Museums and collaboration

Heumann Gurian writes about museums as a place of memory that is central to the spirit of a society, and not necessarily dependant on objects. She does this by examining the contested space of objects and museums, and their various and often changing source of definitions and museums’ ability to become accredited via the American Association of Museums. She poses questions of authenticity of chosen objects when the objects are displayed out of cultural context to the viewers, ownership especially in relation to indigenous communities who work collaboratively with museums to care for and use the objects, as well as the question of reconstructing memory in the absence of material evidence.

In the beginning of her paper, Heumann Gurian states that the definition of museum is blurring to include other kinds of public spaces and she sees this as a positive thing. I’m not sure that she’s articulated why exactly this is a positive thing through her paper and I’m left wondering what she meant by this statement. I do feel though that raising the issue of museum appropriation of indigenous cultural material is an important call to make. Heumann Gurian states that indigenous communities such as those working through the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act work together with museums to care for and use material, and while this seemingly is a positive step that perhaps she’d hope other institutions to work towards as well, I have to wonder about the evenness of grounds on which this kind of partnership works. In the Canadian context, I’m aware that the federal and provincial governments have long claimed to be ‘working with’ indigenous communities over matters that concern them, such as land preservation, cultural and language preservation, and self-government, however, the governments tend to define ‘working with’ and ‘in consultation’ in a way that makes indigenous extinguish their title to their land in exchange for a say in how their future gets handled. I’m thus suspicious of watery phrases such as the ones Heumann Gurian has presented in this paper to explain the relationship indigenous communities have with the objects in museums, and I’d prefer to have a better illustration of these partnerships before feeling as positive as the author is about it.

               Catalani presents a short examination of the difference between history and memory to set up her argument that museums are a site of public accessible memory that necessitates the collaboration of local communities in the creation of collections (an arguement not unlike Heumann Gurian has made about partnership). She asserts that for communities, their access to their heritage in museums is crucial to their 'reclamation' of identity for instance not as 'Africans in Europe' but as Europeans with an African background. This can be done through a program like the one in Manchester at the Manchester Museum which has documented a series of conversations between individuals of local “source” communities and museum professionals. She sees museums as shifting in meaning from a monolithic institution towards a "more socially-oreinted custodian of a shared cultural heritage" (6), while artifacts from communities constitute a part of their identity formation and recreation, and community members are needed in the process of interpretation and identification of objects.

               I am interested particularly in this passage; “Through 'identity', people define themselves as belonging to a specific group and, at the same time, they redefine and reshape the way that they want to be perceived by other groups” (8). Yet, I think I am interested for different reasons than the ones that made Catalani include it in the essay. It makes me ask, what about the society that the museum is of. How does the museum and the society use the collections to shape an identity of itself? For instance, I never get to hear the story of how all these artifacts were stolen in the first place. What does the absence of negative memory mean for the self-image of the society that has constructed the museum? I feel that Catalani really messed up here, in neglecting to explore this further even as she tries to hint at her understanding of this by mentioning in passing that the curator’s voice is still predominant despite ‘source’ community consultation. She has presented an argument that museums are collaborative spaces of identity formation without addressing the rebuttals (like mine) to prove her point.
               I had a few other thoughts on particular passages of both articles, namely Catalani’s passage - "For centuries, non-Western objects have been displayed as curiosities; they have been studied as typological specimens that could shed light on the progress of human thought," (4); and Heumann Gurian’s assertion that, "In fact, part and parcel of conquest and subjugation was the access to interesting bits of the subjugated. This assumption that everything was fair game held currency for a long time," (179). Because I feel these relate back to previous points I’ve raised in earlier weeks about the positioning of non-European examples of trade and value in the articles we’ve studied and also about the political nature of souvenirs and conquest.

Questions for this week:

1)      Heumann Gurian’s points about authenticity and viewer cultural positioning, and Catalani’s brief statement about the curator’s voice question the validity of museums as sources of education. How does this translate to the validity of anthropologic academic texts (also collections of proof and material) as sources of education?

2)      How else can the blurring of definitions of what constitutes a museum be a positive thing, as per Heumann Gurian’s article?