Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture

On Having a Culture: Nationalism and the Preservation of Quebec’s Patrimoine

ON HAVING A CULTURE Nationalism and the Preservation of Quebec's Patrimoine RICHARD HANDLER It even happens frequently in anthropological collections that a vast field of thought may be expressed by a single object or by no object whatever, because that particular aspect of life may consist of ideas only. (Boas 1907:928) Twenty years after his debate with Otis Mason and J. W Powell over the proper arrangement of ethnological objects in museums, Franz Boas returned to the pages of Science to discuss the relative place that popular education and scientific research should occupy in the hierarchy of objectives of a great museum. The argument against arbitrary classification he had sketched only tentatively in 1887 (d. Stocking 1974:2, 57) was now elaborated with the confidence of one who had long since won his point: "any attempt to present ethnological data by a systematic classification of specimens will not only be artificial , but will be entirely misleading." Decontextualized in museum cases, specimens or objects were fundamentally inadequate to portray cultural realities : The psychological as well as the historical relations of cultures, which are the only objects of anthropological inquiry, can not be expressed by any arrangement based on so small a portion of the manifestation of ethnic life as is presented by specimens. (Boas 1907:928) Richard Handler is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Lake Forest College. He is completing a book on nationalism and the politics of culture in Quebec. His other research and writing concerns the anthropology of Jane Austen's novels, and the literary and aesthetic aspects of the work of Edward Sapir. 192 ON HAVING A CULTURE 193 Yet for Boas the existence of unsolvable problems connected with the display of material culture (cf. Jacknis, this volume) did not mean that anthropology museums were to be abandoned. The "function of the large museum," he wrote, was to preserve "vanishing" specimens for future scientific research: We collect these [specimens] because they are the foundation of scientific study.... It is the essential function of the museum as a scientific institution to preserve for all future time ... the valuable material that has been collected , and not allow it to be scattered and to deteriorate. (Boas 1907:929-30) Apparently Boas, preoccupied with the problems of "salvage" ethnography, did not consider the collecting of ethnographic specimens-that is, their removal from living cultural milieus-as an example of arbitrary decontextualization . Perhaps because he believed that many "primitive" cultures would soon cease to exist, Boas wanted a tangible record of their contribution to human history preserved in metropolitan museums. There at least they could be studied by the appropriate specialists, and protected from physical destruction . The problem of the proper contextualization of museum specimens, however , has not disappeared in the intervening years. If anything, the postcolonial , often militant self-consciousness of "tribes" who have become "ethnic groups" (Cohen 1978), of former colonies that have become new nations, and of "underdeveloped" nations attempting to develop, has reoriented and embittered disputes about the contextualization issue. It is no longer simply particular methods of display, but the very right of old and established museums to the objects in their possession that is now contested. In the eyes of their critics, these museums have not merely misrepresented other cultures, they have oppressed and plundered them. From this point of view, no appeal to scientific necessity can justify the removal of what has come to be called, tellingly, cultural property: only the people who created artifacts, or the people whose "identity" they represent, can place them in a proper context. Conflict over the collection and preservation of cultural property in museums is as old as the museum itself. The Louvre was founded during the French Revolution to house art treasures confiscated from the Crown and Church and transferred to the ownership of the sovereign people. Napoleon systematically extended the collections of the Louvre by "liberating" the art of Europe from its aristocratic and royal owners, but after Waterloo the French were required to return much of what they had taken-while the Paris mob watched in despair as their treasures were dispersed. Subsequent European revolutions saw similar programs of cultural expropriation intended to democratize access to previously inaccessible cultural treasures, as well as to protect them from the revolutionary mob: "Rescued from the fury of the 194 RICHARD HANDLER people by revolutionary art lovers and scholars, the visual...