The essays in this two-part book explore the central force of “difference” in the organization and conception of museums. The project, says the editor, is to understand the mutual constitution of museums and of categories of difference “as a complex historical process, but also as an active phenomenological challenge to those who work in and on museums” (3–4). Part 1 is titled “Representing Difference.” Andrew McClellan’s “Art Museums and Commonality, a History of High Ideals” (25–59) admirably shows the art-museum concept of itself to have been obliged to take in cultural artifacts of people around the world. Comprehensive history of trends and influences--for instance an incisive critique of Edward Steichen’s photographic exhibition “The Family of Man”--and the opening of museums to contemporary social forces give this essay pride of place.
Ira Jacknis amplifies and rectifies what the world knows about “‘The Last Wild Indian in North America’: Changing Museum Representations of Ishi” (60–96), that solitary representative of a threatened culture, who never left Berkeley (75). In the museum’s photographs, Ishi (who preferred to dress like everybody else) was often posed in inauthentic costumes conforming to accepted stereotypes of the wild man. “At the Hearst Museum,” the author writes, “the Ishi story is like a hit song for some singers; it is what the public wants and repeatedly asks for, and the institution denies it at its own peril” (87). The museum’s Ishi exhibit was mounted, removed, restored because of public protest, and is now part of a larger display. The problems of accuracy, understanding, representation, and interpretation are all tactfully delineated by the author.
The third chapter turns to Japan, to contrast three museums in a detailed and critical history. Angus Lockyer’s “National Museums and Other Cultures in Modern Japan” (97-123) asserts that the three national cultural museums of Japan all avow Japanese uniqueness, “but in none is there any convincing way of bringing the [historical] story into the present.” After criticizing the museums’ philosophies, the author solaces us with an account of a more recent exhibition at Minpaku, where at last “an alternative-self-referential exercise” emerged to regard Japanese identity “in terms of its looking at, and being looked at by, other cultures” (99). If, as this author says, a museum should “provide a history within which modern art could take its place” (108), could American folklore studies construct a similar history?
The fourth chapter brings us to the most controversial museum of all, through an account
by its most patient critic, Nélia Dias, titled “Cultural Difference and Cultural
Diversity, the Case of the Musée de Quai Branly” (124-154). The MQB’s theatrical and
hypnotic presentation of its exotic artifacts can be defended as well as attacked, but
Ms. Dias is its historian. What has made the MQB controversial is its Oedipal
assassination of its predecessor, the Musée de l’Homme (1937-2006), which promoted
cultural relativism (131), at the same time that the folklore-oriented Musée des Arts et
Traditions Populaires disappeared. What was to be the status of non-European objects?
Where was the novelty of the project to reside? The answer proclaimed by the MQB is, “it
is the equality of creations, and especially of artistic creations, that paves the way
for the equality of peoples and societies” (148). France, says Nélia Dias, is committed
to an equivalence of cultures, which still allows French culture to be special. “By
trying to take into account both cultural
Chapter 5, “Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds: Exhibitionary Practice, German History, and Difference,” by Peter M. McIsaac (155-202), informs those of us who haven’t seen it about something we’re not sure we’d care to: “over two hundred specially prepared human specimens, some twenty-six of them lifelike, posed, whole human corpses” (155). Evoking much controversy and plenty of visitors, the exhibit was a popular science show, with quite specific relations to German cultural history, democratic values, and even the German constitution. McIsaac’s article is a revelation of the broadest implications museum work can have.
Part 2, “Representing Differently,” presents cases which tell “a story of institutions or moments that questioned the prevailing relationship between exhibitions and difference” (12). In “Meta Warrick’s 1907 ‘Negro Tableaux’ and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory” (205-249), W. Fitzhugh Brundage impressively portrays an artist whose dioramas were to “provide evidence to whites and blacks alike of the modernity of African Americans,” while adapting and extending the forms of museum display (206). The author contextualizes Warrick’s work, narrates her life and career, reconstructs these long-dead dioramas in words, and concludes, “Warrick’s 1907 creation exemplifies the innovative aural and visual representations of African American history in the first two decades of the twentieth century” (237).
In chapter 7, “Skulls on Display: the Science of Race in Paris’s Musée de l’Homme”
(250-288), Alice L. Conklin, against the background of the developing French
anthropology between the wars, focuses on the attempt by French ethnographers to handle
the concept of race at a time when cultural relativism was gaining recognition. In
France, museum development was the matrix for
For chapter 8, “Dossier: ‘Inventing Race’ in Los Angeles” (289-329), the editor collaborates with curator Ilona Katzew in a “dossier” of a 2004 exhibition of colonial Mexican paintings, including the museum’s press release, the accompanying brochure, two newspaper reviews, and a conversation between the authors. The beautiful paintings depicted family harmony, the authors show, but also promoted a caste system (315); the chapter points again to that fundamental quarrel between ethnography and art.
Both museumology and folkloristics see their publics surrounded by options: popular books, world music CDs, television programmes, DVDs... Curator Lissant Bolton, author of chapter 9, “Living and Dying: Ethnography, Class, and Aesthetics in the British Museum” (330-353), points out the options for a museum-going public: “print media, radio, television, and travel all offer other ways for people to see objects and learn about people and places” (335). Her chapter draws several “linked issues of difference” (331). Which political and social contexts shall be featured in an exhibition? Reviewing the history of the British Museum, the establishment and discontinuance of its Museum of Mankind (1970-1999), and her own previous experience in Australia and Vanuatu, the author then explains the constraints on “Living and Dying” (for instance, the sponsor specified the theme) and the ethnographic solution she found: to use “an unexpected lens to look at the visitor’s own practice” (350). She leaves her reader with another statement of the recurrent issue: “When they are displayed as art, objects, created in contexts of human suffering and even exploitation can be presented without necessarily engaging with the humanitarian costs of their creation and celebration” (351).
The final chapter, “Museums and Historical Amnesia,” by William H. Truettner (354-374), returns to the same issue. What could an exhibition of Belgian Art Nouveau say about King Leopold’s bloody history in the Congo, which made it possible? The author ends by focusing on the catalog of a 2001 exhibition of paintings of the American West. One portrayed an Indian artist as if he were “an example of High Renaissance art” (363). If the artist was trying to pay tribute to a disappearing Indian way of life, he also revealed his opinion that Indians were primitive, even in adapting Michelangelo’s figures to his own compositions (370). Thus concludes these fascinating and probing treatments of issues that press on both museum workers and folklorists.
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[Review length: 1342 words • Review posted on October 15, 2008]