored the diverse, and often mutually interdependent imaging of Western, Japanese, African and Pacific cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the United Kingdom, the teaching and practical exhibitionary strategies employed by faculty and students at the University of Sussex, in the early 1990s, formed another nucleus which explored critical issues and non-conventional exhibition genres using the collections of Brighton Museum.2 The theoretical practices described here will be limited to the period 1991–1995, when they were elaborated with student groups at the University of Sussex and applied to the Cultures Project and temporary exhibition programme funded by the Green Centre for Non-Western Art and Culture at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. The second period between 1995–1998, which saw an increase in teaching and research at Sussex leading to the establishment of a MA in Critical Museology and the development of strategies employed at the Horniman Museum, London and elsewhere will be discussed in a later paper. 149

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No critical discourse can be established without the development of a theory of practice and the antecedent deconstructionism which it implies (Bourdieu 1977). Exhibition strategies must therefore begin with the excavation of the schemes underlying conventional museum representations before they can begin to make explicit their own practice. This was indeed the function of three papers (Shelton 1991, 1992, and 1993) published prior to and during work on the Cultures Project. Following the break between academic anthropology and museum ethnography in Britain in the 1920s, with the former being re-institutionalised in academic departments, museum ethnography became increasingly dependent on its parent subject. However, divorced from a research base, critical scholarship and funding, museum ethnography consistently lagged behind anthropology, failing to catch up with its academic paradigms until each in turn had become redundant. Whereas evolutionary anthropology had become discredited with the rise of the functionalist school in the first decades of the twentieth century, it nevertheless remained the main approach informing museum exhibitions until well into the 1960s. Similarly there was a ten to twenty year time lag between the academic decline of functionalism and its adoption in museums, first at Manchester in the 1960s, and in the following decade and in the early 1980s at Brighton, Ipswich, Exeter, Glasgow, Edinburgh and the Horniman. Lastly, comparative approaches, that began to loose currency in academic anthropology from the late-1970s, only started to form the basis of new museum exhibitions from the late-1980s (Horniman 1988–1996, Birmingham 1990–, Nottingham 1992–, Aberdeen 1992–1996). Once this dependency had been identified, it became possible to reconfigure the relationship between the two anthropologies. The 1993–1995 redisplay of Brighton Museum’s ethnographic collections attempted consciously to position its own practice in the context of the various crises of representation articulated by academic anthropology, but until then largely ignored by British museums. The concept behind Brighton’s Cultures Project involved the juxtaposition of two galleries, which were intended to confront each other as contesting discourses (Shelton 1993). The first of these, the Cultures Gallery, used a thematic approach to compare cultural practices from different parts of the world (Exchange, Worship, Conflict, Associations, Ancestors, Men and Women, Performance). The themes and the societies chosen were intended to juxtapose the familiar with the exotic which, with the help of the text, would produce a normalising effect on objects often valued for their exoticness, while alienating their more familiar Western counterparts. Mende Sande society masks and costumes were juxtaposed with standards of British mutual aid societies, to describe the purposes of formally constituted associations. Christianity was juxtaposed with Buddhism, although plans to juxtapose Second World War gas masks with masks from other cultures to bring attention to the performative metaphors used in describing warfare and the ontological changes involved in the transformation of the subject from civilian to military protagonist were not 150

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included in the final exhibition (cf. Macdonald, this volume). Other sections dealt with gender and non-Western representations of Europeans (ideas borrowed from Charles Hunt’s exhibition at the Marischal Museum). The general intention was to try to present a small number of cultural themes in indigenous terms. This was nothing new and, seen in retrospect, suffered from the same limitations as similar exhibitions elsewhere.3 Hunt had attempted to use structuralism to define a set of themes intended to organise and convey other societies’ diverse ideas about aspects of culture (Aberdeen 1992–1996), while Gisela Volker had produced a number of exhibitions (at the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum in Cologne) which began with themes that were first described in Cologne (men’s houses, drugs), before going on to look at their manifestations and institutionalisation elsewhere in the world. Where the Cultures Gallery differed from these exhibitions was in the intention that it should be read in relation to a second gallery. The Green Gallery, named after an important benefactor, presented six collections that had entered the museum over the last 100 years.4 Kebbell and Ashbury, Lucas, Adams, Shelton5 and Green provided insights into the reasons behind collecting. In some cases, notably the early collectors, the motivations behind the collection were obscure. Nevertheless, it was possible to examine souvenir collections (The Ashbury collection including pre-Columbian Peruvian material, malangans from the Pacific, and items from Japan and Nigeria collected during yachting trips), contingent collections (The Green collection consisting of a fairly large sample of textiles made during military operations in Burma6), and systematic collections (Lucas, items made from animal products from around the world; The Adams collection of Papuan masks, figures and other material made in the 1960s; and my own collection of Mexican masks made in the early 1980s). This was probably the first permanent British display which approached ethnographic collections as part of local or regional history by looking at the lives and motivations of the people who had created them and inscribed their meaning.7 The Adam collection, purchased specifically for the new gallery, was particularly interesting because it had been made by the daughter of Leonard Adam, a wartime German émigré who wrote one of the earliest books on non-Western art, and was the largest collection assembled by a woman held by the museum.8 The interpretative strategy was for the two galleries to exist in tense opposition to each other, presenting a plurality of voices and interpretations divided between those issuing from the peoples who had made the objects and European collectors, adventurers and anthropologists. This juxtaposition was intended to subvert the traditional and anonymous authority of museum representations and to problematise the whole process through which meaning was generated. This would be achieved by reserving a third exhibition area in one of the galleries for temporary exhibitions for exploring such issues and making them explicit within particular concrete situations. This area, reserved for experimental exhibitions, constituted the most visible expression of our concept of the gallery as a laboratory in which the creation and deconstruction of objects and meanings could be endlessly 151

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explored. Three exhibitions were mounted within the first year: Textiles from the Green collection (1993) and Kinyozi: the art of African hairstyles (1994), both curated by Louise Tythacott; and Badgering the people: a Mao badge retrospective (1994), curated by R. Benewick and S. Donald (see Tythacott, 1995). These were followed in 1995 by Glimpses of Hell. The Underworld Gods of China, curated by Holly Robson and Keith Stevens. In addition, Sonia Boyce made an intervention in the Cultures Gallery (Peep, 1995), and another artist, Shirley Chubb (Hold, 1995), used the collections to create new works about Western subjective encounters with the works of other cultures. Plans were also discussed for Cultural encounters. Communicating otherness, curated by Liz Hallam and Nicky Levell, and a project to involve the artist Sally Payen working with the collection to produce her own intervention in the gallery, which was brought to completion after I left the Museum (Charmed bodies, 1996). The intention was to make the galleries into an hive of creative activity which would open the way for interventions and reinterpretations that would provocatively challenge received expectations and stereotypes and encourage an active viewing public, rather than simply reproduce more familiar tomb-like galleries which congealed meaning and demanded only a passive voyeuristic gaze from its audiences. Students at the University of Sussex were encouraged to engage with the way that the displays constructed and transmitted meanings, and subject them to relentless critical scrutiny. Tythacott’s concern in Kinyozi was to challenge popular concepts of African art by ruthlessly displaying the effect of its collision with the global market, imported

Figure 9.1 Kinyozi. The art of African hairstyles, 1994. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph by Anthony Alan Shelton. 152

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Western styles and values and the emergence of urban cultures, which cut across traditional mechanisms of ethnic identity (see Tythacott, 1994). The hairdressers’ signboards from East Africa provided a medium through which issues of the creativity, which emerged from the interstices between different cultures, economies and urban/rural situations, could be explored and, in the process, provide a medium through which some of the most cherished ideas of anthropology could be reappraised. The sign writers’ art refuted the equation that correlates particular art styles with specific ethnic groups, demonstrating a new functionality of African art and the development of new mediums as well as the emergence of new patron-client relationships. This was no affirmation of the image of the superstitious ‘fetishes’ of ‘darkest’ Africa, but an expression of the change and adaptation required by the demands of the global market, which has created the cosmopolitan centres connecting Africa with metropolitan areas elsewhere in the world. Benewick and Donald, both then members of the University faculty, aimed to explode other popular stereotypes when they focused the following exhibition on the huge variety and role of badges in the cult of personality of Mao Zedong. When Badgering the people was succeeded by a more conventional exhibition, one on the Chinese underworld, the gallery was immediately enabled to increase and develop its exposition on the nature of belief in China and raise questions on the relationship between the past and the present which were further explored through a publication series linked to gallery projects (Benewick and Donald 1996). Western stereotypes and ways of rationalising the classifications and knowledge underlying them were critically scrutinised in exhibitions. Communicating otherness: cultural encounters (1996) was an experiment to ascertain whether the process through which knowledge was formed could be represented through visual media. The exhibition formed part of a theme year series of lectures and discussions, entitled Cultural encounters: communicating otherness, sponsored by the Graduate Research Centre in Culture and Communication at Sussex University. The exhibition aimed to deconstruct visually how otherness was constructed as part of specific discursive practices: British radio propaganda during the Second World War; the caricatured politics underlying Edwardian land reform; the representation of gender in Early Modern England; the psychology of collecting represented through Sir Alan Barlow’s Chinese ceramics housed at the University; and gender relations in an Iranian village. Each of the themes was presented in one of five cabinets to provide a case study on the raw materials and the process of their manipulation, which enabled particular types of knowledge to be constructed (cf. Levell and Shelton 1998: 26). The use of research material (notes, manuscripts, photographs, maps, graphs, diagrams) not usually placed in public space was both problematic and unusual. According to Liz Hallam, one of the exhibition’s curators: In order to render research processes visible we planned to expose research materials. ... These materials are not usually open to public scrutiny. They accumulate in filing 153

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cabinets, office shelves, draws and bookshelves. They might pass through various stages such as indexing and cataloguing, as they are written, read and rewritten into research papers, lectures, teaching materials, reports and books. They are an essential part of research practices and although they are known intimately by their owners, they usually remain secluded within private spaces. They remain hidden behind the apparently accomplished and seamless final product – the book, the article, the research report (Hallam 1996: 4).

In a sense the museum had turned the books away from academic criticism of its own legitimating practices into a reminder that all knowledge is culturally constructed and that the basis of the museum’s own practices has its origin in the rationalising discourses of the academy. The exhibition’s co-curator called for a revitalised and more transparent relationship between the academy and museums ‘…opening up communication between different institutions dedicated to display, creativity and textual research, between the fields of words and objects, between the process of creativity and its finished product and between new and old technologies, to better disclose the contingent basis of all representations’ (Levell 1996: 16). Fetishism intended to expand this critique of rationalism, by exploring the social meanings ascribed to sets of objects that were set apart from others on the basis of their transgressive, dangerous, corrupting or threatening qualities. The three galleries, which looked at Africanist discourses on the meaning of religious fetishism;

Figure 9.2 Fetishism, 1995. Nkisi Against Rubber. National Touring Exhibitions, the South Bank Centre with Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. (Courtesy of The South Bank Centre) 154

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the surrealist reading of Freud on fetishism; and notions of sexual and commodity fetishism, explored through the work of contemporary artists, sought to reveal the arbitrary and contingent meanings given the category and its use as a rhetorical device. The event was again supported by an international conference and publication, as well as distinguished lectures, seminars and, of course, a fetish party. Another series of exhibitions and gallery interventions emerged through artists critically reflecting on the gallery displays and experimenting with the creation of meaning through a dialectical engagement with objects in the collection. The politically compromised and subjective nature of exhibitions was here made transparent by the easy construction of a second order of meaning to replace the first. Sonia Boyce’s Peep covered the glass fronts of cases in the Cultures Gallery with a film of translucent paper, which in part had been cut away to reveal, at oblique angles, some of the objects or parts of objects that lay hidden behind it. Following Boyce’s reflection that it was only in pornography shops and museums that one could encounter naked representations of the human body, the gallery was effectively turned into a peep show. In the process the voyeuristic gaze, that reduces both women and other cultures to scrutiny for either scientific introspection or pleasure, is shown to be a function of similar power relations and preoccupations which are institutionalised in public spaces and whose difference is more apparent than real. The subject of the gallery was no longer an object

Figure 9.3 Fetishism, 1995. The Curiosity Cabinet. National Touring Exhibitions, the South Bank Centre with Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. (Courtesy of The South Bank Centre) 155

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show of the signs of difference collected together from foreign cultures to represent the plays of exoticism, but the members of the dominant culture going about their silent business of straining their necks, bending low, looking at cross angles in a vague gesture to recover the exotic signs partly denied them. To see the objects now, you are forced to move up close to the glass cases and peer through the uneven shapes cut out of the tracing paper. ... Your view is limited, partial and incomplete and you are made to feel self-conscious about the act of looking. ... Sonia Boyce has circumscribed our gaze and forced us to acknowledge the very act of looking in a museum is an illicit act (Tawadros 1995).

This was a site specific work which grew out of Boyce’s own unease about museums, stemming from an early visit to the Museum of Mankind when she stumbled across a vitrine of shrunken heads, associated with Guyana, the birthplace of her father. Her chance confrontation with these grisly trophies that had been outside her experience of what it was to be part Guyanese growing up in Britain, forced a radical consideration of her constituted identity. She recounted, ‘Immediately the space between me, the glass case and these objects collapsed. All sorts of crass “Hammer Horror” images came to mind. What could these exhibits have to do with me?’ (Boyce 1995: 4). Another artist, Sally Payen, recounted her own astonishment over the contents of one of the galleries in Fetishism: I began to walk through the show when I experienced the sensation of knives being put in my back. I rushed from the building having seen only the contemporary artists room. A week later I returned to the show and saw for the first time a row of wooden nkisi with knives hammered in the wooden bodies. Understandably this left me very shocked and confused (personal letter).

Such confrontations may not be dissimilar from the ‘surreal moment’ of ethnographic encounters, where we suspend belief in the analytical concepts and sureties transmitted to us as we face the sheer incommensurability of another reality. Boyce’s own experience prefigures the possibility of museums occasioning such deep ontological and epistemological reappraisals of all our tried and tested ways of seeing ourselves through the world and asserts the radical potential for which we have argued. The attempt personally to come to terms with a meaning that will always be illusory, because of its historical and cultural remoteness, also formed part of a series of works constructed by Shirley Chubb. How does a member of one culture who has never even visited the lands of others which are the subject of museum exhibitions, honestly and respectfully engage in trying to understand a reality that is conjured only by the fragments and tissues of wider assemblages, against the background of popular imagery, negative reportage and cultural stereotypes? Shirley Chubb is candid in her own understanding of her work: Trying to describe my feelings and reactions in words is a problem for me. All my work tries to capture a huge breadth of references and associations. There are sparks of recog156

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nition all over the place – about the work as a whole and the materials used to make it, about history, about culture and about me – within each work. The written text can prescribe what somebody should think, and I don’t want to do that. I can tell people what’s in the work, and what’s it about, but I don’t want to say what they should think. When people are looking, I want them to react (Theophilus 1998: 33).

Historically, Chubb’s Hold (Brighton 1995) responded to Paolozzi and McLeod’s Lost magic kingdoms (Museum of Mankind 1985). The earlier exhibition had challenged the public by rejecting the usual respect for the classification of different types of objects according to culture, the way they were made, or authenticity and rejected any critical path that identified a beginning and end by creating a series of assemblages that borrowed from the artists own works, notebooks and assortment of found objects and those of the Museum. Whereas Paolozzi sought to explode meanings through the juxtaposition of different types of assembled objects, Chubb exploited their ambiguous significations by incorporating museum objects into her own work, creating new objects with their own contingent, dense and contradictory tensions in the process.

Figure 9.4 Ghana I (African beeswax, acrylic and perspex on board. Mounted on wall), and Tanzania (brass wire and brass plaque, constructed as two spools). Two works by Shirley Chubb from Hold, 1995. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph by Shirley Chubb 157

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Boyce’s and Chubb’s work form an interesting intersection. Boyce’s journey aimed to regain something of her own identity from the flotsam and jetsam that had been carried into museums and used as the foundation for a dominant culture’s perception of others. In the face of such an authoritarian enterprise, Boyce reasserted her own freedom as an actor not only her fundamental human right to self identification, but her incontestable right to question and subvert the cultural violence intrinsic to the master narratives transmitted by museums. Chubb on the other hand was responding to her disquiet with the actions of a White establishment into which she was born, and searching for criteria through which to understand the limited conditions for understanding and respecting the achievements of other cultures; not through the anthropological process of objectification, but through a dialectical encounter which resolves two mutually independent others in the terms of a third represented by the work in which these mediations become explicit (cf. Crapanzano 1979: xv). Greg Hilty compares Chubb to artists like Sophie Calle and Louise Lawler who have also felt compelled to search for meaning, not within themselves, but through the exploration of cultural artefacts found in museums and elsewhere. Hilty astutely observed that while Chubb’s attention remains focused on herself and the culture of which she is part, the works and the title she chose for the exhibition are highly pertinent. ‘Museums hold exhibitions which hold boxes which hold objects which hold meanings’ (Hilty 1995: 30). The tensions between and within these ‘containers’,

Figure 9.5 Charmed bodies, 1996. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph by Sally Payen 158

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which characterise their fragility and freeze them for a brief time, possess all the qualities of the contingency and specificity of every ethnographic encounter. Payen adopted a different composure in grappling with the existential, political and ethical conditions centred around the engagement with cultural and artistic works derived from other cultural realities. Her work, in Charmed bodies (Brighton, 1996), six large canvases of paired standing figures and talismans, was part of a very personal reaction to the nkisi figures she had seen in Fetishism and more specifically and more intimately, an Asante batakari gown, part of Brighton’s permanent collections. She was drawn to the gown by its physical characteristics: ‘its colours, forms, textures – its ageing qualities. From a distance I found it visually satisfying, and yet when I got close to it, touching and smelling bits of it, it became more frightening, unknown, scratchy, hairy and edgy’ (Payen, unpublished exhibition text, Brighton Museum 1996), and yet it was its life enhancing qualities (it was made as a means of magical protection) and its ‘openness’ that fastened her gaze and resulting work on it. The finished paintings and related works appear to be almost like tracings produced by the slow translation of Payen’s subjective perceptions of the gown’s qualities into the terms familiar to her; terms which she believes have a common transcultural significance and therefore a similar intelligibility. To cope with the chosen object I had to encourage it to become a part of my fantasy self; to imagine a life around it in my dream world, until it became a part of my vision. I am

Figure 9.6 Charmed bodies, 1996. Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Photograph by Sally Payen. 159

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talking about going beyond what the object looks like, and any incidental features that anthropologists report on the culture and use. I had to become intimately involved with the object, until I could smell, hear it, feel a life and energy around it (Payen, n.d.).

Charmed bodies became a testament of the encounter between a late twentiethcentury Western artist and the fragmentary remnant of a proud and brilliant nineteenth-century civilisation; an essay on the comparative sensibilities towards protective and purgative technologies and mechanisms. Just as the protective forces contained in the Islamic verses and medicines sewn into the leather talismans that were stitched to the gown had been brought from the edges of Asante society, Payen’s own cathartic works employed a similar foreignness in threading and weaving a form to make a poetics of security. Such an engagement transformed Payen’s own understanding of her working practices. As the gown had been viewed as an embodiment of protective forces, her ‘own making of paintings is also like an embodiment, onto canvass, of my imagination, physical existence and spirituality’ (Payen, unpublished exhibition text, Brighton Museum 1996). Despite describing the catharsis as coming about through the juxtaposition of works from two radically different cultures, could the exhibition be seen as another modernist incorporation of foreign art into the terms of a modernist aesthetic? What is interesting is Payen’s abandonment of modernism and, like Renée Stout and other Black American artists, the way she embraces an African or Black prophylactic aesthetics (Harris 1993: 132). Furthermore, the dubious opposition between virtuous and invocatory art, discussed by Harris, is resolved in the works of all three artists. Virtuosity is a necessary condition of metaphysical conviction. The brief five years that witnessed extremely close and fruitful ties between the anthropology department at Brighton Museum and the University of Sussex, far from creating any specific approach to museology, explored with great vigour a terrain only sketchily mapped out in contemporary hermeneutic and critical discourses. Rather than attempting to create its own self-referential vocabulary and practices, it aspired to openness and encouraged a fierce self-criticism as a means of generating a succession of transformations in its engagements with visual media. It began to engender a series of criss-crossing interconnections, which might have eventually developed a complex series of points and counterpoints, concordances and oppositions, legitimations and critiques, all sharing the same transparency as points on a common intellectual map or semantic field: the Asante batakari gown and the nkisi in Fetishism engendered the works in Payen’s Charmed bodies; Asante gold weights and kuduo, or an unprovenanced drum, Angolan basket or Gambian loom entered and became part of new works by Shirley Chubb; or in the practices of Boyce, as for Paolozzi before her, the new work became the gallery installation itself. All these practices clearly disclose and juxtapose two ways in which museums can operate. They can remain holds or containers for objects, or become places of ceaseless creative and cultural engagement. There is an urgent need for museums, libraries, performance spaces and 160

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universities to reconfigure the fragmented spaces to which they have been consigned by a nineteenth-century dissection of public spaces. Only through the radical reorganisation of such closely related and mutually interacting spheres of activities, can cultural and academic institutions respond to a contemporary political, intellectual and existential reality in which culture is considered as nothing other than interpretation itself (Rabinow 1977). Anthropology, art, and critical museology are, as cultural productions themselves, as much part of the world’s enchantment as they are sceptical exegeses of it.

NOTES 1. Quoted in Frances Calvert and Emily Purser, 1998. Moving images, making meanings. M-C Gonseth, J. Hainard and R. Kaehr (eds.), Derrière les images. Neuchâtel, Musée d’ Ethnographie: p. 307. 2. Louise Tythacott and I both taught Critical Museology at the University of Sussex, while holding positions at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. Liz Hallam, Gareth Reece, Bob Benewick and Stephanie Donald, all lecturers at Sussex or Brighton University, curated various exhibitions as part of the Cultures Project. J. Shipp, Nicky Levell, Holly Robson and Celina Jefferies were among students who later curated or assisted with key projects in Brighton Museum and/ or at the Horniman. Louise Tythacott is currently curator of Ethnology at the National Museums on Merseyside and Nicky Levell is curator of collection history at the Horniman Museum. 3. The text panels were stiff and read more like an introduction to social anthropology. Plans were made to substitute these with a series of recordings made by members of ethnic minorities which would have provided a series of tours around the gallery. The plan was not followed after I left Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in 1995. 4. It was originally intended to include the Melton-Prior collection (Shelton 1993), but the case sizes and gallery layout would have necessitated being shown in the first case facing the entrance to the gallery. Given Melton-Prior’s almost stereotypical jingoism and unreserved patriotism, it was decided that such a positioning of the collection was unsuitable and would only reinforce prejudices surrounding the motivation of all ethnographic collectors. 5. Brighton’s senior management team decided that the collection could be exhibited provided the collector remained anonymous. The collection of Mexican masks was made between 1981–1984, when I lived in Mexico. 6. Catalogued by Louise Tythacott. 7. The approach had, however, been influenced by the success of John Mack’s Torday exhibition at the Museum of Mankind which signalled a decisive break between the old established and largely rhetorical oppositions between art and ethnography museums. 8. Between 1991 and 1995, the ethnographic collection increased from 12,000 objects to just under 13,000 through selective and judicious purchases, donations, long-term loans and, for the first time in its history, by field collections from Côte d’ Ivoire, Southwest China and Vietnam.

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10 I NSIDE

OUT: CULTURAL PRODUCTION IN THE MUSEUM AND THE ACADEMY

Jeanne Cannizzo




This chapter uses a case study, the development of the exhibition David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, to examine the theoretical construction, methodological issues and analytical frameworks which govern cultural production. The negotiations necessary to resolve any conflicts or tensions which result from the pairing of different academic disciplines on a curatorial team will be explored. Certain aspects of almost all academic training, regardless of discipline, which may be antithetical to the exhibition process will also be addressed. Possible analogies with the production of radio documentaries for public broadcasting will be offered. Like a museum exhibition, but unlike the product of most academic research, a radio documentary uses a production unit with specialised personnel which creates a public product consumed beyond the institution while representing that institution to the wider world. Finally, a return to university teaching allows an integration between academic and museum anthropology. The practical difficulties of articulating the links, past and present, between academic anthropology and the museum are presented along with critical reflection on a process which challenges the fieldworker, the exhibition curator and the university teacher to both rethink and re-experience those complexities.

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Exhibition background David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa opened at the National Portrait Gallery in London in March 1996 and moved, under the auspices of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, to a new venue at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh in July, closing in October of that year. During this run it was seen by some 50,000 visitors; there was an admission charge but a series of free public lectures accompanying the exhibition in each city. It was well reviewed in the British press, including The Times and The Scotsman as well as more academic journals such as The Times Literary Supplement. The genesis of the exhibition took place in both galleries. First Michael Cassin, Head of Education for the National Galleries of Scotland, asked me to give a public lecture on a portrait of 1842 by William Scott in which the central figure is Robert Moffat, a Scottish missionary working in Southern Africa and soon to become David Livingstone’s father-in-law, with two African converts, Robert Mokoteri and Sarah Roby. Then, in consultation with James Holloway, Keeper of the Gallery, we decided to do a small exhibition on Moffat for 1995, to coincide with the 200th anniversary of Moffat’s birth and also the bicentennial of the London Missionary Society. As preparations began, word arrived that John Cooper, of the education department at the Portrait Gallery in London, had been thinking of a small exhibition, tied to the school curriculum, on David Livingstone. Rather than compete for scarce resources and objects, the two institutions decided to join forces, producing a much larger, more wide-ranging and critical exhibition which would be shown in both capitals. My co-curator for the London gallery was an art historian, Dr Peter Funnell, a specialist in Victorian painting. Just as in real life, Moffat was eclipsed by his son-in-law as the new exhibition took shape. There were over 325 individual objects in the exhibition, which was the product of some two years work by dozens of people. Sponsorship came in small amounts, including one from a trust run by one of Livingstone’s descendants; there were no attempts to control or direct the content of the exhibition by any of the sponsors. One of the gallery fundraisers thought the exhibition was lucky to get any sponsors at all since it was not, to use her word, ‘pretty’ and it was much easier to find funds for art than for ethnography.

Production of the exhibition Any exhibition is the result of many negotiations over boundaries, internal and external, conducted according to rules, both stated and implicit. One of the principles not up for negotiation was that this exhibition, given the particular nature of the two portrait gallery collections, would be focused on the individual within a broadly biographical approach. Thus any discussions or demonstrations of process or themes would be contained within a chronological framework featur163

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ing Livingstone himself. This was not how I had originally conceptualised the exhibition, which had initially developed around themes such as Livingstone’s relationships with various African peoples and other Europeans, his commitment to both Christianity and colonisation, and his geographical interests and expertise. While research continued around such themes, none of them were obvious in the physical layout of the exhibition, although the content of wall texts and object labels dealt in various ways with the information. The brochure, written by the publicity staff and the co-curator, and illustrated with full colour reproductions, describes the content and conceptual layout in London: Livingstone’s career, from his humble upbringing in the cotton mills of Lanarkshire to his death in Central Africa in 1873, provides the narrative focus for the exhibition, with sections tracing his three main periods of exploration. An account of his early work as a missionary in Southern Africa, and his acclaimed coast-to-coast crossing of the continent from 1853 to 1856, forms a striking opening to the exhibition. His disastrous Zambezi expedition of 1858 to 1864, illustrated by on-the-spot paintings, drawings and photographs, occupies a central position while a section on his last journeys, including his celebrated meeting with Henry Morton Stanley, shows the dramatic climax to Livingstone’s life. The exhibition ends with an examination of how, in the years immediately after his death, the Livingstone myth was shaped.

It was agreed from the beginning that the overarching issue to be examined through the exhibition was how Livingstone, a failure as a missionary, only partially successful as an explorer, and an obsessive personality – came to be such a central figure in the imperial imagination. The two co-curators hoped to examine the mythological baggage of empire through portraits, relics, ethnographic objects and manuscripts.1 Although it has become fashionable recently in the popular press in Britain to extol the virtues of the British Empire and the gifts that British colonialism extended to the colonised, neither curator shared this view. Thus there were two major conceptual tasks. Visitors were to appreciate that Livingstone was the vanguard for a whole set of active colonial agents, particularly non-conformist missionaries like himself, who sought to render the African societies they encountered civilised according to European models, and individuals acceptable to a Christian god. At the same time Livingstone was not to be reduced to a caricature imperialist. Rather, something of his individual experiences, conditioned by the historical and social circumstances in which he lived, should come to the fore. Within that context, the exhibition was not about Africa but about Europe, not about Africans but Europeans. What the exhibition needed to convey was that particular vision of Africa which Livingstone, his supportive public and his critics, had constructed. These concerns stem from my view of museums as social artefacts and the suggestion that the cultural and ideological assumptions that have influenced their creation and their collections are a critical dimension in understanding their significance. This also applies to the selection of objects for conservation, 164

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interpretation and display within the museum itself. Thus within Livingstone’s collection, the objects act as an expression not only of the worldviews of those who chose to make and use them, but also of those who chose to collect and exhibit them, including, of course, the exhibition curator. Livingstone’s aims in going to Africa were to bring, what he thought of as Christianity, Civilisation (on the British model) and Commerce to replace the slave trade. He did so under a fourth ‘C’- the colonial context. His encounters with Africans, and the objects and natural history specimens he collected, can be viewed within a wider ideological framework in which Europe and Africa were perceived by the colonial powers for much of that century. That framework has been described by many scholars as an unequal, if complementary, relationship based on the opposition between civilised and savage, saviour and saved, healer and patient and actor and subject (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991). Understanding that framework helps interpret Livingstone’s collection, which consists of those things he found interesting, beautiful or ugly, repugnant or just curious. As is common with many nineteenth-century collectors, Livingstone sent back to Britain both human artefacts or cultural products and natural history specimens. Thus, in the Kelvingrove Museum in Glasgow, those artefacts specifically identified as belonging to Livingstone include several butterflies, four hippopotamus incisors, an elephant molar, the skull of a hornbill and the snout of a swordfish which were presented to friends or family members. Livingstone specimens in the Royal Museum of Scotland were sometimes accompanied by old catalogue notes pointing out their particular historical significance. For example, a note from 1858 refers to a lump of coal, identifying it as ‘the first indication of true coal Dr Livingstone found in coming east’. He had visions of vast coal fields in Central Africa supplying the Cape. Unfortunately this object has disappeared, or if it is still in a museum storeroom, it was unrecognised although diligently searched for when the loan request was made. In the context of the exhibition – with labels, proper lighting, and in conjunction with other objects, this rather unassuming item might have acquired more significance. One of the greatest challenges for a curator is to imagine what mundane things will mean after being transformed from an African object into a missionary souvenir, then a specimen in a museum storeroom, and then finally a full-blown museum exhibit. The life history of such an object illustrates the transformational power of context and suggests that the meaning and significance of an object change according to the circumstances in which it appears and is understood (Appadurai 1986). That transformational power is particularly evident in museums. Design is, of course, an important element in that transformation. One of the most exciting consequences of having two quite distinctive venues was that the exhibition looked completely different in London and Edinburgh. The installation in London was in a much smaller rectangular shape. Walls were an intense white, as the designer, Caroline Brown, had been to the mission station at Kuruman in South Africa where the Moffat family once lived. She wished to convey some of the 165

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intensity of that African sun through the wall colouring. Visitors entered and left through the same wide door, travelling up one side of the rectangle, around the end, and down the other side in a rather controlled path. The exhibition was compact and layered, without being cramped or crowded. The individual objects were very distinctive against the white walls. Dividers carried the title or header for each section of the exhibition under which scenes and documents from Livingstone’s life, taken from nineteenth-century sources, were enlarged. The documents were quite legible and many visitors stopped to read these wall dividers as very large labels, learning in the process more about, for example, Livingstone’s funeral service in Westminster Abbey. The cap worn by Livingstone and the pith helmet worn by Stanley when the later uttered his famous line ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’, proved to be two of the most popular objects in the show (see Saunders, this volume). The exhibition poster used a photograph of Livingstone by Thomas Annan, from 1864, which was produced in London and used in both places. The accompanying book, also produced in London, featured six essays, which aimed to help expand on issues raised by the exhibition, offering many fresh approaches while also providing an accessible introduction for those new to the subject, as well as providing a full list of exhibits.2 The exhibition was shown in Scotland after the London opening, partly in order to secure a larger audience during the Edinburgh International Festival in August. While Livingstone is no longer the local hero as he was when, earlier in the twentieth century Glasgow school children were taken to see his birthplace outside the city at Blantyre, he remains an important historical figure in Scotland. The venue available for the exhibition was at least twice as large as the space in London and a different designer, Edward Longbottom, went to work. While the basic layout, case materials and wall dividers were used, he chose different colour schemes to suggest Livingstone’s early life in Scotland, his career in Africa, his return to Victorian society to seek further funds, and his futile search for the Nile. He also framed the internal doors in the exhibition with architectural elements to suggest to visitors their passage from Europe to Africa and vice versa. There was much more space for the visitor path and a meandering route was devised for the section on the Zambezi river expedition, which had the advantage of creating more wall space. It was now possible to unfurl the splendid antelope net, made of baobab bark, which had been collected in one piece on the Zambezi but cut in two in 1860, providing a specimen each for the Royal Museum of Scotland and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew. Putting the halves back together (figuratively only) for the exhibition helped restore the historical significance to these previously unrecognised items. One of the things added to the Edinburgh venue was a collection of mineral specimens, each still wrapped in a paper with Livingstone’s own careful hand written notes about the location site. While requested much earlier, they had not been found in time for the original opening. The biggest addition to the design, which initially raised serious curatorial and aesthetic doubts, was an audio-visual presentation of the Victoria Falls, usually 166

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described as discovered by Livingstone, although of course already known to the Africans who guided him there. A photographer and sound technician went on location, filmed the changing features of the waterfall from sunrise to sunset, and recorded the sounds throughout that time. This material was edited into a continuous video lasting some fifteen minutes which was projected upon a giant screen. Visitors did not see this screen but peered through ‘vegetation’ to get a glimpse of the waterfall. The low rumble or, as some visitors described it, muffled roar of the falls could be heard throughout the exhibition hall. Some people even claimed it felt cooler by the falls. Many of the reviews in the popular press mentioned the waterfall and it was widely believed among staff members that such demotic publicity increased visitor numbers.

Dealing with complexity Turning from the physical presentation of the material, it is time to look more closely at the complex web of relationships that bound together three different groups of people during this period – Africans, Europeans and people often called Arabs, but are perhaps better thought of as Swahili traders of the East African coast – and how this complexity was dealt with, sometimes more successfully than others, in the exhibition itself. Where possible, real portraits of Africans were chosen for display; these were individualised depictions of named individuals, such as a study of Conde, a resident of Tete painted by Thomas Baines, the artist hired for the Zambezi expedition. In the colonial context those colonised are most often shown in anonymous groups unless they have acquired some particular significance (compare Porto, this volume). For example, the first convert a missionary makes is almost always named as an individual. That was the case with Livingstone’s one and only convert, the Kwena chief Sechele, whose conversion eventually foundered on the question of polygamy. Livingstone, unlike many missionaries, recognised that in this part of Southern Africa men took more than one wife as part of a system of political alliances, but did not realise the economic significance of multiple marriages (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 1992). One of the research goals behind the exhibit was to think more about Livingstone as ethnographer than as missionary or explorer. There was another very strong portrait by Baines in the show, that of Shibante (or Chibante), a boatman and river pilot who was a slave to a Portuguese official. Livingstone was desperate to eradicate the slave trade, to heal what he called this open sore. He collected many slave chains, manacles, shackles and slave sticks. The one shown in the exhibition was removed from a slave’s neck by Livingstone himself. Arabised Africans from Zanzibar and the east coast were sometimes slave traders and they feature in Livingstone’s journals and letters. While Livingstone detested the slave trade, he was actually on friendly terms with some individual traders, not 167

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all of whom were slavers. He seems to have collected few, if any, objects which can be identified as belonging to these people. Also missing are objects associated with the Portuguese who were in Africa well in advance of Livingstone and who often aided him. Presumably, their objects lacked the necessary exoticism which the colonial gaze projected upon African objects (Thomas 1991). Thus their presence in the exhibition was restricted to letters, journal entries or photographs, one of the best of which was taken by John Kirk who acted as botanist on the Zambezi expedition and later had a distinguished diplomatic career. A collection of Kirk’s photographs from the Zambezi trip, which are some of the earliest ever taken in this part of Africa, is in the National Library of Scotland. The prints themselves date from at least two different periods but a selection was made on the basis of their historical and ethnographic content. However the co-curator rejected those which had not been printed about the time the original photographs had been made. He was, of course, treating the photographs themselves as unique objects, noting their own life histories and including those most authentic and aesthetically appealing. Thus a later print (one of my own ethnographic favourites), illustrating a trap for capturing hippopotami, was eliminated, at least for the London venue. It did appear, by mutual agreement, in the Edinburgh show where there was much more space available. It was placed not far from a very graphic depiction by Thomas Baines of a river hunt for the same animal. The label for the painting included a journal entry about the hunt illustrated in the painting. Such negotiations, across disciplinary boundaries and curatorial expertise and interests, are necessary not only for the successful exhibition as product, but for the museological process itself. Livingstone collected mostly from the people he called the Mang’anja and those he identified as the Manyema (Manyuema), and it seemed clear that these two peoples formed a set of oppositions in Livingstone’s mind which was apparent in the artefacts he collected. The lives of the Manyema had been greatly disrupted by their involvement in the slave trade and their inclusion in a Swahili commercial empire. Livingstone travelled in their homelands during his ill fated search for the source of the Nile. There is still a region in Zaire called Maniema inhabited by some twenty-five different groups, all of whom Livingstone referred to as Manyema, although he did recognise that there were variations in cultural practice and language. He once remarked he would rather have dinner with a group of Manyema than the members of the London Anthropological Society. He was terribly distressed when he witnessed a massacre by slavers of several hundred Manyema at a huge market in Nyangwe. Livingstone’s party was attacked a few days later by some Manyema, whom he believed had mistaken the red shirt he often wore for the red vest of one of those involved in the market massacre. Livingstone, of course, survived the ambush and eventually sent home, with Stanley, several of the Manyema spearheads and spears that failed to kill him. Some of these he may have acquired as gifts or as demonstrations of metalworking. However, the partiality of this collection promoted or reinforced stereotypical views of the Manyema, who were often described as cannibals. While such weapons pre168

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sent a very limited and skewed view of the lives of Manyema, they do represent how Livingstone had come to view them, as examples of the obstacles to the further development he hoped would occur in Central Africa. Livingstone and his colleagues on the Zambezi expedition collected rather different objects from the Mang’anja whom he viewed as a model for the commercial projects he had in mind – such as the establishment of enterprises under European direction, which would then produce African-grown cotton at cheaper prices than the slave-grown cotton from the American South. Looms and spindles still loaded with Mang’anja cotton thread were sent back to illustrate this potential commodity. The industriousness of the Mang’anja also attracted Livingstone’s attention, and he wrote of how the women were in their gardens from dawn, pounding and grinding corn. Just such a hand maul as he described is featured in a finely drawn illustration on the title page of the narrative of the expedition. What is almost certainly the same object was found in the stores of the Royal Museum of Scotland. These objects present an equally limited, if more positive, view of this society than those objects preserved by Livingstone to mark his encounter with the Manyema, but the collection is an accurate if unidimensional representation of Livingstone’s interest, and suggests why he collected and preserved these types of artefacts. In both cases he was dealing with collectives, with group attributes. The relationships between Livingstone, James Chuma and Abdullah Susi were quite different. Chuma, a Yao, was born about 1850 and rescued from slavers as a boy. In European accounts he is usually described as Livingstone’s personal attendant, while Susi, from Shupanga, began as a wood-cutter on the Zambezi expedition but became a key figure on Livingstone’s trip in search of the Nile. They were responsible for bringing out Livingstone’s body, carefully preserved, to the coast for shipment to England for burial. They also later travelled to Britain to give their account of that last journey, which was embellished by the editor of Livingstone’s diaries, setting up the still potent image of the saintly figure who died praying. They brought with them a small enamel bowl, which was, perhaps one of the most evocative items in the show. Livingstone himself seems to have kept no mementos of these two men who went on to be professional guides and caravan leaders for the many missionaries who quickly followed him. There can be no doubt that Livingstone, Chuma and Susi were mutually transformed by the intertwining of their lives in Central Africa, but it is very difficult to find African sources revealing how those he encountered felt about Livingstone. The muting or even silence of colonised voices in the colonial records is a real problem. Some statues of Livingstone in Africa have been destroyed and his reputation attacked in recent times. On the other hand, the High Commissioner for Zambia enthusiastically viewed the exhibition in London and volunteered to come to Edinburgh for the official opening there. For the Zambian tourist industry, Livingstone and his myth have become a useful commodity. The negotiations and informed reflexivity necessary to mount this particular exhibition undoubtedly underlie, in some form, all communal or institutional 169

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cultural productions offered to a wider public. While these processes are rarely discussed, they can be readily observed by anyone who works both within and outside of those institutions which sponsor such productions. Even if the resulting product is judged to be unsuccessful in some way, the process should be explored since the notion of praxis as theory in action is nowhere more crucial than in the intersection between academic and museological practice.

The academic model and curatorial cultures Having looked in some detail at an example of praxis in cultural production, this section considers the weaknesses and merits of what I shall term the academic model in relation to museum work. The academic model discussed here, from which I originate,3 is probably most fully applicable to the social sciences in North America. The criticisms advanced here do not concern the model in itself, but rather such academic training in relation to museum work. The limitations of that model stem from the different products which universities and museums are geared to produce. Professorial cultures are both individualistic and competitive. Spatial analysis of a Canadian social sciences building illustrates how such attitudes can be architecturally inscribed. This building was designed without communal meeting rooms for interdepartmental gatherings and with few common rooms even within single departments, a design widely rumoured to reflect the belief of a dean at the time that people should be in their own ‘cells’ working on individual research, not wasting time exchanging ideas. There were no rooms which might have functioned for group faculty research or products, and certainly none for team projects by students. This dean was, and is, not alone in his views, and the professional process many academics go through, even today, is still one of constant winnowing, culminating in a document based on both original and individual research. Academic culture is also still primarily a written one; it is not yet widely acceptable to produce, for example, a film rather than a monograph for an ethnographic dissertation. This emphasis on written documents leads not only to a paucity of expressive forms, but to certain kinds of permanent records being accorded a higher status as evidence of productivity. The academic preference for written documents ensures that more ephemeral or non-text based forms are accorded nothing like the prestige and value they have in the wider society. If our era is now indeed post-modern, then such a preference seems rather dated in service-oriented and performance-based societies when research results are not widely distributed in a multiplicity of forms. There are other weaknesses in the academic model for museological work as well. Regardless of the fact that academics are most often teaching in universities, they are usually neither trained as teachers nor necessarily rewarded for their communication skills in terms of rank or salary. 170

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There are also elements of academic culture that are not only admirable but very appropriate for curatorial cultures. The first and most obvious is the capacity for and commitment to scholarly research. Even in the search for wider and larger audiences, museums must neither neglect nor resent the time and money spent on curatorial research. If the museum retains any pretence to having an intellectual role as well as an entertainment function, then the best scholarly research must underlie all presentations of its collections. Another feature of the academic model which should be shared with museological cultures is its elitism in the standards set for achievement. It is a museological illusion that if the subject is entertaining enough, if the labels are short enough, and the graphics spectacular enough, then everyone will become a museum visitor. If museums try to compete on the same terms with other institutions offering leisure products, there is a real risk that museums will lose sight of what their special combination of characteristics allows them to offer to their visitors: access to unique or authentic artefacts, understanding of those objects based on contemporary scholarship and specialised space to contemplate the meanings of these things. Finally, at least in theory, the academy rewards originality and innovation. Museums should share this part of academic culture and be undeterred from experimenting with content and formats, even if the outcomes are not those hoped for or expected. However, to do so requires vision, political will and a flexible structure, commodities which are not always abundant in either academy or museum administrations.

Cultural production and public radio If academic training is or has been thin on preparing cultural products other than texts, how might training in other forms of cultural communication contribute to such a grounding? Working as a freelance writer and presenter of documentaries for public radio network broadcasting provides interesting parallels to the professional work of an academic anthropologist and a museum curator.4 The way in which non-commercial radio broadcasts are produced can provide insight or even a model for cultural production in both the university and the museum, even when the subject matter is not directly museological. I shall refer here to a recent programme, which was broadcast in 1998 by the BBC, as a way of framing the following discussion. The half-hour programme was on chrome and its use in the twentieth century as an icon of modernity and, in places such as Britain, as an emblem of the cultural hegemony of America; with the added twist that just as the global expands, the local reinterprets. The original idea was generated by my own ageing car needing to have its bumper re-chromed, whereas almost all newer cars have rubber bumpers. Had there been what could be called a chrome age, and was the age 171

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of chrome now over? Thinking this might make a good radio programme, I approached a Glasgow producer who condensed the ideas into a one paragraph sketch, entitled Bumper to Bumper, and sent it to a London commissioning editor who accepted the proposal and suggested a play date. Most of the interviews with designers, art historians and artists were conducted in the presence of the producer and a recording technician in an Edinburgh studio. Using the Internet, the producer found a young American artist who uses 1930s toasters and cocktail shakers as bases for his transgressive lamps, and he also interviewed an American architect known for the chrome columns in his buildings. There was broad agreement about which elements in each interview worked and which could ‘end up on the floor’. However, the producer, whose job is to ensure audio quality and act on behalf of the listener, actually did all the cutting of tape and selecting from each interview. In doing so he ensured a particular structural arrangement between the voices and topics. My general request for musical jingles and advertisements about 1950s cars and domestic appliances was answered by the producer who, with the help of a production assistant, located and selected the clips. I listened to all selections, suggested minor changes, and then wrote the connecting script around this structure. The producer engaged an American actor to read this script, which I did not hear until after the broadcast. This can be interpreted as a sign not only of trust between colleagues, but also a broadly defined sense of ownership. What lessons for curatorial and academic cultures might be drawn from the broadcasting model? In the world of public radio everyone – producer, writer, actors, presenter, interviewees, recording technician, sound effects engineer, production assistant and the promotion people – realises and acknowledges the obvious truth that the product is the result of, and dependent upon, collective enterprise. Everyone assumes, until proven otherwise, that their colleagues are fully professional, up to date in their respective fields, and hard-working. If this does not always turn out to be the case, it is at least identified as a personnel problem. The assumption is always one of professional collegial equality in producing a joint product. After all, there can never be ‘dead air’ when the 9:00 News ends. A similar assumption is sometimes in short supply in both universities and the museums. Spatial arrangements in the production unit at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reflect these underlying assumptions. Each person has an office with a closeable door, but instead of opening into a corridor the doors give on to a huge space filled with comfortable chairs, children’s art, textiles from around the world, teapots with broken spouts, computers, international magazines and newspapers and crumpled up paper. This central space, which acts as an informal forum, is filled, littered some might say, with the detritus of creative collaboration. Experience in the broadcasting world has also been greatly beneficial in scripting a number of interpretative dramas which were produced with professional actors at the Royal Museum of Ontario and the Canadian Museum of Civilization. Academic training as a fieldworker, sensitivity to dialogue and a multiplicity 172

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of views of complex events, helped to make the plays performed in the museum acceptable to other curators and a wider public (Cannizzo and Parry 1994). Broadcasting, like exhibition work, often presents a conundrum: it is continually necessary to make clear the critical contribution of an academy-based discipline to a non-academic project, while expressing that contribution in terms and forms governed by the commissioning institution whose goals and audiences may or may not be similar. While constant struggles with this conundrum can be frustrating, they can also liberate the process of cultural production and enhance the product offered for wider consumption whether at the academy, in the museum or on air.

Teaching and a return to academic anthropology How can experience from the world of radio broadcasting and museums be incorporated into university teaching? At the most obvious level, the introduction of the study of objects into a departmental curriculum concerned, as are most, with the non-material aspects of culture, provides another tool for understanding human behaviour and ideas. Surrounded as we are to a greater or lesser extent by objects, offering students the chance to analyse them as part of contemporary anthropological discourse expands the data base from which they may draw, incorporating their own material lives into the discussion, and changing the way many of them perceive museums. This discussion draws on my own teaching of two honours options open to third and fourth year students, as well as postgraduates from other disciplines who are hoping to convert to an advanced degree in social anthropology. Both these courses usually attract a number of students doing archaeology and art history, and many students from EU countries and North America. One is called ‘The anthropology of the material world’, but of more interest here is ‘Objects and others’ (borrowing the title of George Stocking’s (1985) volume of edited papers). The syllabus outlines three broad topics; the first is the analysis of the museum itself as a social artefact and the product of particular historical events and worldviews. The second focus is on objects, which remain the primary conduit for the curatorial messages found in museums, together with various approaches to their interpretation and display. As ‘displays’ of people are often governed by the same ideological assumptions and operational paradigms as those pertaining to objects, the exhibiting of humans and their cultural practices, along with images of the same, constitutes the third aspect. It is thus easy to see what effect work in the curatorial realm can have on the content of academic teaching. The effect of radio work and the actual practice of museological production may be somewhat less obvious. At the most mundane level, students gain an understanding of the importance of production schedules and time management. They also come to appreciate that poorly communicated 173

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ideas are often denuded of their efficacity. Tricks of the trade from broadcasting, such as how to prepare a script for presentation to a seminar rather than a written paper to be read, are taught, although with varying degrees of success. Students struggling to discern/define the disciplinary core of anthropology are sometimes unaware that many other aligned professions contend with similar issues while providing different answers to the same questions. A class debate on, for example, archaeological looting can help to clarify this. With an estimated 80 per cent of the antiquities currently offered for sale having been illicitly looted, the question was whether it is possible for individuals or institutions to collect with a clear conscience. Students developed positions on this question as private collector, museum director, non-museum based scholar, art dealer, museum visitor and so on. The rest of the class witnessed this debate and then quizzed those representing the different positions not only on the issue, but also on their roles as cultural producers and consumers. When students carefully research and rehearse their positional roles, the debates reveal the variety of responses to complex ideology and human motivation. An anthropology practised only within the academy is both politically and intellectually weakened; therefore the class has a fieldtrip to see a current exhibition at the Royal Museum of Scotland with the aim of applying theory to practice. An excursion to the newly opened Ivy Wu gallery of Asian art induced immediate questions about the problematic definitions of what is art and what is artefact, about display by category, variation in collection density, the history of European collecting of Asian objects, and the nature of sponsorship for contemporary museums. The trip is also a way of pragmatic provision, through their own responses to an exhibition: what works for them as individuals, as anthropological students, or as museum visitors? These responses from the fieldtrip then help shape their own group project: an exhibition using the display cases in the departmental library. This team work is a required, but not individually graded, part of the course. All students gain some experience in the collection, interpretation and display of objects. The topic is assigned, drawing on core areas of anthropological interest (such as the analysis of kinship), methodology (fieldwork), or more topical themes. The controversy about the Millennium Dome under construction in London, suggested the anthropology of time as a recent topic, based on a core of initial readings which the students were to tackle collectively (Ohnuki-Tierney 1990, Fabian 1991, Gell 1992, Bedoucha 1993, Thomas 1996). They were also provided with copies of key books on exhibition development: Miles (1988), Ambrose and Paine (1993), Dean (1994) and Edson and Dean (1994). Each stage in developing and opening an exhibition was discussed; ways to think about objects and images were suggested; a preliminary production schedule and a budget (students have fifty pounds from the departmental teaching budget) were drawn up, and an installation tool kit with plexiglass mounts and plinths was provided. No group to date has failed to open their exhibition on time (although not all have been complete), and none have gone over the budget. 174

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The 1998 to 1999 process resulted in an exhibition in six cases, which began with an exploration of Australian Aboriginal concepts of dream time, continued through the variations by class and region of Scottish tea time, to the idea of cycles of birth and rebirth in nature and culture. Audience response (that is, fellow anthropology students who use the library and faculty members) suggested that the first case, on dream time, was the most appreciated in both visual and anthropological terms. It featured a real sand desert floor, a bleached-out tree branch around which curled a rubber snake with black and coral strips, and a broken European style watch. Text panels sought to explain Aboriginal concepts of time and the meanings attached to those concepts. The display technique which generated the most comment was that centreing on a bowl of fruit which was fresh when installed but became desiccated in the dry air of the sun-heated room and only eventually decayed. Every year this course produces student complaints about people who were not ‘pulling their weight’, and grumbles about the amount of work for which no individual mark is given. They were left to negotiate all these issues within the group without intercession. Evaluations reveal that by the end of the course students usually have a strong sense of collective achievement after their fellow students in other classes and faculty members have attended the opening and viewed the exhibition. Although they are often critical of their own efforts, and sometimes explicitly compare their own exhibition to the preceding year’s efforts, most feel that they have learned both an immense amount about anthropology and about working in groups. A few have gone on to do dissertation fieldwork in museums or sought employment and volunteer positions in galleries. University policy of offering students what are called transferable skills (to take out into the wider world in addition to their discipline-based knowledge) is certainly met by this team project. However, there is a further issue here; the course seems to attract some of the department’s brightest students as well as some of its most mediocre so that there is often a disconcerting bimodal distribution of marks which are based solely, as is common departmental practice, on a single essay. Some students appear to assume that the course is less demanding than those dealing explicitly with – say – political and economic processes, or gender, ethnicity and nationalism. They discover that putting on an exhibition is not only intellectually demanding, but that these wider issues are present in the analysis of objects as both evidence of cultural practices and as exegesis on social relationships. While this course, like any other, is not enjoyed by all those who take it, it is clear from evaluations and essays that mounting their own exhibition has disabused students of any notion that museum anthropology is in some way inferior. More generally, it has become impossible for them to experience a museum as a fusty place housing a sterile past or an inert ethnographic present. Within the limited context of the course, they begin to acquire some of the skills which academic anthropologists may find useful in museum work, including greater flexibility inside organisational structures, time management and team building. These 175

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transferable skills are generated in the students’ practical critique of both the academy and the museum through their exploration of museums of anthropology and museums as anthropology.

Conclusion This chapter has examined both the constraints and negotiations required of an academically trained anthropologist, and also the rewards of collaborating on cultural productions such as exhibitions and radio programmes. The skills required to engage in these forms of cultural production deserve a more central place on modern anthropological curricula. The (re-)invention of museum anthropology and the current (re-) assessment of the anthropological curriculum in many academic departments offer new operational and intellectual space for those interested in cultural production and the manufacture of knowledge in its broadest sense. Engagement with projects in both worlds may eventually achieve a new synthesis in which the boundaries between the academy and the museum present today become less problematic or even disappear in the future.

NOTES 1. We read all of each other’s labels and texts and agreed not to tell one another until the exhibition had been up for two months if any typological errors were found in the labels or texts already on display. It is usually too late to change any labels once they are in locked cases, as to open such cases may negate insurance policies and possibly disturb humidity and temperature levels. It would have been too problematic after all that hard work to know on the day of the opening that there was a mistake but nothing to be done about it – luckily none were found. 2. The authors were selected by the two curators, and I contributed an article on Livingstone as a collector. Together they matched the texts of the essays with exhibits from the show, producing a book of 240 pages with some 200 illustrations, of which approximately half were in colour. 3. My training took place entirely within the academic or university system, rather than the museum, with a Ph.D. in anthropology based on fieldwork on street masquerading among urban children in Sierra Leone. Subsequent professional employment has been teaching anthropology in universities in Canada and Scotland, interspersed with six years work as a curator in the Ethnology Department of the Royal Ontario Museum. 4. Some of these documentaries have been explicitly museological – such as the first one in 1982 Old Images/New Metaphors on the problems facing museums in the late-twentieth century. Another featured the fortress of Louisbourg, in Cape Breton Island, a well-known Canadian living history museum. This three hour series explored the contradictions and pleasures of visiting a site reconstructed in the 1960s by unemployed Anglophone coal miners as part of a make-work scheme, and now presented by their descendants costumed as French colonists of the mid- eighteenth century.

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ART OF EXHIBITION - MAKING AS A PROBLEM OF TRANSL ATION

Mary Bouquet




The collections in our folk museums are built up from objects that have been saved on the very point of destruction. The zeal with which that took place stemmed from a need to save what could be saved before it was too late. It is a great temptation to believe that we thereby preserve life as it used to be for future generations. And we make that seduction even greater by filming objects...or by displaying them in a carefully reconstructed environment, as is done in our folk museums. That the visitors and we ourselves all too readily succumb is a measure of our stake in romanticising a past, the memory of which still hangs in the air with the fragrance of a paradise lost. (Voskuil 1998: 598)

This chapter addresses what are often seen as the practical issues of exhibitionmaking as a theoretical problem of translation – with all the transformative effects of moving between languages1 – and as a didactic device. It begins by invoking anthropological concern about recent developments in the museum world. It goes on to consider how (what are often thought of as) technical aspects the process of making a temporary exhibition at the University of Oslo Ethnographic Museum were used as a didactic device. Finally, there is a discussion of how these technical matters fit into the theoretical operation of translation that exhibitionmaking involves. Exhibition-making is an important academic issue in the light of recent developments in the museum world, and it has received corresponding attention (see, for example, Baxandall 1991). These developments include a shift in the balance of power between curators and other members of museum staff (see Kavanagh et al. 1994), as a result of the organisational upheavals in museums since the late 1980s (see Reedijk 1998, Segalen this volume). Elements in that shift include the 177

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changing emphasis from collections as such towards exhibitions, which now have to address less experienced museum audiences as well as those with a stake in what is being shown. These changes are both politically and commercially motivated (see Zukin 1995), and academic anthropologists are among those who have expressed their concern about certain aspects of this turn of events. Since most museums are publicly funded institutions, it is argued that they have a responsibility to present their collections (held in the name of the public) to as wide an audience as possible, rather than an educated elite. However, the incorporation of museums into the culture industry, as a corollary of this democratising trend means, amongst other things, an almost insatiable demand for new and competitive products to lure greater numbers over the threshold. A constant turnover of new temporary exhibitions (with only a few months’ life span) is a major element of contemporary museum policy – certainly in countries such as the Netherlands. This tempo of cultural production demands different forms of organisation from the past, affecting curatorial authority and work relations more generally. Concern about this turn was expressed, for example, in the call for papers for a panel on museums at the Dutch Anthropological Association’s centennial conference in December 1998: Museums provide anthropologists and non-Western sociologists with a unique opportunity to bring their discipline to the attention of the general public. How is this topic being picked up within Dutch anthropology and what do Dutch museums expect from Dutch anthropologists in this respect? What problems develop through the increasing commercialisation, dominance of pedagogical concepts and the emphasis on design at the expense of content? (VCA/SNS Nieuws 1998: 39)

Several issues deserve comment here. The generality of the concept museum, makes the unique opportunity they represent for anthropologists seem broad and open. However, it later became clear that the session would in fact address ‘past, present and future of ethnographic museums’, which was somewhat disappointing given that the developments in question are common to many other sorts of museum. Indeed, considering the high museum density in the Netherlands (De Haan 1997), it is difficult to see why anthropologists should limit themselves to ethnographic museums in the narrow sense of the term. Ethnographic museums are assumed to be about other cultures, disguising the fact that the form of culture museums actively constitute is by definition other. Jonanthan Benthall (1993: 18) has observed that, ‘The recent attention given by anthropologists to museums is welcome, but too narrow in scope. All museums can be seen as museums of ethnography’. Jan Vaessen’s (1996: 14). argument is even more radical: As far as I know, museums are divided up into different sorts in a similar manner throughout the world: art museums, historical museums, natural history museums, folk- and ethnographic museums, industrial and technical museums, etc. It is a remarkable fact that these categories are seldom if ever questioned in the Netherlands... 178

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The customary division of museums suggests that there is a fundamental difference between the “sorts” of objects that are collected and presented in them; however this assumption is less self-evident than it appears, indeed, it is in many respects quite simply open to discussion. These differences among museums cannot be attributed to a distinction among objects but are rather anchored in differences among historically rooted disciplines, in ways of seeing, ordering and thinking.

This approach makes all museums interesting for contemporary anthropologists, not only as research sites (see González et al., and Macdonald, this volume) but also as places of cultural production (see Shelton, and Cannizzo, this volume). The technical and practical aspects of translation into design that actually make knowledge materialise are equivalent in all sorts of museum. Given the structural importance of temporary exhibition-making in museums of various kinds, my question is in how this form of cultural production might be compared with writing ethnographic or anthropological texts? How does writing an exhibition script or storyline for a temporary exhibition compare with writing ethnography? Is there a sense in which exhibition making resembles ethnographic fieldwork? The part of exhibition making under consideration here refers to neither the specialist knowledge of the conventional curator,2 nor the process of consultation with different (potential) audiences (see Van Hamersveld 1998), but rather to the concrete processes that go on backstage as temporary project groups are formed to work out such technical details as design and construction. These small-scale negotiations tend to be overshadowed in ethnographic museums by the attention given to processes of consultation with indigenous people and issues of representation. The working relations that directly shape an exhibition are much more restricted than the latter and yet, in view of the anxieties referred to above, of seemingly increasing importance. Who are the people involved at this level? One way of exploring the inner world of the museum is through the concrete practices involved in making a temporary exhibition. Members of project groups correspond to a degree with the museum natives in Richard Handler’s (1993: 33–36) definition of the museum as a social arena: ‘an institution in which social relationships are oriented in terms of a collection of objects which are made meaningful by those relationships – though these objects are often understood by museum natives to be meaningful independently of those social relationships’. This definition seems to imply a relatively stable group, such as those in Dutch national museums in the ‘good old days’ before verzelfstandiging (privatisation), when museum employees were tenured ambtenaren (civil servants) and whole lives might be spent in the same institution (see Vaessen 1995; also Voskuil 1996–2000). The nature of those social relationships is to some extent altered by project work, lasting eighteen months to two years for a fairly large temporary exhibition, which engages increasing numbers of external personnel.3 Handler adopts a Martian perspective to underline the differences between what are considered central activities (the conservation and carefully controlled exposure of objects to the pub179

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lic gaze), and conceptually underprivileged activities: administrative meetings, study and research, conservation activities, maintenance work, parties and celebrations, eating and drinking, buying and selling, coming and going. Externally contracted personnel would presumably be classified under comings and goings in this definition, yet whilst they are there they are drawn into both kinds of activity. However, the activities defined as central and as underprivileged in given museum contexts are likely to vary through time measured on various scales. Exhibition making at the level examined here concerns a fairly long process of production (concept making, consultation, choreography, the design of ‘sets’, vitrines, lighting, colour schemes, texting and so forth), before the spotlights settle on the stars of the show. My focus here is on how the work of conceptualising an exhibition as storyline dovetails with translation into design and production. I suggest that this work could also be didactically important when considering ways of (re)integrating museum anthropology into academic curriculae. In other words, that between learning to ‘see’ what is behind finished exhibits (see Dias, this volume), and handson experience such as those discussed by Shelton in Brighton and Cannizzo in Edinburgh (both in this volume), there is a third area requiring attention: how do we engage with the technical skills involved (photography and design, for example) as anthropologists; and how might the intersection of skills be approached as theoretical issues of translation, in addition to being practical matters in the hands of non-curatorial specialists in the museum. Exhibition-making is not only a question of a specific knowledge about and access to collections, which is perhaps how academic anthropologists used to think about the ethnographic museum. It is also about the technical specialists’ work that renders those collections visible and accessible to the public. The status of that work, when compared to the status (formerly, anyway) attached to curatorial work, was mostly lower. My argument is that the concrete processes and artefacts (what might be called the ‘props’) of staging a show are a fundamental part of culture in the broadest sense, and an example of how the ethnographic exhibition is always an amalgam between ‘them’ and us. Precisely this amalgamating quality makes the exhibitionary process such a rich theoretical object, which deserves ethnographic attention quite as much as what might be assumed to be the ‘subject’ of the exhibition. Didactically, therefore, these processes can be integrated into museum anthropology in order to elucidate how knowledge is made to materialise at the museum. What are seen as ‘technical constraints’ are often quite determining of how (and sometimes what) can be shown. Thus the emphasis on visiting the work floor to appreciate concrete aspects of cultural production is intended as a corrective to the notion that contemporary anthropological work in museums is exclusively or even primarily concerned with curating collections.

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Exhibition-making as a didactic device in Oslo The experimental use of an exhibition, both as a kind of fieldwork and as a didactic device, at the Institute and Museum of Anthropology (hereafter IMA) at the University of Oslo, 1995–1996, will serve as an illustration (see Bouquet 1996). When IMA contacted me, in the Spring of 1994, with an invitation to spend the following academic year in Oslo, they described the combined teaching institute and museum as dating respectively to 1965 and 1857.4 The Ethnographic Museum is located in central Oslo, while the Institute is a twenty minute tram ride away on the main university campus in suburban Blindern. Although the two institutions had been administratively reunited in 1990, this reunification had, with few exceptions, been little more than an administrative fact. The institute and museum had grown out of different academic traditions. The aim was to try ‘to reintegrate awareness of, and insight into, ways in which material culture and objects form part of social processes’.5 The Ethnographic Museum is housed, together with the Archaeological Museum and Numismatic Collection, in an art nouveau building known collectively as the Historical Museum. The ethnographic library is also housed in the attic of the building. Franz Boas was a visiting scholar in 1926 to 1927 and held a lecture series entitled Primitive art, later published by the Institute for Comparative Research in Human Culture. By the 1960s, however, social anthropology had become a university discipline in Norway – consolidated by Fredrik Barth in particular. An unfortunate corollary of this development was that interest in museum-based material culture dwindled to the point of near abandonment by a whole generation of anthropologists. A relation of mutual ignorance developed between the institute and museum, which lasted for a couple of decades. It could be said that locally they divided the world of anthropological interest between themselves, with social relations at the institute, and objects at the museum. Contact was virtually broken, and many undergraduate students in this period did not know that there was an ethnographic museum downtown. The renewal of interest among a number of staff members (at the Institute) during the early 1990s, brought about the resolve to reintegrate the study of objects, aesthetics and material culture into the curriculum. After visiting IMA in the autumn of 1994, I proposed using my year in Oslo to make an exhibition about the historical relationship between the museum and institute (and before that, anthropology as a discipline), using the collections to illustrate that relationship; and giving a course of lectures that would draw upon the exhibitionary process. One striking absence from the description of IMA from which I began were the museum collections. On my first visit to Oslo in September 1994, I learned of the radical experiment that was taking place in the aftermath of the 1990 reunification: curatorship had been abolished, and all (academic) staff had equal teaching and curatorial responsibilities. It was clear to me from visiting the depots that in practice the technical staff at the museum carried out daily curatorial 181

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duties. The absence of curators managing and mediating the visit to the depot was somehow epitomised in the difficulties of getting storage cupboard doors open: the intractability of the doors seemed to reflect the deeper problems of activating the historical collections. My guide in the depot was a ‘depot manager’ and questions about items in the different collections were answered by consulting box files sorted according to geographical region (such as the Congo, Japan, Melanesia and Santal), from which the main collections come. ‘The book’ was frequently consulted as a short cut to information, in the absence of active curators or an electronically accessible database. ‘The book’ turned out to be De Hundre År, a centennial history of the museum and its collections, written by Gutorm Gjessing (then Director) and Marie Krekling Johannessen (who was trained as an artist but whose work at the museum turned her into the institutional memory) and published in 1957. One of my first tasks was to obtain a translation of De Hundre År, which involved frantic transcription as Axel Sommerfelt (who was academic Head of the museum in 1995–96) rendered it aloud in English. This was a fascinating process since he elaborated and commented upon a history of which he and his colleagues were also a part. For all its literary meanderings, this 1957 volume was both the only practical way to get about the collections, and a constant source of discussion with colleagues at the museum since it referred to the social life of collections as well as simply the material. Performing a similar translation exercise on (another former director) Yngvar Nielsen’s 1907 Universitetets Etnografiske Samlinger, 1857–1907, with Ingrid Rudie (then Head of the Institute of Anthropology), it became clear that Gjessing had incorporated not only much of the contents of Nielsen’s history but also some of the same style: providing ethnographic collections with their social provenance. It was in the pages of these books that I first learned of the existence, for example, of an on-going category of curiosities: the Russian ‘Devil’s Machine’, the relic from Napoleon’s tomb on St. Helena, and even an item added to the category as recently as 1983 (see Bouquet 1996: 44). Although Nielsen had tried to eradicate the worst of the kuriositeter from the museum, it was startling to learn that there were actually boxfuls of the offending materials in a distant underground storage place. All this preparatory work bore comparison with fieldwork: it was, in fact, a process of exploration. The more I talked to people, both at the institute and at the museum, the more critical the historical dimension became in order to make sense of contemporary positions. The loss of this historical dimension was echoed in the absence of history from the permanent exhibits – the Arctic, Africa, North and South America, South Asia and so on. Like many ethnographic museums, these – historical – collections were presented as if they refer to discrete populations, living in some rarefied zone beyond the passage of time, without any explicit connection with the Norwegian terra firma to which they had been brought. My colleagues at the museum told me about the modernisation of the building, about the moth plague(s), and the failure 182

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of open exhibits. The building itself made a striking contrast with the 1960s Institute at Blindern: above all the central, spiralling staircase which grows, from a rather insignificant start on the ground floor, into a open gallery with two magnificent golden arched windows on either side at the top. When I learned that the planned exhibition might have to be held on the staircase, the prospect of choreographing the history across the four landings and upper gallery of this inner, interstitial space, was an exciting one. This would be the perfect place to make the invisible connecting histories of the collections and the institutions materialise. The exhibition on the staircase would be a truly site specific work: it would be thought into a pre-existing architectural space, in an analogous way to (say) Richard Serra’s Spin Out at the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterloo. There were a series of sharp contrasts between the museum, situated downtown on the corner of one of the busiest cross-roads in the city, with its turn of the century architecture, locked up depots and antiquated catalogue system, and the clean, modern University site at Blindern where everything was geared to students. It was perhaps little wonder most of the students never came down to the museum, except to visit the library!6 It therefore seemed important to try to gain students’ attention not only by the exhibition as a finished product, but also by providing windows onto the process of exhibition-making through the planned lecture series. The exhibition brought (a number of ) academic colleagues down from Blindern in their curatorial capacity; it took museum staff up to Blindern as contributors to the lecture series; and it brought students and participants from other departments down to the museum to follow up what we had been discussing as abstract issues on the work floor – where people actually conserve and manage collections, take photographs, design exhibits and build them. In this way, the course had two aims: to discuss a number of topics from the recent literature on museums, collections and exhibitions; and to relate each of the topics to the process of making what came to be known as ‘the staircase exhibition’. The timing of the course was important. The exhibition was well-advanced by the time the lecture series was scheduled. Taking eighteen months as a rough estimate of the time needed to make a fairly major exhibition, work began on the concept in January 1995, with two visits of one month each to Oslo in February and June of that year. I talked to all the staff at IMA, and through them came to know the rich folklore associated with the museum. I also got to know the collections, the literature, and the members of staff who could help me with specific ethnographic areas. The rough divisions of the exhibition were already taking shape through the project meetings, which included academic staff and museum staff, such as the architect, the photographer, the depot manager, the education and public relations officer, and conservation staff. The idea was a simple one: the five landings on the staircase were used to stage five historical periods in the history of the museum, roughly corresponding to five directorships. Ascending from the first landing – the present, the second landing was devoted to the post-1947 period (with Fredrik Barth as the last Professor-Director, and his predecessor 183

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Gutorm Gjessing. The third landing was devoted to the period between 1917 and 1946, when Ole Solberg was director. The top landing was used for the turn of the century (1877–1916, the Yngvar Nielsen period) and the gallery opposite for 1857–1877 (Ludvig Daa). The architectural disposition of the staircase meant that you would walk through historical time ‘as a spiral rather than a line’ (Latour 1993a: 75). ‘Elements that appear remote if we follow the spiral may turn out to be quite nearby if we compare the loops. Conversely, elements that are quite contemporary if we judge by the line, become quite remote if we traverse a spoke’.

Figure 11.1 Diagram of the staircase of the University Ethnographic Museum, Oslo. Drawing by Marianne Brochmann. Reproduced by kind permission of Marianne Brochmann, Oslo. 184

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The idea was to insert a selection of items into the polytemporal framework provided by the staircase, according to their moment of entry into the museum, and to try to make visible some of the usually hidden population who were ‘bringing it all back home’: explorers, missionaries, diplomats, sailors, tradesmen – as well as anthropologists. In other words, we were trying to connect the museum with the invisible worlds (cf. Pomian 1990) to which its ‘semiophores’ refer by means of a primarily Norwegian population. This population acted, of course, within the specific context of Norwegian nationalism during the nineteenth century: Norway was then part of a Swedish-Norwegian union, which culminated in Norwegian independence in 1905. Norwegian traders, missionaries, diplomats, doctors and explorers were effective collectors, despite the fact that Norway itself was not a colonial power. The possession of an ethnographic collection was indeed closely associated with nation state formation during the nineteenth century (Prösler 1996), and Norway’s ethnographic museum and its donors were certainly implicated in that project.

Outline of a theory of practice? By the end of 1995, the sketch design for each of the five sections was completed, the inventarisation and documentation of the objects was well-advanced, and the architect was about to start work on the technical design and lighting plan. Thus the lectures were scheduled at a moment when the exhibitionary process was well underway. The course began by considering such questions as ‘what could a social anthropologist do in a museum?’, using Ames (1992), together with other authors who have discussed the chronology of the divergence between social and museum anthropologies, and their more recent re-approximations. Technical staff from the museum were invited to contribute to the next four sessions.

The photographer The photographer, Ann Christine Eek, discussed photography in the context of the museum. Much of what we do and what we know of museums and their contents is intricately tied up with photography (see Porto, this volume). We depend upon photographic images and photographic reproduction of information to an astonishing degree in the complex world of museums (see, for example, Purcell and Gould 1992). Photography enables us, for example, to do research on museum collections; working photographs, as distinct from the aestheticised images that are used in catalogues or as publicity material, are often crucial to the process of identifying, documenting and selecting from collections (cf. Bouquet 1991, 1992). Eek discussed photography in general as the art of illusion, and her work at the museum in terms of technical conditions (lighting, materials) and the 185

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standards she tries to meet (the information a photograph should convey). A few days later, students had the opportunity to visit her studio at the museum, where she was engaged in photographing some of the objects selected for the staircase exhibition that would be reproduced in the exhibition publication. Photography is thus one of the technical skills essential to the process of reconnoitring and inventarising what will go on display in an exhibition; as well as for illustrative and publicity purposes. Another aspect concerns locating archival photographs used to illustrate events in and outside the museum. The museum photographer was not only essential to this part of the process of exhibition making, but also to making the image of the exhibition: she personified the photological apparatus to an important extent (Saunders, Porto, this volume). Eek, intrigued by fourteen unidentified wax heads in glass boxes, played a singular role in our coming to ‘see’ them as candidates for the staircase exhibition. In physically arranging and photographing them on the upper landing of the staircase, she effectively placed them in the exhibition space before the event.

Figure 11.2 Ann Christine Eek’s arrangement of the fourteen wax heads in glass boxes on the staircase in Oslo. Photograph: Ann Christine Eek. Reproduced by kind permission of the photographer and the Universitetets kulturhistoriske museer, Oslo 186

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Cooperation with a photographer along these lines provides another example of the exploratory fieldwork-like quality of exhibition making. Effects that are more than just appearances are constantly being tried out: these trials are also an intrinsic part of what might be called the ethnography of exhibition making. The final appearance of an exhibition cannot be known in advance; the long, slow process of defining what it contains and how it will look is also about making it meaning something, and in this respect it may be compared to an art (cf. Morphy 1994). The look, the contents and the meanings were formed to a remarkable – although perhaps not entirely surprising – degree through the work of the photographer.7 In these ways, and many more, photographic vision is an integral part of an apprenticeship in seeing (Bouquet 2001a).

The depot manager The second guest to the lecture series was Ingrid Marstrander, who was jointly responsible with Farideh Faramarzi for work in the depots. We discussed the nature of the museum (the storage areas backstage), the daily use of Gjessing and Johannessen’s history, and the application of Handler’s definition of the museum as a social arena. We also considered what happens when academic anthropologists desist from the task of mediating the material remnants they inherited from previous generations (in other words, not doing research on historical collections, or systematising knowledge about them), in terms of Latour’s (1993a) theory about incomplete modernity. Latour argues that modernity would involve proper mediation between, for example, the material (or technical) and the social (or the natural and the political orders), which we have conceived of separately for several centuries. The separation or purification of historical collections not only from the people who made them, but also from the complex web of relations that brought them into museums – and keep them there – is a brilliant example of how ethnographic presentation is often made to materialise at the expense of the past. The staircase exhibition provided an opportunity for drawing out by historicising and spatialising some usually invisible object-relations. Interestingly, the modernised museum infrastructures included administration, design, education, conservation and the library. The unmodernised infrastructures were the academic ones relating to documentation and research – scarcely surprising, perhaps, in the effective absence of curators. It was extremely important for students to be able to visit depots and see for themselves how the vast majority of the historical collections are kept backstage in museums. Storage areas extend by now far beyond the immediate vaults of the museum: to locate the curiosities, for example, an expedition was required to an underground garage some blocks away. The time-consuming nature of working with collections is seldom congenial. Yet the students were – people invariably are

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– fascinated by their visit to the underworld and by Marstrander’s calm description of her work and working conditions, often alone in these distant depots. The process of locating and selecting objects for the staircase exhibition depended to a large degree on the systematic work of tracking down and documenting objects with the depot managers. They also organised the objects selected or lent for the exhibition in a specially cleared room at the museum, greatly facilitating the work of those needing frequent access (the photographer, the architect, the conservation staff ). This pre-assemblage also meant that students were able to have a preview of what would go on display. They were particularly intrigued by the curiosities, and especially by the fact that this category did not become extinct in the nineteenth century, or indeed earlier – as the literature has it. The social relations so crucial to Handler’s definition of the museum are central to the success or otherwise of an exhibition. Whilst working on the exhibition we were also involved in the daily round of drinking coffee, eating lunch together in the museum lunchroom, drinking tea in the afternoon; as well as annual events such as birthdays and the Julebord.8 The depot manager, a personal friend of the architect, greatly facilitated the always slow, creative process of getting the design made. The time-consuming character of drawing up an inventory and being able to work effectively under pressure, makes personal relations with the technical staff a critical factor – certainly for those engaged on a short-term basis. Although students could barely glimpse this from a morning spent in the depots, it did at least bring them into areas of the museum mediated by people of whose existence they were scarcely conscious at the Institute in Blindern.

The conservation staff Apart from learning to see through or beyond objects to the social relations that congeal in them, and the classificatory processes that are responsible for their assignment to different kinds of museum, and within museums into different sorts of collections, the condition of the materials themselves is of critical importance to what museums do and what the public does or does not get to see. Few anthropologists are familiar with conservation techniques and their implications for exhibition making. This is obviously connected with the institutional history of anthropology, and more particularly with the way it has been embedded in the university. It is nonetheless important to be at least minimally conversant with some of the techniques and practices, in order to appreciate the limitations they impose. The Head of the Conservation department, Arne Bakken, and the textile conservator, Nalini Sharma, talked about the physical and material constraints on what could be displayed. We discussed why it is not always possible to use the objects we would like in order to say what we want to say in an exhibition. Once artefacts have been re-contextualised in museums, part of that new context involves trying to preserve them from relentless processes of decay, attacks by 188

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moths and so on. The physical, material state of an object cannot be taken for granted, and conservation staff are responsible for maintaining objects in an artificial state of suspension in museums.9 In this they resemble makeup specialists at a beauty parlour ensuring that objects are fit to be seen by the public. A Northwest Coast mask, for example, which had been found in fragments in the depot, was imperceptibly spruced back together again before the opening. The physical and material condition of museum specimens is part of our knowledge about them – not something on the other side of an unbreachable technical barrier (cf. Latour 1993a). This condition is also part of their historicity, which is exactly what some ethnographic museums try to suppress. Responsibility for the perishable nature of collections, which rests with conservation staff, can lead to tensions with those responsible for concept and design. While the latter may fervently wish to display a certain object, such as the extraordinary Amazonian feathered hammock which entered the Ethnographic Museum in the second part of the nineteenth century, the former may have to apply the brake. Concept-maker, depot manager, architect and photographer were all eager to display the hammock in the upper gallery of the exhibition, where this period was staged. However, the space available was too limited to display it flat, as required from the conservation angle, and for that reason the hammock had to return to the depot. The light entering the large curved windows on each side of the upper level of the staircase had to be filtered to protect textiles and other vulnerable materials from the bright midsummer Scandinavian sunshine. These, and numerous other constraints upon display, could be concretely discussed in the workshops at the museum, where students could also see the restoration of malangans, a number of which were included in the turn of the century section (see Bouquet 1996: 84–85).

The architect Cooperating with the (interior) architect, or designer, was obviously a crucial step in the process of translation. Toril Mugaas discussed her sketches for the different sections of the exhibit at Blindern. Students were particularly struck by her integration of the fourteen uncatalogued wax heads in glass boxes at every level of the exhibition: in the first scene (the present), for example, they were interspersed with T.V. screens showing clips of media-friendly anthropological personalities, talking about everything from football to fieldwork. The idea was to juxtapose the use of contemporary media with abandoned (and somewhat embarrassing) vestiges of the historical media collected in the museum. The museum visit with Mugaas included a glimpse of the workshops, where Inge Bjørgen and his colleagues were actually building the sets she had designed, walking through the exhibition space (up and down the staircase) and discussing her solutions to the problems of translating the concept into design. The fact that 189

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Figure 11.3 Cross sections from architect Toril Mugaas’ sketch design for the exhibition Sans og Samling, showing levels 1, 3 and 5, which were positioned vertically from 1, at the bottom, to 5 at the top of the staircase (Etnografisk Museum, 11/12/95; 01); level 2 (02), and level 4 (03), which were positioned one above the other – level 4 being on the opposite side of the upper landing from gallery 5. Reproduced by kind permission of Toril Mugaas, and the Universitetets kulturhistoriske museer. 190

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a staircase, however magnificent, is an access area rather than a gallery meant that security and fire regulations had to be dealt with alongside the more alluring issue of using an existing space within a building to narrate (in this case) multiple time. Making different historical and museological moments in the history of the museum materialise on the various levels, using selected items from the collections to reveal the complex system of social relations mediating their accession, 192

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was the architect’s tall order. Working together for a number of months, the architect’s deep emotional involvement with the museum’s history and characters (she succeeded Marie Krekling Johannessen) became clear, and was a tremendous asset to the project of translation. She was, in fact, a part of the ethnography she was making visible, and her solutions were ingenious and often surprising. There was a real sense of exploring a concept through a set of skills – in this case, design, but the observation applies equally to photography – which do not belong to the anthropologist’s instrumentarium. The importance of understanding the ethnographic potential of this process cannot be overstated. This kind of exploration bears comparison with the ‘fieldwork’ conducted by certain artists, except that in the kind of cooperation I am describing here, concept and design are an amalgam of the skills of anthropologist and architect. This approach differs from that assuming curatorial instruction to the designer, which seems to be at the root of the observation on design at the expense of content quoted at the beginning of this chapter. Students of museology need to understand the legitimately transformative nature of translating concept into design, in order to appreciate the specific input that is required of them in that process.

Cultural translation as anthropological work These brief snapshots of strategically using exhibition making as part of a lecture series in mid-1990s Oslo, exemplify another way of defining and teaching the transferable skills discussed by Cannizzo (this volume). My emphasis has been upon skills that anthropologists seldom master yet urgently require in the exhibitionary process. These skills are both practical and theoretical, and their entanglement in the social arena that is the museum is an absorbing side of museum anthropology. The fact that it is necessary to cooperate with particular persons in order to see a project through involves understanding and respecting their work not only as a set of technical skills, but also as a set of creative transformations that profoundly shape the cultural product that will be unveiled to the public. It should be possible for anthropologists to grasp what is at stake here in terms of their own methodology. Cultural translation has, according to Asad (1986), been principally a matter of language for anthropologists during the twentieth century. The cultural translator tries to render the intentio of what is being translated in the form of a coherent rather than a literal version of the original. Asad (1986: 156) cites Walter Benjamin (1969): ‘The language of a translation can – in fact must – let itself go, so that it gives voice to the intentio of the original not as a reproduction but as harmony, as a supplement of the language in which it expresses itself, as its own kind of intentio’. In order to translate the original meaning and coherence, the second language will need to undergo change. The challenge for the translator therefore consists in continually pushing his own language further than is usual. Asad recognises that it is never easy partially to de193

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and recompose your own language in this way through translation. He asserts that the process of translation is to some extent dependent on the ‘willingness’ of a language to be remodelled. The distinction between the process of translation in the field, and that which occurs when the anthropologist ‘writes culture’ at home, is an important one. The latter has as much to do with the audience who will read the text as it does with the language. If translation is a matter of harmonisation with the intentio of the original, rather than some kind of mechanical reproduction, then it does not have to be in the same form. It may be that the translation of another way of life, or culture, is actually not well accomplished in the form of ethnographic text. Asad refers to drama or dance performances, or the playing of a piece of music, as productions of the original, rather than a text which tries to provide a representation of the original. Asad has his doubts about whether such performances can be called cultural translations, since they introduce new dimensions into the relationship between anthropology and its public. That relationship would no longer be almost exclusively fashioned by writing and reading; but would involve anthropology in a new set of practices. Although Asad (writing in 1986) does not go into these new practices, his insight suggests that exhibition making qualifies in an interesting way as a problem of translation. Translation into a completely different form implies, indeed, a new production that is not equivalent to textual production. It augments and therefore becomes involved with new practices, including design and the literal construction of a scenario (building, lighting and so on), in which anthropolo-

Figure 11.4 Diagram showing the phases of concretising an exhibition, drawn in the process of making Sans og Samling in Oslo, 1995–1996. 194

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gists are not the experts. That entails new kinds of cooperation with non-anthropologists, shaping anthropological ideas in the process. Asad’s notion of translation is in many respects comparable to that of Michel Callon. Callon (1986) analyses how three scientists played a key role in a network of scallops, Breton fishermen and the scientists themselves. The scientists managed to create a coherent picture, in which the scallops, the fishermen and the scientific community all had a position. Before their ‘translation’, there were three separate worlds; afterwards, one. Callon analyses the various steps in putting together that coherent story. He distinguishes (i) problematisation (ii) interessement (iii) enrolment (iv) mobilisation (v) dissidence, in a process whereby a spokesman (for all the actors involved) emerges. If the script-writer for a temporary exhibition starts out as spokesman, s/he does not remain in that position throughout the exhibitionary process. Callon’s analysis permits the apprehension of how things as well as persons can be part of translation. Conversely, although an exhibition appears to be composed of things (and images, and words), it is actually a mixture of actors: things and people at the same time. Writing a storyline is one of the tasks in the process of contemporary exhibition-making. However, the process does not stop there: Translation is the mechanism by which the social and natural worlds progressively take form. The result is a situation in which certain entities control others. Understanding what sociologists generally call power relationships means describing the way in which actors are defined, associated and simultaneously obliged to remain faithful to their alliances. The repertoire of translation is not only designed to give a symmetrical and tolerant description of a complex process which constantly mixes together a variety of social and natural entities. It also permits an explanation of how a few obtain the right to express and represent the many silent actors of the social and natural worlds they have mobilized (Callon 1986: 223).

Ethnographic exhibitions were often thought of by anthropologists in the past as a way of depicting the lives of ‘others’. Seen as a process of translation, however, curatorial knowledge is only one element in a broader network of specialists in musealising culture. My argument has been that the means of making culture materialise in the form of an exhibition are more than ‘technical’: photography, design and conservation are fully fledged components of cultural production that inspire, take over from and amalgamate with the anthropological input. The comparison between exhibition making and the ethnographic process of translation underlines the intrinsic theoretical interest of seemingly practical activities – in both cases. The ethnography of exhibitionary processes brings out the complexity of the various skills at the museum. The translation of an exhibition concept into design differs from the translation involved in writing ethnographic texts by drawing on a network of people, skills and objects in a three dimensional, visual process of meaning making. These procedures amalgamate into a composite artefact, the exhibition, which can also be seen as an art form: ‘a set of objects having semantic 195

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and/or aesthetic properties that are used for presentational or representational purposes’ (Morphy 1994: 654). This chapter has argued that anthropologists can engage in a form of exploratory fieldwork through cooperation with specialists from other fields in making exhibitions. There is much to recommend ethnographic exploration of contemporary cultural production in museums, rather than assuming that an ‘emphasis on design’ is made at the ‘expense of content’. Drawing upon such an experiment, I have also argued that the process of translation that is intrinsic to exhibition making, is a matter of considerable theoretical interest to anthropology, and one that lends itself as a didactic instrument.

Acknowledgements I gratefully acknowledge the Institute and Museum of Anthropology, University of Oslo, for the invitation to spend a year with them, and for making the experience such a pleasure.

NOTES 1. The title of an earlier version of this paper, presented (in Dutch) in Amsterdam in December 1998, was ‘Het maken van tentoonstellingen als vertaalproblematiek’. It was striking that this title, which was (unremarkably) in English ‘The art of exhibition making as a problem of translation’, could not be rendered as ‘de kunst van het maken van tentoonstellingen’ in Dutch. In any case, it provides a good example of the problem of translation. The loss of ‘the art’ in the Dutch title possibly reflects the much greater precision of Dutch, some might say sobriety. A version of this chapter was published under the title ‘The didactics of exhibition making’ in Focaal, 34. I revert to the original title here in order to underline the translation process. The translations from Dutch (Voskuil, VCA/SNA) are mine. The Dutch ethnologist and novelist, Han Voskuil, expresses concern about the ‘museum effect’ several times in his massive seven part novel, Het Bureau, which is a literary account of daily life at the Meertens Institute in Amsterdam during the second half of the twentieth century. The citation at the beginning of the chapter is one such expression (from Part 4); there are many others throughout the novels. 2. Obviously, curatorial knowledge is critically important in the process of producing an exhibition, and Odd Are Berkaak, Per Rekdal, Ingrid Rudie, Arne Røkkum, Sarah Lund Skar, Axel Sommerfelt, Tom G. Svensson, Arve Sørum, and Espen Wæhle all contributed to Sans og Samling in that capacity. This input was particularly significant because of the crisis of curatorship that afflicted ethnographic museums, such as Oslo’s University Ethnographic Museum, as it did in many other sorts of museum (see Kavanagh et al. 1994) during the 1990s. A number of anthropologists remained physically in the museum or involved with it in different ways. (For a complete list, see Bouquet 1996: 130.) It is impossible to do justice to this dimension of the situation here, although I have tried elsewhere to exemplify it (Bouquet 2000a:170). My focus here is on the neglected issue of how technical processes of translation intervene in constructing others, and how in fact such processes inevitably produce amalgamated, anomalous materials that rightly defy classification into ‘them’ and ‘us’, hence complicating the conventional notion of

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3.

4.

5. 6

7.

8.

9.

curatorial expertise. In this respect, it is an attempt to redress the (im)balance in what is considered relevant for anthropologists in museums: in the past, this was assumed to be curatorial knowledge; under present circumstances, the intervention of technical expertise in making culture materialise should form an equally important item on the anthropological agenda (see Bouquet 1999, and forthcoming). Design and architect bureaus, logistical experts but also academics belong to this shifting labour force. Keith Hart (1998: 21) has referred to ‘Macjobs’, and observed that the ‘purveyors of hamburgers don’t get the time to reflect’. Although in the museum context, this reflection may be delayed, and take place over a number of years, it does nonetheless occur – not only among academics but also designers, photographers, managers and others (see Macdonald, this volume; also Bouquet 1996). I include this description since it crystallises a certain view of the situation then. It should be obvious that my account is strictly limited to the time I spent in Oslo (1995–1996), and does not go into the changes that have taken place since then, culminating in complete reorganisation as the Universitetets kulturhistoriske museer (joining the Ethnographic, Archaeological and Numismatic Collections, which already occupied the same building), in 1999, severing administrative ties between university faculties and their museums. It would be interesting to analyse in how far the making of Sans og Samling contributed to the process of reorganisation, but is beyond the scope of this chapter. This description (and the following paragraph) is based on the letter of invitation (066.94–1/LJF/Oslo/6 May 1994). There were a number of interesting exceptions since half a dozen or so MA and Ph.D. students had rooms in the attic at the museum. Maria Guzman first drew attention to the fourteen wax heads in glass boxes, which were stored on the tops of cupboards and along the corridor between the student offices and the library, and were to become a feature of the exhibition (see Bouquet 1996, 2000b). Compare with Rosamund Purcell’s photograph of the specimen, given to Ole Worm by King Frederick III for his ‘cabinet’ (‘the jaw of a horse, so joined to an oak branch that no traces of its insertion remain’), which she photographed from the other side at the Zoology Department of the University of Copenhagen (Purcell and Gould 1986: 9–10). Julebord is the Christmas feast, which was held in December 1995 on the upper landing of the museum staircase. Staff from the whole of IMA were invited, and everybody brought their culinary specialty. Ann Christine Eek and Nalini Sharma were in charge of beautifully decorating the long tables. Apart from eating and drinking, speeches were made including the farewell speech to mark Arne Martin Klausen’s retirement. The photographer Rosamund Purcell writes of her fascination with zoological collections in just these terms: ‘... the death of an organism is the beginning; it strips away the layer of life. Other layers of information may then vanish with each stage of dissection – the skin from the bone; the bones from the skin; color and opacity from the tissue ... or fluids from the vital organs, arteries and veins. Irrelevant layers are discarded as the scientist seeks a proper vantage point for his work ... What the viewer to the collections sees then is always partial, sometimes vestigial, and to the nonscientist, often mysterious’. She continues that we have rendered animals ‘as gods as totems, as auguries. We have devised peculiar rites for these creatures in natural history museums – inscriptions in ink on bone, chemical baths to render them translucent, systematic placement on shelves, often in the dark, often in shrouds of dust or moth crystals. I think of these treatments as forms of burial, but I think of the animals as expressing, in various ways, life after death’ (Purcell and Gould 1986: 115–116).

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V Looking ahead

12 W HY

POST- MILLENNIAL MUSEUMS WILL NEED FUZZY GUERRILL AS

Michael M. Ames




As the millennium approached more attention was being given to speculations about what the twenty-first century holds, the terrors of damnation, the delights of paradise, or a mixture somewhere in between. Whatever the futures projected for the future, there appeared to be growing consensus on what we were leaving behind: the end of everything we knew. Indian sociologist T. K. Oommen (1995: 141) observed several years ago how ‘We live in a world of endisms (end of history, geography, nature, ideology), pastisms (post-industrial, post-capitalist, post-modern) and beyondisms (beyond the nation state, beyond the Cold War) .... If endisms indicate a world without boundaries, pastisms announce the emergence of fresh boundaries and beyondisms allude to the elongation of boundaries.’ Whatever else happens, nothing is expected to remain the same. Oommen is certainly not the only commentator on endisms. There is a long standing tradition in Western thought to proclaim the decline and fall of civilisations: Gibbon’s (1804–1805) seven volume The history of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, for example, or Spengler’s (1926) Decline of the West (Fulford 1997, Herman 1997). Consider the following titles published during the last few years of the twentieth century: Damian Thompson’s (1996) The end of time: faith and fear in the shadow of the millennium, Asa Briggs and Daniel Snowman’s (1996) Fins de Siecle: How centuries end 1400–2000, Jeremy Rifkin’s (1995) The end of work, John Horgan’s (1996) The end of science: facing the limits of knowledge in the twilight of the scientific age, Bill Readings (1996) The university in ruins, and numerous other familiar titles, including Woodall’s (1996) list of The end of affluence, The death of inflation, The death of competition, The end of geography, The 200

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death of money, The death of economics, and to cap it all off, June Nash’s (1997) essay, ‘When isms become wasms: structural functionalism, marxism, feminism and postmodernism’, John Leslie’s (1996) proclamation to end all proclamations, The end of the world, and, not to be outdone, physicist Julian Barbour’s (1999) The end of time (Farrar 1998). I do not want to add to these endisms, though I would like to make a modest contribution to futurisms. It is not my contribution but the ideas of twelve museum professionals who signed up for a long distance Internet seminar, which the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology (MOA) colleague, Kersti Krug and I gave during the Spring of 1997 as part of MOA’s experimental Museum Studies Certificate course. The twelve participants were scattered across North America, from Alaska and the Northwest Territories in the North to Utah and Arizona in the South, and from Hawaii out in the Pacific to Newfoundland on the East Coast. Krug and I conducted our discussions by e-mail. One of the tasks Kersti Krug suggested we assign them was to work in four email teams of three each to sketch future scenarios for museums, based on a framework derived from Nancy Ramsey and Pamela McCorduck (1996) in their book The future of women, scenarios for the 21st century. Ramsey and McCorduck conducted on-line and in-person discussions with men and women around the world with regard to four scenarios: (1) Backlash (against women’s rights), (2) The Golden Age of Equality, (3) Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Backward, and (4) Separate and Doing Fine, Thanks (Gram 1997). We asked our four Certificate teams to consider how the first three scenarios – Backlash, Golden Age, and Two Steps Forward and Backward – might apply to the cultural sector, that is, to create their own scenarios.1 In retrospect, we probably should have included the fourth scenario – Separate and Doing Fine – to provoke their imaginations even more. In this fourth projection Ramsey and McCorduck describe how by 2015 women respond to continuing inequality by creating their own women-only environments, organising residential enclaves, businesses and families. Many women choose to have children by artificial and anonymous insemination, interact with men mostly in business contexts, organise internationally to influence governments, boycott or strike against sexist firms, and – because they continue to outlive men – dominate policy decisions affecting pensions. (Krug and I did not think at the time that Separate and Doing Fine was a viable option for museums, though in fact it is for many public non-government and non-university ones. Apparently we allowed our bias for the Museum of Anthropology’s nesting within the University of British Columbia to influence our judgement.) The four Certificate teams responded with imaginative pictures of the future, some a little frightening when it came to worse case scenarios, and all of them not just a little revealing of how we all tend to think about the future, especially concerning the future of those cultural institutions near and dear to us. I will summarise the three scenarios, extracting ideas from the four team reports, adding a few points here and there drawn from research reports by Des 201

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Griffin (1996), Griffin and Abraham (1999), a few other sources such as Canadian Museums Human Resource Planning Committee (1997), and some of my own imaginings derived from North American, Australian and New Zealand experiences.2

The Backlash, dateline 2015 A new world disorder prevails worldwide. Capitalism’s highest claim (Thorsell 1996), that ‘a rising tide floats all boats,’ has left many of them floundering on the rocks. While market-friendly reforms have helped to reduce government deficits and boost consumer production, unemployment remains high in most nation states. Governments continue to relinquish fiscal controls to global trade organisations, money markets and continental unions in an almost religious faith in the benevolent power of global market forces. Everyone becomes a consumer, everyone belongs to an ethnic community or tribe, but the idea of citizenship declines along with the power of nation states to direct their economies. Ethnic conflicts and extremist movements are on the rise, financial crises and gaps between rich and poor within and between nations widen despite reforms, and degradation of the environment continues unabated. So-called liberal institutions, which include many not-for-profits, are publicly ridiculed for promoting diversity and dissent (typically considered to be the same thing). Government interest in social equity programmes diminishes. Some museums and galleries are converted to community centres. Those cultural institutions that continue to receive government funding are officially licensed by authorities, which must approve all exhibitions and programmes. Many convert into community centres managed by government departments of recreation and physical fitness. All public institutions are expected to be non-controversial, entertaining (‘infotainment’ or ‘edutainment’), and committed to a sanitised point of view so as not to disrupt the public peace. Cultural institutions are centrally organised with homogeneous managements along gender and/or ethnic lines. The government generously supports a few major flagship organisations, popularly referred to as ‘public temples’, and decreases funding for others designated as satellites. Typically the large and the small survive while middle-sized institutions are more vulnerable to cut backs therefore are more likely to fall by the wayside. Men occupy most positions of authority in the larger institutions, while older women staff the small satellite museums as volunteers. Chief officers of larger, thriving cultural institutions are now all government appointees, selected for their business acumen, particularly in profit-making enterprises. The bottom line is placed at the top of the agenda for those organisations wishing to succeed. Management systems are hierarchical, and most staffs manifest little enthusiasm for working collectively towards goals imposed upon them, which in any case 202

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the trustees do not clearly articulate. Internal bickering and jealousies among both the governing authorities and within museums are rampant; teams are formed and quickly break down into warring factions. Staffing is gradually reduced over the years and work loads for those remaining correspondingly increased. Through government-supported ‘bumping’ regulations most curatorial and other professional museum positions are gradually filled by people with seniority and little or no appropriate training or experience for, or little interest in, their new postings. That no longer seems to matter to anyone. Museums begin to de-accession artefacts and documents representing working class life as a cost-saving measure, and in recognition of the viewing interests of a narrowing well-to-do audience base and requests from corporate sponsors for upscale images to use in their marketing campaigns. Signposts that we may be heading in this direction include the prevalence of market-friendly government policies, persisting unemployment and economic inequalities; continuing monopolisation of top political and cultural positions by ‘chronologically-enhanced males’; public expressions of right wing neo-conservative or family value sentiments, homophobia, racism and political correctness; taxpayer revolts and increasing reliance on user fees and two-tier social services; further reductions in government funding coupled to growing demands for public accountability; downsizing and retrenchments in public and private sectors; weakening of public infrastructures because of reduced funding; the general public either indifferent or critical of the cultural sector, which is seen as wasteful and elitist.

The Golden Age of Equality The Golden Age is a different world order altogether, opposite to The Backlash, the kind of world museum people dream about. By 2015 the globally integrated economy, achieved through careful social as well as economic reforms, has produced enough wealth to give most people a decent standard of living and to allow governments to fund social and cultural initiatives generously. The capitalist tide has risen enough not only to float all the boats but also to provide many people with new and larger ones. Cultural diversity is highly valued. Equality of genders, races and lifestyles is constantly protected and enhanced nationally and internationally. Museums become the ‘in’ places to be and to be seen by children as well as adults. Trustees share long-term visions with museum administrators and staff, leading to widespread consensus that they should not only ‘do the right thing’, but also ‘do the thing right’. What is more, trustees support objectives with resources. Museums also become robustly entrepreneurial. Prosperous ones communicate effectively to audiences in and beyond their walls with innovative uses of electronic technology. They become centres of community activity, attracting increased attendance. Larger museums have an important influence on government and community 203

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policies concerning the environment and community lifestyles. The museum work force becomes highly mobile because of the growth of the museum movement and new opportunities for consulting. Women and men hold equal numbers of positions at all levels. Communities welcome and respect cultural workers and even celebrate some as culture heroes. Traditional hierarchies in museums are levelled, power relations are equalised, team work becomes the norm. All marginalised peoples are given voice in mainstream institutions where programming becomes increasingly diverse, while tribal and ethnic museums generously supported by the state continue to be established everywhere to tell their own stories for their own communities. Signposts of the impending Golden Age include the growth of information technology and global communication systems that increase world levels of education and cross-cultural understanding, the continued expansion of free trade agreements and liberal market philosophies that fuel continued economic growth, and the growing public acceptance of cultural diversity and policies of multiculturalism within most western nation states. Museums, in accord with these developments, have been busily re-engineering themselves to reduce operating costs and increase programme efficiencies; to invest more in marketing, especially to non-traditional or ethnic markets; and to diversify their exhibition offerings in line with these promotional strategies, with particular emphasis on non-European arts, crafts and artists. Gender equity and anti-harassment policies are becoming standard in the public sector, hiring priorities are established for under represented groups, efforts are being made to ensure that the governing boards of not-for-profits have appropriate class, gender and ethnic mixes, and a growing number of not-for-profits routinely involve their staffs in planning and visioning exercises.

Two Steps Forward, Two Steps Backward The global economy is booming. Standards of living have increased worldwide with the growth of free trade and rapid communication systems, and governments give high priority to cultural organisations as civilising forces. The benefits of economic growth are unequally distributed, however, both between and within nation states. The tide of progress rises and falls unequally around the globe, carrying polluted waters with prosperity, swamping some boats and carrying others forward. Tourist destinations boom. Local communities suffer from government neglect, overcrowding and pollution caused by the widespread use of private transportation and fossil fuels, and lack of employment opportunities except in low-paying service industries. Older people exert more influence over government policies and expenditures, especially for medical and pension services, as their percentage of the total population increases. This leads to further divisions between the haves and have-nots, between well-to-do older people and low income seniors relegated to urban ghettos, and between the older employed and younger under204

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employed. Mandatory retirement regulations are abandoned as seniors refuse to give up their jobs because of the diminishing value of their medical and pension plans. This fosters increased mobility for youth because there are fewer jobs, requiring them to travel from region to region and, thanks to free trade agreements, from country to country. Thus young people have unrestricted movement, but few permanent job prospects. Crime rates drop among older generations, but increase dramatically among younger people who see few prospects of career employment or adequate pensions. Growing numbers of young people drop out of mainstream society, forming gangs that rule over decaying city centres. Women are now beginning to out number men in the public sector, and they are gradually moving into the traditionally male-dominated professions and occupations in increasing numbers (though the service industries continue to supply most new employment opportunities for women). These new arenas mostly remain hierarchical, however, with the higher levels of power remaining in the hands of older white males. Meanwhile, Iron John movements remain strong as men attempt to reclaim through litigation lost positions lower down the organisational and professional pyramids, citing pro-women hiring practices as a violation of their civil rights, and claiming that the establishment of women-only educational, residential and retail communities constitute unfair trading practices under prevailing global trade agreements.3 Governments extol the virtues of cultural organisations for their civilising or domesticating influences and promise cultural centres for everyone, a museum, gallery and theatre for every city. These centres succeed in attracting people with higher disposable income who are the ones invited to openings where food and wine are served. Lower income people who do not donate generously to museums or purchase membership packages are only invited to sidewalk displays where they are issued food stamps that can be exchanged at local McSoup Kitchens. Large city museums surround their buildings with sidewalk booths selling everything from cheap artefact replicas to designer hot dogs. Museum trustees develop eloquent vision statements for the long term which, however, management and staff largely ignore in favour of their own visions, even though they cannot agree among themselves as to what those visions are. Cultural organisations now handle most routine tasks with electronic technology, releasing cultural workers to focus on their higher pursuits of research, publication and internal politics. Staff teams work effectively, though often in opposition to management, viewing such oppositional tactics as a form of on-the-job recreation. High definition computer-video systems have taken over most of the functions of interpretation and education. Written forms of communication that used to be called labels, once produced by people identified as curators, are now displayed as historic museological curiosities or as examples of primitive graphic art. Tour guides and explainers are replaced by visitor-activated televised talking heads. Security is provided by robotic Renta-Robo Guards and high voltage laser fences. Staff publications have increased considerably because of all the release time, 205

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though most are published on the dated CD-Rom system. Job-induced stress is reduced because most staff now work behind protective curtains of electronic media and laser fences, and therefore need not interact with the public from one year to the next. On the other hand, staff rivalries, feuds and character assassinations increase because they have more time to interact with one another. The introduction of market-friendly human resource policies means that directors, senior managers and star curators can now be bought, sold and traded among museums like their counterparts in professional sports. Museums routinely draft new staff from the colleges and send them down to community museums for seasoning on reduced pay and longer working hours. Most are subsequently laid off or traded to smaller institutions rather than brought up to the big city museums. Uneven employment rates by age, gender and region, most employers in the public sector to offer unlimited time off without pay, while reducing full time employment for permanent staff to ten hours per week. Most people therefore moonlight as marijuana farmers, McSoup Kitchen customer service representatives, or security personnel for factories that manufacture Renta-Robo guards. Signposts and signals of the Two-Step Scenario: great wealth is being produced through market reforms and global trading networks; rapid advances in electronic technology are enhancing the accumulation and dissemination of information; growing numbers of women are enrolling in traditionally male-dominated professions; gender and ethnic equity policies are now standard in the public sector. Benefits from all these advances continue to be unequally distributed, however. Western governments publicly celebrate multiculturalism while continuing to privilege traditional Eurocentric cultural, legal, and political policies and practices. Large differences in privileges and powers persist between the rich and the poor, men and women, European and non-European, north and south, and in some cases are expanding. Large pockets of poverty and unemployment persist in most countries. Crimes against private property increase. Industry continues to promote the use of the private automobile while pollution chokes a growing number of cities. Iron John, Real Women and radical feminist groups continue to vigorously contest one another. Separatist movements and ethnic conflicts grow at the same pace as global markets, demonstrating the ambiguous effects of globalisation that reduce distances between people while simultaneously reaffirming old divisions and instigating new ones. Governments extol the virtues of culture while reducing their support for it. A major publishing and consulting industry is being built around the quick fix strategies of management gurus.

Imagining the future: conclusions Imagining the future is always a risky business, nevertheless I will try to summarise what we have achieved here with the help of our Certificate teams. Who in 1472, for example, would have imagined what happened in 1492? Who in 206

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1978 imagined that people would be nattering on the net in 1998? How, then, can one think about 2015 in any realistic way? Our Certificate groups made intuitively reasonable assertions. Some of the backlash scenarios were particularly horrifying, which perhaps was a good thing. Unless we can imagine the look of evil how can we rise up to resist it? The four on-line Certificate groups were obviously drawing upon their own extensive experiences, many of which we would share because of the common nature of the work we do. There was general agreement, for example, on the important ‘signposts and signals’ from 1997 used to project the future: neo-conservative political ideologies and market-friendly reforms, continuing growth of consumer capitalism and associated criminal elements on a global basis, financial accountability as the driving force, taxpayer revolts, downsizing, increasing cultural diversity through immigration, deterioration of public infrastructures, continuing growth of populism and the marginalisation of cultural activities considered elitist. There was consensus among the four groups as to what the three scenarios would be like as well, though they gave less attention to the Golden Age because it did not seem to be as likely an outcome. The Backlash and Two Steps Forward and Backward, on the other hand, shared a number of features: persistence of hard and soft forms of hierarchical systems of authority, disharmonious divisions of labour, exploitative market conditions, divisions based on ethnicity, sex and age, decreasing personal freedoms, increasing economic and social inequalities, decreasing public and private support for alternatives to standard mainstream cultural productions, increasing importance of cultural revenue generating activities (‘infotainment culture industries’). The four teams were concerned that systems of hierarchy and inequality may continue to exist into the future, therefore they also devoted attention to counteractive strategies that might be put into place. One group4 proposed an opposition between two organisational models they termed the ‘recipe’ and ‘stone soup’ systems. The ‘recipe’ model refers to the classic Weberian bureaucratic process: topdown hierarchical relations of power and authority, formal rules of order and procedures, agendas pre-set and frequently hidden, dependence on outside experts who support the ideas at the top. The planning process follows the same model, leading to results that typically are comprehensive in scope, formulaic in nature, and proscriptive in intent. The ‘stone soup’ model is taken from a folk tale about a hungry traveller who had no food. He/she stopped by the roadside and began to boil some stones in a pot, explaining to passers-by that it was soup. As people gathered, each contributed some food, a vegetable or piece of meat, making the soup thicker and richer, until finally they all sat down to feast on the nourishing ‘stone soup’. The ‘stone soup’ organisational process is structured, or re-engineered, from the ground up rather than from the top down. All stakeholders contribute to the mix according to what they have to give, so it is difficult to predict the outcome 207

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in advance. It depends upon contributions during the process more than on any prescribed agenda or desired conclusion. Widespread participation means (at least in theory!) widespread appreciation of the results The problem the Certificate people examined was how to interject stone soup ideas into museums that usually act like recipe-based organisations and into planning exercises that are likely to be required under all three scenarios. Even Golden Ages have kings and queens or administrative hierarchies, and besides, a perfect life could become rather boring without stone soup surprises. Attempting to persuade trustees and administrators, or kings and queens, who normally think in terms of trusted family recipes, to opt instead for the uncertain contents of a stone soup is not always a viable option. The Certificate groups thus began to explore soft underground or fuzzy guerrilla tactics (cf. the Guerrilla Girls website, see also Guerrilla Girls 1998) designed to open up or loosen formal administrative and planning processes. Suggested tactics included publicly crediting superiors for successful ideas subalterns themselves introduce, using humour as a less-threatening form of criticism, finding ways to subvert or bypass hierarchy or traditional procedures in order to enhance participation from the ranks, unsettling those in charge of official rules and regulations by professing innocence or surprise as to their purpose or effectiveness, challenging these procedures by repeatedly asking for their rational-legal justifications. The common strategy

Figure 12.1 Guerrilla Girls ponder museum practices. © Guerrilla Girls.

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underlying these tactics is the promotion of ‘discontinuous upside down thinking’ (Handy 1991: 19–23): turning a premise or conclusion on its side or in reverse, taking concepts from one field and applying them to another, turning a problem on its head to make it strange, or introducing any other conceptual technique that might encourage new ways of looking at a problem. There was general agreement among Certificate participants that the Golden Age would represent the reversal of all the negatives of the Backlash scenario: economic prosperity through globally integrated economic growth (the market turns benign), dismantling of hierarchies, harmonious divisions of labour, acceptance of diversity, practice of equality within a context of individualism and cultural pluralism, the widespread acceptance of cultural activities and productions as integral parts of everyday life, and people showering respect and appreciation upon museum folk. These conclusions are in line with current organisational theories that claim horizontal or participatory organisational forms that ‘empower’ people are more productive than hierarchical ones. Why does hierarchy always get a bad name? It looks as we have arrived back at that grand dream of Western civilisation that sprang from the Enlightenment, of a prosperous society (or cultural organisation), which happily combines equality with rewards for individual effort and promotes the idea of universally shared social values along with acceptance of cultural differences. Imagine the potential contradictions among those four themes! The values of individual achievement and equality can work at cross purposes when they are simultaneously implemented, as can the values of unity around common standards and tolerance for others. Our favourite nightmare of ineffective or indifferent governments threatens to haunt us from the shadows: a rapacious form of global capitalism that sinks more boats than it floats, persisting or growing inequalities of power and wealth, and short-term vested interests, all of which want to conspire together to deny us our desirable future. The fact that the values of equality, achievement, universalism and tolerance are culturally situated, descending to us from the European Enlightenment, does not in itself make them ‘wrong.’ All values are historically situated. One has to stand somewhere, to speak from somewhere, from some socially constituted position. Nevertheless, we might also want to question our automatic distrust of hierarchical or unequal forms of authority (‘systems of domination’). As Griffin and Abraham (1997) noted, it is not the type of structure that matters so much as the manner in which it operates. One way to look critically at our own assumptions is to apply Handy’s (1991) upside down thinking. Not all systems of authority, or all hierarchical relationships, or all inequalities, or all gender differences, are necessarily harmful or exploitative, for example. As someone once said, politics is like sex: someone has to take the lead otherwise nothing gets done. Can we think then of the possibility of people being equal and different at the same time? The idea of equal value for equal work may have been a little misguided. An idea according to which 209

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many small-scale or tribal societies have managed a successful division of labour is more in line with the principle of equal value for different work. Perhaps a principal is needed which will bring together the value of individual equality with respect for gender, ethnic and cultural differences. Whatever future scenarios happen, whatever kinds of museum organisation come into place – and one thing we know for certain about the future is that we know it will be uncertain – perhaps what organisations also need are underground, subaltern or soft guerrilla manoeuvres, and upside down thinking, to keep their management systems flexible and authorities accountable to those below as well as to those above them. Soft or fuzzy guerrillas we might call those who provide these organisational loosening services. They could also be described as ‘tempered radicals’ who, according to management theorists Debra Meyerson and Maureen Scully (1995), in a paper in Organization Science,5 are individuals committed to their organisations and to improving them. That is why post-millennial museums, whatever their type, could use fuzzy guerrillas in their midst (as well as critics on the outside, of course).

Acknowledgements An earlier version of this article was presented to the Planning Group of the Australian Museum, Sydney, 19 August 1997, chaired by Dr Des Griffin and Tim Sullivan. I am greatly indebted for the comments received on that occasion. I am also grateful to the Research Institute for Cultural Heritage, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia (and to Director Professor David Dolan) for the visiting appointment, August-November 1997, which provided opportunity to continue working on the article. I am also indebted to Kersti Krug, University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology (UBC-MOA), for comments on an earlier draft and for many observations that ended up included here.

NOTES 1. Since writing the above I discovered Tadashi Nakamae’s article in The Economist (1998), where he also outlines three main scenarios for the Japanese economy: Japan fails to make necessary structural changes, it manages a virtuous reform, and, third, changes lead to mixed results. Hammond (1998) also offers three economic scenarios for the future: Market World (new era of prosperity brought on by one big market), Fortress World (market fails, poverty spreads), and Transformed World (the market and local democracy flourish). 2. The scenarios described here are summarised from more detailed reports submitted during the Internet Phase of the Museum of Anthropology Certificate Program by Team A (Lyn Royce, Doreen Cooper, Darrin Martens, 6 June 1997), Team B (Peggy Lindauer, Pauline Sugino, Mar-

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Why post-millennial museums will need fuzzy guerillas lene Lambert-Tempest, 6 June 1997), Team C (Charles Arnold, Derek Cooke, John Rumming, 6 June 1997), and Team D (Penny Houlden, Bev Kennedy, Kathryn Rumbold, 8 June 1997). The teams, Kersti Krug or Des Griffin are not responsible in any way for how their ideas and words were incorporated in this report, however. The Museum of Anthropology has a long history of experimenting with museum training. Audrey Hawthorn, the founding curator, introduced in the early 1960s the first university museum courses in Canada. Over the years others were added, all of them periodically revised, and new ones tried out. The Certificate Program, directed by Dr Carol Mayer, a MOA curator, was the most recent experiment. It involved a twelve-week internet seminar and a two-week residency. Though the first year was successful, the Certificate Program is now on hold while the museum considers yet another initiative, an interdisciplinary MA in critical curatorship jointly with the Departments of Anthropology-Sociology and Fine Arts. (The new director of MOA, Dr Ruth Phillips, a historian, holds professorial appointments in both departments.) 3. A coalition of men’s groups in Canada apparently threatened to begin a class action suit against the federal government on the grounds that some of its equity policies discriminate against men. That is ‘nothing short of preposterous,’ according to the president of the National Action Committee (NAC) on the Status of Women (Southam Press 1998). ‘To actually begin with the premise that men and women are equal in Canada is factually wrong,’ NAC president Joan Grant-Cummings stated. 4. Charles Arnold, Peggy Lindauer and Lyn Royce proposed this idea during the summer residency phase that followed the Internet seminar, chaired by Dr Carol Mayer, Director of Certificate Program. 5. I am indebted to Kersti Krug for this reference.

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230

I NDEX




‘nation-building’ v. ‘empire building’, 103 of museums, 14, 107, 109 relationship to museums, 144, 162 status as an art, 145 teaching and research on collections, 97 transferable skills, 175 university teaching, 86, 149, 162, 173–6, 183–93, 201–10 apprenticeship in seeing, 102, 104 architect, 189 Ardener, Edwin, 144, 145 art, 10, 23, 34n26,145 African, 23–4, 43, 89,152–3 and anthropology, 147 as fieldwork, 145 contemporary, 102 national display at Louvre, 89 art museum, 16n7, 96 and history of art, 82 status of ethnographic objects in, 96 art/science dichotomy, 23 artefacts, commoditisation, 67–9

A academy, 20, 30, 154 aesthetic, 16n7, 24,19, 29, 30, 80, 86, 87, 89, 90, 148, 160, 166, 181, 185, 196 agency, 56, 72, 118, 138 American Museum of Natural History, 100 Ames, Michael, 14, 109, 110 anthropologists, rediscovery of museums, 14 relationship to museums, 107 anthropology, academic, 2, 56,150 art and critical museology, 161 at home and in museum, 80–4 critical, 145 critique of, 109, 143 development of, 107 discipline of, and museum, 2, 93, 106, 145, 162 discourses, 142–3 history of, 2, 93, 99 leaves the museum, 84–6, 93 museum as, 176 museum of, 2, 107, 176 national traditions, 7, 93, 99 231

Index

Clifford, James, 20, 27–31, 115 typology, 28–9 Coimbra University, 37, 93, 97–9 Anthropology Museum, 38, 97–9,101 teaching ethnographic museology at, 99 collecting as ‘gathering things from the natives’, 60 as intercultural exchange, 72 ceremonial artefacts, 61 colonial, 65 ‘contact zones’, 66, 72 culture of, 67 see also performances, rituals, trade no longer goal for researchers, 85–6 collections, 77–84 abandonment of, 3, 86 Aboriginal, 6, 55 see also Tiwi access, 9, 99, 101 Barbier-Mueller, 23–4, 34n26 context of, 135 Graburn on, 65 Green Gallery, 151 history of, 6, 55–72, 101, 165–70,182 indigenous agency in, 56, 65–72 see also colonial collecting Mang’anja and Manyema, 168–9 nation state formation, 185 photographic archives, 5, 36, 51 potlatch regalia, 5, 27–30 research potential of, 56, 97 role in national identity, 102 role in teaching, 97, 101 ‘unique selling point’, 129 weapons in, 168–9 collectors, 55 collector’s collections, 132 Livingstone, David, 167–9 Spencer, Baldwin, 56–72

artists, 155–61 avante-garde, 146 Asad, Talal, 193–5 Aubrac research programme, 83–4 Australian Aborigines, 55–71 passim selective representation in collections, 55 authority, 4, 20, 25, 101, 135, 151, 178, 202, 207, 209, see also Native Authority

B Bal, Mieke, 137 ‘back stage’ and ‘front stage’, 117 Baxandall, M., 19, 177 ‘beholder’s share’, 19 Benjamin, Walter, 193 Bennett, Tony, 124 Benthall, Jonathan, 178 Boas, Franz, 28, 100, 101, 108, 181 Boas-Hunt corpus, 28–9 Bouquet, Mary, 13, 103, 139 Boyce, Sonia, 155–6, 158 Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, 149 broadcasting, 171 see also cultural production Broca, Paul, 93, 99

C Callon, Michel, 195 Cannizzo, Jeanne, 12, 193 capitalism, 19, 24, 33n10, 207, 209 Chubb, Shirley, 156–8 citizens, 77 citizen-mass vs. ‘visitors’, 126 citizenship, 202 classification, 25, 100,157 232

Index

colonial administration, and collecting, 57 discourse on otherness, 31 encounter, 56 subject, 20 see Native Authority colonialism, 19, and anthropology, 109 and domesticity, 22 and evolutionary theory, 143 as a desiring machine, 19, 20, 25 Belgian, 22 British, 164, see Livingstone French, 78 see also rural France impact on anthropology, 143 Portuguese, 6, 38, 102, 103, 168 see post-colonialism, print colonialism colonisers, Joe Cooper, 57–65 in Melville and Bathurst Islands, 64 Congo, 21–6 conservation, 188 consumer, 202 Cossons, Neil, 119 crisis, of museums, 76–7, 86, 94, 109 of representation, 107, 114, 142 critical museology, 11, 101, 145, 146 see unsettlement, 137 see unsettling meaning, 142 critical reflexivity, 11, 138 cross-cultural exchange, 55 see collections Cuisenier, Jean, 85 cultural agency, 138 cultural analysis, 119 cultural communication, 171 see broadcasting, parallels with, 171–3 cultural production, 162–9, 171, 173, 176, 178–80, 195 academic training for, 171

collective enterprise, 172 see trust cultural studies, 118, 144 ethnographic study of, 96 cultural translation, 193 culture, 24, 25, 27–32 passim, 46, 50, 56, academic vs. curatorial, 170–1 artificial, concentrated form, 15 see also museum culture as interpretation, 12, 161 as a material thing, 100 see artefacts commodification of, 4 consumption of, 2, 24, 173, critique of, 32 industry, 4, 178 making materialise, 15 material, 2, 3, 8, 10, 56, 65, 72, 81, 85, 88, 90, 92, 95, 97, 98, 107, 108, 111, 125, 181 musealisation of, 14 post-colonial, 24 curator, 4, 24, 85, 122, 132,133, 162, 164, 165, 182 balance of power, 177 co-curator, 163 crisis of curatorship, 4 curator-interpreter, 133 curator-researcher, 95 guest curator, 12 reflexivity, 110 scholarly research, 171 star, 206 curatorial culture, 171 curatorial expertise, 122 curatorial GPs, 132 curatorial team, 162 curiosities, on-going category of, 182, 188 curriculum, 8, 13, 173 critical museology, 101 marginalisation of ethnographic museology on, 7, 9, 98 233

Index

everyday life, 130 see also science evolutionary theory, 57, 81, 99, 108, 143, 150, 165 and diffusionist, 106 exhibition, as artefact, 13, 195 see also network as collection, 122 as a mixture of actors, 195 backstage, behind the scenes, 117 contexts, 165–7 critical, 149–61 David Livingstone and the Victorian Encounter with Africa, 162–9 ethnography of, 115 experimental, 151–2 Fetischism, 154–5 La verité sur les colonies, 147 reflexivity, 169 the staircase, 183–93 temporary, 12, 13 thematic, 129, 132 exhibition-making, 13, 163–7 analogies with production of radio documentaries, 162 as art, 187 as translation, 13, 193–6 biographical approach, 163 contests and struggles, 118 didactic device, 177 ethnographic, 102 in teaching, 174, 185–93 narratives, 133 site-specific, 183, see the staircase small-scale negotiations, 179 strategic use of, 185–93 technical aspects, 180 temporary, 179 theoretical problem, 177 see translation see also script-writing

Masters in ethnographic museology, 101 skills for engaging in cultural production, 176

D depot manager, 187 design, 165, 180, see Victoria Falls Diamang, The Diamonds Company of Angola, 37 Dias, Nélia, 3, 22, 124, 128, 140n.18, 145 Disneyland, 125 Duncan, Carol, 22, 33n4, Dundo Museum, 37, see Diamang and its photographs, 42–51

E eco-museums, 87, 100 ‘edutainment’, 202 endisms, 200–1 epistemologies, 107 ethnographic approach, see fieldwork ethnographic contingency, 159 ethnographic exhibition as amalgam, 180 ethnographic method, in exhibition-making, 13 ethnographic museology, 96 ethnography, 5, 28, 37, 102,106, 115 of exhibition-making, 187 see fieldwork of museums, 14, 107, 115 of science museums, 10, 117 salvage, 71 surrealist moment, 148, 156 writing, 179 234

Index

F

H

failure, 118 Falk Moore, Sally, 144 fieldwork, 2, 57, 85 see ethnography and art, 145 and collecting, 79 and exhibition-making, 179, 187 and museums, 32, 82 artists and, 193 as exhibition topic, 174 in museums, 115, 182 in the Science Museum, London, 117 methods, 57 refashioning to include the museum, 5 Spencer, Melville and Bathurst Islands, 57 functionalist theory, 143–5 structural functionalism, 201 Future of Women, 201 future scenarios, backlash, 202–3 Golden Age of Equality, 203–4 two steps forward, two steps backward, 204–6 futurisms, 200–1

Hainard, Jacques, 149 Handler, Richard, 179 Halpin, Marjorie, 110 heritage centres, 100, see eco-musée, patrimoine heritage sites, 119 history see anthropology, collections Hunt, Charles, 151

G

J

globalisation, 5, 19, 206 González, Roberto, 10, 16n7 Graburn, Nelson, 107 Greenaway, Peter, 147 Guerilla Girls, 208

Jorvik, 124–5

I iconography, 22 of nineteenth century natural history museum, 25 identity, see also curator constituted, 156 politicisation of, 4 professional, 122, 132 ‘infotainment’, 202 institutional divide, 86 institutional histories of French museums, 76–90 I.S.C.T.E., 93, 96–7 teaching museology at, 98

K Kaehr, Roland, 149 kinship, 16n2, 31, 56 see nation as exhibition topic, 174

235

Index

Macdonald, Sharon, 3, 10–11, 16, 26, 111, 117–20 Marcus, George, 111, 145, 146 material culture, see culture Matton, A., 22 see Tervuren, iconological programme Mauss, Marcel, 79, 101 mediation, 37 Melville and Bathurst Islands, 55–72 missionaries, 57, 64, 164 Molella, Arthur, 113 Mugaas, Toril, 189–93 museological practice, 170 museological process, 168 museology, 3, as theoretical field, 101 at home, 4 critical, 145, 146 Critical Museology, M.A. in at Sussex, 149 discourses, 146 ethnographic, 96–102 new museology, 81,109–12, 146 praxiological, 147, 148 three museologies, 142 Musée de l ‘Homme, 76, 86, 93, 95 Museé du Quai Branly, 95 Musée National des Arts et Traditions Populaires (MNATP), 7, 76, 95 see Centre d’Ethnologie Française, 83 see also Musée Laboratoire, 82–3 Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Lisbon, 93, 102 museum, 1, 18 106 admission charges, 119 and anthropological theory, 150 and anthropology, 92 and gender, 201–10 and hierarchy, 201–10

Koninklijk Museum voor MiddenAfrika, Tervuren, 21–6 knowing, making, using, 130 knowing, 131 making visible, 133 knowledge, see collections, curators materialising, 180 see museum of objects, 189 organising, 122 photological, 19 popularisation of, 103 spatialising, 131–2 types of knowledge, 142 Krug, Kersti, 201, 210, 211n5 Kwagiulth Museum, 27–8, 31 Kwakwaka’wakw, 27–30 culture as national, 30

L Latour, Bruno, 2 actor-network theory, 6 agency of objects, 123 incomplete modernity, 187 mediation, 37, 187 lay people vs. experts, 114 lay vs. intellectual perspectives, 133 Leopold II, 21, 23 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 81, 84, 101 Livingstone, David, 21, 163–9, see exhibition

M management, customer, 125 managerial policy, 120

236

Index

and state, 18 anthropological-ethnographic exploration of, 118 anti-museum, 28 see Kwagiulth as a kind of attentive looking, 7 as an aspect of company photography, 42 as community centre, 202 as social artefact, 164 as a social arena, 179–80, 193 as part of culture industry, 4 as key institution in globalising national society, 5 as monuments to settlement, 137 as photological apparatus, 6, 19 as public image, 48 backstage, 37, 117, 138, 187 boom, 1, see also proliferation colonial, 20, 37, see photological apparatus, desiring machine controversies, 110 critique of, 109 culture, 15, 100 debates, 125 democratisation of, 109 eco-musée, 87–8 educational value, 15 see also ‘edutainment’ entertainment value, 15 ethnographic, 2, 5, 8, 14, 92, 149, 177, 185 ethnographic encounters with, 5 ethnography, 77, 145, 146, 150, 178 folklore, 183 future scenarios, 14, 201 indigenous, 27 institutional histories, 7, 77 landscape, 8, 89 ‘majority’, 27 master narratives in, 158 multi-museum concept, 136, 137

national, 76, 117 natural history, 94 organisation, 177–8 post-colonial, 5 proliferation, 88 re-writing, 124 science, 5, 9, 16n7 scientific character of, 79–83 see also photography Studies, 26, 36, 110, 201 ‘tribal’, 27 trustees, 205 work, 170 world, 11, 177 Myers, Fred, 96

N Nader, Laura, 10 nation, 18, 19, 30 as museum’s referent, 32 ethnographic collection and state formation, 185 state and citizenship, 202 national character embodied in buildings, 77 national histories, American anthropology, 10, 107 Australia, see National Museum Belgium, 26 see Congo, MiddenAfrika Britain, 11, 129 Canada, 20, 30 France, 8, 76,77, 94 Norway, 77, 185 Portugal, 8, 93 Scandinavia, 77 Sweden, 77 national traditions, British, 145

237

Index

Payen, Sally, 156, 159–60 peasant culture, see rural France as French national genius, 77 performances, 22–3, 67, 72 photographer, 38 Ann Christine Eek, 185–6 office of, 39–41 photographs as artefacts, 36 as mediators, 37 as museum artefacts, 50 as performance, 68 as unique objects, 168 material system of, 49 of objects vs. events, 51 working, 185 Zambezi expedition, 168 photography, 36, 122,180 see also collections and bureaucracy, 39 and exhibition-making, 186 and museum studies, 36–8 approaches to, 36 as material culture, 38 material system of, 38 photographic archives, 36 photological apparatus, 19 production of, 37 Pickstone, John, 122 picturesque, 68 and exotic, 79 pilgrimage, 30 Pitt Rivers Museum, 99 politics, 28 of display, 115 of representation, 109 of exhibition space, 123 Porto, Nuno, 5, 6 portraits, 46–7,167 post-colonial theory, 26 power relations, 126 print colonialism, 38, 51–2 property, material and intellectual, 100

Portugal and France, 93 National Museum of American History, 106 National Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, 56, 58, 63 Tiwi artefacts in, 58, 63 National Portrait Gallery, London, 163 Native Authority, 20, 27, 29, 31 Needham, Rodney, 144 negotiation, 46, 48, 125, 131, 162,163, 168, 169, 176, 179 networks, 13, 39–40, 195

O objects, 85, see material culture life histories of, 165 of genealogical identification, 29 study of on curriculum, 173 transformation of meaning of, 165 organisational models, ‘recipe’, 207 ‘stone soup’, 207–8 O’Hanlon, Michael, 55 Oommen, T.K., 200 Ou, C. Jay, 10

P past, clash with the present, 137 national, 6, see also collections, identity weight of the, 136–7 pastisms, 200 see endisms pastness, 2 patrimoine movement, 87–9 238

Index

‘props’, 180 public, 106, 128,170, see also visitors as natives, 114, see also lay people as ‘Other’, 10, 107 display as prestige, 122 purpose of the museum, 26 understanding of science, 10

S Saunders, Barbara, 5, 25, 35n science, and society, 113 and technology of everyday life, 130 anti-science debates, 112 appeal to, 24 art/science dichotomy, 23 as truth and progress, 25 Big Science, 112, 114 museum’s construction of, 128 practice of, 133 rituals of, 25 technology and us, 107 visibility to ‘the public’, 128 visibility problem, 134 Science Museum, London, 117–38 see fieldwork ‘Gallery Plan’, 119 ‘theology’, 134 trustees, 135 script-writing, 172, 179 Segalen, Martine, 7, 8, 95 Shelton, Anthony, 11, 93 slave trade, 23, 167, 168 Smithsonian Institution, 106 controversies at, 106 space, organisation of, 123, 170, 172 Spencer, B., 55–72 and Gillen, F. 57 sponsorship, 110,123, 163 Stanley, H.M., 21, 166 state, 18, Canadian, 29 Stocking, George, Jr., 93 Sturtevant, William, 92, 108

R ‘repetitive allegory’, 118 representation, 29 crises of, 150 critiques of, 109 research, and museum, 2, 77, 80, 82, 106, 150 museums and anthropological theory, 99 reconfiguring of to include the museum, 5 Ricoeur, Paul, 142 rituals, and the production of artefacts, 67 initiation, 61 mortuary, 62 of science, 25 postfunerary, 60, 63 Rivet, Paul, 79, 89 Rivière, George Henri 80–3, 86, 87 and new museology, 81 Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 163 rural France, 77–9 as repository of tradition, 79 vanishing, 82 rural Portugal, 102 Rwanda, 26

239

Index

T

V

taxonomy, 122, 124 teaching, see anthropology, collections team work, 175, 204 Tervuren, see Koninklijk Museum voor Midden-Afrika iconological programme, 22–3 temporality at, 26 translation, 177, 179, see exhibitionmaking Trigger, Bruce, 110 Trocadéro, Musée d’Ethnographie du, 78–9, 99 time, 2, 192, 200–1 anthropology of as exhibition topic, 174, 175 as a spiral, 184 Tiwi, 55–72 trade, 23 and collecting 60–1, 66–8, 72 trust, 172

Vaessen, Jan, 16n6, 178 Vakimes, Sophia, 106,112 Venbrux, Eric, 5, 6, 16n4 Vergo, Peter, 146 Victoria Falls, 167 visitors, 124–9, 167 as individuals vs. citizen-mass, 126 imaginary, 133 visual representation, 102

W Ward, H., 23 Weil, Stephen, 109 Wolf, Eric, 107

Y U

Yoshida, Kenji, 149

U’Mistà Centre, 20, 27–31, see also Kwakwaka’wakw University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology, 27, 201 Internet seminar, 201–10 University of Oslo Ethnographic Museum, 177 University of Sussex, 149 University of Utrecht, 2–3

Z Zambezi expedition, 164, 166–8

240