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.
