Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture

Essays on Museums and Material Culture

ESSAYS ON MUSEUMS AND MATERIAL CULTURE The two halves of our volume title-"Objects and Others" and "Essays on Museums and Material Culture"-imply overlapping but somewhat different enterprises. The latter suggests, and did in fact elicit, a series of institutionally oriented studies, focusing on what has been called the "Museum Period" in the history of anthropology (Sturtevant 1969:622). The former-which suggested itself only later in our volume planning-implies a more generalized metahistorical, philosophical, or theoretical consideration of two defming categories (or category relationships) of human existence, and therefore of anthropological inquiry in the broadest sense. Given the announced bias of History of Anthropology toward studies grounded in primary historical materials, it is not surprising that the essays in this volume are, for the most part, more obviously related to its subtitle than to its title. Particularly in the early stages of the historiography of any field, institutional (and/or biographically oriented) topics provide a convenient focus for research grounded in documents, which tend to collect around individuals and institutions. But despite the embeddedness of the present essays in documentary historical material, they do in fact raise important broader issues: the problematic interaction of museum arrangement and anthropological theory; the tension between anthropological research and popular education; the contribution of museum ethnography to aesthetic practice; the relationship of humanist culture and anthropological culture, and of ethnic artifact and fine art; and most generally, the representation of culture in material objects-to mention only some of the more obvious focusing themes. Nevertheless, they are far from exhausting, even by glancing allusion, the range of issues implicated in our title-in either of its parts. In order to suggest something of this still-unrealized context of significance, this volume is framed by two brief essays, each taking one-half of the title as its point of departure. Etymologically, a museum is a place dedicated to the muses. Although astronomy and history were perhaps more at home there than dance and erotic poetry, the force of that etymology was clearly manifest two thousand years 3 4 MUSEUMS AND MATERIAL CULTURE ago in the Mouseion of Alexandria (Alexander 1979:6-7). Modern museums , too, have been called secular temples, and the spirits of certain of the muses still inhabit and sometimes inspire them; but the common denominator of modern definitions of "the museum" is distinctly material. Museums are institutions devoted to the collection, preservation, exhibition, study, and interpretation of material objects. Insofar as they are "anthropological" museums, in the broader Anglo-American sense of the term, they are the archives of what anthropologists have called "material culture." Characteristically , these objects of material culture are the objects of "others"-of human beings whose similarity or difference is experienced by alien observers as in some profound way problematic. As objects-things thrown in the way of the observer or actor-the pieces preserved in museums exist in a three-dimensional space encompassing both object and viewer. It is this complex three-dimensionality that distinguishes the museum archive from essentially two-dimensional repositories of linear texts-although linear thinking long characterized much museum practice. But as the word "archive" suggests, there is a fourth dimension that bears a peculiarly problematic relation to the museum. In general, the objects preserved in museums come from out of the past, so that the observer experiencing them in three-dimensional space must somehow also cross a barrier of change in time. Paradoxically, however, those objects are at the same time timeless-removed from history in the very process of embodying it, by curators seeking (among other goals) to preserve objects in their original form. Removed, however, from their original contexts in space and time, and recontextualized in others that mayor may not seek to recreate them, the meaning of the material forms preserved in museums must always be acutely problematic. This is even more the case inasmuch as the objects viewed by museum observers are "survivals" not only of the past from which collection wrenched them, but from those later pasts into which any given act of exhibition has placed them. Museums, in short, are institutions in which the forces of historical inertia (or "cultural lag") are profoundly, perhaps inescapably , implicated. Whatever the contingencies of their specific histories, the threedimensional objects thrown in the way of museum observers from out of the past are not placed there by historical accident. Their placement in museums , their problematic character, and indeed, their "otherness," are the outcome of large-scale historical...