A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies
2005; Oxford University Press; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/ahr/110.1.68
ISSN1937-5239
Autores Tópico(s)Digital and Traditional Archives Management
Resumounfolding of historiographical narrative; in one form or another, contrast has inspired recovery or outright construction of alternative histories for marginalized or excluded groups. Over and against idea that objects are passive registers of symbolic meanings or exchange values, some revisionist thinking in anthropology stresses their material specificity as things with pasts.56 This revisionist enterprise has real-world consequences in Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) in United States and comparable initiatives in interests of native people elsewhere, particularly in Canada and Australia. Statutes of this sort have written into law view that objects are bearers and witnesses of values past and present, not just their signifiers or specimens. Where it is possible establish legitimate claims, legislation mandates restitution native groups of human remains and material goods collected by institutions such as ethnographic or local history museums. Predictably enough, enforcement has met institutional resistance in name of public interest, scholarship, and science. Between extremes, however, many creative accommodations have emerged: exchanges and loans of objects between museums and tribal groups; exhibitions and workshops bringing together museum professionals and curators; revival or adaptive reuse of techniques and traditions. Critics argue that results are forced, inauthentic, and evasive, but this line of criticism tends attribute a purity cultural objects that chipped glaze, torn thread, or worn surface insistently belie. 57 It is quite possible imagine some future version of this Brief Guide suggesting that museum studies had turned-or returned-from primacy of discourse priority of object. IF THE UNIVERSAL SURVEY was highest ideal of great public museums, partiality, in all senses of word, is a major theme and preoccupation of 56 For a survey of the museum-memory nexus [as] one of richest sites for inquiry into production of cultural and personal knowledge, see Susan A. Crane, Introduction, in Crane, ed., and Memory, 1-13; Gaynor Kavanaugh, Dream Spaces: Memory and (London and New York, 2000) is a practice-oriented study by an experienced museum professional. Working with concepts from linguistics and cognitive studies, Diana Drake Wilson, Realizing Memory, Transforming History: Eum/American/Indians, in Crane, ed., and Memory, 115-36, constructs a theoretical rationale for a materials that has referential immediacy and effects ... as truthful and socially, culturally, psychologically, and physically consequential for subjectivity and experience. Quotation on 34. Cf., however, provocative historiographical essay that brings out equivocations in collective memory literature by Kerwin Lee Klein, Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse, Representations, no. 69 (Winter 2000): 127-43. On inalienable possessions, see Fred R. Myers, Introduction, in Myers, ed., The Empire o/Things (Santa Fe, N.Mex., and Oxford, 2001), 12-15, referring particularly work of anthropologist Annette Weiner. 57 A very large bibliography ranges from local studies reflections on cross-cultural encounters in museums as staging grounds of memory, identity formation, and identity politics; two excellent examples of each kind are, respectively, Michael Ross and Reg Crowshoe, Shadows and Sacred Geography: First Nations History-Making from an Alberta Perspective, in Gaynor Kavanaugh, ed., Making Histories in (London and New York, 1996), 240-56; and work of James Clifford, esp., essay chapters in Routes: Travel and Translation in Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1997), chap. 5, Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections, 107-145; chap. 7, Museums as Contact Zones, 188-219. For debates surrounding Native American repatriation issues, see Devon A. Mihesuah, ed., Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? (Lincoln, Neb., 2000); Jed Riffe has produced and directed an excellent documentary film on subject, Who Owns Past? AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005 A Historian's Brief Guide 85 newer museum studies. Exhibiting Cultures, a collection of papers from a landmark conference held at Smithsonian Institution and published in 1991, opened with editors' essay on museums and cultural difference. In this introduction, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine discuss a 1987 exhibition of Hispanic art at of Arts, Houston, where the exhibition strategy reflect[ ed] good current thinking about nature of pluralism. Somewhere between forbearance and frustration they conclude that matter how exhibition was organized, it would have been disputed because the subject matter inevitably was open multiple responses ... [m ]useums attempting act responsibly in complex, multicultural environments are bound find themselves enmeshed in controversy.58 Nearly ten years later, Smithsonian produced a volume of articles on recent exhibitions coincide with its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary. The title this time was Exhibiting Dilemmas, hardly a cue for celebration; articles, all by Smithsonian curators, are mostly about beleaguered choices. Museum wars had become a kind of Western Front of culture wars with no end in sight beyond a whole genre of case studies and casebooks on latest battles.59 Since exhibit is a professional unit of reckoning, museum workers are at home with this genre.60 The Smithsonian curators' dilemmas turn out be mostly on-the-job issues, however much intensified by rising and often conflicting expectations from administrators, patrons, and publics. Their dilemmas are grounded in specific cases rather like minefields are grounded. So, for example, obtain centerpiece of an exhibit at National of American History featuring Woolworth's lunch counter of historic 1960 sit-in in Greensboro, North curators had negotiate with corporate executives, city government and community groups, an ad hoc African-American association promoting its own museum in Woolworth's building, a carpenters' union, and not least their Smithsonian colleagues, because exhibition space was limited in museum's crowded Political History Hall. 61 Another collection of curators' papers, Making Histories in Museums, revolves around British and Commonwealth history museums, from medical and agricultural minority and childhood museums. The title is a gentle teaser. The authors do not want argue that history is merely made up. Their aim, according editor Gaynor Kavanaugh, was to open museums braver and better researched histories presented with great imagination and real regard 58 Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, Museums and Multiculturalism, in Karp and Levine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Display (Washington, D.C., 1991),5. 59 Amy Henderson and Adrienne Louise Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at Smithsonian (Washington, D,C., 1997); Willard L. Boyd, Museums as Centers of Controversy, in America's Museums, 85-228, is a survey by a distinguished museum professional, lawyer, and academic administrator, 60 Marlene Chambers, Critiquing Exhibition Criticism, News (September/October 1999): 31-74, notes long-standing popularity of sessions at annual meetings of museum associations that are devoted critiquing exhibitions; she offers a clever taxonomy: Yankee Trader criticism, with its authoritarian, didactic emphasis on putting across a message; Houdini criticism, which focuses on escaping culturally conditioned paradigms that shape our messages and their meanings; LEGO criticism, which views meaning making as a shared social process. Quotation on 31. 61 William Yeingst and Lonnie B. Bunch, Curating Recent Past: The Woolworth Lunch Counter, Greensboro, North Carolina, in Henderson and Kaeppler, eds Exhibiting Dilemmas, 143-55; an eight-foot section of counter was eventually (and provisionally) installed in a second-floor corridor, outside main exhibit but in view of star-spangled banner, and accompanied by photo murals on civil rights movement. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005
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