People and Plants at the Powell-Cotton Museum

 On 11 March 2022, the Powell-Cotton Museum hosted the first workshop of the AHRC funded project ‘People and Plants: Reactivating Ethnobotanical Collections asMaterial Archives of Indigenous Ecological Knowledge’. This meeting was a collaboration between the Museum, the School of Anthropology and Conservation at the University of Kent and the NOMAD Project, which works within Somali communities to engage with cultural heritage in the UK. This workshop met to explore the ethnobotanical specimens at the Powell-Cotton —focusing on those collected by Diana Powell-Cotton in Somalia in 1934-5 — as well as the narratives, knowledge and experiences they inspire, particularly for women within the Somali diaspora.

This workshop featured a tour of the museum galleries with a discussion of their renovation as well as the research of three presenters: Abira Hussein of NOMAD Project/University College London; Rosa Dyer, a CDA PhD student at the Pitt Rivers Museum/Birkbeck College; and our host Inbal Livne of the Powell-Cotton Museum. Following their presentations on digital engagement with cultural heritage within the UK-based Somali community, women’s healthcare in the ethnobotanical collections at Powell-Cotton, and the museum’s goals for decolonisation and inclusive knowledge production, we had an open, unstructured handling session and a discussion centred on ethnobotanical specimens from the museum collection.

As awardees of a bursary for attendance at this meeting, Jonn Gale and Ayesha Fuentes reflect on their experiences below.

The process and non-extractive engagement

At the very beginning of the day, our host Inbal Livne talked about the process being the focus, rather than the end goal for the People and Plants event. The notion of actively being with, and in a process where the outcome is unknown is extremely interesting, thought provoking, and in many ways necessary. Even if the facilitation of some type of intersectional knowledge production was hoped for when the People and Plants gathering was conceived, there really was no pressure or strict guidelines to what that should look like, or on how to arrive there. Embracing this type of open-ended approach is one way to encourage non-extractive engagements within museum collections, as it allows for creative play and the flow of non-linear modes of knowledge (such as storytelling), which may work against the reinstatement of dominant narratives inherent to this particular context. While the event contained a basic structure, time being broken down into specific activities -  lecture, lunch, roam, workshop, etc, with no clear cut outcome expectations, there was a sense of openness to the kinds of things people wanted to explore, discuss or bring attention to.

In the most basic but most positive of terms, we could say this was a matter of ‘we don't know where we're going SO THAT we might wind up someplace else’. This tongue-in-cheek anecdote helps highlight the link between classification and destination but also how they relate to suppression. After all, does not desired outcome imply discrimination, and thus the suppression of other outcomes? So in a sense, any bid for fairer, more multiverse museum practices must go beyond deterministic and discriminating assumptions that things, people, knowledge, and life move in a linear fashion. When we let go of moving towards a desired outcome we allow for the slight anticipation that in doing so something new or somehow different will emerge as a result.

Tim Ingold’s idea of wayfaring is useful for visualizing a process focused approach (see Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description, 2011). Here, he explains that, ‘the storied knowledge of the wayfarer is neither vertically nor laterally integrated. It is not hierarchical, like a classification, nor is it ‘flat’ or planar, like a network.’ Instead, Ingold argues, ‘the paths of wayfaring, as they thread their way through the inhabited world rather than routing across it from point to point’ make it so the thing itself is ‘movement alongly in the world, creating itself endlessly in the process’.

Jars display the African plant material collected by Diana and Antoinette Powell-Cotton. Photo by Jonn Gale.

 

The People and Plants gathering was non-extractive to the extent that while the museum was host, and interactions synchronized through the collection material, the running theme acknowledged that whatever we were hoping to achieve extends far beyond the space we were occupying. And in doing so it also emphasized and admitted the possibility where the museum could gain nothing as a result of these activities. That in itself is a weird thing to hope for, especially if we think of collecting and collections to be about keeping something aside. But if we think of them as bringing things or people together, connecting people from different backgrounds, bringing together different generations from the communities that hold traditional knowledge (about the plant species in their collections), we can begin to consider how non-extractive engagements not only subvert museum practice but also help to re-create and redefine the role of museum itself.

Storytelling and reactivation

Storytelling is at the core of the decolonising project. As Donna J. Haraway reminds us in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Cthulucene (2016):

It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

The matter of storytelling was central to the collection reactivation realized at the ‘People and Plants’ gathering at the Powell-Cotton museum. In a day of attentive exploration we encountered and accounted for the starkly varied in tone, structure and aesthetic, modes of storytelling that echo throughout the biocultural collections of this museum. Confronting both the mythology and actualities interwoven in the collections of the ‘Great White Hunter’, with their meticulous yet ghostly fragmentations of the past and its more-than human actors, Percy Powell-Cotton’s dioramas and gaming displays, portray a cosmology of bemusing conservation, binaries, and competition.

As we shifted our focus to the collections of Percy’s daughters Diana and Antoinette Powell-Cotton, we remarked on the differences of approach between father and daughters. The sisters’ ethnographic sensibilities are evident in their gathering of data relating to the traditional uses of the material they collected, as well as information regarding the locations, livelihoods, medical and sacred realms of the people groups they encountered. Their story speaks both to early scientific pursuit, and to womanhood; inciting our curiosity we consider the types of encounters the anthropologists had in their ability to gain access to women’s spaces, provoking us to question just what the ramifications of such entanglements are, if the voices of the women whom the Powell-Cotton sisters met, had so far been absent.

 

During the workshop we used the catalogue pages
to identify and get additional information on the
 plant material from Somali, Jubaland.
Photo by Jonn Gale.

 

Noting the asymmetry between actors in this story in an introspective discussion, marks only a fraction of the reactivation we sought to attain during the People and Plants gathering. Connecting through the collections of the Powell-Cotton Museum, an assembly of academics, museum curators, artists and diaspora members, we utilized storytelling not simply as a way to fill in the gaps of history, but as means by which to represent the intricate meshwork of interactions, inherent to ethnobotanical collections. The vibrant discussion that ignited while we examined numerous boxes of Somali plant material extended to include personal memories as well as sensory responses. The gathering allowed for the production of storied knowledge, the kind of knowledge Tim Ingold says is ‘open-ended rather than closed off, because it merges into life in an active process of remembering rather than being set aside as a passive object of memory’ (op.cit.). It felt like a mediation, and we inadvertently gained access to or called into life the critical fabulation that researcher Abira Hussein spoke of in her lecture during the event. This critical fabulation, as Abira’s taught us, seeks to intervene into the aloof classifications and distant gaze of the past, by reactivating the emotional component of artifact creation.

 

Museums as meeting places

 

One of the more refreshing parts of this first People and Plants meeting was the ways in which personal narrative and lived experience shaped how people engaged with our themes, as well as each other. This was especially true in the afternoon session where various leaves, resins, roots, flowers, and fibers from the Powell-Cotton collections were placed on a large table around which participants gathered informally, noisily, even awkwardly at times. Participants exchanged words, recipes, questions and suggestions as hands reached over one another or passed between them the clear plastic bags of plant material. At a second, smaller table, we studied a map of journeys made by Diana Powell-Cotton into the northeastern regions of Africa from which these samples had come. We flipped through an album of photographs made there with images of animals, families, dwellings and landscapes.

 

Later, the workshop participants gathered around the larger table and listened to one another, reflecting on the meeting, the collection and the identity of the museum. We mostly spoke in turns, each of us balancing the needs for expressing our ideas, listening and being heard in order to cultivate trust and a reliable means of communication between a group representing a variety of intellectual and educational experiences. Just as our host Inbal Livne had framed the handling session as a workshop without a generative purpose — in the sense nothing was required of it, there was no predetermined outcome — she had framed the museum setting as a meeting place, a safe and accessible space for the exchange of material and cultural knowledge.

 

Reactivating the collection - unboxing plant material at the People and Plants workshop. Photo by Jonn Gale.

 

Where a cultural institution admits its visitors openly, where it provides areas to sit and rest, where it invites play and conversation, or where it acts as an educational arena with the potential to be reconstructed and redirected according to an individual’s interests and curiosity, these are characteristics of a museum with the capacity to expand and adapt to a public need. In this first handling session, in the physical exchange of materials and circulation of narratives and expertise, a framework for activating the museum as a meeting place was tested and one which connected rather than alienated its diverse community of visitors through a shared interest in the relationship between people and plants. By leaving our exchange unstructured yet oriented around a specific set of materials and questions about them, this workshop achieved a platform for a curiosity that could be articulated through a broad range of vocabularies, expertise and experiences. Refreshingly, nothing else was expected of us.

A multiverse of sciences

An investigator who hoped to learn something about what scientists took the atomic theory to be asked a distinguished physicist and an eminent chemist whether a single atom of helium was or was not a molecule. Both answered without hesitation, but their answers were not the same. For the chemist the atom of helium was a molecule because it behaved like one with respect to the kinetic theory of gases. For the physicist, on the other hand, the helium atom was not a molecule because it displayed no molecular spectrum. Presumably both [people] were talking of the same particle, but they were viewing it through their own research training and practice. Their experience in problem-solving told them what a molecule must be. Undoubtedly their experiences had had much in common, but they did not, in this case, tell the two specialists the same thing.

As Thomas Kuhn examines in the example above and throughout The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), science, as a system of empirical learning, is conditioned by what he describes as its ‘paradigm’, its social, political, historical and intellectual setting. And yet these paradigms — like the traditions of scientific thinking they support — can be interrupted, revised and expanded. Further, they require maintenance and continuity but should also remain adaptable in order to manage periods of crisis.

There is an underlying assumption in many narratives of museum practice and dominant methodologies for the study of the natural world that both museums and science as methods of knowledge production are historically European innovations, and that other localized cultural groups and their intellectual traditions lacked fully-formed systems for empirical learning and/or the preservation and public display of material heritage. And yet, through this workshop, we were participating in the reconstruction of an ethnobotanical tradition which existed and exists in Somalia and abroad based on the knowledge and experiences of those who have historically inhabited or identified with that landscape and valued its material culture. If, as Kuhn suggests, all formal scientific learning is a combination of received knowledge and its application, how should one draw distinctions between systems of custodianship or forms of expertise based on culture or geography? Moreover, how is it possible — or even useful — to describe these various human traditions of learning as independent of one another?

 

Jubaland objects: Seashells used as perfume. Photo by Jonn Gale.

 

Possibly this is a distinction based on the documentary language used to develop these systems of learning; there was much discussion of regional linguistics at the table, just as there was of the various contingencies to be considered in the harvest of plants and their derivatives including the season, the inter-related components of the plants, its storage, etc. But what was refreshing about this workshop —  and which is evident at many other museums and cultural institutions — was a diminished process of gatekeeping, wherein the methods of engagement are subject to the control of the institution whose concern is primarily the material integrity of its collections. Instead — as our host had stated in her welcome and our speakers had demonstrated with their research — where safe handling and intellectual access can be facilitated, one has the impression that there are an infinite number of empirical traditions and standards of care which might activate these materials and add value to the lives of those who care about them from both within the museum and beyond.

In conclusion, we would like to thank the organisers of this workshop for their effort and willingness to expand. The ‘People and Plants’ project will continue over the course of the year with additional workshops at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and National Museums Scotland. Attendance is limited but the project will keep you informed through this and similar channels.

Jonn Gale joined MEG in the recent months. They are an artist and ethnobotanist working with the Economic Botany Collection at Kew and currently researching Thomas Clarkson’s chest at the Wisbech and Fenland Museum.

Ayesha Fuentes has been a member of MEG since 2019 and is currently Isaac Newton Trust Research Associate in Conservation at the University of Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.