![Introduction 11
curators is a realistically utopian ‘curatorial dreaming’,57
a conviction in
the role of the curator and a concrete, ethical sense of value and mission
for the museum. This brings us back to the title of this book, a word
that postmodern scepticism and postcolonial critique might frown on –
Curatopia – but which our dire current situation demands: a commitment
to cultural futures. After decades of suspicion about grand narratives and
universality, which rightly drew attention to the limits of Western para-
digms, it is time to move beyond the postmodern/postcolonial impasse and
imagine a museum curatorship that deals not just with the past, and the
present, but also the future.
In pursuit of this aim, we offer in this volume building blocks towards
Curatopia, an ideal of socially and politically engaged, interdisciplinary,
and radically cross-cultural curatorial practice. Curatorship as cross-cul-
tural translation makes sense, however, only if we do not commit the ‘the
basic error of the translator’, which, according to Walter Benjamin, ‘is that
he [or she] preserves the state in which his [or her] own language happens
to be instead of allowing his [or her] language to be powerfully affected by
the foreign tongue’.58
Instead, Benjamin rightly insists, ‘he [or she] must
expand and deepen his [or her] language by means of the foreign lan-
guage’,59
which is not confined to the linguistic domain but includes visual
and ‘thing languages’60
among others. Curatorship thus faces the constant
challenge of engaging with the effects and opportunities as well as the limits
and risks of dialogical translation through mutual transformation. On the
historical level, colonialism has neither been complete in the past nor com-
pleted in the present – it is not an event but a process. In curatorship, then,
we cannot escape the constant dialectical effort to consciously ‘inhabit his-
tories’61
while being placed into histories, that is – as Karl Marx famously
noted – being thrown into ‘circumstances’ which are not ‘self-selected’ but
are ‘existing already, given and transmitted from the past’. There has to be a
constant analytical movement between the ‘here’ and ‘there’, the ‘now’ and
‘back then’, to make sense of these ‘messy entanglements’.62
On the theoretical and methodological level, such a dialectical effort
requires a ‘recursive anthropology’63
which is not content with generating
ethnographic evidence for pre-conceived ideas but allows different cultural
worlds to ‘dictate the terms of their own analysis’64
while recursively refram-
ing its own points of departure. That is, serious cross-cultural study searches
for resonances between different culturally grounded analytical positions
and their respective articulation and movement through a common sphere
while opening spaces for dissonances,65
which are provoked through
the ‘untranslatable’.66
The nature of such curatorial inquiry is, like ‘the
very nature of exhibiting’, of course, ‘a contested terrain’.67
Curatorial
reciprocities/
symmetries are never quite possible – but always worth striv-
ing for – through conscious attempts to produce heterotopian rather than
hegemonic spaces.
We end by returning to our opening provocation to think of museums
as moving vessels, inspired by the example of museums in Aotearoa New](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5825158-250601115812-ce6a3370/85/Curatopia-Museums-And-The-Future-Of-Curatorship-Philipp-Schorch-And-Conal-Mccarthy-34-320.jpg)
![Introduction 15
46 M. Horwood, ‘Worlds Apart: Indigenous Re-engagement with Museum-held
Heritage: A New Zealand–United Kingdom Case Study’ (PhD dissertation,
Victoria University, Wellington, 2015).
47 P. Schorch and N.M.K.Y. Kahanu, ‘Forum as Laboratory: The Cross-Cultural
Infrastructure of Ethnographic Knowledge and Material Potentialities’, in
Prinzip Labor: Museumsexperimente im Humboldt Lab Dahlem (Berlin: Nicolai,
2015), pp. 241–8.
48 W.F. Hanks, ‘The Space of Translation’, in W.F. Hanks and C. Severi (eds),
Translating Worlds. The Epistemological Space of Translation (Chicago: HAU
Books, 2015), pp. 21–49.
49 A. Salmond, ‘Digital Subjects, Cultural Objects: Special Issue Introduction’,
Journal of Material Culture, 17:3 (2012), 229–44.
50 On this topic see L. Davidson, Museums and International Touring Exhibitions,
blog, https://leedavidsonresearch.wordpress.com/author/leedavidsonnz/. Acc
essed 15 March 2017.
51 B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy
(Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2005).
52 P. Schorch, ‘The “reflexive museum” – Opening the Doors to behind the Scenes’,
Te Ara – Journal of Museums Aotearoa, 33:1–2 (2009), 28–31; S. Macdonald and
P. Basu (eds), Exhibition Experiments (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007).
53 L. Davidson, ‘Visitor Studies: Towards a Culture of Reflective Practice and
Critical Museology for the Visitor-Centred Museum’, in Museum Practice:
International Handbooks of Museum Studies, vol. 2 (Oxford and Malden, MA:
Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 503–28.
54 This research draws upon the dialogues recorded in 2011 in Wellington, in
2015 in Munich, and interviews with Māori curators conducted in 2016–2017:
Huhana Smith, Paul Diamond, Anna Marie White, Awhina Tamarapa and
Matariki Williams.
55 J. Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century
(Cambridge, MMA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2013).
56 See McCarthy, Hakiwai and Schorch, Chapter 13 below.
57 Butler and Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams, 2016.
58 W. Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings,
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA, and
London: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 262.
59 Ibid.
60 W. Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in One-Way
Street and Other Writings: Walter Benjamin, trans. by E. Jephcott and K. Shorter
(London and New York: Verso Classics, 1997).
61 I. Wedde, ‘Inside Job’, in H. McNaughton and J. Newton (eds), Figuring
the Pacific: Aotearoa Pacific Cultural Studies (Christchurch: University of
Canterbury Press, 2005).
62 A. Taku and M. Quanchi, Messy Entanglements: The Papers of the 10th Pacific
History Association Conference (Tarawa: Kiribati Paperback, 1995).
63 A. Salmond, ‘Transforming Translations (Part I): The Owner of These Bones’,
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3:3 (2013), 1–32.
64 A. Henare [Salmond], M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds), Thinking Through
Things:TheorisingArtefactsEthnographically (LondonandNewYork:Routledge,
2007), p. 4.
65 Schorch and Kahanu, ‘Forum as Laboratory’.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/5825158-250601115812-ce6a3370/85/Curatopia-Museums-And-The-Future-Of-Curatorship-Philipp-Schorch-And-Conal-Mccarthy-38-320.jpg)
Curatopia Museums And The Future Of Curatorship Philipp Schorch And Conal Mccarthy
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- 5. ‘This provocative and timely volume provides a series of critical reflections on the future of curatorial practice. It maps out new futures for museums and collections, acknowledging that these cross-cultural institutions can only be made relevant by engaging them collaboratively and dialogically.’ Rodney Harrison, Professor of Heritage Studies, University College London What is the future of curatorship? Is there a vision for an ideal model, a ‘curatopia’, whether in the form of a utopia or dystopia? Or is there a plurality of approaches, amounting to a curatorial heterotopia? Addressing these questions through ‘the figure of the curator’, this volume provides an insightful perspective on the current state of curatorship. It reviews the different models operating in various museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world and discusses emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. At the core of the book is an exploration of the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, symmetrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present. As the contributors argue, this is the most effective way for curatorial practice to remain meaningful. International in scope, the volume covers three broad regions: Europe, North America and the Pacific. The contributors, leading and emerging scholars and practitioners in their respective fields, have all worked in and with universities and museums, meaning that they are ideally positioned to enrich the dialogue between academia and the professional museum world. Philipp Schorch is Head of Research at the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony - GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde Leipzig, Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden and Museum für Völkerkunde Herrnhut, Germany Conal McCarthy is Associate Professor and Director of the Museum and Heritage Studies Programme at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand Cover based on a design by Martin Krauth ISBN 978-1-5261-1819-6 9 781526 118196 www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk A R T E F A C T P R O D U C T MODE R E C I P R I C A L P R A C T I C E S T H E O R I E S T R A N S L A T I O N INDIGENOUS CURATING EXHIBITIONS C U L T U R E ANTHROPOLOGY METHOD INTERPRETATION MUSEUM P A C I F I C FUTURE EUROPE E T H N O L O G Y I N D I G E N O U S CURATOPIA MUSEUMSAND THEFUTURE OF CURATORSHIP EDITED BY PHILIPP SCHORCH CONAL MCCARTHY CURATOPIA SCHORCH AND MCCARTHY ( EDS )
- 6. Curatopia
- 8. Curatopia Museums and the future of curatorship EDITED BY PHILIPP SCHORCH AND CONAL McCARTHY Manchester University Press
- 9. Copyright © Manchester University Press 2019 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 1819 6 hardback First published 2019 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
- 10. Contents List of figures Page vii Notes on contributors xii Acknowledgementsxvii Note on the text xviii Introduction: conceptualising Curatopia 1 Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy and Eveline Dürr Part I: Europe17 1 The museum as method (revisited) 19 Nicholas Thomas 2 What not to collect? Post-connoisseurial dystopia and the profusion of things 29 Sharon Macdonald and Jennie Morgan 3 Concerning curatorial practice in ethnological museums: an epistemology of postcolonial debate 44 Larissa Förster and Friedrich von Bose 4 Walking the fine line: From Samoa with Love? at the Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich 56 Hilke Thode-Arora 5 Curating across the colonial divides 72 Jette Sandahl 6 Thinking and working through difference: remaking the ethnographic museum in the global contemporary 90 Viv Golding and Wayne Modest Part II: North America 107 7 The times of the curator 109 James Clifford
- 11. vi Contents 8 Baroque modernity, critique and Indigenous epistemologies in museum representations of the Andes and Amazonia 124 Anthony Alan Shelton 9 Swings and roundabouts: pluralism and the politics of change in Canada’s national museums 143 Ruth B. Phillips 10 Community engagement, Indigenous heritage and the complex figure of the curator: foe, facilitator, friend or forsaken? 159 Bryony Onciul 11 Joining the club: a Tongan ‘akau in New England 176 Ivan Gaskell 12 c ’əsnaʔəm, the City before the City: exhibiting pre-Indigenous belonging in Vancouver 191 Paul Tapsell Part III: Pacific 209 13 The figure of the kaitiaki: learning from Māori curatorship past and present 211 Conal McCarthy, Arapata Hakiwai and Philipp Schorch 14 Curating the uncommons: taking care of difference in museums 227 Billie Lythberg, Wayne Ngata and Amiria Salmond 15 Collecting, curating and exhibiting cross-cultural material histories in a post-settler society 244 Bronwyn Labrum 16 Curating relations between ‘us’ and ‘them’: the changing role of migration museums in Australia 262 Andrea Witcomb 17 Agency and authority: the politics of co-collecting 279 Sean Mallon 18 He alo ā he alo / kanohi ki te kanohi / face to face: curatorial bodies, encounters and relations 296 Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu, Moana Nepia and Philipp Schorch Afterwords 317 19 Curating time 319 Ian Wedde 20 Virtual museums and new directions? 327 Vilsoni Hereniko Index336
- 12. List of figures 0.1 The seal of the Board of Maori Ethnological Research, Wellington, New Zealand. Courtesy Conal McCarthy. page 2 0.2 Delegates at the Curatopia conference, Munich, Germany, July 2015. Courtesy Paul Tapsell. 4 1.1 Mark Adams, Gweagal Spears, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University, England. 2002. Courtesy Mark Adams. 24 1.2 Five young Tallensi women, photograph by Sonia Fortes, Upper East Region, Ghana, January 1937. Copyright © University of Cambridge Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology, UK. Reproduced by permission. 25 4.1 Siapo: one of the gifts Tamasese gave to Prince Regent Luitpold in October 1910. Courtesy Marianne Franke, Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, Germany. 57 4.2 One of the vista axes in the exhibition From Samoa with Love? Courtesy Marianne Franke; Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, Germany.65 4.3 Michel Tuffery’s art work From Mulinu’u to Berlin. Courtesy Michel Tuffery, and Marianne Franke, Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, Germany. 65 4.4 The entrance area of the exhibition From Samoa with Love? Courtesy Marianne Franke, Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich, Germany.66 5.1 Hip hop jam on the stage in the exhibition Horizons: Voices from a Global Africa at the Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2005. Courtesy Jette Sandahl. 76 5.2 Photograph by Annie Leibovitz, condom dresses by Adriana Bernini, shadow theatre puppets from Java from the museum collection, South African memory boxes and body maps and the suggestive tunes of Russian Mumie Trolls music video, within the section called Hope in the exhibition No Name Fever: HIV-Aids in the Age of Globalization at the Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2005. Courtesy Jette Sandahl. 77
- 13. 5.3 A patera collected in 2005 by the Museum of World Cultures the exhibition Trafficking. Courtesy Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg, Sweden. 79 5.4 A contemporary waka ama (canoe) seen in the context of precious taonga (treasures) from a war canoe, in the exhibition E Tū Ake – as Leurs trésors ont une âme – at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France, 2011. Courtesy Jette Sandahl.80 5.5 A table setting from a marae (the work Nemesis, by artist Reuben Patterson), and a pātaka (food storehouse) in the exhibition E Tū Ake (as Leurs trésors sont une âme) at the Musée du Quai Branly, Paris, France, 2011. Courtesy Jette Sandahl.81 6.1 Magdalena Kaanante of Nakambale Museum and Charmaine Tjizezenga from the Museums Association of Namibia inspecting artefacts at the National Museum of Finland in Helsinki. Courtesy Jeremy Silvester. 103 6.2 Aboriginal artist Christian Thompson working at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University, UK. Courtesy the artist and Pitt Rivers Museum. 104 6.3 Christian Thompson works in situ at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University, UK. Courtesy the artist and Pitt Rivers Museum. 104 8.1 A section of the exhibition The Potosí Principle: Colonial Image Production in the Global Economy, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, 2010–2011. Copyright © Sebastian Bolesch, Berlin, 2010.129 8.2 A section of the exhibition The Potosí Principle, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain, 2010–2011. Copyright © Sebastian Bolesch, Berlin 2010. 130 8.3 Introduction, with statements from Amazonian leaders. Amazonie: Le chamane et la Pensée de la Forêt, Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, Switzerland, 2016–2017. Courtesy Anthony Alan Shelton. 135 8.4 Section three: divided by Amazonian cultural groups. Amazonie, Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, Switzerland, 2016–2017. Courtesy Anthony Alan Shelton. 136 8.5 Section three: divided by Amazonian cultural groups. Amazonie, Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, Switzerland, 2016–2017. Courtesy Anthony Alan Shelton. 137 8.6 Section four: reproduction of a malaca with screens running 23 presentations from the peoples of the Amazon to the citizens of Geneva and the world. Amazonie, Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève, Switzerland, 2016–2017. Courtesy Anthony Alan Shelton.138 viii List of figures
- 14. List of figures ix 9.1 ‘The Hub’, the circular visitor orientation area of the exhibition 1812, Canadian War Museum, Ottawa. Courtesy Canadian War Museum.147 9.2 The Nishga Girl, installation in the Canada Hall, Canadian Museum of Civilization (now Canadian Museum of History, Ottawa). Courtesy Ruth B. Philips and Canadian Museum of History.149 9.3 Vernon Ah Kee, cantchant, 2009. Installation shot Sakahàn: International Indigenous Art, 2013. Purchased 2010. National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Courtesy the artist, the National Gallery of Canada and Milani Gallery. © Courtesy the artist. Photo: NGC. 153 11.1 Five Oceanic clubs as displayed in East India Marine Hall, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, USA. Courtesy Walter Silver and Peabody Essex Museum 2013. 178 11.2 Club: apa‘apai, Tonga, with carving added to the lower part possibly in Samoa or Kiribati, wood, Atwood House and Museum of the Chatham Historical Society, Chatham, Massachusetts, USA, X0679. Courtesy Ivan Gaskell. 184 12.1 Ko Tawa exhibition on display at Rotorua Museum Te Whare Taonga o Te Arawa, Aotearoa New Zealand, 2007. Courtesy Krzysztof Pfeiffer. 193 12.2 The exhibition c ’əsnaʔəm, the City before the City at Museum of Vancouver, Vancouver, Canada. Courtesy Museum of Vancouver. 197 12.3 The ‘kitchen table’ interactive sq ’əq ’ip (gathered together) in the exhibition c ’əsnaʔəm, the City before the City at Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Canada. Courtesy Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia.199 12.4 The exhibition c ’əsnaʔəm, the City before the City at Musqueam Cultural Educational Resource Centre, Vancouver, Canada. Courtesy Musqueam Cultural Educational Resource Centre. 200 13.1 The food store house or pātaka called Te Tākinga on display in the Māori exhibition Mana Whenua at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, 1998. Courtesy Ngāti Pikiao and Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 212 13.2 The Māori carver Thomas Heberley directing work on the carved store house Te Tākinga. Courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 213 13.3 Professor Hirini Moko Mead, academic and curator of the exhibition Te Maori, 1986. Courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 215 14.1 Paikea on the apex of the meeting house Te Kani a Takirau. Photo by Augustus Hamilton. Courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 234
- 15. 14.2 Owen Wharekaponga Rayner shares a hongi (greeting) with Paikea, American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA. Courtesy Jenny Newell. 236 14.3 The Toi Hauiti group perform Paikea’s haka (posture dance). American Museum of Natural History, New York, USA. Courtesy Billie Lythberg. 237 15.1 The Gavin Gifford Museum in the 1950s. Courtesy Te Awamutu Museum. 249 15.2 The current Te Awamutu Museum. Courtesy Te Awamutu Museum. 250 15.3 The entrance to Signs of a Nation: Ngā Tohu Kotahitanga, the Treaty of Waitangi exhibition, at Te Papa, 2015. Photograph Norm Heke, courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 252 15.4 The Māori Cowboy Johnny Cooper’s 1957 recording of ‘Pie Cart Rock and Roll’. Courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. 256 16.1 Entry area to Gallery 3, Migration Museum, Adelaide, Australia, 1986. Photograph Andrea Witcomb, folders Migration Museum archives. 267 16.2 Farewell Forever, Gallery 3, Migration Museum, Adelaide, Australia, 1986. Photograph Andrea Witcomb, folders Migration Museum archives. 267 16.3 Typewritten label. Gallery 4, Migration Museum, Adelaide, Australia, 1986. Photograph Andrea Witcomb, Working Files, Migration Museum archives. 269 16.4 From a display titled ‘The War to End All Wars’ in the listing of images for gallery 5, Migration Museum, Adelaide, Australia, 1986. Original slide in Photograph folders, Migration Museum archives. 270 16.5 Interview interactive with Iraqi applicant in view, Getting In Gallery, Immigration Museum, Melbourne, Australia. Courtesy Museums Victoria. Photograph Benjamin Healley. 273 17.1 Seashell from Tokelau in the Pacific Cultures Collections. Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CC BY-NC- ND 4.0). 280 17.2 New Balance running shoes in the Pacific Cultures Collection at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Courtesy Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (CC BY-NC- ND 4.0). 284 18.1 Office of Hawaiian Affairs Pouhana and Chief Executive Officer Dr Kamanaʻopono Crabbe and Noelle Kahanu share a honi (greeting) at Auckland Airport, Aotearoa New Zealand, March 2016. Photograph Moana Nepia. 297 x List of figures
- 16. List of figures xi 18.2 The same photograph as Figure 18.1, but now revealing the glass that separated Crabbe and Kahanu. 298 18.3 Members of Pā Kuʻi A Lua, including Kahanu on the right, present gifts on behalf of Bishop Museum, Honolulu, USA, to representatives of the British Museum and Peabody Essex Museum. Courtesy Bishop Museum and Noelle Kahanu. 303 18.4 The exhibition E Kū Ana Ka Paia: Unification, Responsibility and the Ku Images on display at the Bishop Museum, Honolulu, USA, 2010. Photograph Linny Morris. Courtesy Bishop Museum.304 18.5 Keone Nunes and assistants at work in the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Commons Gallery opening of the exhibition ArtSpeak, 5 October 2014. Photo Moana Nepia. 305 18.6 Native Hawaiian chanters, led by Kealiʻi Gora, leading opening proceedings for the Binding and Looping: Transfer of Presence in Contemporary Pacific Art exhibition, 5 October 2014. Courtesy UHM Art Gallery. 311 18.7 A group of German and Hawaiian participants in the historic repatriation of iwi kūpuna (ancestral remains) from the State Ethnographic Collections Saxony, Germany, to Hawai‘i, USA, 2017. Courtesy Mo Zaboli and Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden.313 20.1 The statue of A‘a from Rurutu in French Polynesia. Copyright © Trustees of the British Museum, London, UK. 328
- 17. Notes on contributors James Clifford has written influential historical and literary critiques of anthropological representation, travel writing, museum practices and indi- geneity: Writing Culture, the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, co-edited with George Marcus (1986); The Predicament of Culture (1988); Routes (1997); Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the 21st Century (2013). Eveline Dürr is Professor at the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany. She has conducted fieldwork in Mexico, the USA, Aotearoa New Zealand and Germany, and her publications reflect her interests in urban anthropol- ogy, spatiality, material culture, environment and globalisation, taking into consideration the historical trajectories that have formed present conditions. Larissa Förster is a researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage in Berlin, Germany (www.carmah.berlin/), and a representative of the Working Group on Museums of the German Anthropological Association. She has co-curated major exhibitions at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, Germany (Namibia – Deutschland: Eine geteilte Geschichte; Afropolis: City, Media, Art). Her research centres on museums and (post)colonialism. Ivan Gaskell is Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at Bard Graduate Center, New York, USA. He is the author or editor of twelve books, most recently Tangible Things: Making History through Objects (2015). He is a Permanent Senior Fellow of the Advanced Study Institute of the Georg-August University, Göttingen, Germany. Viv Golding is Emeritus Associate Professor at the University of Leicester’s School of Museum Studies. In 2013, Viv co-edited (with Wayne Modest) Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration. Since her academic research relates closely to international museum practice, she was elected President of ICME (The International Council of Museums of Ethnography) in 2013 and 2016.
- 18. Notes on contributors xiii Arapata Hakiwai is the Kaihautū (Māori co-leader) of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa). Arapata has a PhD in Museum and Heritage Studies from Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, and has extensive museum experience at the national museum for over twenty years in various positions. Vilsoni Hereniko is a professor, filmmaker and playwright at the University of Hawai‛i, USA. He is best known for The Land Has Eyes, a narrative feature film that premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and the books Female Clowns and Power in Rotuma (1995) and Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific (1999). Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu is a Native Hawaiian writer, artist, curator and film- maker with fifteen years of programme and exhibition experience at Bishop Museum, Honolulu, including serving on the project teams for the renova- tions of the Hawaiian Hall (2009), Pacific Hall (2013) and the exhibition, E Kū ana ka paia (2010). She is an assistant specialist at the Department of American Studies, University of Hawai‘i. Bronwyn Labrum is Head of New Zealand and Pacific Cultures at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. As well as working as a curator of history and textiles, she has been a university lecturer in pro- grammes of history, design, and visual and material culture. Billie Lythberg is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Auckland. She explores Indigenous economies and aesthetics, and has collaborated with Māori and Pacific artists, academics and communities towards co- developed research, co-authored publications, co-curated exhibitions, and projects of artistic and economic revitalisation. She has a particular passion for eighteenth-century Māori and Tongan artefacts, and the economic and political objectives their transactions were harnessed to. Sharon Macdonald is Anniversary Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, UK, where she directs the Profusion theme of Heritage Futures. She is also Alexander von Humboldt Professor in the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany, where she directs the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage. Sean Mallon is of Samoan and Irish descent, and lives in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. Since 1992, he has worked at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in collection management, education and curatorial roles. He is currently Senior Curator Pacific Cultures. Conal McCarthy is Director of the Museum and Heritage Studies pro- gramme at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. His recent books include Museum Practice (2015), From Colonial Gothic to Māori Renaissance: Essays in memory of Jonathan Mane-Wheoki (2017) and Te Papa: Reinventing New Zealand’s National Museum 1998–2018 (2018).
- 19. Wayne Modest is Head of the Research Center for Material Culture, the research institute of the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Afrika Museum and the Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. He is also Professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the VU University, Amsterdam, Netherlands. His recent publications include ‘Anxious Politics in the European City’, together with Anouk de Koning, in Patterns of Prejudice, 50:2 (2016). Jennie Morgan is Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of York, UK, where she works on the Profusion theme of Heritage Futures. She is also Lecturer in Heritage at the University of Stirling, UK, where she is affiliated with the Centre for Environment, Heritage and Policy. Moana Nepia is a Māori visual and performing artist, choreographer, dancer, video artist, curator, writer and assistant professor at University of Hawai‘i’s Center for Pacific Islands Studies, USA, and arts editor for the journal The Contemporary Pacific. Past projects include performances for the 2017 Honolulu Biennial, PQ15 with Carol Brown and Dorita Hannah, and the 2012 Auckland Triennial with Kō Nakajima and Kentaro Taki. WayneNgataisRaukura/ChiefAdvisorTeAoMāori,MinistryofEducation Te Tāhuhu o te Mātauranga, Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand. He is an advocate for Māori advancement through education in the Māori language, and the reconnection with relocated taonga. He is also a supporter of tra- ditional navigation and waka hourua voyaging with related peoples in Te Moananui-a-Kiwa (the Pacific Ocean) as a means of rebuilding traditional knowledge platforms. Bryony Onciul is a Senior Lecturer in Public History, University of Exeter, UK. She researches Indigenous heritage, decolonising museology, reconcili- ation and climate change in Canada, the UK and Oceania. Bryony is Chair of ACHS UK Chapter; author of Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising Engagement; and lead editor of Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities. Ruth B. Phillips is Canada Research Professor and is Professor of Art History at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Her research focuses on the Indigenous arts of North America and critical museology. She has served as Director of the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology and President of the International Committee on the History of Art. Amiria Salmond’s research interests include Māori weaving, artefact- oriented ethnography, cultural and intellectual property, digital taonga and the ‘ontological turn’ in social anthropology. A former curator at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, UK, she has also curated and designed exhibitions at the Tairāwhiti Museum in Gisborne, Aotearoa New Zealand. xiv Notes on contributors
- 20. Notes on contributors xv Jette Sandahl was the founding director for the Women’s Museum of Denmark and the National Museum of World Culture in Sweden. She served as Director of Exhibitions and Public Programmes at the National Museum of Denmark, as Director Experience at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and as Director of the Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark. Philipp Schorch is Head of Research, State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony, Germany. He has held fellowships at Deakin University, Australia, the Institute of Advanced Study, Georg-August-University Göttingen, and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich (Marie Curie, European Commission), Germany. Philipp is co-editor of the volume Transpacific Americas: Encounters and Engagements between the Americas and the South Pacific (2016). Anthony Alan Shelton is Director of the Museum of Anthropology and Professor of Art History, Visual Art and Theory at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. His publications include Art, Anthropology and Aesthetics (1992), Heaven, Hell and Somewhere In-Between: Portuguese Popular Art and Culture (2015) and From Carnival to Lucha Libre: Mexican Masks and Devotions (2017). Paul Tapsell was formerly Chair of Māori Studies at the University of Otago, Dunedin, Aotearoa New Zealand. His Māori ancestry originates in the central North Island, and his research interests include the role of cul- tural heritage and museums in nation states. His academic and curatorial outputs expand on engagements at Rotorua Museum (curator), Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (doctoral research), UK, and Auckland War Memorial Museum (Director Māori), Aotearoa New Zealand. Hilke Thode-Arora, a German social-cultural anthropologist, is the curator for the Pacific collections at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich, Germany. She specialises in inter-ethnic relations and ethnic identities, material culture and the history of museum collections, and her research projects have included long-term fieldwork in Aotearoa New Zealand, Samoa and Niue. Nicholas Thomas is Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge, UK. His books on colonial history, encounter, art and material culture include The Return of Curiosity: What Museums Are Good for in the Twenty-First Century (2016). Friedrich von Bose is Curator at Humboldt University of Berlin, Germany, where he is preparing the university’s exhibition space in the future Humboldt Forum. In 2015–2016, he was a member of the planning com- mittee for the City Museum of Stuttgart, Germany. For his PhD, he under- took a multi-year ethnographic study of the Humboldt Forum’s planning process (published 2016).
- 21. Ian Wedde is based in Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. He was Head of Art and Visual Culture at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa 1994–2004 and established and taught a postgraduate curatorial practice course at the University of Auckland 2011–2013. His most recent publica- tion is Get a Move On (2017). Andrea Witcomb is Professor in Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. Her work engages with the ways in which museums and heritage sites interpret difficult histories and facili- tate cross-cultural encounters. She is also co-leading, with Alistair Patterson, a project on the history of collecting practices in Western Australia. xvi Notes on contributors
- 22. Acknowledgements This volume is the outcome of two events, a conference held at the Ludwig- Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany, in 2015 and a seminar at Victoria University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand, in 2011. The book was nurtured by the lively discussions spurred by papers presented and benefited from the ongoing intellectual engagement with conference participants as well as other authors we commissioned. It is, therefore, the product of the associated scholarly network, including university academ- ics, museum professionals and community leaders, who are devoted to (re) thinking curatorship for the museums of the future. We are indebted to a range of institutions and organisations that facili- tated the realisation of the conference, seminar and book with their generous funding. We wish to thank the Goethe-Institut, the Ludwig-Maximilians- Universität, Munich (LMU), the Department für Kulturwissenschaften and the Institut für Ethnologie at the LMU for their financial and logistical support. Further funding was received from the European Union’s H2020 Research and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 659660 awarded to co-editor Philipp Schorch. The Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Victoria University of Wellington, and the Canadian High Commission, Wellington, deserve thanks for their research grants which supported the hosting of the seminar, associated travel and editorial assistance. We also would like to express our appreciation to the anonymous reviewers who assisted us with their critical comments and reflections on the manuscript. In addition, we are grateful for the efforts of our student assistants who worked with us to organise and run the conference, and our editorial assis- tants, who helped with copyediting and finalising the manuscript: many thanks to Sasha Gora and Susette Goldsmith. Finally, we would both like to extend our heartfelt thanks to our partners, Eliza and Bronwyn, who put up with us while we were completing this project. Philipp Schorch and Conal McCarthy October 2017
- 23. Note on the text In this book, when using the general category of ‘Indigenous’, we have used upper case, on a par with other conventional markers such as ‘Western’, and observe the use of capitals in reference to specific Indigenous peoples: Indigenous Australians, Native Americans, Māori, Samoan and so on. In order to avoid ‘othering’ Indigenous languages, we have italicised Indigenous words only on the first use in the main text; thereafter they are treated the same as words in English. Some of these words have different meanings and interpretations so we have left it to the author’s discretion as to the translation. We follow the convention in current New Zealand English of using macrons for Māori words to indicate a double vowel. However, Māori words in the titles of books, organisations and so on, and in historical archival sources and texts have been left in their original form. While the country remains formally ‘New Zealand’, we use the double appellation Aotearoa New Zealand where appropriate to reflect increasing formal use of this term. In the use of Pacific languages, we observe the glottal stop with appropriate diacritical marks, for example, in Samoan, the apostrophe fa’a Samoa (the Samoan way), and, in Hawaiian and Tongan, the reverse apostrophe e.g. ‘akau or stave club. Hawaiian words thus incorporate both the ‘okina (glottal stop) and the kahakō (macron). We also acknowledge hən ’q ’əmin ’əm ’ or the Musqueam language of British Columbia by using the word for the village and exhibition – c ’əsnaʔəm – and recognising that there are no capitals in this language.
- 24. Introduction: conceptualising Curatopia Philipp Schorch, Conal McCarthy and Eveline Dürr In Aotearoa New Zealand, bilingual museum titles reflect the Indigenous view of the world. Their Māori names liken museums to hills, caves, store houses and, commonly, to canoes (waka), either literally or figuratively through the image of a treasure box or carved vessel containing precious objects.1 In other contexts, the word ‘waka’ can refer to the crews of, and those descended from, ancestral voyaging canoes, a flock of birds in flight and, today, to cars and other forms of transport. Nearly a century ago, Māori leaders used the same imagery in engagement with museum anthropology, as seen in the seal of the Board of Maori Ethnological Research showing a waka under sail. They urged their people to load on board this waka the ‘pre- cious freight/heritage’ (ngā morehu taonga) of their ancestors, so that it could be preserved and disseminated ‘for all the world to see’.2 (See Figure 0.1.)3 These images of mobility are in contrast with those associated with the history of European museums which have been critiqued as static mauso leums devoted to the preservation of the past. This is prominently displayed in Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopias, in which he contrasts the ‘museum’ as an ‘immobile place’ with the ‘ship’ as ‘the greatest reserve of the imagination’.4 In this introduction to Curatopia, we reimagine the museum as ship, and explore the ways in which the associated practice of curating can be turned around to face the future, as the crew of the waka navigate the ocean before them. This book brings together curators, scholars and critics from a range of fields in international institutions to engage in debates about curatorial histories, theories and practices. Old models of the curator as scholar con- noisseur have been discredited, while new types – curator as entrepreneur, facilitator, artist, activist etc. – need more testing. As museums continue to change in the twenty-first century, the ‘figure of the curator’5 appears to be in flux. What is the future of curatorial practice? Is there a vision for an ideal curatorial model, an imagined future that we might call a ‘curatopia’?6 Would this take the form of a utopia or even a dystopia? We see in the plurality of approaches evident in this collection a curatorial ‘heterotopia’ emerging.7 It is this new, critical but ethical approach to curating that we set out to describe in this volume.
- 25. 2 Curatopia Other questions have to do with the current vogue for curators as co- creators, in the service of cultural diversity, social inclusion and non- Western museology.8 How can we historicise, theorise and ethnographically analyse museums as profoundly cross-cultural spaces, and study curatorship as an inherently cross-cultural method that requires dialogical translation and interpretative reciprocity? By addressing this challenge, the collection sets out to give co-curation a different and more substantial quality, imbuing it with conceptual and methodological rigour, in contrast to critiques that dismiss it as a shallow political gesture.9 Curatopia explores the ways in which the mutual, asymmetrical relations underpinning global, scientific entanglements of the past can be transformed into more reciprocal, sym- metrical forms of cross-cultural curatorship in the present. We argue that this is the most meaningful direction for curating in museums today. In this opening provocation, we survey critical perspectives on curat- ing in general. In the first historical part of the proposed line of inquiry, we follow others to suggest that the ‘European Enlightenment’ should not be understood as a sovereign and autonomous Europe-bound achievement.10 Given the emerging mutual dependence of scientific travel practices, materialities, and academic disciplines in the eighteenth century, it can be argued instead that the encounter with Pacific people, among others, and their material manifestations in objects, had a significant influence on the development of new ideas, such as the Enlightenment,11 an intersection of 0.1 The seal of the Board of Maori Ethnological Research, Wellington, New Zealand, showing an ocean-going waka (canoe) under sail. This seal was used on all Board correspondence from its establishment in 1923.
- 26. Introduction 3 global encounters and European knowledge practices.12 In other words, the Enlightenment should not be seen as a singular event originating in some (European) centre and radiating out into the global peripheries, rather it was a ‘process of global circulation, translation, and transna- tional co-production’.13 Since the same epoch in the eighteenth century, anthropology (and anthropological curatorship) has developed through scientific exploration and colonial expansion beyond Europe, as well as the establishment of ethnographic collections and museums in Europe, thus institutionalising and materialising the global circulation, translation and co-production of ideas. Anthropological curatorship then and now can be understood as a mobile, cross-cultural form of knowledge production. We believe that what is needed today is a form of curating enacted not only through its analyti- cal focus on cross-cultural action, traffic and appropriation but also at the level of method, interpretation and representation of the curatorial inquiry itself.14 To address the second part of the proposed line of inquiry, and to shape Curatopia in more reciprocal, symmetrical forms, we explore how the relationships between Indigenous people in North America and the Pacific, collections in Euro-American institutions and curatorial knowledge in museums globally can be (re)conceptualised. How can we address the per- sistent problem that the majority of museological interventions produce and represent Indigenous visual and material cultures through the imposition of alien categories such as ‘art’ and ‘artefact’? How can Indigenous histories, theories and practices drive their own visual language, representational mode, and thematic and spatial enactment through curatorial interventions in museum collections and exhibitions? We are accustomed to curators from ‘the West’ talking about objects and collections from ‘the rest’ of the world, but what happens when Indigenous curators interpret their own cultures using native and tribal frameworks? And what can European cura- tors learn from this? On the analytical plane, we are accustomed to French and German social theory being exported into Anglophone museum and curatorial studies, but the ways in which Indigenous philosophies and ideas travel and speak back suggest that we can more effectively address the globalised world we inhabit and consider museums for what they are: pro- foundly cross-cultural spaces. This volume follows these lines of enquiry by assessing the current state of play in curatorship, reviewing models and approaches operating in various museums, galleries and cultural organisations around the world, and debating emerging concerns, challenges and opportunities. The subject areas range over Native and tribal cultures, anthropology, art, history and philosophy. In some cases, authors look beyond Indigenous topics to con- sider how collecting, exhibiting and research in former settler colonies have developed in response to, or alongside, Indigenous people and culture; and/ or discuss the implications of these developments for European institu- tions. The volume is international in scope and covers three broad regions – Europe, North America and the Pacific.
- 27. Chapters are grouped by regions for several reasons. The Eurocentric projection of anthropological or curatorial imaginations has come under intense pressure while (post)colonial renegotiations in North America and the Pacific have initiated dramatic changes to anthropology through Indigenous knowledge practices including curatorship.15 The book creates a dialogue between those situations, enabling Indigenous perspectives from North America and the Pacific to directly intervene in European debates and institutions that hold material traces from these regions and their Indigenous inhabitants. While chapters are grouped by region, thematic layers across the chapters show how these regions are relationally consti- tuted, demonstrating that cross-Indigenous initiatives and networks are indeed global in reach. This becomes obvious, for instance, when exploring the manifold linkages across the Pacific and the Americas in both the past and the present. We do not conceptualise these as two separate regions, but instead emphasise the Transpacific as a relational space so that the dynamic character of locations and their entanglements is foregrounded.16 In this vein, most, if not all, chapters in this volume resist conventional territorial boundaries, which reflects what museum objects, collections and exhibi- tions inevitably do: they circulate, and in the process become translated and co-produced. The book is itself the product of a scholarly network that radiates out in different directions and on several levels. It is the result of two events, a con- ference held at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany, in 0.2 Delegates at the Curatopia conference, Munich, Germany, July 2015. They include, from left to right: Bronwyn Labrum, Paul Tapsell, Conal McCarthy, Billie Lythberg, Amiria Salmond, Ivan Gaskell, Philipp Schorch and Larissa Förster. 4 Curatopia
- 28. Introduction 5 2015 (see Figure 0.2), and a seminar at Victoria University of Wellington in Aotearoa New Zealand in 2011. The contributors are leading and emerging scholars and practitioners in their respective fields. Furthermore, all con- tributors have worked in and with universities and museums, often in cura- torial roles, and are therefore well positioned to enrich the dialogue between academia and the professional museum world. In this introduction, we refrain from the common trope of summarising and pre-interpreting indi- vidual contributions. Rather, we allow Curatopia to gradually unfold, seeing it as our task here, first, to situate it, then, second, to suggest how to study and enact it and, finally, to extend an invitation to (re)imagine and (re-) enact it. Situating Curatopia In this section, we consider how curators and curating have been and are being transformed, situating this museological practice against the back- ground from which it can be studied, imagined and enacted. Since the late twentieth century, curating seems to be everywhere. Indeed, one might argue that we already live in a kind of curatopia. The New York Times art critic Michael Brenson calls the 1990s ‘the age of the curator’;17 Paul O’Neill refers to the ‘curatorial turn’;18 and David Balzar claims that ‘curationism’ has taken over the world and everything in it.19 Much of the confusion that surrounds curatorship has to do with what Hans-Ulrich Obrist has called ‘the amnesia of curatorial history’.20 As with museums, curating is a modern, European invention with long historical roots.21 By the twentieth century, the ‘grey’ literature of manuals, policies and other professional documents tells us that a museum curator was expected to acquire, research and manage collections, including their preservation (what we now call conservation), and, by extension, exhibitions (though these were in the main permanent displays).22 But after the Second World War, the expan- sion of the number and type of museums brought diversification, specialisa- tion and professionalisation with new roles such as collection managers and conservators taking over some curatorial duties, while the development of temporary exhibitions became more of a focus.23 Histories of curatorship tend to suggest a ‘pendulum swing’ during the last century going back and forth between scholarship and collections on the one hand, and exhibitions and the public experience on the other.24 In the last thirty years, to put it simply, curatorial practice has changed ‘from caring to creating’.25 Moving beyond collection care, various new models of ‘curator as’ have proliferated which emphasise their creative agency: curator as exhibition-maker, project manager, producer, artist and many more.26 ‘The field of curating itself has changed from one of strict and specialised connoisseurship of individuals and their oeuvres,’ writes Sarah Cook, ‘to one that … has more to do with public service, diplomatic management, and cutting-edge knowledge of the problems at play in contemporary society’.27
- 29. The age of the Internet from the late 1990s seems to promise democratised access to museum collections, and the opportunity for everyone to become their own curator.28 In Beryl Graham and Sarah Cook’s Rethinking Curating,29 they challenge art curators to take account of dis- tributive and participatory systems, and hybrid and collaborative ways of working, characteristic of a digital and networked world.30 Whether or not this access has been realised, the apparent flattening and democratising of an activity once confined to academic specialists is often greeted with alarm by ‘traditional’ curators and with joy by advocates of new media.31 There has consequently been much lament from conservative critics at the apparent ‘erosion’ of curatorial control in the face of the now not-so-new museology.32 By the 2000s, there was an explosion of books, seminars and courses on curatorial practice, mostly dealing with the contemporary visual arts (which is not the focus of this book).33 If technological issues such as those above are mainly articulated in the visual arts, in the writing by or on cura- tors of history, anthropology, science and popular culture, external social factors are grappled with in fruitful ways which, we believe, look ahead to new curatopian futures.34 In anthropology and natural history museums, perhaps most closely associated with the legacy of colonialism, curators have struggled since the 1980s to reconcile tensions of race, identity, conflict and change.35 Objects collected from colonised people were often alienated from their original contexts and reassembled in the museum, reflecting the widespread desire to ‘grasp the world’ and control its resources.36 However, we argue that the postcolonial critique of anthropology and museums overlooks a long and fruitful history of engagement by Native and tribal people,37 failing to engage meaningfully with Indigenous scholars, concepts and frameworks.38 We look to work on colonial museums which figures them as relational entities interconnected with networks of institutions and processes, and objects as active things.39 While we have to be aware of the shortcomings of much work that rather glibly puts an optimistic spin on the difficult work of community engage- ment and collaboration,40 in recent years there has been much impres- sive research showing how curators, particularly in former colonies, have attempted to work in dialogue with Indigenous people, in what has often been called co-curation.41 In Canada in the 1980s, for example, the con- troversy over the Glenbow Museum exhibition The Spirit Sings wrenched curators from their museal enclave and plunged them into the midst of a changing society, transforming their practice in the process.42 Earlier curators might have viewed their work as ‘isolated academic inquiry’, writes Phaedra Livingstone, but this event ‘rendered such a stance unten- able’. From then on, many curators in Canadian history and anthropology museums ‘began to see themselves as public intellectuals whose work had relevance and repercussions for the living communities that were repre- sented in exhibitions’.43 Laura Peers and Alison Brown, in an important survey published in 2003, refer to the emerging collaborative approach as 6 Curatopia
- 30. Introduction 7 the ‘new curatorial praxis’.44 As the anthropologist Christina Kreps has argued, these engagements with Indigenous people and material culture put curating into cross-cultural dialogue, which ‘invariably entails viewing curatorial work as a continuing social process, and the acknowledgement of the social and cultural dimensions of peoples’ relationships to objects’. Usefully for this volume, Kreps theorises ‘curation as social practice and part of continuing social processes’.45 Studying Curatopia Decolonisation in former European colonies, as seen above in North America and the Pacific, has brought about dramatic changes to museums and anthropological practices. Indigenous curators drawing on Indigenous ontological perspectives have reshaped collecting, exhibiting, fieldwork and research (often conducted in partnership with nearby communities). However, the danger persists that some so-called ethnographic objects in European museums remain largely disconnected from the distant cultural environments of their Indigenous producers and sources.46 We believe that the problem is even deeper. Apart from the claims for moral redress, politi- cal concessions and legal reparations, which tend to dominate museological discussions, the issue is essentially methodological.47 It seems to us that anthropology does offer tools and methods that can critically analyse, revise and galvanise curatorial theory and practice. The his- torical gap between the university and the museum is closing up; museums are re-engaging with anthropology, and curators employing its methods to reform their practice. The key concerns of this book – historicising, theorising and ethnographically analysing museums as cross-cultural spaces, and cura- torship as a cross-cultural method – are of mutual benefit for both museums and universities. Acts of translation across social worlds have always been at the centre of anthropological research, including not only semantics and cul- tural concepts but also gesture and performance. Translation can be seen as a world-making process, in which realms of experience are brought together. These processes are always embedded in particular social contexts. Thus, the act of translating is imbued with power and legitimacy. Further, when we conceptualise translation not only as a method but also as a social practice, translation itself comes under scrutiny.48 While the notion of culture as a preset entity is now conceptualised as a dynamic and constantly changing phenomenon, we suggest placing more emphasis on the ways in which ‘culture’ becomes ‘alive’, hence how it is enacted and performed. The performative act shifts attention from the (postmodern) preoccupation with representation to practices through which meaning in the social world is actively constituted. We argue that both notions, enactment and performativity, can help us better understand the figure of the curator in his or her role of (re)constructing or creating culture in terms of a meaning-maker and relationship-creator.
- 31. As this book conceives of museums as spaces of cross-cultural encoun- ters, it is worth investigating the various ways in which these take shape and evolve. How can theories on, and empirical findings of, cross-cultural encounters advance our understanding of the interactions at work in museums? Cosmopolitan and transcultural approaches come to mind, challenging dualities and dichotomies, and stressing by contrast entangle- ment and overlap – e.g. the permeability of cultural boundaries, which are in a constant state of flux and allow for appropriation and adoption of new cultural forms. However, we take issue with the idea that cross- cultural encounters are, per se, something positive, or ‘useful’ in order to widen one’s own horizon or to lay the ground for a better understanding of the ‘other’. More often than not, cross-cultural encounters cause fric- tion, further essentialising otherness and difference while idealising one’s own cultural grounding. The task at stake is to investigate empirically the mechanisms that trigger different responses to face-to-face encounters and ask which theoretical conclusions, and practical – or, in a museum context, applicable – consequences can be drawn from these empirical findings. Another important issue often addressed in museum contexts is ques- tions of power and ownership of both objects and intangible treasures, and their ‘correct’ or adequate forms of representation, documentation and storage. We regard the quest for symmetrical relationships as an aporia, or even a utopia, that will hardly ever exist. Consequently, we suggest asking how hierarchy and authority are exercised and negotiated, how uneven power relations are installed and legitimised, and how they are challenged, appropriated and dealt with in subversive ways. Further, we understand that with an eye to the so-called material turn and impulses from science and technology studies, evident in more recent work on museums, a strong focus was placed on the relationship between the curator and the object, or the space between them. However, we con- sider also the wider material structure in this interplay, that is, to include the structural framework in which museum processes are embedded and shaped. In this vein, it is worth studying which opportunities and challenges arise in specific social settings, such as the materiality of the museum build- ing itself, and more specifically the spatial layout of the exhibition halls, the available budget and the institutional and wider political agendas. We could think along these lines about the practicalities of constraints and opportuni- ties alike. Another important impulse to be followed would be curatorial engagements with new (social) media, asking how physical materiality is transformed into the virtual presence of an object, and how virtuality changes and affects materiality. In which ways does the virtual go beyond, or complement, approaches that are currently widely discussed in the context of the so-called material turn and new material culture studies, along with ontological questions?49 This might be of particular relevance with regard to one of the key questions addressed in this volume, that 8 Curatopia
- 32. Introduction 9 is, how can objects and concepts be translated or transformed through curatorial work? We do not mean to suggest that there is one single answer to these questions, nor do we think that they are all and always equally relevant. Indeed, curators are not the only staff in contemporary museums involved with collections and exhibitions. But we do feel that these questions might be useful tools to think through the topics explored in this book from a theoretical, yet empirically grounded and historically informed angle. These debates should be coupled with the visitors’ engagements with exhi- bitions. While many exhibitions present themselves to the visitors’ eyes as coherent ‘finished’ and ‘polished’ projects, this might hinder the under- standing of the complex processes that take place in order to create this exhibitionary product, ready for experience and consumption. The curator as key actor often remains unknown to the wider public, as do the some- times years-long preparations on many scales that precede the opening of an exhibition. The same holds true for conceptual debates that are brought up in the process of exhibiting, when key approaches are shifted, adjusted, dropped or reinstalled in this negotiation process. Further, probably only a few visitors are aware of the wide range of actors who are involved in different phases of the exhibition process, ranging from scholars to carpenters, designers to concierges, security staff to insurance personnel. It is interesting to under- stand what kind of negotiation processes are shaping the relationships between these heterogeneous actors and how their power structure affects discourses and practices regarding intra- and inter-community relation- ships, including what has come to be called ‘source communities’. A further layer of management that is barely made transparent is the negotiation with regard to the geographical scope and spatial array of an exhibition. What kinds of networks exist between museums that ultimately facilitate or hinder the exchange of objects? Where are the objects from, where and in which contexts have they already been on display and where do they travel to next? How are tours arranged and secured, and which actors meet in the context of these itineraries, accompanying the objects and thus expanding networks and social relationships?50 We are of course aware of the fact that all these questions cannot be addressed in every exhibition – this would be an exhibition project in its own right. But it should be possible to include some of these aspects so as to make the processes behind the scenes more transparent and understandable to the visitor, and thus make knowledge that is evident to the expert, but not necessarily for the wider public, more inclusive and participatory. The great promise of museums, to us, has always been the potential for ‘making things public’51 by revealing the contested processes leading to the definition of categories and the interpretation of cultural worlds, and by giving ‘faces’ to decisions and public expression to controversies, in short, by concep- tualising exhibitions as processes to be revealed rather than products to be presented and experienced.52
- 33. It is one thing to reflect on our own intentions when developing, curat- ing, interpreting and designing an exhibition, but another to analyse its reception in terms of intended and unintended consequences. What effects do exhibits have on the audience, and who are the visitors?53 The classifica- tion ‘visitor’ most likely comprises an enormous range and is hard to pin down as a social category. And what about the inclusion of individuals who are not intellectuals and cosmopolitan travellers but rather the socially dis- advantaged, with Indigenous or other affiliations? What would they make out of the term Curatopia or other intellectual concepts that are foreign to their vocabulary? There might be a risk that we actually produce new ‘elite’ discourses in the context of cutting-edge curatorial thinking, thus actually losing the connection to ‘non-elite’ audiences. Re-enacting Curatopia The variety of disciplines, approaches and contexts in which curatorial work is practised today calls for an interdisciplinary framework which is not confined to specific media or collections. We propose that curation needs to develop its own theories and methods in a wider range of disciplinary settings and kinds of museums, in particular by drawing on specific, local, social and historical conditions, including Indigenous epistemologies and ontologies. Curators need varied, flexible, and practice-based frameworks for curating in a wider range of fields – anthropology, history, science, contemporary media and so on. If curatorial or museum studies and anthropology lack Indigenous voices and perspectives, then the research feeding into this book, tapping a rich vein of contemporary Indigenous scholarship, offers much to think about, and to put into practice. This research shows clearly, if ever evidence were needed, not only that Indigenous curators themselves are aware of the global issues discussed in this Introduction but that in their practices they are pushing the boundaries and exploring new territory, decolonising and Indigenising curatorship in the process and lighting the way to a courageous future for museums.54 As can be seen in the chapters that follow, they are working across diverse collections, and working with and for their people as well as scholarly research through collections and exhibitions. They are actively embracing digital technology, and ethnography/anthropology, and using it as a tool, despite all the detritus of colonialism and a history of strained relationships between museums, anthropology and Native people.55 These Indigenous curators are also interested in social history and are collecting contemporary culture in a lively dialogue with young Indigenous audiences. Lastly, they are engaging with the natural environment, and issues such as climate change, not just objects in museums. Above all, even when they are dealing with the past, they bring it into the present and future.56 This is not to deny individual agendas and interests, or to draw an ide- alised picture. Importantly, what we see in the practice of these Indigenous 10 Curatopia
- 34. Introduction 11 curators is a realistically utopian ‘curatorial dreaming’,57 a conviction in the role of the curator and a concrete, ethical sense of value and mission for the museum. This brings us back to the title of this book, a word that postmodern scepticism and postcolonial critique might frown on – Curatopia – but which our dire current situation demands: a commitment to cultural futures. After decades of suspicion about grand narratives and universality, which rightly drew attention to the limits of Western para- digms, it is time to move beyond the postmodern/postcolonial impasse and imagine a museum curatorship that deals not just with the past, and the present, but also the future. In pursuit of this aim, we offer in this volume building blocks towards Curatopia, an ideal of socially and politically engaged, interdisciplinary, and radically cross-cultural curatorial practice. Curatorship as cross-cul- tural translation makes sense, however, only if we do not commit the ‘the basic error of the translator’, which, according to Walter Benjamin, ‘is that he [or she] preserves the state in which his [or her] own language happens to be instead of allowing his [or her] language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue’.58 Instead, Benjamin rightly insists, ‘he [or she] must expand and deepen his [or her] language by means of the foreign lan- guage’,59 which is not confined to the linguistic domain but includes visual and ‘thing languages’60 among others. Curatorship thus faces the constant challenge of engaging with the effects and opportunities as well as the limits and risks of dialogical translation through mutual transformation. On the historical level, colonialism has neither been complete in the past nor com- pleted in the present – it is not an event but a process. In curatorship, then, we cannot escape the constant dialectical effort to consciously ‘inhabit his- tories’61 while being placed into histories, that is – as Karl Marx famously noted – being thrown into ‘circumstances’ which are not ‘self-selected’ but are ‘existing already, given and transmitted from the past’. There has to be a constant analytical movement between the ‘here’ and ‘there’, the ‘now’ and ‘back then’, to make sense of these ‘messy entanglements’.62 On the theoretical and methodological level, such a dialectical effort requires a ‘recursive anthropology’63 which is not content with generating ethnographic evidence for pre-conceived ideas but allows different cultural worlds to ‘dictate the terms of their own analysis’64 while recursively refram- ing its own points of departure. That is, serious cross-cultural study searches for resonances between different culturally grounded analytical positions and their respective articulation and movement through a common sphere while opening spaces for dissonances,65 which are provoked through the ‘untranslatable’.66 The nature of such curatorial inquiry is, like ‘the very nature of exhibiting’, of course, ‘a contested terrain’.67 Curatorial reciprocities/ symmetries are never quite possible – but always worth striv- ing for – through conscious attempts to produce heterotopian rather than hegemonic spaces. We end by returning to our opening provocation to think of museums as moving vessels, inspired by the example of museums in Aotearoa New
- 35. Zealand which are figured as waka, vessels which move through time and space, joining and making worlds, people, ideas and things. Arapata Hakiwai, co-author of Chapter 13 in this book, works at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (which means a receptacle of treasured possessions). As the Māori co-director, he is the Kaihautū, or ‘navigator’ of the waka. Hakiwai’s vision for Māori curatorship is to use the past as a resource to facilitate the future cultural development of iwi (tribes), working in partnership with those tribes.68 He and his colleagues have answered the call, mentioned at the start of this introduction, to load the precious heritage of their ancestors on board their canoe, and to sail on into unknown seas. Curators everywhere in any museum can learn to do likewise, steering their craft, the museum, into the future, through storms and currents, keeping everybody on board, even when the seas are rough. As the proverb says: He moana pukepuke e ekengia e te waka / Mountainous seas can be negotiated by a canoe.69 Notes 1 Examples include the national museum (Museum of New Zealand / Te Papa Tongarewa), armed forces museums (National Museum of the Royal New Zealand Navy / Te Waka Huia o Te Taua Moana o Aotearoa) and regional museums (Golden Bay Museum / Te Waka Huia o Mohua). The 2017 national conference theme was He Waka Eke Noa: Museums of Inclusion. See www.nzmu seums.co.nz/. Accessed 15 March 2017. 2 SeeT.R.Balneavis,‘TePoariWhakapapa:BoardofMaoriEthnologicalResearch’, Te Toa Takatini (1 September 1924), p. 101; A. Ngata, ‘He whakamarama/ Preface’, in A. Ngata (ed.), Nga moteatea: he maramara rere no nga waka maha. He mea kohikohi na A.T. Ngata / The Songs: Scattered Pieces from Many Canoe Areas Collected by A.T. Ngata. Part I, trans. Pei Te Hurunui Jones (Wellington: The Polynesian Society, 1959/1928), p. xiv. 3 For an explanation of the image, see Ngata, ‘He whakamarama/Preface’, p. xiv. 4 M. Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’, Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité, 5 (1984), 46–9. 5 P. Schorch, ‘Assembling Communities: Curatorial Practices, Material Cultures, and Meanings’, in B. Onciul, M.L. Stefano and S. Hawke (eds), Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2017). 6 S.R. Butler and E. Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams: Critics Imagine Exhibitions (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016). 7 Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias’. 8 V. Golding and W. Modest (eds), Museums and Communities: Curators, Collections and Collaboration (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). 9 S.R. Butler, ‘Reflexive Museology: Lost and Found’, in K. Message and A. Witcomb (eds), The International Handbook of Museum Studies: Museum Theory: An Expanded Field (Oxford and Boston: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 159–82. B. Lynch, ‘The Hole in the Wall: Beyond Happiness Making in Museums’, in Onciul, Stefano and Hawke (eds), Engaging Heritage, Engaging Communities, pp. 11–29. 12 Curatopia
- 36. Introduction 13 10 S. Conrad, ‘Enlightenment in Global History: A Historiographical Critique’, American Historical Review (2012), 999–1027. 11 The ‘discovery’ of the Americas was key for the Enlightenment as it forced fun- damental changes to European worldviews. One aspect of this was the question of whether Indigenous peoples have souls, that is, are human beings. 12 P. Schorch, C. McCarthy and A. Hakiwai, ‘Globalizing Māori Museology: Reconceptualising Engagement, Knowledge and Virtuality through Mana Taonga’, Museum Anthropology, 39:1 (2016), 48–69. 13 Conrad, ‘Enlightenment in Global History’. 14 P. Schorch and A. Hakiwai, ‘Mana Taonga and the Public Sphere: A Dialogue between Indigenous Practice and Western Theory’, International Journal of Cultural Studies, 17:2 (2014), 191–205; P. Schorch and N.M.K.Y. Kahanu, ‘Anthropology’sInterlocutors:Hawai`iSpeakingBacktoEthnographicMuseums in Europe’, Zeitschrift für Kulturwissenschaften, 1 (2015), 114–17. 15 M. Ames and M. McKenzie (eds), Curatorship: Indigenous Perspectives in Postcolonial Societies (Ottawa: Canadian Museum of Civilization, 1996). C. Kreps, Liberating Culture: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Museums, Curation, and Heritage Preservation, Museum Meanings (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). J. Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). 16 P. Schorch and E. Dürr, ‘Transpacific Americas as Relational Space’, in E. Dürr and P. Schorch (eds), Transpacific Americas: Encounters and Engagements between the Americas and the South Pacific (London and New York: Routledge, 2015), pp. xi–xxv. 17 P. Marincola, ‘Introduction: Practice Makes Perfect’, in P. Marincola (ed.), Curating Now: Imaginative Practice/Public Responsibility (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, 2001), p. 12. 18 P. O’Neill, ‘The Curatorial Turn: From Practice to Discourse’, in J. Rugg and M. Sedgwick (eds), Issues in Curating Contemporary Art and Performance (Bristol and Chicago: Intellect, 2007), pp. 13–28. 19 D. Balzar, Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else (London: Pluto Press, 2015). 20 H. Obrist quoted in Marincola, Curating Now, pp. 30–1. 21 See Oxford English Dictionary online: https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/defini tion/curator. Accessed 7 March 2017. 22 See for example J.M.A. Thompson (ed.), Manual of Curatorship: A Guide to Museum Practice (London: The Museums Association/Butterworths, 1984). 23 P. Boylan, ‘The Museum Profession’, in S. Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), pp. 415–30. 24 H. Norton-Westbrook, ‘The Pendulum Swing: Curatorial Theory Past and Present’, in C. McCarthy (ed.), Museum Practice: The International Handbooks of Museum Studies, vol. 2 (Oxford and Malden, MA, Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 341–56. 25 K. Arnold, ‘From Caring to Creating: Curators Change Their Spots’, in McCarthy (ed.), Museum Practice, pp. 317–40; see also A. Harding (ed.), Curating the Contemporary Art Museum and Beyond: Art and Design Profile no. 52 (London: Academy Group, 1997), p. 5. 26 P. O’Neill (ed.), Curating Subjects (London: De Appel, Centre for Contemporary Art, 2007), 13.
- 37. 27 From S. Cook, ‘Toward a Theory of the Practice of Curating New Media Art’, in M. Townsend (ed.), Beyond the Box: Diverging Curatorial Practices (Banff, AB: Banff Centre Press, 2003), pp. 173–4. 28 M. Henning, Museums, Media and Cultural Theory (Maidenhead: Open University Press McGraw-Hill Education, 2006). Paul Crowther even calls for a ‘postcuratorial’ art: P. Crowther, ‘Against Curatorial Imperialism: Merleau- Ponty and the Historicity of Art’, in P. Smith and C. Wilde (eds), A Companion to Art Theory (Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 477–86. 29 B. Graham and S. Cook, Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). 30 Ibid., 10–11. 31 For an interesting view of this see N. Cummings, ‘Everything’, in Harding, Curating the Contemporary Art Museum and Beyond, pp. 13–16. 32 D. Stam, ‘The Informed Muse: The Implications of “the new museo logy” for Museum Practice’, in G. Corsane (ed.), Heritage, Museums and Galleries: An Introductory Reader (Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 54–70. K. Schubert, The Curator’s Egg: The Evolution of the Museum Concept from the French Revolution to the Present Day (London: Ridinghouse, 3rd edn, 2009). 33 See Paul O’Neill’s bibliography on his website Curatorial Writing: www.paulo neill.org.uk/curatorial/writing/. Accessed 15 January 2017. 34 C. Kreps, ‘Non-Western Models of Museums and Curation in Cross- Cultural Perspective’, in Macdonald (ed.), A Companion to Museum Studies, pp. 457–72. 35 I. Karp and S. Lavine (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). 36 D. Preziosi and C. Farrago (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 37 T. Bennett, R. Harrison, I. Jacknis, F. Cameron, B. Dibley, N. Dias and C. McCarthy, Collecting, Ordering, Governing: Anthropology, Museums and Liberal Government (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017). 38 Schorch, McCarthy and Hakiwai, ‘Globalizing Māori Museology’. 39 C. Gosden and F. Larson, Knowing Things: Exploring the Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum 1884–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 40 For a cautionary lesson, see B. Onciul, Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonising Engagement (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). 41 R. Silverman (ed.), Museum as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). Golding and Modest, Museums and Communities. 42 R.B. Phillips, Museum Pieces: Towards the Indigenization of Canadian Museums (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2011). 43 P. Livingstone ‘Controversy as Catalyst: Administrative Framing, Public Perception and the Late 20th Century Exhibitionary Complex in Canada’, in V. Gosselin and P. Livingstone (eds), Museums and the Past: Constructing Historical Consciousness (Vancouver and Toronto: University of British Columbia Press, 2016), p. 192. 44 L. Peers and A. Brown, Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), pp. 1–2, 531. 45 Kreps, ‘Non-Western Models of Museums and Curation in Cross-Cultural Perspective’, 469. 14 Curatopia
- 38. Introduction 15 46 M. Horwood, ‘Worlds Apart: Indigenous Re-engagement with Museum-held Heritage: A New Zealand–United Kingdom Case Study’ (PhD dissertation, Victoria University, Wellington, 2015). 47 P. Schorch and N.M.K.Y. Kahanu, ‘Forum as Laboratory: The Cross-Cultural Infrastructure of Ethnographic Knowledge and Material Potentialities’, in Prinzip Labor: Museumsexperimente im Humboldt Lab Dahlem (Berlin: Nicolai, 2015), pp. 241–8. 48 W.F. Hanks, ‘The Space of Translation’, in W.F. Hanks and C. Severi (eds), Translating Worlds. The Epistemological Space of Translation (Chicago: HAU Books, 2015), pp. 21–49. 49 A. Salmond, ‘Digital Subjects, Cultural Objects: Special Issue Introduction’, Journal of Material Culture, 17:3 (2012), 229–44. 50 On this topic see L. Davidson, Museums and International Touring Exhibitions, blog, https://leedavidsonresearch.wordpress.com/author/leedavidsonnz/. Acc essed 15 March 2017. 51 B. Latour and P. Weibel (eds), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Karlsruhe: ZKM, 2005). 52 P. Schorch, ‘The “reflexive museum” – Opening the Doors to behind the Scenes’, Te Ara – Journal of Museums Aotearoa, 33:1–2 (2009), 28–31; S. Macdonald and P. Basu (eds), Exhibition Experiments (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2007). 53 L. Davidson, ‘Visitor Studies: Towards a Culture of Reflective Practice and Critical Museology for the Visitor-Centred Museum’, in Museum Practice: International Handbooks of Museum Studies, vol. 2 (Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), pp. 503–28. 54 This research draws upon the dialogues recorded in 2011 in Wellington, in 2015 in Munich, and interviews with Māori curators conducted in 2016–2017: Huhana Smith, Paul Diamond, Anna Marie White, Awhina Tamarapa and Matariki Williams. 55 J. Clifford, Returns: Becoming Indigenous in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MMA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2013). 56 See McCarthy, Hakiwai and Schorch, Chapter 13 below. 57 Butler and Lehrer, Curatorial Dreams, 2016. 58 W. Benjamin, ‘The Task of the Translator’, in M. Bullock and M.W. Jennings, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Volume 1 1913–1926 (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 262. 59 Ibid. 60 W. Benjamin, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in One-Way Street and Other Writings: Walter Benjamin, trans. by E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (London and New York: Verso Classics, 1997). 61 I. Wedde, ‘Inside Job’, in H. McNaughton and J. Newton (eds), Figuring the Pacific: Aotearoa Pacific Cultural Studies (Christchurch: University of Canterbury Press, 2005). 62 A. Taku and M. Quanchi, Messy Entanglements: The Papers of the 10th Pacific History Association Conference (Tarawa: Kiribati Paperback, 1995). 63 A. Salmond, ‘Transforming Translations (Part I): The Owner of These Bones’, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 3:3 (2013), 1–32. 64 A. Henare [Salmond], M. Holbraad and S. Wastell (eds), Thinking Through Things:TheorisingArtefactsEthnographically (LondonandNewYork:Routledge, 2007), p. 4. 65 Schorch and Kahanu, ‘Forum as Laboratory’.
- 39. 66 H.K. Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London and New York, Routledge, 1994). 67 Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, 1. 68 Arapata Hakiwai, ‘He mana taonga, he mana tangata: Māori Taonga and the Politics of Māori Tribal Identity and Development’ (PhD thesis Museum and Heritage Studies, Victoria University, Wellington, 2014). 69 King Ihaka, ‘Ngā whakatauki me ngā pepeha māori: Popular and Proverbial Saying of the Māori’, Te ao hou: The New World, 2 (April 1958), 42. 16 Curatopia
- 40. EUROPE PART I
- 42. 1 The museum as method (revisited)1 Nicholas Thomas The spaces of, and between, museums and anthropology today are full of paradoxes. Museums cannot escape the association of anachronism, they connote colonial dustiness. Yet in the early twenty-first century they are probably more successful than ever before – they attract more visitors, they loom larger in cultural life and they are better resourced financially, in general, than they have been at any time in the past. This is true in Britain, notably because of the allocation of a share of national lottery proceeds (through the Heritage Lottery Fund) to museum redevelopment. Virtually all major, and many smaller, institutions have had significant extensions or improvements at some time over the last twenty years. In many other coun- tries, too, museums and art institutions have, over recent decades, been the recipients of investment on a grand scale. National cultural and historical museums have received this support, in many cases, because what they now exhibit and affirm is multiculturalism, a civic project that is resonant of an anthropological legacy. It is a commonplace of the history of anthropology that the academic discipline was once firmly based in the ethnographic museum, but moved steadily away from it with the ascendancy of sociological questions from the 1920s onward. Though the 1980s and 1990s saw a revival of debate around art and material culture, mainstream anthropology arguably continues to drift away from the museum as a research resource or site of analysis. The paradox here is that, at the same time, the public have come to know anthropology almost exclusively through the museum. Up to and during the 1960s and 1970s, anthropologists, such as Margaret Mead, enjoyed mass audiences, and Lévi-Strauss was required reading across the humanities, but anthropology books today are read mainly by anthropologists (there are, needless to say, distinguished exceptions). Similarly, in the 1970s and 1980s, ethnographic films were widely broadcast; but that television slot is now firmly occupied by so-called ‘reality’ programming, which is cheaper and more sensational. Hence anthropology is scarcely either read or watched by a broader public, but the numbers of visitors to both specifically anthropological collections and to survey museums that include extensive anthropological displays have risen very dramatically. The British Museum,
- 43. 20 Europe which draws nearly six million people a year, is exceptional, but an institu- tion such as the Pitt Rivers Museum, which thirty years ago was more a university facility than a genuinely public museum, can now attract around four hundred thousand. Ethnographic collecting, collections and museums have been much debated, but the current ‘success’ of museums brings new questions into focus. Here I am not concerned with what lies behind the creation and resourcing of Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (Te Papa), the Musée du Quai Branly or the National Museum of Australia, the ascend- ancy of the British Museum, or museum-friendly policies on the part of governments and local authorities – though of course there is much to be said about new conceptions of culture and governance, and the growing preoccupation with tourism as a driver for urban regeneration and eco- nomic growth. I am interested, rather, in how we (curators of ethnographic collections) conceive of what we are doing, if our institutions are embedded less in academic anthropology and more in a domain of public engagement. Does anthropology remain the discipline that informs anthropological col- lections, to be in turn informed by them? What kinds of knowledge under- pin the interpretation of collections, what methods does that interpretation involve, and what knowledge does it generate? And – to move from theory and research to public engagement – how in the early twenty-first century should anthropological collections be displayed, what stories should they tell, what questions should they raise? These issues are related to, but somewhat different from, those that have been conspicuous in the museum studies literature over recent years. This literature has been broadly divided between studies that might be consid- ered technical, which range from documentation through conservation and display to public education, and a more critical, historical and theoretical discourse. The critical discourse has tracked (and often lambasted) the project of colonial collecting, diagnosed museums as disciplinary forma- tions in Foucault’s terms, interrogated primitivist representation in display and otherwise explored the politics of institutions and exhibits. If the issues that the critical discourse identified remain present, it makes a difference now that many of the poachers have turned gamekeep- ers. Critics, including Indigenous activists, have become curators, and the newer generation of curators have been trained by critics. A postcolonial understanding of the ethnographic museum has entered the mindset, not of the whole of the museum profession but of most of those who deal with ethnographic material, and contemporary native art. Hence, in many insti- tutions, though certainly not universally, it is anticipated that originating communities are consulted around exhibition or research projects, they are indeed, increasingly, full collaborators. If this has become business as usual, that is surely positive, but it’s perhaps also a sign that the issue of representa- tion is no longer the right place to start from. At one time, it was self-evident that a museum anthropologist used anthropology to contextualise and interpret museum collections – that
- 44. The museum as method 21 anthropology was the discipline that ‘went with’ the anthropological collec- tion. Yet the activity and method of museum work was, and is, profoundly different from that of the academic discipline. Broadly, the academic project begins with theories and questions that are brought, through research methods, to the analysis of a particular case. If, obviously, the museum worker carries conceptual baggage, the practical project tends to start from, and stop with, the object. (Objects are its ‘stoppages’, in Duchamp’s and Gell’s sense.) There is something to be gained, I argue, from reflecting on the simplest of practices, such as writing a label, that of course are not simple at all. If the museum is not only an institution or a collection but also a method, a kind of activity, that activity has its moments. The moments we might reflect on are those of the discovery, the caption and the juxtaposition. It goes without saying that curators choose or select objects for display (or for other purposes such as loan, publication, reproduction on a postcard or whatever) but these terms imply operations more rational than might be apt. ‘Discovery’ is more ambiguous; it often involves finding things that were not lost; identifying things that were known to others; or the disclosure of what was hidden or repressed. What needs to be considered is not the ‘selection’ of artefacts and artworks but their discovery, the encounter with arrays of objects and the destabilisation which that encounter may give rise to. For example, a search for a ‘good’ or ‘representative’ piece may put at risk one’s sense of a genre or place. One may be distracted by another work, or by some aspect of the provenance or story of an object which is not good or not typical. This is in one sense entirely unremarkable, it is the contingency of dealing with things, but in another sense it represents a method, powerful because it is unpredictable. To assert that there might be value in looking for, at or into things, in a manner only weakly guided by theory, or literally misguided, in the sense that direction given by theory is abandoned as things are encountered along the way, sounds like the affirmation of an antiquarian curiosity, an indiscriminate and eclectic form of knowledge, one surely long superseded by rigorous disciplines and critical theories. But there are two reasons why ‘happening upon’ things might have methodological potency. The first is that a preparedness to encounter things and consider them amounts to a responsiveness to forms of material evidence beneath or at odds with canonical ethnographies, national histories, reifications of local heritage – and subaltern narratives. In other words, ‘happening upon’ brings the question of ‘what else is there?’ to the fore. That question has confronted, and should continue to confront, claims about great art, cultural traditions, historical progress and celebrated acts of resistance. Second, the antiquarianism which this discovery licenses is not that of George Eliot’s Casaubon but of Sebald. Not the self-aggrandising accumula- tion of ancient citations or specimens, but a distracted meditation on larger histories of culture, empire, commerce and military enterprise, marked
- 45. 22 Europe by madness, violence and loss, as well as more obscure personal projects, humanitarian missions and idiosyncratic inquiries. If this is an eclectic anti- quarianism, it is one that throws wide open the questions of history – what, out of all that has happened in the past, are we to remember and consider significant? What presence, and what bearing do histories and their residues have, on our various lives? If the moment of discovery gives us a good deal to think about, that thinking must be carefully and deliberately depleted in the act of captioning. By captioning I mean not only the literal composition of a line of text that might accompany an image or object but the business of description and the discursive contextualisation of any museum piece. There has been a great deal of circular argument about whether ethnographic artefacts should be described and presented as works of art or contextualised anthropologically (as though these were the only, and mutually exclusive, options). I am inter- ested not in this sort of debate, but in the point that labelling or captioning, like discovery, involves a particular kind of research that turns on simple questions, such as ‘What is it?’ Is a certain object a decorated barkcloth or a painting? Is a shield a weapon? Is a toy canoe or a diminutive spirit house a model canoe or model house? Is a walking stick an orator’s staff or a souvenir? Is a certain carving a spirit figure or a copy of a spirit figure commissioned by an ethnologist? The question is asked, only incidentally to get the answer right, for the particular piece. The method is the use of the object in the exploration of what these categories and distinctions might mean, where they come from, where they mislead, where they remain useful or unavoidable. The moment of juxtaposition arises because objects are seldom exhib- ited on their own. Whatever ‘it’ may be, one has to ask what it goes with, what it may be placed in a series with or what it may be opposed to. Again, it goes without saying that a chronological ordering of works by a single artist or an assemblage representing a particular culture each asks objects to speak to different conventions. My interest is not in the burden these classificatory or narrative conventions carry but in the moment in which other possibili- ties are present, and the scope for the ‘simple’ question to become a ques- tion of itself. Can objects that belonged to the secret, esoteric, ritual life of mature men (please not ‘of a community’) be placed with quotidian tools? Where does difference become incommensurability? When is it wrong, and when might it be right, to put incommensurable things together? If it has been taken for granted for several generations that the locus of innovation in disciplines such as anthropology has been ‘theory’, there is now scope to think differently and to revalue practices that appeared to be, but were actually never, sub-theoretical. This comment has not tried to map out in any rigorous way what an understanding of ‘the museum as method’ might entail. My general point is simply that one can work with contingen- cies, with the specific qualities and histories of artefacts and works of art, in ways that challenge many everyday or scholarly understandings of what things are and what they represent.
- 46. The museum as method 23 This work has diverse products, including cataloguing data made use of mainly by museum insiders. But among the most important are displays and exhibitions that make wider statements for diverse public audiences. In this context the question of how, today, ethnographic collections are to be shown and interpreted is in practice answered. In the UK, the most general response employs the ‘world cultures’ rubric. Material from diverse parts of the world presents diverse cultures side by side, not least in order to repre- sent and affirm the cultural heritages of immigrant, ethnic minority, com- munities. At some level, there is no problem with this, it is broadly desirable, and to some extent anyway unavoidable – even a lightly contextualised array of material from around the world must in effect present and offer for comparison a set of ‘world cultures’. If, however, this is the primary paradigm, it may sell a collection short, and fail to capitalise on its most fertile associations and their salience to cultural and historical debate today. Anthropological collections are always also historical collections, they are the products of, the evidence for and maybe even the memorials to, entangled histories. In the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, UK, important col- lections were made by explorers such as Cook and Vancouver, by the mis- sionaries who followed them and sought actively to transform local ways of life, and by colonial administrators and travellers who, in some cases, saw themselves as part-time anthropologists. For the most part twentieth-century additions to the collections were made by Cambridge fieldworkers. All of this material speaks to the history of empire, travel and exploration, to contacts that inaugurated colonial his- tories in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, to subsequent, enduringly contentious violence in, for example, Benin. The collections bear witness, as well, to the formation of disciplines such as archaeology and anthropology, and to the emergence of influential ideas and arguments (such as those of Radcliffe-Brown in central Australia, Bateson in the Sepik, Fortes in Ghana and so forth), albeit through object transactions and fieldwork images often forgotten or suppressed in formal publications and at the level of theory. Ethnographic collections may, as it were inadvertently, enable audiences to reinstate the ‘co-evalness’ that, Johannes Fabian has taught us, anthropo- logical discourse chronically denied. In the British context, anthropological collections speak not only of and to ‘cultures’ in various remote parts of the world, and to the ‘cultures’ of (for example) West African and South Asian immigrants, they also evoke engagements between the dominant (and itself heterogeneous) British population and the rest of the world over the last few hundred years. MAA in Cambridge is, as much as anything else, a museum of the formation of modern Britain, from a vantage point that may appear oblique, for those with a more traditional understanding of ‘English’ history, yet one that must also be considered fundamental, given the profoundly global character of British economy and society, from the seventeenth century onwards. Cook’s
- 47. 24 Europe Botany Bay spears belong, not only in a display dedicated to Aboriginal life, but with contemporaneous artefacts such as Gainsborough’s Blue Boy and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy – all three reflect aspects of a wealthy, experimen- tal, dynamic and dangerous imperial society. All good exhibitions should make material accessible at multiple levels, and it would be neither possible nor desirable to make the history of globali- sation the sole or the predominant interpretative frame for anthropological displays at MAA or elsewhere. But it is worth considering how the histories of particular objects, of particular collections, and those of the institu- tion as a whole could become lenses upon the much larger questions of 1.1 Mark Adams, Gweagal Spears, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge University, England. 2002. C type print from 10 x 8 inch C41 negative.
- 48. The museum as method 25 cross-cultural and colonial history. This would mean raising issues that are certainly difficult, from the point of view of the institution. Some members of the public assume that the material they encounter in ethnographic museums is essentially imperial loot. Although this is generally false, certain collections do include material seized in the aftermath of conflict, and the difficult histories of those collections, and the legacies of those histories, need to be acknowledged and explained. Yet historically evocative displays would be provocative in other senses too. They would reveal empire, not just as dominance, not just as a one-way street, not as a set of wrongs that should or simply can be apologised for now. Objects such as gifts to missionaries, and novel, post-Christian forms such as Niue hiapo (tapa cloth) or Cook Islands and Tahitian tivaevae/tivaivai (quilt) demonstrate the complex creativity engendered by these global exchanges that have changed what was ‘the West’ as well as many other societies throughout the world. It is widely appreciated that museums work when they offer their audiences problems rather than 1.2 Five young Tallensi women, photograph by Sonia Fortes, Upper East Region, Ghana, January 1937. MAA N.102347.MF.
- 49. 26 Europe solutions. It might be added that they work best when they allow their audiences to discover things, to be drawn into their unexpected, perhaps disturbing stories. Curiosity has a fraught history, but also an interesting future. Postscript In the early 1990s, during one of my first research visits to Aotearoa New Zealand, I was behind the scenes at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira, on my way to an appointment with one of the cura- tors. As we ascended a staircase, I was surprised to encounter, on the broad landing, a group of Samoan women – sitting on pandanus mats, on the edges of steps, one or two on chairs, surrounded by bags and bundles of rolled and prepared leaves – engaged in conversation. A couple were actually weaving; others were drinking tea. They were there, presum- ably, in the context of some organised visit, and were making themselves comfortable in this improvised, interstitial way, I suppose, because there was no meeting room or workroom available. But if there was a straight- forward explanation for the group’s presence, I had a contrary sense that the women had somehow simply found their way into this part of the building, and were making the space their own, in an unselfconscious and unhurried way. A few years later, I attended the 1996 meetings of the American Anthro pological Association in San Francisco, in the somewhat uncomfortable and alienating environment of the downtown Hilton Hotel. Among the bewildering proliferation of sessions typical of such gatherings was one on museum themes, scheduled in a smaller meeting room. It was a pleasure to hear James Clifford talk about ‘the museum as contact zone’. There were a few questions. We had not met before and chatted afterwards. In hindsight, the presentation was a low-key outing for a paper that would, deservedly, go on to be influential. I took Clifford’s point to be simple: whatever else they were, museums had become places of meeting and encounter. This was already true in many ways in many places – witness the ambiguity of what I had encountered in Auckland. Contacts were inevi- tably heterogeneous, some enormously rewarding, others tense, troubling, frustrating. In the twenty years since Clifford’s presentation, the majority of museums with collections formerly or still called ethnographic have embraced the contact zone as an identity, some more carefully, consistently and effectively than others. In ‘The Museum as Method’ I suggested that engagement of this sort had become, in a good sense, business as usual. I was concerned to rearticulate its consideration with the practical and con- ceptual activity that constituted curatorial work. What I intended was to signal that contact, collaboration, negotiation and partnership needed to be part of any museum’s ongoing work. I did not intend to suggest that debate around the contact zone and its possible
- 50. The museum as method 27 futures – imaginatively redefined by the editors and contributors to this book as ‘curatopia’ – was somehow over, neatly finished or resolved. Recent years have been marked by escalating contention around immigration, national narrative, identity, growing inequality and environmental futures. The multicultural values that museums of world cultures at least implicitly affirm are contested to an extent unprecedented in recent decades. Our ideally hushed conversations, in the company of artefacts, are sometimes drowned out by a political cacophony of categorical claims that refuse ques- tioning, qualification or nuance, from ‘A nation without borders is not a nation at all’ (Trump) to ‘Rhodes must fall’ (student activists in Oxford and Cape Town). There are two comments I would make on this new conjuncture, in the context of this impressive volume. The first is that curatorial authority is challenged, not only by ‘communities’. If, in the 1980s and 1990s, commen- tators were preoccupied with a decolonisation of knowledge, that opening up was often facilitated and mediated by curators who revalued and repositioned their expertise. By now, increasing numbers of curators and museum professionals are, anyway, of Indigenous descent. The new issue is rather that museum restructuring has in too many places downgraded research-based curatorial practice. In many institutions, there is simply less expertise about collections, and less expertise to negotiate the challenges they raise, ranging from the complexities of provenance to ethical ques- tions of access and interpretation. Collections cannot be sensitively and effectively activated if their liminal and sometimes difficult histories are inadequately understood. Partnerships between collections staff, university- based researchers and community members are now all the more critical to sustain understandings of the present and potential significances of remark- able expressions of past human creativity. But museums cannot mobilise those collaborations without some core, in-house capacity, which has in too many institutions been hollowed out as a result of both austerity and misguided approaches to museum management. Secondly, we need a profoundly nuanced approach to the heterogene- ity of material culture and interests in it, across milieux, communities and nations. This book is inspired particularly by Pacific and Māori perspec- tives on taonga (treasures) and their inspiring potential. But it is vital that we do not, in the manner of UNESCO, universalise particular forms of attachment to ancestral artefacts. Both within Oceania and comparatively, people’s investments and disinvestments in things are manifold. Artefacts have telling capacities that both fall short of and exceed the double-edged narratives of belonging that are currently being reasserted so forcefully. We need to engage not only local perspectives but their diversity; we need to ask ‘What else is there?’ and confront uncomfortable issues about identity poli- tics and postcolonial nations. And we cannot stop investigating Europe’s difficult histories, and the difficult histories of collections and museums – that, however, have become fertile and revelatory in ways their makers never anticipated.
- 51. 28 Europe Note 1 This comment was written in November 2009, one of several invited opinion pieces commissioned by Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen Nash at the time they became joint editors of Museum Anthropology. Citations did not seem appropriate, though I am well aware of, and indebted to, a stimulating literature to which many colleagues have contributed. It may however be helpful to some readers if I make it explicit that I refer to Alfred Gell’s discussion of Duchamp in Art and Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); to novels by W.G. Sebald including Austerlitz (London: Penguin, 2001); and Johannes Fabian’s important Time and the Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). I am grateful to Ruth Phillips, the editors of Museum Anthropology and their refer- ees, and the editors of the present volume for their comments and their encour- agement. Apart from the sentence at the end of the second paragraph, referring to the Pitt Rivers Museum, the text has not been updated or revised here; aspects of the argument were elaborated on in ‘Global Reach’, Apollo (April 2016), 30–4 (online version: ‘We need ethnographic museums today – whatever you think of their history’) and in The Return of Curiosity: What Museums Are Good for in the Twenty-First Century (London: Reaktion, and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
- 52. 2 What not to collect? Post-connoisseurial dystopia and the profusion of things Sharon Macdonald and Jennie Morgan Imagine a museum storeroom lined with shelves and racks. These are filled with boxes and objects, labelled by number and name. On one shelf sit a dozen or so radios, mainly from the 1950s, hefty things with dials and wood veneer. On another are six seemingly identical stoneware bed- warmers from the early twentieth century. A tall shelving unit is packed with ceramics – teacups, bowls, jugs, plates – and other, unidentifiable things. A bedframe leans against one of the few bare areas of wall; a butter churn stands on the floor at the end of an aisle. In a corner, two tables and a desk with a computer are piled high with paperwork, ring binders and yet more objects. A woman apologises when we enter: ‘I’m so sorry about the state of this room. We’re just in the process of trying to clear the mega- backlog. Not that I can claim this is new – to be honest, it’s always like this!’ She gestures us to sit down and tells us about what she describes as ‘my big headache’: It’s just so hard to know where to begin – and where to end. There’s so much that we could collect and that we could display, so many stories that we could tell. Already, we have so much. Actually, we even have so much that we haven’t fully catalogued or researched yet – our backlog is pretty scary, well, as you can see – those things on the tables over there waiting to be catalogued are just part of it. And don’t even ask about digitisation. We are hardly alone in this. So many museums are in this position. Our storage is already filled to bursting point, so it is really hard to justify collecting more. But at the same time, we have a duty to future generations to actually try and show the way things are today. Are there ways of putting on the brakes and saying enough is enough? You want to know what we collect and why – and it’s a good question. But to be quite honest, I think that sometimes it’s more a matter of having to decide what not to collect – not that that makes it any easier. The description and quotation above are fictional, in the sense that they are not literal descriptions or transcriptions (except in fragments) from a particular individual or any specific museum storeroom. They do, however, draw upon actual discussions that we have had, and speak in ways that we hope are true to the comments and feelings expressed by curators who
- 53. 30 Europe we have met during our research fieldwork, and whom we quote directly in the rest of this chapter.1 That research field is museums, primarily those within the UK that have a remit to collect recent and/or contemporary everyday life. Our focus here is on what for many curators working in this context is a major challenge, and one that for some at least makes them feel that the role of curator has changed significantly from that of curators of a previous generation. The challenge is what to collect for the future, and how to cope with what has already been collected in the face of what is perceived as a proliferation of possibilities. While selecting what to preserve for the future can be said to have been a central task of curators of previous generations too – some would say this is the central role of curatorship – this, according to many curators of the contemporary everyday, no longer works, and can no longer work, as it once did. Unravelling the reasons for this and its implications for the changing figure of the curator is the aim of our chapter. At issue, we maintain, is not just a practical challenge of the number of things that can potentially be collected and kept for future generations (though that is not irrelevant). Rather, we argue, our curator’s predica- ment is also a function of shifts in ways of understanding the curatorial role; material culture and its value; and the relationship between curators, other people and things. Although our curator, and many like her, may sometimes feel the situation in which she works to be somewhat dystopian, this does not mean that she is, and others are, without utopian hopes and ideals. Indeed, the sense of dystopia is in part at least a function of utopian striving, sometimes for goals that, if not conflicting, do not always mesh seamlessly. Profusion: politics, economics and (alternative) values Our research is part of a larger project called Heritage Futures.2 The theme on which we work is called ‘Profusion’. It focuses on the apparent challenge of mass-production and mass-consumption for selecting what to keep for the future. How in the face of there being so many more things produced today – beginning with industrialisation and mass-production, especially since the mid-nineteenth century, and then accelerated by post-Fordist production since the 1970s – is it decided what will be kept for the future? As research field sites within which to look at this challenge we focus on a selection of household practices and investigate museums that have a remit to acquire from the present and recent past. It is on our museum study that we draw in this chapter. In setting up our research, we presumed that there was something specific and different about the challenge posed by so many things. Now, it might be contested that what makes it through one period of time to another has always entailed selection, some active, some accidental. There are always many more things that could have made it. While this is so, our
- 54. What not to collect? 31 reading of available scholarship suggests that there is something not just more acute but also more historically, culturally and experientially specific about the contemporary situation.3 This is not, however, simply a reflex of mass-production and mass-consumption themselves. That is, there is more causing the headache than an increase in the sheer number and range of available things. Part of our aim, therefore, is to delve further into what is involved in what Elizabeth Chin has referred to as ‘the growing sense of too muchness’;4 and to highlight ‘profusion’ in ways that go beyond quantitative understandings. Certainly, as curators of the contemporary everyday explained to us, their difficulties over what to collect are aggravated both by the quantity and the constant production of new things (models of mobile phones were an example we encountered several times), and also by a ‘lack of time perspec- tive’ as one put it, from which one can look back and make judgements. Here, the question of what was sufficient a difference to warrant collecting something was often raised: ‘Every new model of the iPhone?’ As another pointed out, what also makes the task for the curator of the contemporary everyday particularly difficult is that the range of possible things to collect has not yet been ‘thinned down by the teeth of time’ or by what another referred to as ‘time sift’. ‘I have this slight fear’, we were told, ‘that some- times people think that any contemporary collecting is a gamble … You know, has this been tested by history and has it been found representative enough or vocal enough? Is it typical of its time?’5 Nevertheless, it should be emphasised that it is not only curators of the contemporary everyday who express concern about what to collect and who have mega-headaches over how much has already been collected and what to do with it. An international meeting of natural history museums in 1985, for example, described a dilemma of collections growing by about fifty million specimens per year.6 This also serves to show that the per- ceived ‘too-muchness problem’ is not simply a reflex of mass-consumption, although it may relate to it in more complex ways. What we see more widely, however, is a growing discourse within museums and museum organisations about questions of what to collect in the face of an apparent glut of choice, and about how to deal with expanding numbers of objects in sometimes already full storage spaces. Quite when the idea that museums might have a profusion problem began to be articulated is something that we are still investigating and intend to write about elsewhere. Our reading of available literatures and conversations with museum professionals indicate that – within the UK, at least – the problem seems to have been discussed and debated with particular intensity in the last two decades of the twentieth century.7 In the UK, a 1989 report called The Cost of Collecting, commissioned by the Office of Arts and Libraries, was the source for the frequently quoted figure that 80 per cent of UK collections were in storage.8 By 2003, the National Museums Directors’ Conference could issue a report titled Too Much Stuff?9 If that was not provocative enough, its subtitle, Disposal from Museums,
- 55. Other documents randomly have different content
- 56. VIII HAMILTON'S DEATH AND CHARACTER The death of Hamilton was in a peculiar sense a part of his public career. He had never hesitated to denounce in strong terms the public career and some of the private acts of Aaron Burr. The latter, after losing the presidency, sought the governorship of New York, and entered into correspondence with the Federalist leaders in New England with a view to the formation of a Northern confederacy. Hamilton succeeded in dividing the Federalist vote in New York so as to give the election to Lewis, Burr's democratic rival. Burr then determined to force a personal quarrel upon Hamilton in order to obtain revenge upon the man who had so often thwarted him. Hamilton had no desire to fight, but he did not feel able to repudiate the code of the duelist as it was then accepted among gentlemen. It was on June 17, 1804, that Colonel Burr, through his intimate friend Judge Van Ness, demanded an apology for a criticism by Hamilton which had reached Burr's ears. Several letters were exchanged before it became plain that Burr was bound to force a quarrel or to humiliate Hamilton to a point which he knew would not be endured. When Burr's true purpose became plain to Hamilton, he requested a short time to close up several important cases for his clients, which were then pending in the circuit court. The circuit having terminated, Colonel Burr was informed (Friday, July 6, 1804) that Hamilton would be ready to meet him at any time after the following Sunday. Both men realized that the meeting might be fatal, and prepared for it in a characteristic way. Burr, who because of his fascinating manners was a great favorite with women, destroyed the compromising letters which he had received and devoted his spare hours to pistol practice. Hamilton had fewer such letters to destroy, and was determined not to kill Burr if it could be avoided. He drew
- 57. up his will, and prepared a statement of his reasons for fighting. This statement set forth that he was opposed to the practice of dueling and had done all that was practicable, even beyond the demands of a punctilious delicacy, to secure an accommodation. He then said:— I have resolved, if our interview is conducted in the usual manner, and it pleases God to give me the opportunity, to reserve and throw away my first fire; and I have thought even of reserving my second, and thus giving a double opportunity to Colonel Burr to pause and repent. The arrangements for the duel were made on Monday, and on the following Wednesday (July 11) the meeting took place at seven o'clock in the morning at Weehawken, three miles above Hoboken, on the west shore of the Hudson. Burr and Hamilton exchanged salutations, the seconds measured the distance, which was ten paces, and the parties took their respective stations. At the first word, Burr fired. Hamilton's weapon was discharged in the air, and he almost instantly fell, mortally wounded. The ball struck the second or third false rib, fractured it about the middle, passed through the liver and diaphragm, and lodged in the first or second lumbar vertebra. Hamilton was at first thought to be dead, but he revived when put on board the boat which was in waiting, and was able to utter a few words as he was borne towards his home. He died on the day after the meeting at two o'clock in the afternoon. Even in his death he rendered a parting service to his countrymen, by the revulsion of feeling which was everywhere aroused against the practice of dueling. The news of his premature taking off caused a wave of grief and indignation to spread over the country, differing from the chastened sorrow felt over the death of Washington, because Washington had met his end full of years and honors, and in the natural order of nature. The concluding statement made by Hamilton in the paper which he left regarding his meeting with Burr gives some clue to his reasons for fighting. This paragraph ran as follows:—
- 58. To those who, with me, abhorring the practice of dueling, may think that I ought on no account to have added to the number of bad examples, I answer that my relative situation, as well in public as private, enforcing all the considerations which constitute what men of the world denominate honor, imposed on me (as I thought) a peculiar necessity not to decline the call. The ability to be in future useful, whether in resisting mischief or effecting good, in those crises of our public affairs which seem likely to happen would probably be inseparable from a conformity with public prejudice in this particular. This statement has been construed to mean that Hamilton looked forward to the time when the Constitution would be assailed by extremists and he would be called by events to put himself at the head of a movement for a stronger government, and perhaps even to lead an army. Several passages in his writings, especially after the downfall of the Federalists, gave color to the view that he feared an outbreak of Jacobin violence in America, and the failure of the Constitution in such an event to resist the strain which would be put upon it. In a letter to Gouverneur Morris (February 27, 1802), he drops into the following gloomy forebodings:— Mine is an odd destiny. Perhaps no man in the United States has sacrificed or done more for the present Constitution than myself; and, contrary to all my anticipations of its fate, as you know, from the very beginning, I am still laboring to prop the frail and worthless fabric. Yet I have the murmurs of its friends no less than the curses of its foes for my reward. What can I do better than withdraw from the scene? Every day proves to me more and more that this American world was not made for me. This mood of despondency was not the usual mood of Hamilton. Much as he abhorred the sympathy with France shown by the Democrats and the tendency towards French ideas, his habitual temper was for combination and action rather than surrender. During the three years which followed the inauguration of Jefferson, he continued, though busy with his law practice, to keep up in private
- 59. life an active correspondence with Federalist leaders throughout the country, and to advise earnest efforts to defeat Democratic policies. Only the day before the duel, in a letter to Sedgwick of Massachusetts, he indirectly condemned a project which was on foot for a combination of the Northern States into a separate confederacy. He said that dismemberment of our empire will be a clear sacrifice of great positive advantages without any counterbalancing good, administering no relief to our real disease, which is Democracy. Hamilton had fears for the future of the Union under the Constitution which were much exaggerated by his leanings towards a strong, self-centred government like that of Great Britain. It is not unreasonable to believe that he felt that he might again be called upon to play a great part in politics as the leader of his party, and that under the prejudices then prevailing he would weaken his personal influence if he refused a challenge. The public man of that day who could be charged with cowardice or lack of regard for his personal honor would suffer much with the masses, if not with the party leaders, who understood his character and abilities. Hamilton hardly needed to prove his personal courage to any reasonable man after his services in the Revolution, including his reckless charge upon the redoubt at Yorktown, but political foes might forget these evidences of his character if he should tamely submit to insult from a political opponent. It is doubtful whether his purpose in meeting Burr went beyond this submission to the general prejudice in favor of dueling and the belief on his part that his position as a gentleman and a political leader required him to accept the challenge. The high abilities and great services of Hamilton to the new Union have been sufficiently set forth in these pages to make unnecessary any elaborate estimate of his character and attainments. His essential merit was that of a constructive and organizing mind, which saw the opportunity for action and was equal to the opportunity. Hamilton was governed to a large extent by his intellect, but having reasoned out a proposition to be sound and wise, he
- 60. rode resolutely to its accomplishment, taking little account of the obstacles in the way. He was not a closet philosopher, pursuing abstract propositions to their sources, and searching, through the discordant threads of human destiny, the ultimate principles of all things; but his mind was keen and alert in seizing upon reasoning which seemed obviously sound, laboring in behalf of his convictions, and presenting them with force and simplicity to others. He found the career for which he was preëminently fitted in the organization of the financial system and the consolidation of the Union, under the first administration of Washington. He was less fitted for the career of a politician in times less strenuous, or when tact and finesse were more useful in securing results than clear reasoning and strong argument. Hamilton was cut off when he had only recently resumed his professional career, but was making a distinguished record at the bar. Always a great lawyer, he would soon have accumulated a fortune if he had lived amid the tempting opportunities of to-day. As it was, his legal fees were modest and his sudden death left large debts. He bequeathed the request to his sons that they should assume these debts if his estate was insufficient, but the gratitude of some of the wealthy Federalists relieved them of this filial obligation. Hamilton had six sons, but most of them were already approaching a self-supporting age when he died. His oldest son had fallen a victim to the barbarous practice of dueling in a petty quarrel at a theatre three years before the father's death. The fourth son, Mr. John C. Hamilton, gave much time to the study of his father's career, and prepared the Life of Hamilton which has been the source of the later work of historians. Hamilton's widow, the daughter of General Schuyler, survived until 1854, when she died at the age of ninety- seven years and three months. As a man in private life, Hamilton was loved and respected by those who came closest to him, but it was as much by the qualities of his mind as by the special fascinations of his manner. He commanded the respect and support of most of the leaders of his party, because
- 61. they were great enough to grasp and appreciate his reasoning, but he was never the idol of the people to the same extent as many other leaders. He would probably have made a great career in whatever direction he might have turned his high abilities, but he was fortunate in finding an opportunity for their exercise in a crisis which enabled him to render greater services to the country than have been rendered by almost any man in her history, with the exception of Washington and Lincoln. The Riverside Press Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton Co. Cambridge, Mass., U.S.A.
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