World view
A conference later this month will ask what role ethnographic museums have in the 21st century. Geraldine Kendall reports
“Si ton musée est mort, essaye le mien!” reads one exhibit on display in Fetish Modernity, a touring exhibition currently travelling to ethnographic museums across Europe – “If your museum is dead, try mine!”
Created by the artist Jean-François Boclé, from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, the artwork is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the dilemma that ethnographic museums in the western world, particularly Europe, have been wrestling with for the past few decades: how can institutions founded to display the spoils of empire stay relevant in a postcolonial world – and how far should they go to acknowledge their sometimes disreputable histories?
In the 1990s and 2000s, serious efforts were made by ethnographic museums to reinvent their role, primarily through reconnecting and collaborating with source communities, collecting contemporary indigenous art and, on occasion, repatriating objects. The measures went a long way towards deepening understanding of collections and rehabilitating the sector’s image.
Refocus
Some institutions went a step further, abandoning the vestiges of their colonial history entirely by rebranding and moving their collections to a new building.
The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris is probably the most prominent example of this. When it opened in 2006, the new institution had inherited art collections once displayed in the colonial-era Musée de l’Homme, which has itself closed for a major renovation and will relaunch in 2014 as a museum of biological evolution.
The old fears that restitution would open the floodgates to lots of claims have largely subsided, says Corinne Kratz, an anthropology professor at Emory University in Atlanta, as it became clear that access was more important to most source communities than “asking for everything back”.
Although debates over postcolonial thinking linger, an international conference taking place at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on 19-21 July, the Future of Ethnographic Museums, seeks to look ahead and move the conversation beyond the identity crisis that once dominated discussions.
Museum network
The conference marks the culmination of Ethnography Museums and World Cultures, a five-year project funded by the European Commission to enable museums to exchange cross-cultural dialogue and share practice through a new group, the International Network of Ethnography Museums.
Since 2008 the initiative has brought together ethnographic curators, academics and social scientists to redefine their priorities in “an ever more globalising and multicultural world”.
Originally formed of 10 partner museums in Europe, the network eventually hopes to expand to ethnographic institutions worldwide, particularly those from economically underprivileged countries.
Clare Harris is co-convenor of the conference and acting director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the network’s original partners. A key shift in thinking since the project began, says Harris, is that museums are increasingly focused on “engaging with diverse communities that are on our doorstep in Europe, as well as those in more distant places”.
“The situation in the EU is becoming much more about how museums interact with migrant communities and connect with them,” she says. “For some, it’s become less about historical objects and more about addressing issues and creating a space of interaction and debate.”
A more practical but fundamental question the conference will also address, says Harris, is “how do we decide how we are going to collect the vast number of things from everyday life? That is one of the definitions of an ethnographic museum but we cannot collect everything – we have to come up with some criteria.”
Technology will inevitably play a vital role in any new approaches. Museums are finding new ways to boost access to collections, build relationships with source communities and reach wider audiences by using social media, data sharing and 3D scanning of objects, among other strategies.
But much of this thinking has evolved separately across Europe. A number of the partners in the International Network of Ethnography Museums, which includes the Musée du Quai Branly; the Museum für Völkerkunde (National Ethnography Museum) in Vienna; the Världskulturmuseernas (Museum of World Culture) in Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Museum Volkenkunde (National Museum of Ethnography) in Leiden in the Netherlands, came to the network with very different ideas about how things should be done, says the project’s research assistant Anna Seiderer, who is based at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (Royal Museum for Central Africa) in Tervuren, Belgium.
“Spiritual repatriation”
“In the beginning it was a really conflicted project in which each partner tried to defend their own position,” Seiderer says. Arguments flared over how best to collaborate with diaspora communities, with questions raised such as whether museums should allow religious ceremonies and other rituals to take place.
But the network – in particular the process of putting together the jointly produced exhibition, Fetish Modernity (see box) – eventually succeeded in breaking down barriers.
“In the end it became less about the theory and much more about practice and collaboration,” says Seiderer. “It was interesting – we are all still really different but now we understand the position of the other.”
Nicholas Thomas, director and curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, is speaking at this month’s conference. “We’re in an exciting phase,” he says. “The old distinctions – art museum, anthropological museum, history museum – are breaking down.
“Museum collections are not just historical archives, they’re strange, eclectic collections that a lot of different people make a lot of different things out of. We shouldn’t be prescriptive in asserting that people need to come to an exhibition to get one thing or another out of it.”
One example of this blurring of boundaries, he says, is the sector’s ambitious use of works of contemporary art from source communities; either through acquisition or by inviting indigenous artists to use existing collections as a creative tool, an approach some describe as “spiritual repatriation”.
Beyond colonialism
The MAA has an active contemporary acquisitions programme, while the Pitt Rivers Museum recently engaged Aboriginal artist Christian Thompson to create an art exhibition, We Bury Our Own, inspired by the museum’s Australian photographic archive.
“It demonstrates that these are real and dynamic cultures,” says Thomas. “Contemporary art also provides audiences with a point of entry to cultural collections that can sometimes be a bit daunting to understand.”
Thomas says it’s now time to think beyond the burden of colonial guilt and start drawing new stories out of collections: “There’s a sense that there has been too much focus on that debate. My argument is that there is a lot of European history in collections as well. Up to now, there’s been a failure to bring out the multidimensionality of collections.”
One step towards redressing this balance is the MAA’s latest exhibition, Chiefs and Governors: Art and Power in Fiji (until April 2014), which looks at the first encounters between the colonial and the Fijian elites.
Claire Wintle, the secretary of the UK’s Museum Ethnographers Group, believes other types of museums should share responsibility for the colonial past: “Ethnographic collections tend to have been responsible for dealing with colonial legacies but that’s something that all different kinds of collections could do. They all have those legacies, some are just a little more subtle than others.”
Elsewhere, institutions are taking a more proactive approach to academic research.
The Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève (Ethnographic Museum of Geneva) in Switzerland, for example, is carrying out a redevelopment that will see it established as a centre for anthropological research and for “interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange”.
“The collections are still very important,” says the museum’s conservator, Steve Bourget, but when the museum reopens next year, its exhibitions will be determined by a research programme and accompanied by teaching, symposia and publishing.
One planned exhibition on Islam aims to bring representatives from Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities together in a neutral space to foster dialogue and understanding.
Social justice
Bourget hopes this approach may help to elevate the position of ethnography and anthropology in society: “We are still lagging behind the other social sciences that have found a way of being installed in the general discourse of society. When we see the way societies work and don’t work, the way they fail to integrate together – anthropology could have a much more meaningful impact.”
Liberal governments had embraced the multicultural agenda but a backlash against this is having an impact, with the hardening of attitudes affecting institutions in some countries. The Dutch government, for example, is threatening to withdraw funding from ethnographic museums, a move attributed to the influence of the rightwing Freedom Party.
In the UK, immigration is a contentious issue, with migrant communities increasingly maligned by politicians and the press.
This societal shift may seem at odds with the redefined role of the ethnographic museum, but many believe it offers institutions an opportunity to step into the breach to promote social justice and community cohesion.
“Ethnographic museums are multicultural places,” says Harris. “We are about encouraging and fostering diversity, rather than telling one national narrative.”
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
The Ethnography Museums and World Culture project’s flagship exhibition, Fetish Modernity, has toured to a number of countries, including Belgium, Vienna and Sweden.
The exhibition has been co-produced by partner museums in the International Network of Ethnography Museums. The network fostered a collaborative way of working that saw each museum put forward a theme and propose objects from other institutions that should be included.
The exhibition aims to explode the assumption that western society has “a monopoly on all things modern”. Exhibits such as a photograph of an indigenous Papuan wearing a CD-Rom as a nose ornament give traditional clichés about indigenous cultures a subversive contemporary twist.
Other objects, such as ladders used by migrants to cross the border into Sweden, force the visitor to confront current attitudes to immigration, says Anna Seiderer, a research assistant at the International Network of Ethnography Museums who is based at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (Royal Museum for Central Africa) in Tervuren, Belgium.
“We like the objects coming into our country but we don’t like the migrants coming in.” The exhibition prompted a huge range of responses from visitors in different countries.
“The reaction at the Royal Museum for Central Africa was quite bad,” says Seiderer. “A lot of people got angry because they didn’t understand the message.”
Even the physical context of the display had an impact, she adds. “Our building is a thing of glory built for King Leopold, so it was quite difficult to deconstruct the exhibition alongside that.
“But in cities like Vienna the public and journalists were really enthusiastic.”
Created by the artist Jean-François Boclé, from the French Caribbean island of Martinique, the artwork is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the dilemma that ethnographic museums in the western world, particularly Europe, have been wrestling with for the past few decades: how can institutions founded to display the spoils of empire stay relevant in a postcolonial world – and how far should they go to acknowledge their sometimes disreputable histories?
In the 1990s and 2000s, serious efforts were made by ethnographic museums to reinvent their role, primarily through reconnecting and collaborating with source communities, collecting contemporary indigenous art and, on occasion, repatriating objects. The measures went a long way towards deepening understanding of collections and rehabilitating the sector’s image.
Refocus
Some institutions went a step further, abandoning the vestiges of their colonial history entirely by rebranding and moving their collections to a new building.
The Musée du Quai Branly in Paris is probably the most prominent example of this. When it opened in 2006, the new institution had inherited art collections once displayed in the colonial-era Musée de l’Homme, which has itself closed for a major renovation and will relaunch in 2014 as a museum of biological evolution.
The old fears that restitution would open the floodgates to lots of claims have largely subsided, says Corinne Kratz, an anthropology professor at Emory University in Atlanta, as it became clear that access was more important to most source communities than “asking for everything back”.
Although debates over postcolonial thinking linger, an international conference taking place at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford on 19-21 July, the Future of Ethnographic Museums, seeks to look ahead and move the conversation beyond the identity crisis that once dominated discussions.
Museum network
The conference marks the culmination of Ethnography Museums and World Cultures, a five-year project funded by the European Commission to enable museums to exchange cross-cultural dialogue and share practice through a new group, the International Network of Ethnography Museums.
Since 2008 the initiative has brought together ethnographic curators, academics and social scientists to redefine their priorities in “an ever more globalising and multicultural world”.
Originally formed of 10 partner museums in Europe, the network eventually hopes to expand to ethnographic institutions worldwide, particularly those from economically underprivileged countries.
Clare Harris is co-convenor of the conference and acting director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, one of the network’s original partners. A key shift in thinking since the project began, says Harris, is that museums are increasingly focused on “engaging with diverse communities that are on our doorstep in Europe, as well as those in more distant places”.
“The situation in the EU is becoming much more about how museums interact with migrant communities and connect with them,” she says. “For some, it’s become less about historical objects and more about addressing issues and creating a space of interaction and debate.”
A more practical but fundamental question the conference will also address, says Harris, is “how do we decide how we are going to collect the vast number of things from everyday life? That is one of the definitions of an ethnographic museum but we cannot collect everything – we have to come up with some criteria.”
Technology will inevitably play a vital role in any new approaches. Museums are finding new ways to boost access to collections, build relationships with source communities and reach wider audiences by using social media, data sharing and 3D scanning of objects, among other strategies.
But much of this thinking has evolved separately across Europe. A number of the partners in the International Network of Ethnography Museums, which includes the Musée du Quai Branly; the Museum für Völkerkunde (National Ethnography Museum) in Vienna; the Världskulturmuseernas (Museum of World Culture) in Gothenburg, Sweden; and the Museum Volkenkunde (National Museum of Ethnography) in Leiden in the Netherlands, came to the network with very different ideas about how things should be done, says the project’s research assistant Anna Seiderer, who is based at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (Royal Museum for Central Africa) in Tervuren, Belgium.
“Spiritual repatriation”
“In the beginning it was a really conflicted project in which each partner tried to defend their own position,” Seiderer says. Arguments flared over how best to collaborate with diaspora communities, with questions raised such as whether museums should allow religious ceremonies and other rituals to take place.
But the network – in particular the process of putting together the jointly produced exhibition, Fetish Modernity (see box) – eventually succeeded in breaking down barriers.
“In the end it became less about the theory and much more about practice and collaboration,” says Seiderer. “It was interesting – we are all still really different but now we understand the position of the other.”
Nicholas Thomas, director and curator of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge, is speaking at this month’s conference. “We’re in an exciting phase,” he says. “The old distinctions – art museum, anthropological museum, history museum – are breaking down.
“Museum collections are not just historical archives, they’re strange, eclectic collections that a lot of different people make a lot of different things out of. We shouldn’t be prescriptive in asserting that people need to come to an exhibition to get one thing or another out of it.”
One example of this blurring of boundaries, he says, is the sector’s ambitious use of works of contemporary art from source communities; either through acquisition or by inviting indigenous artists to use existing collections as a creative tool, an approach some describe as “spiritual repatriation”.
Beyond colonialism
The MAA has an active contemporary acquisitions programme, while the Pitt Rivers Museum recently engaged Aboriginal artist Christian Thompson to create an art exhibition, We Bury Our Own, inspired by the museum’s Australian photographic archive.
“It demonstrates that these are real and dynamic cultures,” says Thomas. “Contemporary art also provides audiences with a point of entry to cultural collections that can sometimes be a bit daunting to understand.”
Thomas says it’s now time to think beyond the burden of colonial guilt and start drawing new stories out of collections: “There’s a sense that there has been too much focus on that debate. My argument is that there is a lot of European history in collections as well. Up to now, there’s been a failure to bring out the multidimensionality of collections.”
One step towards redressing this balance is the MAA’s latest exhibition, Chiefs and Governors: Art and Power in Fiji (until April 2014), which looks at the first encounters between the colonial and the Fijian elites.
Claire Wintle, the secretary of the UK’s Museum Ethnographers Group, believes other types of museums should share responsibility for the colonial past: “Ethnographic collections tend to have been responsible for dealing with colonial legacies but that’s something that all different kinds of collections could do. They all have those legacies, some are just a little more subtle than others.”
Elsewhere, institutions are taking a more proactive approach to academic research.
The Musée d’Ethnographie de Genève (Ethnographic Museum of Geneva) in Switzerland, for example, is carrying out a redevelopment that will see it established as a centre for anthropological research and for “interdisciplinary and intercultural exchange”.
“The collections are still very important,” says the museum’s conservator, Steve Bourget, but when the museum reopens next year, its exhibitions will be determined by a research programme and accompanied by teaching, symposia and publishing.
One planned exhibition on Islam aims to bring representatives from Jewish, Christian and Muslim communities together in a neutral space to foster dialogue and understanding.
Social justice
Bourget hopes this approach may help to elevate the position of ethnography and anthropology in society: “We are still lagging behind the other social sciences that have found a way of being installed in the general discourse of society. When we see the way societies work and don’t work, the way they fail to integrate together – anthropology could have a much more meaningful impact.”
Liberal governments had embraced the multicultural agenda but a backlash against this is having an impact, with the hardening of attitudes affecting institutions in some countries. The Dutch government, for example, is threatening to withdraw funding from ethnographic museums, a move attributed to the influence of the rightwing Freedom Party.
In the UK, immigration is a contentious issue, with migrant communities increasingly maligned by politicians and the press.
This societal shift may seem at odds with the redefined role of the ethnographic museum, but many believe it offers institutions an opportunity to step into the breach to promote social justice and community cohesion.
“Ethnographic museums are multicultural places,” says Harris. “We are about encouraging and fostering diversity, rather than telling one national narrative.”
Geraldine Kendall is a freelance journalist
Talking points: the key questions being asked at the Ethnography Museums and World Culture Conference
- What are Ethnographic museums for in the 21st century?
- What audiences should they aim to address and what should they contain?
- Should ethnographic museums retain the evidence of their entanglement with the colonial past or prioritise the contemporary in their collections and displays?
- Who has the right to own and represent the material culture of others?
- To what extent have new models of curatorial practice and contemporary anthropological theories realigned the power imbalance of earlier eras?
Challenging perceptions: Fetish Modernity
The Ethnography Museums and World Culture project’s flagship exhibition, Fetish Modernity, has toured to a number of countries, including Belgium, Vienna and Sweden.
The exhibition has been co-produced by partner museums in the International Network of Ethnography Museums. The network fostered a collaborative way of working that saw each museum put forward a theme and propose objects from other institutions that should be included.
The exhibition aims to explode the assumption that western society has “a monopoly on all things modern”. Exhibits such as a photograph of an indigenous Papuan wearing a CD-Rom as a nose ornament give traditional clichés about indigenous cultures a subversive contemporary twist.
Other objects, such as ladders used by migrants to cross the border into Sweden, force the visitor to confront current attitudes to immigration, says Anna Seiderer, a research assistant at the International Network of Ethnography Museums who is based at the Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale (Royal Museum for Central Africa) in Tervuren, Belgium.
“We like the objects coming into our country but we don’t like the migrants coming in.” The exhibition prompted a huge range of responses from visitors in different countries.
“The reaction at the Royal Museum for Central Africa was quite bad,” says Seiderer. “A lot of people got angry because they didn’t understand the message.”
Even the physical context of the display had an impact, she adds. “Our building is a thing of glory built for King Leopold, so it was quite difficult to deconstruct the exhibition alongside that.
“But in cities like Vienna the public and journalists were really enthusiastic.”