Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations (review)

Museum Frictions sets the agenda for the conjuncture of critical theory and practice in the museum world and the arts and heritage industries as they continue to grapple with the effects of globalization. It is the last in a trilogy on museum anthropology, the first being Exhibiting Cultures (1991) and the second being Museums and Communities (1992). The series constitutes the tangible heritage of the Rockefeller Foundation’s and the Smithsonian Institution’s investments in funding, inspiring and assisting museum programs, exhibitions and scholarly research. If the first two volumes provided the proverbial intellectual wheels for critical museum studies in the 1990s, this volume provides the connecting chain to combine and advance all this knowledge so as to produce the conceptual power to sustain such intellectual energy in museums and the heritage industry for years to come.

Inadvertently perhaps, Museum Frictions represents a productive conjunction of anthropological interests in the politics of cultural representation with philosophical issues previously more central to cultural studies, specifically in terms of the shared interest in Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere. Working within this legacy it is an exceptional example of interdisciplinary fertilization in which anthropologists have responded to Tony Bennet’s groundbreaking contribution The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995), which advanced his earlier work “The Exhibitionary Complex,” published in New Formations in 1988. No less significant is the opportunity that this engagement has provided for Bennet himself to advance his notions of the museum as a differencing machine and to develop a more qualified notion of the public sphere in order to more effectively engage the particularities of globalization. The total effect is a wonderfully energized set of emerging theoretical discourses and practices in tactical museologies and museum reconfigurations in which activist-scholars are applying and debating critical theory in the service of creativity and cultural production. Herein, the institution, activities, politics and even pre-colonial histories of museums become as much sites of observation, critique and action as do the nature of the exhibits themselves.

The study presents a diverse field pointing to the ever-expanding conceptualization of what constitutes a museum and its aims and content. These include conflicts, tensions and anxieties within tangible and intangible heritage industries, including community museums; slavery and holocaust museums as commemorative contexts for expressing grief; national parks as spaces of death, colonization and opportunity; Disney-fication and the neo-liberal Bilbao-effect; and much else. Despite this profusion of materials, a singularly powerful thread is woven intermittently through the text, namely the conceptual work performed on Bennet’s notion of the exhibitionary complex in developing the related notions of experiential and the expositionary complexes as deftly considered by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Extending this, and almost by way of epilogue, Fred Myers combines Bourdieu and Bennet, proposing an “exhibitionary field of cultural production” and exploring revelatory Aboriginal regimes of value and the way in which academic seminars complementing exhibitions highlight the dislocations that exist between the various participants. This adds tension to Howard Morphy’s prior questioning of the very notion of the exhibitionary complex in which he proposes that exhibitions might more accurately be understood in terms of complex motivations and negotiated and highly motivated outcomes used by individuals, institutions and communities in order to achieve their different objectives.

Critique and extension of the Habermasian notion of the public sphere aside, similarly fascinating ideas and instances stand out, such as the new term “tactical museologies,” the refusal in certain cases to include specimens or originals, the use of originals to magnify the aura of the copy and the simulacrum, the use of auto-critique to limit the inevitable controversies that result from exhibitions and even the destruction and removal of specimens to honor the intent or cultural logic and mores of the creators. From all these fascinating instances to the surprise and wonder in the Lucky Market in Phnom Penh and the...