 |
| Delegates mingle at a wine reception held in the Pitt Rivers Museum on the Friday evening before James Clifford's keynote lecture |
 |
| Delegates have a tour of the special exhibition 'Visiting with the Ancestors: The Blackfoot shirts project' with exhibition curator, Laura Peers. |
A conference review
This
recent conference held at the University of Oxford and Pitt Rivers Museum
brought together a stellar cast of speakers including James Clifford, Sharon
McDonald, Wayne Modest, Nicholas Thomas, Ruth Phillips and Annie E Coombes to
explore the challenges facing ethnographic museums in the 21st
century. The conference was one of the outputs of a research project, RIME,
which secured European funding to bring together ten ethnographic museums from
across Europe to ‘rethink the place and role of ethnography museums in a
political environment which has undergone radical change’, ‘enhance knowledge
of the collections’ and ‘initiate new collaboration’ amongst other things.
 |
| James Clifford delivers his keynote lecture. |
Challenges
addressed included the rise of the right in Europe and the impact of right-wing
politics on ethnographic museums: Wayne Modest in particular described recent
events at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, which was forced almost to the point of
closure by Party for Freedom (PVV) members who view its transparent discussion
of the impact of Dutch colonialism as advocating a form of ‘self-hate’. There
were the inevitable struggles and shifts around terminology which reveal what
Clifford described as ‘the push and pull of local, national, international
forces’. Clifford reported that the Museum of Anthropology at the University of
British Columbia, Canada, was recently rebranded to become ‘MOA – a place of
world arts + cultures’ partly to facilitate new engagements with the city’s
diasporic communities, many of whom object to the implications of primitivism
suggested by the term ‘anthropology’. Ruth Phillips told us about the
successful efforts of Canada’s right-wing Minister of Canadian Heritage, James
Moore, to rename and repurpose the Canadian Museum of Civilisation as the
Canadian Museum of History and we also heard that Vienna’s Museum für Völkerkunde, following a 25
million euro grant for the completion of its redevelopment, will reopen in 2016
as the Weltmuseum Wien (‘World Museum Vienna’). Other speakers challenged terms
such as ‘source community’ (‘is the West not also a source for ethnographic
objects?’ asked Modest) and ‘Indigenous’ versus ‘First Nations’ (Phillips noted
how many First Nations people are finding it politically useful to align
themselves with other Indigenous communities).
 |
| Delegates are greeted by Director of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Michael O'Hanlon. |
Geographical
shifts were also evident, one example being the Humboldt Forum, a huge
initiative on Berlin’s Museum Island which will involve the relocation of (some
of) the city’s ethnographic collections from a museum building in the suburb of
Dahlem to the city centre. Historical examples such as the absorption of the
collections of the Musée de l'Homme into the Musée du quai Branly, Paris, and the Museum of Mankind into the
British Museum, London, were also acknowledged. While there was much discussion
about wider political desires to see world cultures at the centre there was also
recognition by many speakers of the value of museum practice being conducted at
the margins. Annie E Coombes, in particular, presented compelling evidence of
the efficacy of the Lari Memorial Peace
Museum, near Nairobi,
Kenya, which despite its limited resources (one room and a linked educational
programme), was doing much to offer peace and reconciliation to a community
beleaguered by the effects of both historical and recent conflict. A paper by
Clare Harris on the Tibet Album suggested how work by ethnographic museums
could use digital technologies to move beyond geography. She showed how images
from a large collection of photographs taken by British colonial officers in
the period 1920-1950 digitised and made available online by the Pitt Rivers
Museum had been taken up by members of the exiled Tibetan community and
deployed in ways not possible or even imagined by the museum. One discomforting
outcome had been the use of some of these images in Chinese government
propaganda which sought to denounce the photographed Tibetan subjects. Harris
noted that, while objects ‘dislodged’ from their archival source through
digital technologies are vulnerable to ‘radically different regimes of truth
telling’, the use of these technologies is likely to be a hallmark of the
future ethnographic museum.
 |
| Kavita Singh gives her thought provoking and insightful lecture. |
 |
| Kavita Singh and Clare Harris take questions from the floor. |
A key
paper by Kavita Singh offered much evidence to support her assertion that ‘The
Future of the Museum is Ethnographic’. She described the increasing appetite of
the western contemporary art market for non-western artists, often via trends
which reflect opening of new global markets, most recently in Eastern Europe,
China and now Africa (interesting, then, to reflect on the Tate Modern’s
current showing of Meschac Gaba’s The
Museum of Contemporary African Art). Through this process artists become
ethnographic informants and ‘survivors’ of communities in crisis. Singh noted
that while the increasing application of the white cube gallery aesthetic to
non-western objects suggests a ‘museological seal of approval’ for the cultural
products of others, the urge to contextualise then finds release by museums
through the increasing use of audio guides and pod casts. These she described
as the ‘diorama of our times’. Singh also highlighted how, in contrast, some
communities are resisting the reification of collections of relevance to
themselves as ‘art’ and calling for the return of cultural specificity and
greater ethical attention. What happens, she asked, when museum attentiveness
to the concerns of source communities is applied to majority populations?
Lastly she highlighted the explosion of new museums outside the west – in
China, Singapore and the Middle East. While these new museums might appear to
mimic traditional forms, their new contexts inevitably change their meaning. Indeed,
she suggested, it might be that, in these new environments, the museum becomes
the artefact itself. If so, what might the appropriation of this European
artefact by non-European nations tell us about the forces of globalisation?
The
conference was peppered with acknowledgements of the challenges faced by
ethnographic museums in terms of balancing the desires of different
stakeholders, be they politicians (whom one speaker suggested museums could
fruitfully target as ‘non-users’), long-standing indigenous community partners
or members of new, local, diasporic constituencies. Less attention was given to
museum visitors bar James Clifford’s observation that there have been few
in-depth ethnographic studies of this group. Clifford did point to one such report
conducted by the Musée du quai Branly
but noted that its conclusions offered a ‘lucid uncertainty’. For UK museums
the success of any museum project will be – at least partly – judged by the
number of people who engaged with it, as visitors, users or participants, so
the absence of a close attention to the visitors and users of our organisations
was surprising. Possibly this was partly the result of the majority of
presenters being academics rather than museum practitioners but it is
nevertheless important to be reminded that ‘we’ are not the target audiences of
our institutions.
It is
the privilege of academic conferences to problematise rather than problem-solve
and ‘The Future of Ethnographic Museums’ raised many issues which remain
unresolved. Nevertheless the chance to have these issues so compellingly
presented by scholars who have forged careers in addressing them, was much
valued as, too, was the opportunity to do along so our European counterparts
who constituted a large part of the delegation. Discussion of the importance of
museum ethnography at the ‘margins’ underscored the absence of many MEG members
working in local authority, independent or otherwise chronically-underfunded
organisations who could not have afforded the high conference fees (although a
number of us who were able to attend owe thanks to a bursary scheme offered by
Oxford Aspire). In the context of the toll of budget cuts and museum closures
reported on an almost daily basis by the Museums Association it might be that
such discussions, while engaging, remain academic.
 |
| Delegates explore the Pitt Rivers Museum by torchlight. |
Helen Mears
Keeper of World Art
Royal Pavilion &
Museums, Brighton & Hove
