Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic [1 ed.] 9781782387121, 9781571815200

Citation preview

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

SCIENCE, MAGIC AND RELIGION

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

New Directions in Anthropology General Editor: Jacqueline Waldren, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Oxford Volume 1 Volume 2 Volume 3 Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Volume 8 Volume 9 Volume 10 Volume 11 Volume 12 Volume 13 Volume 14

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Volume 15 Volume 16 Volume 17 Volume 18 Volume 19 Volume 20 Volume 21 Volume 22

Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism Edited by Jeremy Boissevain A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and Community in Rural Ireland Carles Salazar Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and Reality in Mallorca Jacqueline Waldren The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town Miguel Vale de Almeida Communities of Faith: Sectarianism, Identity, and Social Change on a Danish Island Andrew S. Buckser After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe Edited by Ray Abrahams Immigrants and Bureaucrats: Ethiopians in an Israeli Absorption Center Esther Hertzog A Venetian Island: Environment, History and Change in Burano Lidia Sciama Recalling the Belgian Congo: Conversations and Introspection Marie-Bénédicte Dembour Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit Eyal Ben-Ari The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel Dina Siegel Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System Edited by Italo Pardo Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future Edited by Mary Bouquet Simulated Dreams: Israeli Youth and Virtual Zionism Haim Hazan Defiance and Compliance: Negotiating Gender in Low-Income Cairo Heba Aziz Morsi El-Kholy Troubles with Turtles: Cultural Understandings of the Environment on a Greek Island Dimitrios Theodossopoulos Rebordering the Mediterranean: Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe Liliana Suarez-Navaz The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley Jaro Stacul Foundations of National Identity: From Catalonia to Europe Josep Llobera Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus Paul Sant Cassia Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a ‘Model’ Bulgarian Village Deema Kaneff Science, Magic and Religion: The Ritual Process of Museum Magic Edited by Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

S CIENCE , M AGIC

AND




R ELIGION

The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Edited by Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Berghahn Books New York • Oxford

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Published in 2005 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com ©2005, 2006 Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto First paperback edition printed in 2006 All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now know or to be invented, without wirtten permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Science, magic, and religion : the ritual process of museum magic / editors, Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto. p. cm. -- (New directions in anthropology) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-57181-520-1 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-57181-521-X (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Museum exhibits. 2. Museum theater. 3. Historic sites. 4. Museum techniques. 5. Rites and ceremonies--Exhibitions. 6. Ritual--Exhibitions. 7. Performing arts--Exhibitions.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

8. Cultural property--Protection. I. Bouquet, Mary, 1955- II. Porto, Nuno. III. Series. AM151.S39 2004 069’.5--dc22 2004046271

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed in the United States on acid-free paper. ISBN 1-57181-520-1 (hardback) ISBN 1-57181-521-X (paperback)

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

C ONTENTS




List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion: the Ritual Processes of Museum Magic Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

1

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

PART I OBJECTS OF SCIENCE? BABY AND THE MUMMIES 1. Memorialising the Future: the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester Penelope Harvey

29

2. Unwrapping Mummies and Telling their Stories: Egyptian Mummies in Museum Rhetoric Anna Wieczorkiewicz

51

PART II SITE SPECIFICS: THE CASE OF TERVUREN 3. Congo-Vision Barbara Saunders

75

4. The Scourge of Chief Kansabala: the Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (1884–2001) Boris Wastiau

95

PART III ENCOUNTERS, PERFORMANCES AND UNPREDICTABLES 5. Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo, Amsterdam Natasha Silva v

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

119

Contents

6. The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni: Authority, Authenticity and Ritual in Sardinia Tracey Heatherington

141

7. The Performance of Heritage in a Reconstructed, Post-Apartheid Museum in Namibia Ian Fairweather

161

8. Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar Barbara Wolbert

182

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

PART IV DILEMMAS OF ENCHANTMENT 10. Enchantment and its Dilemmas: the Museum as a Ritual Site Sharon Macdonald

209

Notes on Contributors

229

Index

233

vi

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

L IST

1.1

F IGURES




‘The world’s oldest surviving railway building, the warehouse at the terminus of the Liverpool to Manchester railway which opened in 1830’ (photograph by Penelope Harvey)

34

1.2

Railways in 1830 (photograph by Penelope Harvey)

36

1.3

Futures – The Telephone, 1880 (photograph by Penelope Harvey)

37

Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill pose in front of the ‘Baby’ for the press on 21 June 1998 (photograph by Penelope Harvey)

43

The Baby as exhibit, with the image of Chris Burton (photograph by Penelope Harvey)

45

Scheme of the placement of sculptures in the Rotunda, Africa Museum (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

80

‘Belgium grants civilization to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

81

‘Belgium grants her support to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

81

3.4

‘Slavery’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

82

3.5

‘Belgium grants prosperity and well-being to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

82

‘The Artist’, H. Ward, 1912 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

84

1.4

1.5 3.1 Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

OF

3.2 3.3

3.6

vii

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

List of Figures

3.7

‘Chief of the Tribe’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

84

‘The Idolmaker’, H. Ward, 1906 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

85

‘Making Fire’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

85

‘Vuakusu-batetela protects a woman from an Arab’, Charles Samuel, 1897 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

88

Tabwa cephalomorph carvings, two ‘masterpieces’ of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by R. Asselberghs, 1994)

97

4.2 and 4.3 The two Tabwa carvings exhibited as trophies in the middle of panoplies in General Storms’ Ixelles (Brussels) house (Anonymous photographer (circa 1929) © Royal Museum for Central Africa)

102

3.8 3.9 3.10 4.1

4.4

The two Tabwa artworks in the exhibition TABWA. The rising of a new moon, Royal Museum for Central Africa (Anonymous photographer, 1985 or 1986)

104

Chief Kansabala’s ancestor figures in the exhibition Hidden Treasures of the Tervuren Museum, Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by J.-M. Vandyck,1995)

106

Kansabala’s ancestral figures in the display of works of art collected by military personnel during the colonial period in the exhibition ExItCongoMuseum. A Century of Art with/without Papers, Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by Boris Wastiau, 2001)

109

5.1

A Map of Artis Zoo

121

5.2

Eye to eye with a raccoon (photograph by Natasha Silva)

124

5.3

Elephant Bull ‘Murugan’ (photograph by Natasha Silva)

126

5.4

A guided tour (photograph by Natasha Silva)

129

5.5

The Minangkabauan House (photograph by Natasha Silva)

132

Visitors watch grey meerkats sunbathing (photograph by Natasha Silva)

136

4.5

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

4.6

5.6

viii

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

List of Figures

6.1

The road to Monte San Giovanni, Orgosolo (photograph by Tracey Heatherington) 141

6.2

Geological formations at Monte San Giovanni (photograph, courtesy of Francesco Pili)

145

Lunch with the Shepherds’: Egidio Manca demonstrates cheesemaking for Sardinian schoolchildren (photograph by Tracey Heatherington)

150

Roundup on the commons (photograph by Tracey Heatherington)

154

A plan of the Nakambale Museum showing the route of the guided tour and highlighting several important stops on the tour (from a handout given to visitors at the start of the tour)

170

Local schoolchildren perform ‘traditional dances’ at the Nakambale Museum (photograph by Ian Fairweather)

171

A reconstruction of Nakambale’s study which forms part of the display entitled ‘Translating the Bible’ (photograph by Ian Fairweather)

175

Copper anklets, part of a display of ‘Ladies’ Ornaments’ in the section entitled ‘Traditional Personal Belongings’ (photograph by Ian Fairweather)

177

6.3

6.4 7.1

7.2 7.3

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

7.4

8.1

A view of the courtyard of the castle, which hosts the Weimar art collection and, in summer 1999, the exhibit ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 187

8.2

A view of the display of Graf Kessler’s portrait by Munch in the castle. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 188

8.3

An exhibition wall with a painting by Rohlfs, depicting a Weimar street, and an opening that allows a view of the paintings from the permanent collection on the wall behind it. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 189

8.4

A view of a part of the Gauforum complex with the annex building of Multi-Purpose Hall and a banner of the exhibit’s second part ‘Art to the People – The Collection Hitler’. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 190 ix

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

List of Figures

8.5

A view of the presentation of Hitler’s art collection on the first floor of the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 192

8.6

A view of paintings, a.o. by Schult, from Hitler’s art collection in the first floor of the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 192

8.7

A view of the ramp leading to the entrance of the exhibit’s third part ‘Official/Unofficial: The Art of the GDR’. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)

193

8.8

A view of ‘the curve’ with paintings from the Palace of the Republic in Berlin by Vent, Heisig, Neubert, and Sitte in the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 194

8.9

A view of ‘the panorama’ with garden chairs and paintings from GDR collections in the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 195

x

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.




This book started to take shape at the end of the last century with the idea of exploring further Carol Duncan’s seminal theory of the art museum as a ritual site. When we floated our idea for a workshop on the museum as a ritual site at the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) conference in Crakow in 2002, we were surprised and pleased by the enthusiastic response. It was at that stage that we thought of asking Sharon Macdonald to act as discussant at the workshop and, having graciously accepted the task, she carried it out with finesse. We would like to thank Sharon for her great contribution both to the workshop and to this book. We would also like to thank each and every one of the contributors not only for their originality, creativity and scholarship in writing the chapters, but also for their considerable patience and understanding with the time it has taken us to do our part. We would especially like to mention Anna Wieczorkiewicz’s guided visit to the Crakow Museum and one of the exhibitions she writes about in her chapter. We are also particularly grateful to our Polish hosts at the conference in Crakow for reserving for our use the splendid – galleried – lecture room (where Malinowski used to teach) in which to hold our workshop, and for their help in many other ways. Back in Portugal and the Netherlands respectively we would like to thank our colleagues in Coimbra and Utrecht for providing us with such stimulating working environments. Students of Ethnographic Museology and Material Culture in Coimbra engaged in stimulating discussion of the arguments with which this book is concerned. Anthony Shelton, Sandra Xavier and Susana Matos Viegas were invaluable discussion partners; while Nélia Dias may be held accountable for her support. In Utrecht, thanks go to Maarten Prak and Aafke Komter for their encouragement in launching the Museum Studies course at University College in 2003. Field trips and discussions with the first students to follow the course helped to focus the theoretical notion of the museum as a ritual site by putting it into practice. xi

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Acknowledgements

Finally we would like to thank Marion Berghahn for her enthusiasm for this book from its inception, as well as to Jackie Waldren for welcoming it into the New Directions in Anthropology series. Mark Stanton at Berghahn Books in Oxford made the production process run smoothly and efficiently. And on the home front, Henk de Haan has been generous with his time and patience on many occasions as the manuscript passed through various metamorphoses. Museums are in fact places that are increasingly used by people for a variety of quasi-ceremonial occasions. And it was in recalling and reflecting upon such moments that the inspiration for this volume arose.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Coimbra/Wageningen, 13 February 2004

xii

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 1

I NTRODUCTION : S CIENCE , M AGIC AND R ELIGION : THE R ITUAL P ROCESSES OF M USEUM M AGIC Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.


This was a museum of technology, after all. You’re in a museum of technology, I told myself, an honest place, a little dull perhaps, but the dead here are harmless. You know what museums are, no one’s ever been devoured by the Mona Lisa – an androgynous Medusa only for esthetes – and you are even less likely to be devoured by Watt’s engine, a bugbear only for Ossianic and Neo-Gothic gentlemen, a pathetic compromise, really, between function and Corinthian elegance, handle and capital, boiler and column, wheel and tympanum. Jacapo Belbo, though he was far away, was trying to draw me into the hallucinations that had undone him. You must behave like a scientist, I told myself. A vulcanologist does not burn like Empedocles. Frazer did not flee, hounded, into the wood of Nemi. Come, you’re supposed to be Sam Spade. (Eco [1989] 2001: 12)

This passage from Umberto Eco’s celebrated novel Foucault’s Pendulum captures succinctly the central theme of this book: how are places such as the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, one of the key settings of Eco’s novel, transformed into ritual sites? How can scientific and technological relics, monuments to rationality and Enlightenment thinking, be infected by the strong enchantment of magical and ritual procedures? A museum of technology is, as Eco puts it, scarcely the venue one would expect for a bizarre ritual. Yet, unfolding as it does through time compressed inside the periscope where Casaubon stows away after closing time, the plot brings us relentlessly to the point where we are prepared to suspend our disbelief. The long chain of events leading up to this moment invests the place and its collection with the fathomless webs of meaning spun by the actors involved in the plot. 1

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 2

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

This is exactly the point made – in a different way – by Donald Tuzin in his analysis of the construction of the Ilahita Arapesh tambaran house, venue for the Nggwal initiation ceremonies in north-eastern Papua New Guinea. ‘It took me sometime to rid myself of Judeo-Christian preconceptions as to what a ritual is – that it is not the substance of an activity which defines it thus, but rather the significance that attaches to it – and to realise that the ritual according to Nggwal truly began before the men went out to cut the first timbers’ (Tuzin 1980: 122–23). Ritual thus generates meaningful action long before the event. Concrete social activities, such as the construction of a spirit house and the flow of yams and pigs between exchange partners, are geared towards this future moment but govern life long beforehand. We argue that these two instances do not belong to the realms of extravagant fiction and exotic ethnography, but suggest new approaches to the comparative analysis of the museum as a ritual site and as a ritual process. Let us briefly consider a case closer to home to underline this point. Museums (or similar sites1) are repeatedly used as venues for the opening ceremonies of international scientific organisations such as the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA).

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Visiting Malinowski The reception party for the European Association of Social Anthropology’s conference in 2000, ‘Crossing categorical boundaries: Religion as politics/ politics as religion’, took place in the National Museum of Krakow and was combined with the opening of the exhibition Malinowski – Witkacy. Photography: Between Science and Art. The ceremonial opening of an exhibition devoted to one of the key ancestral figures of modern social anthropology, Bronislaw Malinowski, exemplifies how the museum may be pressed into service by and for particular groups.2 The differing stakes held by museum staff, conference organisers, EASA members and wider publics in this specific event in Krakow, reflect a common pattern that can be found in connection with museums and related sites the world over. A place, a collection, a building is filled with various meanings and therefore worth visiting as – for different reasons – an anthropologist, a tourist, or as a Polish or European citizen. In the case of the Malinowki – Witkacy exhibition, the European anthropologists present were paying homage to one of the founding fathers of the discipline, in the hometown of the Jagiellonian University. The narrative structure of the exhibition was built around the friendship between Malinowski, the scholar, and Witkacy, the artist, combining Malinowski photographs from the London School of Economics’ archive collection with paintings and drawings by Witkacy. Between Science and Art is a good 2 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 3

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

metaphor not only for photography, but also for anthropology and for the museum. The exhibition was dramatised by the convergence of anthropologists from across the world on this town and in the reception hall of this museum to be present at the inauguration ceremonies. Participants arrived in Krakow to the accompaniment of a dramatic thunderstorm; the conference was inaugurated at the Philharmonic Hall, complete with ritual doorway and a piano recital (Chopin and Paderewski); and followed by the reception and opening at the National Museum. The exhibition opened in the presence of Helena Wayne, Malinowski’s daughter. And when everyone had had something to eat and drink, the EASA congregation climbed the stairs to the exhibition entrance and made its way through the dimly lit exhibition halls, looking, exclaiming in small groups and encountering familiar as well as new faces throughout. A ceremonial visit to an exhibition of this kind obviously concentrates and solidifies meaning for a group such as this one. Performing this itinerary, conference participants (re-)encountered one another, while simultaneously engaged with one of their own culture heroes summoned up in situ. Malinowski became a tangible presence in the exhibition which, by focussing on a relatively unknown relationship, gave further depth and richness to anthropology as the common factor uniting everybody. The invitation to identify oneself as a member of the congregation in the act of collectively remembering Malinowski is one that few anthropologists would have difficulty with. Malinowski belongs to the past and anthropology has moved on, yet the revelation of this new dimension of the founding father of the ethnographic method endows his memory with a kind of generative immortality. This was not simply a case of remembering a completed curriculum, but of opening up a new chapter – and one that resonates with some of the innovative directions being taken by contemporary anthropology. It is with this generative capacity of the exhibitionary complex that the chapters of this volume are concerned. Secular rituals, such as this one from EASA’s history, seem in some sense to fill a void created by the ‘crossed-out God’ of rational, post-Enlightenment mankind (Latour 1993: 33), conceptualised by Weber in terms of the ‘disenchantment of the world’. This book sets out to explore how museums and similar sites may be invested with ritual meaning by both museum staff and visitors. Carol Duncan’s (1995) seminal work on the art museum as a ritual site is our point of departure. We aim to extend the scope of ethnographic analysis beyond the modern western art museum to other kinds of museum (zoo, science museum, former colonial mission) and sites (natural parks, former Nazi rallying grounds), both in Europe and in Africa. In this introduction we set out the coordinates that enable us to develop the theoretical range of Duncan’s argument beyond the exhibitionary site as ‘script’, to examine the actors taking a hand in museum choreography (in both the long 3

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 4

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

and short terms); to go beyond Duncan’s ‘ideal visitor’, whom she conceives as performing a rite confirming citizenship, to examine ways in which museum publics actively use the museum for their own performances; and to consider how their performances dovetail (or fail to) with curatorial agency in the kinds of encounters that take place between different parties on the ritual site. To accomplish this, the authors adopt a strictly ethnographic approach that allows the comparison of exhibitionary situations. Contributors examine ways in which museum collections are constituted and technologically manipulated (Harvey, Wiekzorcewicz, Silva), through the interplay of science and magic; how collections or collection elements are actively transformed through time and context (Wastiau); how the constitution of sites may involve both architectural and sculptural elements (Saunders); the way landscape may be turned into a museum without walls (Heatherington); or an existing complex be musealised, reframing its cultural significance by contextual strategy (Fairweather); or how a site may become implicated in thwarting curatorial intention (Wolbert); and finally, posing dilemmas about the contemporary enchantment of haunted sites (Macdonald). The actors’ share in constituting collections and their settings, imbuing them with meaning or engaging with them as visitors, is central to nearly all the chapters. The issue of agency is therefore a central concern: in the processes of constituting artefacts, collections and sites; in officially mediating public meanings accessible through personal guides or technological devices; and in visitors’ performances, appropriation or even rejection of what is on offer. This introduction reviews the forms of agency involved in the constitution, mediation and reception of contemporary museums and related sites, proceeding towards a theoretical formulation of the museum as a ritual site in which longer term processes converge.

Constituting Ritual Substances: the Beholder’s Share One of Duncan’s principal arguments is that although post-Enlightenment culture dichotomises the categories of secular and religious, ‘our supposedly secular, even anti-ritual, culture is full of ritual situations and events’, few of which take place in religious settings (Duncan 1995: 2). She argues that ‘we too build sites that publicly represent beliefs about the order of the world, its past and present, and the individual’s place within it’ (ibid). Duncan’s analysis of (mainly Anglo-American) public art museums proved inspiring as a framework for understanding contemporary, secular ritual. However, her focus on these specific sites also circumscribes the explanatory horizons of such a model. Our first concern has been to put these limitations to the test by examining how her insights might be applied to other sorts of 4

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 5

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

museum, collections and related sites and also beyond Europe and America. The ethnographic cases under consideration stretch the term museum3 to the limits of its application, dealing with museological apparatuses which, even if developed beyond the museum walls, may nonetheless be conceptualised as part of ‘museum culture’ (Sherman and Rogoff 1994). ‘Museum culture’ provides a useful framework for putting Duncan’s model into perspective. According to Sherman and Rogoff, the museum engenders its own specific practices and representations which they explain through four main concepts. Object, context, public, and reception provide through their interaction a means of specifying what the museum is about, beyond the conventional definition of a collection-based place. Such articulation paves the way for considering visitor agency in the process. An urban (context) art (object) general (public) museum – such as the Louvre – is likely to be experienced by its local Parisian ‘regular’ quite differently than, say, a Japanese visitor on a week’s tour de France that includes a Saturday afternoon whistle stop whiz through the Louvre in the two days spent in Paris. In fact, everything is altered by including reception in the analysis. Although, however, this notion does accord some role to visitor agency in the museum process, it does not in itself address the issue of how that agency works on the museum as a ritual site. The contributors to this volume go beyond the museum as an institution to consider the processes and underlying rationales whereby different exhibitionary situations become ritualised.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Thumbnail Overview of the Volume The volume is divided into four sections: Part I concerns key moments in the life trajectories of two distinctive museum objects – a reconstruction of the first computer (‘Baby’) at the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in Manchester (Penelope Harvey), and the unwrapping of Egyptian mummies in various museums (Anna Wieczorkiewicz). In both cases, the objects are enfolded in powerful narratives: the ‘birth’ of an enormous machine as a public media event and the culmination of a race against time; and the engagement of various kinds of narrative to reanimate the mortal remains of ancient Egyptians. Casting them in narratives of life and death, involving a subtle intersection between the techniques of science and magic, is compounded by specific ways of interpreting these objects in the museums concerned. Part II zooms in on the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, from two distinctive perspectives: as a ritual site where artistic embellishment produces a very directed way of seeing – ‘Congo Vision’ – the former Belgian colony of Congo (Barbara Saunders); and a curatorial account of subverting that vision through meticulous historicisation of the paths of 5 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 6

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

two ‘masterpieces’, which were part of the temporary exhibition ExItCongoMuseum (Boris Wastiau). Part III comprises four cases of encounters between different curatorial and public actors and exhibited objects. The guided tour brings visitors to emotional as well as rational understandings of wildlife and its predicament at Artis Zoo in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Natasha Silva). Visitors to Monte San Giovanni in Sardinia are received into a landscape that is a source of local pride and pastoral identity (a ‘cathedral’), turned symbol of the global environment by a park authority applying external scientific criteria of ecological management; both discourses produce ‘ritual bodies’ that are transformed by the ‘natural magic’ of the place (Tracey Heatherington). The encounter between tourists visiting the Nakambale Mission Museum to experience ‘real, traditional Africa’ and locals who, in performing their tour of the mission and homestead, confirm a sense of their own modernity, is one of ‘creative misunderstanding’ (Ian Fairweather). Curatorial scripting of the ‘Rise and Fall of Modernism’ exhibition in Weimar failed to anticipate the unintended consequences of creating this narrative of failed modernity in three different locations in the city, provoking ‘resistance fighter’ reactions among critics and the public (Barbara Wolbert). The zoo in the Dutch capital, the Sardinian heterotopic park, the modernist mission-turned-museum in northern Namibia, and an exhibit dealing with the rise and fall of modernism that stranded in Weimar, all point to site-specific meanings produced through interactions between the different parties engaged in creating and performing scripts with outcomes that are by no means predictable. The ‘magic’ can go seriously astray, leading to conflicts (between zoo guides and keepers, or between park personnel and locals, or between curators and the public) about ‘proper’ curation; but it may also lead to forms of ‘creative misunderstanding’ between tourist and local. In Part IV, Sharon Macdonald revisits and explores the religion/museum analogy, reviewing ways in which work on new religious movements contributes to understanding recent developments in museums. Macdonald goes on to illuminate how contributions to this volume reflect these wider developments concerning canonical authority/knowledge and subjective experience. She also analyses the dilemmas of trying to achieve a balance between science and magic, enchantment and authority, for as ‘difficult’ a heritage site as the former Nazi rallying grounds in Nuremberg. She shows there are contexts in which the semireligious aura of ritual sites can pose extraordinary and even moral dilemmas; where something has to be done with the past, however unsavoury, simply because of the way it obtrudes into the present. Macdonald concludes with the reminder that, since museums are such deeply political agencies in public culture, their responsibility is not simply to enchant but also to educate – in the broadest sense of the term. Let us turn now in more detail to the complex constitution of that agency in the wide variety of settings that this volume includes. 6

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 7

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Part I Objects of Science? Baby and the Mummies Science, as the sequence of terms in the title of this volume indicates, is the point of departure for trying to understand contemporary developments in museum culture rather than a final destination. Many objects on public display in science museums today are clearly subject to interpretative procedures that exceed their status as objects of knowledge. The very idea of memorialising the future by devoting a gallery to how people conceptualised the future in the past aims, as Harvey argues in the opening chapter, to engage the audience with the objects on view in an exercise of ‘imaginative reasoning’. Imaginative reasoning is also involved in the dramatisation of events, profiling scientists as ‘personalities’ and playing down the rational scientific process of their work behind the closed doors of the laboratory (cf. Barry 1998). This exhibitionary strategy can clearly be seen in the ‘birth’ (commemorative unveiling) of a reconstruction of the first computer, known as ‘the Baby’ at the MSI in Manchester. Conversely, the scientific procedures may themselves be harnessed to enhance museum drama. Subjecting the mortal remains of dead Egyptians (‘mummies’) to ritualised scientific medical procedures may be incorporated to great effect in museum spectacle, as Wieczorkiewicz demonstrates in the second chapter.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Birth of the Baby in Manchester Reconstructing the first computer in terms of a Baby, for public ‘delivery’ on a given date, involved both the creation of a ‘cradle’ (the newly restored MSI in Manchester) and midwifery by scientific ‘personalities’. The race against the clock by the scientists involved in building this first computer turned the whole event into a kind of dramatised family narrative. Harvey argues that in themselves objects have no intrinsic power to enchant; this depends upon the exhibition makers. She suggests that museums are increasingly becoming places where the relationships between objects and people are brought out and explored. Creating settings where people can make imaginative sense of objects that have changed the world, nowadays often seem to involve recourse to mixtures of art and science reminiscent of the seventeenth-century Kunstkammer. The rituals surrounding the birth of the Baby played down the rationalized scientific process, while playing up the human passions and struggle involved in making a machine work. This family narrative fits well with Manchester’s localising claim to be the new brain centre of England. The birth was given full media coverage via satellite communication, appealing in a commonsense way to the brave new world of Manchester. The birth was about giving substance to genius: making an object whose genealogy or creation story had been ‘lost’ quite literally materialise, and rendering the human agents involved as highly visible media 7 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 8

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

personalities. While it may be a little uncharitable to observe that Michel Serre’s History of Science refers to neither of the Manchester personalities in connection with the development of the computer, it does suggest that this is a very local origin story (cf. Lévy in Serres, 1989 [1996]). Celebrating the Baby in this way gives voice and credence to Manchester’s global ambitions to being a science capital. The social drama of the birth attempts to establish this machine as a specifically local form of competence that will make Manchester renowned throughout the world. In this respect the MSI birth ritual makes an interesting contrast with the eminently modern performance of tradition at Nakambale (see Fairweather, Chapter 7 in this volume) which, by confining the past to the museum, brings the world to a remote place in Namibia. Manchester, by contrast, attempts to impose its claim upon the world by metaphorising it as that most incontrovertible of events: the birth of a baby. The hope of drawing visitors to Manchester is of course also there.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Egyptian ancestors If birth refers to the beginning of a person’s life which, by museum magic, can be extended to the unveiling of a reconstructed machine, so too can death – or more specifically the dead bodies of Egyptians treated with preservatives and wrapped in linen – be manipulated to great effect. Egyptian collections are in several respects a key case. In her discussion of Van Gennep’s and Turner’s concepts of the ritual state of liminality – the betwixt-and-between, out-of-this-world, zone through which initiates pass as they transit from one social status to another – Duncan emphasises how museum visitors are led to commune with the spirits of the dead in their aesthetic contemplation of particular works of art. How might this liminal state work for other kinds of collections and more particularly for Egyptian mortal remains? A related question is why Egyptian mummies are considered to be a suitable, indeed an educational, source of fascination for children. Spooky but at the same time susceptible to neutralisation by scientific procedures, Egyptian remains have been pressed into service in contemporary stories, rather than dealing with the incorporation of Egypt into European history. Contemporary Egyptian exhibitions anticipate and cater for visitors’ (and above all, children’s) fascination with mummies. Wieczorkiewicz unravels this fascination in her chapter by examining the narrative genres in which they are commonly placed, and then focussing on the transgressive act of unwrapping mummies and subjecting them to scientific procedures, such as medical diagnoses and plastic reconstruction. By personalising these remains but at the same time distancing the viewer from them, the fact of death is somehow 8 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 9

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

suspended for the duration of the visitor encounter with these objects and may even involve the creation of a new ritual (as in Krakow). This particular way of exposing children (and adults) to the ancient dead bodies of Egyptians is also of interest because of what it suppresses about the nineteenth-century European context of colonial collection. French campaigns in Egypt were part of Napoleonic imperial expansion and competition with other colonial powers, especially Britain and Germany, for control over strategic trading routes and oil. Egyptian objects were retrieved from ruins and brought to Europe on the grounds that these were the ancestors of the Greeks and therefore of western civilisation. Deciphering the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone was one of the crucial events in assigning this African civilisation to Europe, welding it onto the western genealogy and thus adding extra historical depth and a new identity component to the period before the Greeks. The presence of Egyptian collections in the newly constituted national museums that began to appear in the wake of the revolutionary act of opening the royal palace of the Louvre to the people (1793) added depth and richness to the genealogies of the respective nation states. For the new citizens of those states, the presence of Egyptian ancestors assigned to specific spaces within their national ‘temples’, effectively demarcated the frontier between civilisation and savagery. In Kristiania (now Oslo), for example, Egyptian items were the first to be registered in the new ethnographic museum collection, underlining both the Napoleonic origin of Norway’s assignment to Sweden in the early nineteenth-century and the nationalist aspirations which later came to centre on that museum (Bouquet 1996: 102–105). The African identity, as well as the colonial circumstances under which these collections came to Europe, are missing from many Egyptian narratives in European and American museums. These missing factors greatly contribute to the specific ways that Egyptian materials have been ritually charged and are received outside as well as inside the museum. Focussing on mortal remains is an almost magical procedure that deflects attention from the historical manoeuvre involved, diverting it into the performance of a play. Domesticated into contemporary popular culture by inflecting them with ‘horror’, science then takes over to neutralise and re-enchant the resulting materials – especially for children but also, according to Wieczorkiewicz, to enable us to face up to the existential dilemma of death. If nineteenth-century Egyptian collections helped to constitute the historical depth of western civilisation by splicing them onto the classical Greek genealogy and purging them of their African identity, their removal nonetheless implied that contemporary Egyptians (like their Greek counterparts) were unable to take care of this heritage. This was the explicit justification for transporting archaeological materials to places where they would be valued, protected and placed on display for modern citizens who would be able to draw the proper conclusions. The mainly positive reception of the ancient 9

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 10

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Egyptians (notwithstanding ‘horror movies’ showing reanimated mummies) is almost diametrically opposed to the way that contemporary Congo populations were evaluated during the same colonial period, as the case of the Belgian Royal Museum for Central Africa (hereafter RMCA) at Tervuren aptly demonstrates.

Part II

Site Specifics: the Case of Tervuren

Context, as the cases of Manchester and Krakow demonstrate, can be decisive for the specific meanings attaching to museum objects. The ‘same’ scientific procedures for diagnosing and reconstructing Egyptian mummies were quite differently interpreted in Manchester and Krakow. In order to examine the workings of site specificity in more detail, this section dwells upon two different approaches to the RMCA, Tervuren, in Belgium: Saunders analyses the visual parameters imposed by the sculptures used to decorate the building, and Wastiau gives an account of ongoing transformations in the meanings of two objects now in the Tervuren collection.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

(Belgian) Congolese others The sculptures adorning the RMCA cupola entrance at Tervuren are, as Saunders explains in her chapter, twofold in character: above, the allegorical figures of art embody the civilising Belgian input to the relationship with the Congo: ‘Civilisation’, ‘Support’, ‘Prosperity’ and (the end of ) ‘Slavery’. Below, the naturalised figures of the African ‘Artist’, ‘Chief ’, ‘Woodcutter/Idolmaker’, and ‘Making Fire’, make native culture visible for the Belgian public. Tervuren was also a propaganda machine for the early twentieth-century Belgian colonial project, including missionaries as well as commercial interests, in Africa. The museum was privately financed with the aim of showing what there was to be developed there. As a day trip out of town for the Brussels public, Tervuren in its park setting was both entertaining and inviting: King Leopold II’s civilising mission for his people included showing them the enormous possibilities for making money in the Congo. The 1898–99 ‘Congo State solution’ divided equatorial Africa into forty huge territorial units, each of which was leased to a state-administered company to exploit and rule. It is perhaps worth underlining the obviously international dimension of colonial projects in the context of national collections and museums. Belgian colonialism included many non-Belgian nationals (merchants, explorers, missionaries and state representatives) who were integrated into local political activity during the 1870s and 1880s. In this way the Norwegian medical doctor Heiberg’s collection of nine hundred Congo pieces was donated to the 10 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 11

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Norwegian Ethnographic Museum from 1902 onwards (Bouquet 1996: 74–77). This example demonstrates the powerful model established by the Belgian RMCA – not least for an aspirant nation state such as nineteenth-century Norway, which was under colonial (Danish and later Swedish) rule. The Ethnographic Museum became in fact a rallying point for nationalist aspirations. Founding an ethnographic museum was an important way of presenting the nation’s credentials, thereby constituting a conventional model of the world (Prösler 1996). Saunders argues that the Tervuren entrance cupola actively coerces the visitor into seeing the Congo in certain ways. The relations embodied in the figures physically engage the viewer (whose gaze goes ‘up’ to the allegorical figures and ‘down’ to the naturalistic ones), without requiring any mediation of ‘representations’ or interiorisations of consciousness. This physical engagement echoes that identified by Wieczorkiewicz, for whom visitors’ stooping to examine the tilted sarcophagus in Krakow marks the inception of a new ritual. Saunders’ visitors to Tervuren are in some respects comparable to Duncan’s ideal visitor: they perform a disquieting ritual of citizenship within a scenario that has frozen early-twentieth-century Belgian understandings of the colonial project. The spell has yet to be broken. The final part of her chapter turns to the exhibition ExItCongo Museum as an attempt to do just that. The extent to which meaning can be transformed by active curatorial intervention that unsettles the meanings embedded in the site, is the subject of Wastiau’s chapter.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Curatorial magic Anthropologist-curator Wastiau’s account of the life histories of two Congolese ‘masterpieces’, which were included in the temporary exhibition, ExItCongoMuseum held at the RMCA 2000–01, explores the issue of agency from the curator’s perspective, as well as considering how collections are constituted and how they are charged with meaning in the course of their life histories. Wastiau exemplifies the creative and generative use of sites and collections, in which curatorial intention and mediation can play a critical role. Wastiau’s curatorial aim was to break the spell of Tervuren (Wastiau 2000). His chapter focusses on a pair of objects and one collector, illuminating the making of ‘masterpieces’, as certain well-known and well-travelled Congo pieces are nowadays classified. Artistic intervention contemporised the historical narrative of the first part of the exhibition (Exit Congo) in the second and third parts (Ex-Congo Museum; Exit Museum). This exhibition succeeded in generating controversy and debate, demonstrating not only hostility and lament about breaking the spell of the masterpieces not to mention the RMCA itself, but also support for doing just 11 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 12

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

that (see Arnaut 2001; Corbey 2001). This polemic was conducted beyond the range of the RMCA, which meant that it could elude the agency of the museum (cf. Porto 2000). One of the most interesting outcomes of this temporary exhibition was to revive academic/university interest in the museum. There is a good chance that this will actively contribute to the creation of a new identity for the museum and new interest in it on the part of contemporary Belgian and international publics. Does such an intervention break with the ceremonial role of the curator if that is understood as mediating the museum’s officially approved message to the public? The notion that a curator could somehow betray the trust placed in him by the museum (as was the case with Wastiau, cf. Bouquet 1998) indicates the centrality of agency – including the curator’s – in constituting the museum as a ritual site. This agency, along with its contradictory potential, is missing from Duncan’s model of the museum as a ritual site for reaffirming citizenship, which anticipates identification with what is shown and the narrative behind it. In some ways, of course, curatorial authority has been undermined by what Macdonald and Silverstone refer to as the ‘cultural revolution’ that took place in many museums from the late 1980s onwards (Macdonald and Silverstone 1991). Curatorial authority has been tempered in many museums by new marketing practices aimed at producing ‘publicfriendly’ exhibitions for entrance-fee-paying customers, thereby giving a whole range of other museum staff (notably from Communications, Presentation, Design, Education and Marketing departments) as important a voice in the exhibition-making process as that of the curator, at least in theory. Despite all this, successful cultural production in museums as in other institutions depends upon the ability to develop and unveil new creations, which relies heavily on curatorial knowledge and creativity. Many contemporary blockbuster exhibitions stress completely new interpretations of works of art resulting from research; for example, careful scrutiny of the relationship between Van Gogh and Gauguin formed the basis of an exhibition which made strategic use of both painters’ work (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2001). However much of a rupture ExItCongoMuseum may represent in the way that Central Africa was constituted at Tervuren, the question remains: to what extent is any curator bound by the very nature of the location, space and collection at his or her disposal to reformulate, certainly, but still to enchant? The fact that the curatorial team intends a specific message does not guarantee that the message will be received in the same form. For Wastiau, the exhibition actually starts with fragments of the third part: contemporary artworks were interjected from the entrance hall and throughout the permanent galleries deliberately disturbing the conventional displays. The first part encouraged visitors to reflect on the histories and stories of the artworks, by their unconventional placement, lighting and documentation. The second section questioned the way Congolese artefacts were naturalised in the 12

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 13

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

museum’s space. Between the first section, dealing with the objects’ provenance, and the second about ‘after acquisition’ (their use and abuse in private and public displays), was a transitional room evoking transportation. A tall white wall marked the passage to section three, with installations directly questioning Tervuren’s museography and practice. Behind the wall were installations by guest artists relating to broader issues including race, history, exhibiting, and interpretation, some of which were exhibited on the ground floor in the permanent galleries. There is, however, no guarantee that the visitor will receive the curator’s message precisely as it was intended (cf. Wolbert, Chapter 8 in this volume). Wastiau and his colleagues’ choreography of Tervuren space could in fact be interpreted as pursuing a quite Turnerian formulation, despite intending a diametrically opposed argument: up the spiral staircase on one side of the building as a beginning; through a seemingly conventional – if eccentrically lit – presentation of the history of the collection; into a central area of limbo (quoting the much-used packing-case motif ) directly above the small rotunda; followed by artists’ installations (including the supermarket trolley filled with ‘bargains’ [masterpieces]), the toy railway track, and down the spiral staircase on the other side of the building to some ‘occupied’ glass cases below. Duncan certainly anticipated the misreading visitor, but failed to consider the implications of various forms of agency for the museum as a ritual site. Curatorial and other forms of agency are central concerns of the next section.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Part III Encounters, Performances and Unpredictables This section focusses on issues of agency that arise through particular kinds of performances in four different ritual sites. If the birth of the Baby (Harvey, Chapter 1 in this volume) was a one-off ritual performance, dramatising the human struggle to reconstruct a machine as a classic life-cycle rite de passage, the guided tour of an established site tends to comprise a given repertoire of objects, stories and other highpoints, yet to leave room for embroidery and elaboration. Silva’s chapter demonstrates how the volunteer guides at Artis Zoo mediate visitor appreciation of the specific form of animal sacrifice that this most popular of museum collections entails. She takes us on a guided tour of Artis Zoo in Amsterdam that deliberately conducts visitors ‘backstage’, telling stories about the animals but also showing the complex social relations that develop between zoo keepers, their charges, volunteer guides and the public. While going ‘backstage’ at a zoo may have developed into a somewhat predictable routine, the underlying moral ambivalence of keeping animals in captivity combined with ongoing tensions arising from the differences in professional status between keepers and guides is likely to provide visitors with food for thought. 13 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 14

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Going behind the scenes at Artis Zoo Zoo animals are not simply ‘there’ in their cages or enclosures but are actively made ‘present’ by zoo guides. These are the people to convey the personalities, accompanying stories and the sense of order for visitors to this highly idiosyncratic collection and environment. Guided tours of Artis Zoo include not only the celebrated feeding of animals, but also go behind the scenes – into the kitchen where the meals are composed, or among the pipes and filter system behind the aquarium. This privileged access to what Goffman (1959) has referred to as the backstage area of social performances admits visitors to a zone normally out of bounds for the public, inviting them to experience the position of a zoo employee – in a way similar to Bennett’s (1995: 67) argument about nineteenth-century public museums enabling the people to experience what it was to be on the side of power. Visitors to the zoo are invited to stand in the shoes of their guide, learning to see and to know the animals through their eyes and experience. The fact that guides are not ‘real’ zoo personnel does, however, also introduce a measure of ambiguity and sometimes even verbal conflict (between guides and keepers) into the tour. Going behind the scenes is also perhaps about ‘seeing’ certain civic responsibilities regarding these often large and exotic creatures, in what is explicitly a ‘fun’ visit to areas not normally accessible to the public. There is an invitation implicit in the knowledge gained through privileged access to assume greater responsibility toward these specimens of endangered wildlife. Visitors on a guided tour of the zoo are being initiated in several different ways: these may include gossiping about animals (in the way that anthropologists might gossip about people), thereby personalising and often anthropomorphising them (Silva gives the example of penguins in ‘tuxedos’); or it may involve seeing beneath the surface of the easily perceptible (‘feeding time’), through a visit to the kitchens; or having your attention drawn to reclusive or lesser-known animals whose existence might otherwise be overlooked. The enormous popularity of the zoo with all sections of the population means that giving the zoo visit a serious slant is a tempting option, certainly in the Netherlands. The guided visit through the zoo seems to involve a trade off between the pleasure derived from maximum insight and the responsibility that goes with this sort of inside information. Getting to know the animals leads to an appreciation of the sacrifice that they are required to make by being in captivity. Going to the zoo is a collective ritual that almost every child undergoes either en famille or with the school, which suggests that parents and teachers see it as an opportunity to teach something as well as being a super-popular destination. The ephemerality of animals’ lives strikes a chord of recognition with humans: the animal condition is also the human one. Although the zoo might, arguably, just as easily be seen as 14 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 15

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

the ultimate expression of rational man, playing God, managing and controlling the natural world this does not seem to be the tone of the guided tour, in Artis Zoo, at least. Set in the heart of Amsterdam, the appeal to moral conscience and responsibility that can be discerned in the midst of all the fun is a reminder of the moral fibre still at the core of this local setting (cf. Schama 1987). The way an external discourse on the environment articulates with local appreciation of the landscape is the subject of Tracey Heatherington’s chapter on Monte San Giovanni in Sardinia. The designation of certain landscape features as being of outstanding natural beauty, requiring protection, also involves forms of structured contact (such as nature excursions) that enable visitors to get closer to Sardinian nature. As with the guided tour at the zoo, these excursions enact environmental identities: learning takes place by visiting, seeing and appreciating Nature. Alternative local narratives about Monte San Giovanni emphasise, by contrast, local community values and ‘tradition’ in making the landscape what it is.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Performing locality vs. performing ecology Monte San Giovanni was already a local landmark or ‘anthropological place’, in Marc Augé’s (1995) sense of being filled with history, identities and social relations, before its sudden redefinition according to external ‘ecological’ criteria as the centre of a natural park. Monte San Giovanni was already defined by local people as a ‘cathedral’ – a key symbolic place of pilgrimage to which people felt attached both on religious and family grounds. Local feeling about Monte San Giovanni is connected to its survival as common land in the face of nineteenth-century enclosure. The continuation of pastoral and communitarian traditions helped to save the commons from deforestation and is one of the reasons for strong local feelings about this place as being theirs and pride in showing it to visitors. The redefinition of Monte San Giovanni as a uniquely valuable symbol of global environmental heritage places a different frame around the landscape. The formalisation of the Gennargentu National Park enshrines features of the natural landscape as a potent source of both knowledge and aesthetics, as Heatherington puts it. This frame also, however, implies techniques of park management imagined as custodial techniques. This management effectively renders invisible the local population and its constitution of the landscape by framing the park as a space set aside from human use, in its turn a kind of sacred space – idealised and ritualised as well as regulated and controlled. Park-organised excursions to Monte San Giovanni effectively sanctify ecological identities, emulating scientific observation and sharing in the project of scientific conservation that should enable the visitor to get closer to nature. 15 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 16

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

At the same time, it fosters a sense of responsibility for preserving the purity of nature in terms of what might be called ‘environmental citizenship’. Locals, by contrast, think of the purity of nature as evincing cultural authenticity: reenacting the experience of shepherds, retracing the steps of the Catholic processions that used to go to the site of an old mediaeval church on the summit of the mountain until World War Two, imbibing the salubrious spring waters and going for summer picnics. The range of discourses generated by Monte San Giovanni over the past thirty years (local, cultural and external, scientific/ecological), demonstrate how the meaning of landscape becomes diversified (a ‘heterotopia’) through the process of musealisation (cf. Hetherington 1996). Local mediators (residents, tourist guides, forest rangers) are responsible for constituting and negotiating both external and internal visions of the landscape. This adjustment, producing a plurality of meanings among tourists, environmentalists, nature lovers and residents, inevitably alters local perception of their own key symbolic space. A comparable effect is found in the performance of heritage at a museum in northern Namibia (Fairweather). It is important to point out that the museum model colonised not only Europe and the West but has also travelled significantly farther afield – right up to the present day (see Prösler 1996). Fairweather’s analysis of the ex-Finnish Mission Museum in postindependence Namibia demonstrates how colonisation itself can be musealised from the other direction.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Nakambale double act: performing heritage Staff and visitors to the Nakambale Museum in Namibia are involved in a complex process of (re)constructing their culture. Claiming to preserve local ‘traditions’ and ‘culture’ is modern, Fairweather argues, and has ideological dimensions associated with Namibian nation building. These ‘traditions’ were shaped by the encounter with Europeans, and the Nakambale Museum celebrates both the arrival of Christianity and missionaries and local customs and traditions. Staff and community in fact reclaim the colonial past objectified in the mission house turned museum as their own since this was the way they came in contact with the wider world. The paradox inherent in the museum is resolved, according to Fairweather, through the performances that take place there: foreign tourists who come to visit Olukonda in search of the traditional are given a guided tour, a meal and the opportunity to purchase local products from the museum shop. The performers, on the other hand, both identify with but also distance themselves from the traditional by pointing out how different things were in the past. They demonstrate to themselves, as well as to non-Oshiwambo speakers, their modernity in being able to perform 16 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 17

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

tradition so well that they can attract visitors from the wider world, thereby transcending the local. Enchantment in the Nakambale case consists in the double act of being able to conjure up tourists in this remote part of North-Central Namibia, and being able to put on folklore performances and a meal for them. At the same time, the performance is also for a national audience and clearly claims a stronger position for Oshiwambo speakers at that level. The syncretism between Christianity and local narratives (as in the passage from ‘savagery to civilisation’ that forms part of the display at the museum), demonstrates that this is not a straightforward case of exporting the museum model. Instead, the museum as an institution is ingested, digested and remoulded into new forms: the competitive claims made by local people through their museum demonstrate a greater degree of open-endedness than Duncan’s original definition of the museum as a ritual site anticipated. There is room for differing interpretations not only between official museum messages and the reception of those messages, but also in the highly ambiguous performances that are staged in and around museums. The Nakambale case provides a good starting point for considering how the dynamic character of meaning invested in museums articulates with strategic management of representation on behalf of certain groups vis-à-vis current social issues. Bringing contemporary postcolonial culture into a former colonial mission is one form this process can take. The past may, however, come to haunt the present in quite unintended (as far as curatorial intention goes) ways, as Wolbert’s contribution shows.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Curating German pasts The internationalisation of locality associated with the Manchester (Harvey), Monte San Giovanni (Heatherington), and Nakambale (Fairweather), resurfaces in the way Weimar chose to give expression to its nomination as European cultural capital in 1999. Barbara Wolbert’s analysis of the art exhibition, ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, is situated in a city which, like postindustrial Manchester, became a candidate for recuperation – although, of course, the case of Weimar is qualified by German reunification after the fall of the Wall. The sites connected by the exhibition trajectory (the Castle and Gauforum) were not associated with the Nazi past, which had always been locked away in Buchenwald. However, in the event, an unanticipated problem arose through the superimposition of several ‘pasts’ on the same highly charged space. This was not initially seen as a problem with which the exhibition had to deal. The attempt to diffuse this effect, transforming it through artistic intervention into something tangible for debate, produced instead a kind of redundancy as an art exhibition. The failure of the curators responsible to 17 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet_Q3.3_3_3L

2/9/04 4:28 PM

Page 18

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

create the required technology of enchantment (Wolbert refers to the ‘amateurish’, botched hanging in the Castle, and the propped-up art from the GDR period), led to unified public outcry. Journalists from both former East and the West, politicians and those writing in the visitors’ book felt insulted by the treatment of the art at the hands of arrogant curators. Wolbert argues that the story repeated in the newspapers about the fateful combination of site, art and curation perfectly reflecting the collective malaise of the reluctantly reunited Germany, was in fact a myth. The terms of the outcry were in fact unanimous (about art and professionalism) yet came to express anxieties and frustrations connected with East/West divisions. The outcome was that the great occasion for joining the European club, on one of its most prestigious circuits, was spoiled by press insistence on unresolved conflicts still simmering beneath the surface. The idea of invoking a European audience to contemplate the rise and fall of modernism subsided into a witches’ brew of supposed internal divisions, issuing forth from several pasts. As Wolbert points out, Duncan’s model disregards the actual relationship between curator and visitor, confounding as it does the curator(s) with the institution. Her analysis of the Weimar exhibit shows that the institution, the site and the curator(s) are unpredictable components of the museum; and that the volatile mixture produced in their interaction with visitors may feed directly back into the local social context. * * * These ethnographic approaches to exhibitions, whether in conventional museums or elsewhere, invite discussion of Duncan’s model of the museum as a ritual site at two related levels. The first of these is theoretical and relates to Turner’s model, from which she departs. The second concerns the broad notion of museum operating in various ways in the different settings described, which suggests that public involvement with museum culture as a way of making coherent statements about social identity is far more complex than she anticipated. Turner himself proposed that liminoid phenomena occur in very different situations, as he perceived in shifting his analysis from African rites of passage to Latin American and European Catholic pilgrimage. Duncan seems to have underestimated the specificities of liminoid phenomena in modern contexts when restricting Turner’s formulation to European and American art museums. For Turner, this shift implied considering individual experience rather than general social structure. The liminoid would, in these cases, not be located in the domain of ‘the whole’ social group, but among clusters of individuals who, although identified with one another, might be situated in transnational spaces, and think of themselves as westerners (cf. Turner 1973). These people might also think of themselves as belonging to a community defined by shared common practice such as, critically in Turner’s formulation, attending theatre 18 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 19

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

performances (Turner 1986). Duncan’s reading of Turner, and her seminal approach to museums from this perspective, fails to incorporate the diversity of ritual experience that these ritual settings permit. This critique had already been levelled at Turner himself by, for example, Gerholm (1988) who argued that ritual (in what he claims to be a postmodern view) is structured by nonritual procedures. These account for the fact that it is the subject’s point of view that determines whether or not a concrete situation is experienced as a ritual situation. Attending a theatre performance may, from this perspective, be sheer entertainment. The same applies to visiting museums, zoos or natural parks: it depends how visitors define the situation, which may in turn depend on many other factors. The main issue concerning ritual experience associated with museum visiting is that it involves not only the visitor but also (as with theatre) ritual officials and volunteers: curators, designers, exhibition makers and the like, as the cases under discussion demonstrate. A second issue connects with this theoretical position, although it might also be seen as a product of recent history. This concerns increasing public awareness of the museological process, and its corresponding impact upon both exhibitions and museum politics (see Wastiau, Heatherington, and Fairweather). As Karp (1992) reminds us, museums and museum-like sites may be included in what he calls (following Gramsci) the regulatory devices of civil society. For Karp, ‘civil society’ includes not only – or even mainly – institutions, but covers ongoing processes of negotiation about social identities. Museums are actively engaged in this discussion and hence in the negotiation of social identities. In this respect, contesting a museum exhibition may range from ignoring the museum’s existence to appropriating it as a cultural frame to value places and people otherwise invisible. Duncan’s focus on European and American art museums narrows the scope of this process to one category of museums among many. If, as the cases included in this volume seem to demonstrate, the ritual spectrum is much broader, then its analysis must include not only other sorts of museum, but especially museum personnel as well as visitors, celebrity scientists, and arguably personalised machines, mortal animals and immortal mummies. In pursuing how and why museum culture participates in the enchantment of the world, the various chapters of this book substantially adjust Duncan’s framework by adding agency to the actors involved. The orchestration of liminality is a complex collective endeavour in the museum-visiting process, and we now need to return to the issue of reception.

Part IV Dilemmas of Enchantment If the musealisation of culture is an inevitable accompaniment to the process of modernisation, as Vaessen (1986) has argued, whereby objects that have 19

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet_Q3.3_3_3L

2/9/04 4:28 PM

Page 20

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

fallen into disuse as well as newly created objects are used to fill the gap left by too rapid change, the capacity to reengage with this material either as a member of the public or as a cultural (= ritual) specialist, becomes one of the defining criteria of the modern citizen (Bourdieu and Darbel 1991; Solberg 1994). We return to this issue in connection with the fall of the Arapesh tambaran cult and ensuing production of heritage in the final section of this introduction. Macdonald addresses the new religiosity in the concluding part of the book, where she reviews the preceding chapters in terms of contemporary dilemmas for the museum as a ritual site. She examines the shift of attention and experience from the church to other sites which may, in turn, be transformed into ritual places. Their recognition as significant destinations containing meaningful objects depends on various kinds of knowledge that makes them significant for different segments of the population. Macdonald takes Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the world as her point of departure for discussing the new forms of religiosity sought by the modern self, relating this to the project of museums and comparable sites. The dilemmas associated with the process of musealising the former Nazi rallying ground in Nuremberg underline the deeply political agency of museums. The past haunts the Nuremberg project in a way that resembles the Weimar case (Wolbert). The difference lies perhaps in the explicit use of art in Weimar in a temporary exhibition, which raises the question of whether Macdonald’s concept of enchantment is equivalent to Gell’s formulation of art as a technology of enchantment (1992). Gell conceived of art as a technology that is magical in the sense that the resulting artefact seems to exceed productive labour. However, the agency of curators and other museum staff as well as visitors in producing this enchantment, as repeatedly demonstrated in the contributions to this volume, suggests that the museum effectively channels the agency of modern subjects in several directions.

Museum Magic Carol Duncan’s theorisation of the art museum as a ritual site demonstrated how a modern, post-Enlightenment, elite institution is scripted as a rite of citizenship. The neglected issue of agency, both of museum staff and of visitors, is of central importance to understanding the museum as a ritual site, as the contributors to this volume elucidate in their explorations of various exhibitionary configurations both in Europe and beyond. Enchantment, whether in a Namibian village, an Amsterdam zoo, a Sardinian natural park, or a Mancunian science museum, emerges as something that not only involves locals in a global discourse (and simultaneously localises global issues), but is 20

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 21

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

actively constituted by both producers and consumers through the repertoire of objects, images and places they have at their disposal. The museum as a ritual site involves not only the physical constitution of collection, buildings and choreography in space, but also the active mediation by ritual specialists, who by no means operate according to precepts concerning the ideal citizen even in the contemporary market-oriented incarnation of ‘target group’ or consumer. This is fortunate since visitors themselves may be interested in appropriating the museum for their own purposes – actively and not always predictably. However political the agency of the museum may be, there are likely to be curators who manage to subvert or alter the course of official messages just as there are visitors who domesticate the museum for their own purposes. In this sense, citizenship (if that is what the museum is ‘about’) is subject to continuous overhaul through the museological process including (but not centrally dependent on) museum visiting. Malinowski inspires one possible explanation for why this might be so nowadays. If we connect contemporary social processes of identity formulation in a disenchanted world with the role that museums and museum-like sites play in it, it may be that such institutions are inherently magical. What museums and processes of contemporary identity formation have in common is that they can be grounded on practically anything which may, in turn, be subjected to musealisation. This observation implies that museums are less about things in themselves than about the social networks that bring these marked things to the core of some signifying process. These are long-term processes that converge in different ways upon museums and similar sites where they serve to reenchant the world. The specificity of such sites is that they wrap things in a mythological universe, indeterminate enough to accommodate multiple layers of identification, and thereby providing open-ended comments on everyday life. This quality is partially derived from their seemingly extraterrestrial origin – the museum setting is out of this world, in liminoid time and space. In this respect they seem to be very much like Trobriand gardens. Gardens, to borrow from Malinowski’s account of yam planting (and its insightful reading by Gell (1988: 9)), are not simply about growing yams, but about their planting to the accompaniment of the proper spells and procedures. Gell refers to a kind of ‘ideal garden’, which strongly resembles the exhibition concept and special effects, which are developed on paper in a long-term process leading up to the opening. Applied to the case of museums, the magic involved is as diverse as contemporary identities are fragmented, and may include exorcisms in Weimar, ecological empowering at the Amsterdam zoo, rewriting national history at Tervuren, or domesticating technology at Manchester by walking around inside a computer. Museum magic is, in other words, a way of reflecting upon the world – things, ourselves, others, the past or the future – by creating a framework that 21

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 22

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

is both orderly yet more than that: it uses special effects, such as lighting, which resemble the Trobrianders’ magical prisms. It is magic in that it subjects only part – a small but significant part – of that world to such reflection in some ideal historically and socially situated manner. For this reason, museum magic works by trial and error and is always provisional. It is not magical to everybody all the time, nor is it completely predictable (as with yam magic). It is difficult to understand, just as coexisting forms of magic – notably cinema, theatre, advertising and other practices implying liminoid suspension of disbelief – are difficult to understand in purely rational terms. Museum magic does, however, surpass certain other technologies of enchantment since it provides a spatial venue for wider ritual processes that endure beyond the time frame normally available to film, theatre or advertising. If the liminal space of the museum enables visitors to grasp some part of the world in another light, museum specialists – such as curators, architects, and designers – may be seen as its magical technicians, using the complex means of museum spells against a disenchanted world.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Postscriptum: The Past, its Presence and the Future When Tuzin revisited Ilahita in the mid-1980s, the tambaran cult had been dramatically unmasked at a Sunday morning Revivalist (Christian) service; in the course of his fieldwork, he was to observe the cultural process of memorialising the tambaran (Tuzin 1997: 142). For if the revelation that the secret men’s club was a ‘hoax’ led in the first instance to the destruction of cult paraphernalia and associated practices (1997: 9–11), later on the memory of the Tambaran came to stand for ‘Ilahita’s past greatness … tainted … but nonetheless glorious’ (1997: 142). The instigators of the tambaran iconoclasm ‘wanted to remember, but also redefine the value and relevance of, those traditions, putting them safely at bay from the self ’ (ibid). Life and practice were, according to Tuzin, transformed by emotional distancing into heritage and reminiscence. The ambivalence of this redefined tambaran, a source of both attraction and revulsion, is reminiscent of human attitudes toward caged wildlife at the zoo (Silva), or the transgressive allure of unwrapping mummies (Wieczorkiewicz) or even, although in a different way, the Nazi rallying grounds at Nuremburg (Macdonald). As Tuzin observes, ‘a moral and cognitive dissonance was cast in the form of an “incriminating charter”, in this case the promulgation of a “heritage”, a cultural enshrinement that ironically indicts today’s modernist ideology and deprives it of unquestioned legitimacy’ (1997: 142). Fairweather’s interpretation of modernism at the colonial mission turned museum suggests, however, that the making of heritage may constitute a significant act of modernism – as indeed the tambaran episode tends to confirm. 22 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 23

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

When Revivalists went as far as staging performances of tambaran music for a visiting ethnomusicologist (1997: 221–222, n.15), they were first criticised by anti-Revivalist traditionalists for (as they saw it) trivialising custom. However, once the performances got underway, everyone was soon caught up in a ‘festive, nostalgic atmosphere’. Tuzin affirms, ‘the experience demonstrated, however – rather subversively, from the standpoint of the traditionalists – … that Tambaran art can be secularized, and that doing so might be preferable to totally abandoning it’ (ibid). * * * The detailed cases in this volume illuminate how the ritual processes of museum magic are an integral component of contemporary culture. We make into heritage the ‘stuff ’ (Charles Hunt’s term) that comes down to us through intense social and political negotiation, frequently involving performances that engage visitors with ritual specialists, either directly or indirectly. The concentration of meaning in specific spaces uses diverse exhibitionary technologies that appeal – sometimes on an alternating basis – to the rational and the emotional, bordering on the religious. As Eco reminds us, ‘[t]o enter the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, you first cross an eighteenth-century courtyard and step into an old abbey church, now part of a later complex, but originally part of a priory. You enter and are stunned by a conspiracy in which the sublime universe of heavenly ogives and the chthonian world of gas guzzlers are juxtaposed’ (Eco [1989] 2001: 7). Günther Domenig’s diagonal slice design for the documentation centre in the – unrestored – Nuremberg Colosseum provides a stunning example of the magical as well as the political sensitivity of making heritage (see Macdonald, this volume). Despite the rhetorical emphasis placed on the pastness or alterity of the material involved, attending to its cultural uses in the present will provide anthropologists, together with contemporary scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, with interpretative challenges for the foreseeable future.

NOTES We would like to thank Boris Wastiau and Barbara Wolbert for their helpful comments on this introduction. We are particularly grateful to an anonymous reader of the manuscript for a number of suggestions. 1. Palau de la Musica in Barcelona was the venue for the 1996 EASA opening. 2. The present volume developed out of the workshop, ‘Science, Magic and Religion, the Museum as a Ritual Site’, which we convened at the Krakow conference – in one of the old lecture rooms at the Jagiellonian University.

23 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet_Q3.3_3_3L

2/9/04 4:28 PM

Page 24

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto 3. Although it should be noted that museum as defined by ICOM and certain national museum organisations would include zoos. The wider term heritage as defined by UNESCO includes both material and immaterial sites, which certainly border on if not overlap with the term museum.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES Arnaut, K. (2001) ‘ExItCongoMuseum en de Africanisten. Voor een etnografie van de Belgische (post-)coloniale conditie’. Nieuwsbrief Belgische Vereniging voor Africanisten http://home4.worldonline.be/~ababva/forum/forum20/KA_ exitcongomuseum.htm Augé, M. (1995) Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. London and New York: Verso. English translation by John Howe of Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1992. Barry, A. (1998) ‘On Interactivity : Consumers, Citizens and Culture’, in Macdonald, S. (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 98–117. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. New York and London: Routledge. Bouquet, M. (1996) Sans og Samling/ Bringing It All Back Home to the Oslo University Ethnographic Museum. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. –––––– (1998) ‘Strangers in paradise. An encounter with Fossil Man at the Dutch Museum of Natural History’, in Macdonald, S. (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London: Routledge, pp. 159–72. Bourdieu, P. and Darbel, A. (1991) The Love of Art. European Art Museums and their Public. Cambridge: Polity Press. English translation by Carole Beattie and Nick Merriman of L’amour de l’art. Paris : Les Editions de Minuit, 1969. Corbey, R. (2001) ‘ExItCongoMuseum. The travels of Congolese art’, Anthropology Today, 17(3), pp. 26–28. Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Routledge. Eco, U. ([1989] 2001) Foucault’s Pendulum. London: Vintage. Gell, A. (1988) ‘Technology and Magic’, Anthropology Today, 4(2), pp. 6–9. –––––– (1992) ‘The Technology of Enchantment and the Enchantment of Technology’, in Coote, J. and Shelton, A. (eds), Anthropology, Art and Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 40–63. Gerholm, T. (1988) ‘On Ritual: a Postmodernist View’, Ethnos, 3-4, pp. 190–201. Goffman, E. (1959) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hetherington, K. (1996) ‘The Utopics of Social Ordering – Stonehenge as a Museum without Walls’, in Macdonald, S. and Fyfe, G. (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review, pp. 153–76. 24 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 25

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Karp, I. (1992) ‘On Civil Society and Social Identity’, in Karp, I., Kramer, C. and Lavine, S. (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 19–33. Latour, B. (1993) We Have Never Been Modern. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Lévy, P. ([1989] 1996) ‘A invenção do computador’, in Serres, M. (ed.) Elementos para uma História das Ciências, Vol 3, De Pasteur ao Computador. Lisbon: Ed. Terramar, pp. 157–83. Macdonald, S. and Silverstone, R. (1991) ‘Rewriting the museums’ fictions: taxonomies, stories and readers’, Cultural Studies, 4(2), pp. 176–91. Porto, N. (2000) Modos de Objectificação da Dominação Colonial. O caso do Museu do Dundo, 1940–1970. Coimbra: Universidade de Coimbra, Dissertação de Doutoramento. Prösler, M. (1996) ‘Museums and Globalization’, in Macdonald, S. and Fyfe, G. (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers/The Sociological Review, pp. 21–44. Schama, S. (1987) The Embarrassment of Riches: an Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. London: Fontana Press. Sherman, D. and Rogoff, I. (1994) ‘Introduction’, in Sherman, D. and Rogoff, I. (eds), Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles. London: Routledge, pp. i–xix. Solberg, V. (1994) “‘An Elite Experience for Everyone’: Art Museums, the Public, and Cultural Literacy”, in Sherman, D. and Rogoff, I. (eds), Museum Culture. Histories, Discourses, Spectacles. London: Routledge, pp. 49–65. Turner, V. (1973) ‘Variations on the Theme of Liminality’, in Moore, S.F. and Myerhoff, B. (eds), Secular Ritual. Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, pp. 36–52. –––––– (1986) ‘Dewey, Dilthey and Drama: an Essay in the Anthropology of Experience’, in Bruner, E.M. and Turner, V. (eds), The Anthropology of Experience. Chicago: Illinois University Press, pp. 33–44. Tuzin, D. (1980) The Voice of the Tambaran: Truth and Illusion in Ilahita Arapesh Religion. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. –––––– (1997) The Cassowary’s Revenge: the Life and Death of Masculinity in a New Guinea Society. London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vaessen, J. (1986) Musea in een museale cultuur: De problematische legitimering van het kunstmuseum. Zeist: Kerckebosch BV. Wastiau, B. (2000) ExitCongoMuseum. Un essai sur la ‘vie sociale’ des chefs-d’oeuvre du musée de Tervuren. Tervuren : Musée Royal de l’Afrique Centrale.

25 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

00_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:51 PM Page 26

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 27

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

PART I O BJECTS OF S CIENCE ? B ABY AND THE M UMMIES

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 28

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 29

C HAPTER 1 M EMORIALISING THE F UTURE – T HE M USEUM OF S CIENCE AND I NDUSTRY IN M ANCHESTER 1 Penelope Harvey




Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Magic in the Science Museum Science museums have long been associated with a sense of wonder and magic. London’s Science Museum emerged from the Great Exhibition of 1851 when visitors to the Crystal Palace were invited to marvel at the Machine Hall and admire the inventions and products of the Industrial Age. The importance and the excitement of science have continued to motivate science museums across the world. Many adults today remember the childhood thrill of watching the effects of pushing buttons and pulling levers, of being able to stand close by and even touch the huge machines of industrial production, and many parents take their children back to the museums they visited as youngsters to recapture something of the pleasure of playing with machines. And the institutionalised practice of science has benefitted from such effects. The early museums collected objects to inspire good practice and even to loan apparatus2 and contemporary science museums continue to promote the institution of science even if in a more abstract way. This chapter is based on ethnographic work in the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester (MSIM) and asks questions about the kinds of knowledge that are produced in contemporary museums of science and industry. At the time of my involvement with the Museum (1998–99), they were participating in an EU-funded project, Infocities, in which seven European cities worked to develop and test the interoperability of networked computer 29 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 30

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Penelope Harvey

applications in various domains of public interest – such as health, education, commerce, culture, and transport. Manchester was leading the work on culture. The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester was centrally involved in this effort and became a focal point for a series of activities designed to highlight Manchester’s profile as an Information City. Under the general publicity banner of Digital Summer 1998 the Museum opened a new exhibition space, a meticulously restored railway warehouse, the world’s first, built in 1830. A temporary exhibition, ‘Futures’, was produced to inaugurate this new space and to pilot ideas for a subsequent, permanent Communications Gallery. The Futures gallery explored the past and future of communications. It housed a public-access computer centre with state-of-theart machines, but the centrepiece of Futures was a replica of a computer, known as ‘the Baby’, the first computer with stored memory, built at Manchester University fifty years previously. The rebuild was itself a project in scientific history. A group of computer enthusiasts worked closely with the original developers, known as the ‘pioneers’, to recreate a machine able to run the original programme. The science on display in Futures thus had an explicit orientation towards the future as well as the past, and was quite clearly part of a wider political effort to promote one particular way of using scientific knowledge to change the world. This distinction between science as knowledge of the world and science as the means by which the world can be changed is an important one. Tambiah (1990) has argued that it is the slippage between these two domains of scientific activity that promotes the idea of ‘science’ as a particular autonomous realm of knowledge, as the motor of history. The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester is interested in both displaying science (as knowledge of the physical world) and in exploring the impact of scientific innovation in Britain’s first industrial city. This chapter explores how the slippage between these two areas of interest reproduces cultural understandings of the magical effects of science. The expertise of scientists is gained through a cross-dynamic of engagement in the world (as required by experimentation) and disengagement from the world (as required by the standards of objectivity). Scientific expertise rests on the acquisition of specialist knowledge and specialist languages which are used to generate theories or generalised statements to explain observable natural phenomena. Scientific truths are provisional but not personal. The emotional, moral and physical characteristics of particular scientists might affect their capacity to know, but truth itself is not contingent on the character of those who bring such truths to light. The gap between science and the science museum thus rests on the fact that for science the human story of how things came to be known is irrelevant to the status of knowledge, once that knowledge has been scientifically established. Scientific knowledge of the physical world is primarily conceptual 30

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 31

Memorialising the Future

and abstract. The science museum needs some help in displaying these truths and tends to appeal to narratives, specific contexts or personal experience to communicate and render such knowledge relevant to visitors. Objects themselves do not necessarily help that much: ‘[O]bjects from science museum collections are often understandable only in terms of the ideas they helped form or served to uphold. Technology lends itself more easily to display, but often the vital innovation within the machine on view is not apparent’ (Butler 1992: 108).

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Museum as Ritual Site Rendering scientific knowledge relevant and accessible to a general visiting public requires a disruption of rationalising abstraction, and a communicative process that restores some sense of visceral engagement. There are various ways in which such an effect might be achieved. There is the sense of wonder at the unimaginable (a technique used to great effect in the universal exhibitions of the past), or the ways in which some museums create a sense of hallowed terrain, as Duncan (1995) has argued in respect of certain art collections. Science museums can offer visitors proximity to objects that appear to have changed the world. In the museum setting the objects themselves can take on the magical quality of autonomous agents – just as the automata of the past were able to. Usually these objects cannot be touched but they almost can. Objects can also stand as silent witnesses to former times, vicarious points of access to former worlds that facilitate the journeys into the historical imaginary which have proved so popular in recent times.3 Within the museum, objects are integrated into collections, and perhaps more significantly into designed environments in which their relationship to other objects and to people can enhance their communicative power. The objects held in museums do not have the intrinsic capacity to enchant. Visitors need to be drawn into relationships with them and the skill of those who put the exhibitions together is to find a way to articulate that relationship such that it both attracts and educates. Many contemporary museums are intensely aware that in the sale of the knowledge commodity an overbearing appeal to notions of expertise or exclusivity can alienate potential visitors. Contemporary museum exhibits thus have to find ways to demonstrate the rigour of scientific thinking without allowing the appeal to authority and expertise to destroy opportunities for visitors to experience enchantment and personal involvement. Furthermore the public funding on which the majority of these institutions depend is tied to a commitment to opening access to all sectors of society. Such access requires a more horizontal and less hierarchical relationship between museum professionals and the visiting public. A commitment to transparency is often articulated as a neat solution to such dilemmas. The expert work of the 31 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 32

Penelope Harvey

museums can continue, but incorporated into the museum displays. Thus the daily business of the museum becomes more visible to visitors.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Some curators are inclined to see themselves as facilitators for learning rather than as sole dispensers of knowledge … the private spaces and processes are sometimes opened quite literally through inviting visitors on ‘open days’ to see ‘behind the scenes’. Storage areas, conservation and photographic laboratories, and archives are demonstrated and explained. Sometimes the activities that, in the past, would always have been carried out behind closed doors, are pursued in the public spaces. (Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 200)

The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester has embraced this ethos in many ways as they try to draw in new visitors and to explore a more communicative and less didactic approach in their exhibits. There are still tensions within the Museum between the idea of the museum visitor as passive consumer of expert knowledge, and the visitor as a person who brings their own experience (and expertise) to what is conceptualised as an interpretative and interactive process. Backed by extensive visitor research the new approach within the Museum has the upper hand, and visitors are encouraged to touch and feel, to get personally involved in science, to thoroughly mix the social and the scientific and to produce new unexpected artefacts from the fragments of past industrial production. Visitors are encouraged to think of knowledge as experiential, the machines as expressive and communicative. In a radical innovation in display techniques, the Museum began to employ artists to produce ‘installations’ (performative artwork) that encourage visitors to question the superiority of scientific expertise and value their own responses. The idea of using art installations was first introduced in 1992 in a temporary exhibit entitled ‘Home Truths’. The idea was to use the flexible and creative structure of an artwork to rethink, and re-present the standard categories through which museums habitually approached the objects in their care. The point of this exhibit was to problematise the place of ‘domestic’ technologies in human social life. Within museums, some things are chosen for the collections, others aren’t. For example, museum curators collect the hardware of pottery, metals, wood, plastics; they pay less attention to the softwares of teabags, tissues, liquids or bedclothes. These are domestic technologies which have developed or changed very considerably in the last forty to fifty years. In this museum’s collections, for example, we have the earth and water closets but not the lavatory paper. Museum staff collect many artefacts from kitchens and living rooms; they collect few from bedrooms and bathrooms. (Porter ms 1995)

The idea behind this new approach was to bring people more firmly back into the exhibition space. The staff involved in these projects wanted to think more deeply about the social lives of objects, their personal contexts, and the 32

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 33

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Memorialising the Future

associations, emotions and experiences of those whose lives had been inflected by them. One of the effects of this approach is that the object is replaced as the central focus of the exhibit by a theme on which there might be many different kinds of expertise. The idea is that in such a setting visitors can more easily find a point of connection, or at least of comparison and science and technology can become less alien and more familiar to visitors. The museum itself also becomes less important as a source of knowledge about the objects and more important as the means by which visitors come to recognise themselves and their own histories in relation to the general theme of the display.4 As part of Digital Summer 1998, the Museum and Art Transpennine commissioned an installation by the Canadian artist Dominique Blain. ‘Chorus’ was developed in collaboration with an ethnomusicologist who records lullabies from around the world, collected as people are singing their children to sleep. The concept was to introduce the traces of the people who might have had some connection with the warehouse and the goods which passed through it. There was a deliberate attempt to insert alternative exhibitionary forms and ‘to introduce notions of the personal, private, intimate, subtle, suggestive and multi-cultural into a space which was public, industrial, literal and explicit in its messages and often conceived as “Manchester” and male’.5 Hammocks hung from the warehouse ceilings occupied by the shapes of human forms. The lullaby music filled the room. On the ground old oil drums glowed like the braziers over which people could warm their hands and inside each drum the photographs of hands of various ages, colours, and sizes were lit from beneath to invoke the huge diversity of people who might in some way be connected to that space. No official visitor studies were done on this exhibit, but anecdotally it appears that some people loved it while others did not like it at all, and found it hard to interpret. The Museum also commissioned a community play. The script for the play, NETS, was written by the director, Mike Harris, but his way of working suited the Museum’s more open collaborative approach. He began by running public workshops and encouraging people to explore their ideas of technological futures. To the images that came out in these public brainstorming sessions, he added further ideas from novels, documentaries, and from expert research into bio and information technologies to create a dramatic work that would challenge and stimulate performers and audience alike. The interest among certain Museum staff members in juxtaposing their collections of industrial artefacts with contemporary artworks lay in the possibilities for enhancing the communicative potential of these object, of animating the collections and making the Museum visit more exciting and more rewarding for visitors. The focus on futures and on networked computing became part of this agenda. Much of the Museum’s profile, site and collections are about the old staple industries of Manchester – textiles, engineering, transport. They’re about the first 33

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 34

Penelope Harvey

Industrial Revolution, ‘of atoms’. We needed to put people into these stories; and to bring history up to date, to include Manchester’s current industrial and economic profile; as a city of students, music and football, with new industries. We wanted to feature the second industrial revolution, of ‘bits’ and contribute to the city’s social and economic regeneration. (Member of the MSIM curatorial staff )

The push was for a conceptual move away from the idea of museums as places where objects are (re)stored, held and displayed – to places where the relationships between people and objects can be brought out and explored.

The Futures Gallery

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Having spent £5.5 million on restoring the 1830 Warehouse the museum was looking for a way to draw people into this building with an exhibit that made an impact, but was not going to interfere with the fabric of the building, now a precious artefact in its own right. The brief for the gallery was drawn up by

Figure 1.1 ‘The world’s oldest surviving railway building, the warehouse at the terminus of the Liverpool to Manchester railway which opened in 1830’ (photograph by Penelope Harvey) 34

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 35

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Memorialising the Future

a team made up of the senior designer, the senior curator and an external consultant. The museum had done preevaluation work using external research based on focus groups. Communications emerged as the theme. The idea was to explore the analogy between the age of the railway and that of the computer. Taken together the 1830 Warehouse, the Baby, and Digital Summer 1998 would connect the international movement of commodities and bulk goods associated with nineteenth-century industrialisation to the proliferation of networks that characterises twentieth-century globalisation. There were various institutional partnerships involved in this endeavour. The Museum, the University of Manchester who wanted to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Birth of the Baby, the Computer Conservation Society who were busy rebuilding the Baby and wanted a home for it, and Manchester City Council who wanted a high-profile media occasion to launch Digital Summer 1998 and enhance their efforts to rebrand Manchester as a postindustrial information city. The Museum, once it had agreed to accept the Baby, found itself carried along by the pressing and non-negotiable deadline of 21 June 1998. Futures was thus a temporary exhibit, a pilot for the Communications Gallery. They decided to work with the interplay between the past and the future, and look at how people had imagined the future in the past, highlighting the impact of technological change on people’s lives. The exhibit would work as a memorial to previous imagined futures, and a testimony to the developmental impact of new technologies. Two large spaces covering one floor of the building were used. The first housed three mini exhibits each organised around a significant date: the railways in 1830, the telephone in 1880, the computer in 1948. The second space held the fourth exhibit, the networks of 1998. The 1830s section depicted the railway age. An image of the journey from Liverpool to Manchester, shot from the driver’s perspective played on a TV screen; railway cargoes were on display and the visual and aural effects evoked the period: Speed – distance – are still relative terms, but their meaning has been totally changed within a few months: what was slow is now quick, what was distant is now near; and in the future this change in our ideas will not be limited to the environs of Liverpool and Manchester – it will pervade society at large! (Henry Booth, Liverpool and Manchester railway company secretary and treasurer 1830)

Reference to the mail system linked the railways to the next communications era, that of the telephone which becomes the focus of the second space. A telephone from around 1880, designed by Charles Moseley & Son, one of the first local companies to make and install telephone equipment was on display, and contexualised by quotations from the time: ‘Until some more expeditious form of writing comes into general use there is little chance of the telegraph 35

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 36

Penelope Harvey

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 1.2 Railways in 1830 (photograph by Penelope Harvey)

being superseded by the telephone for ordinary purposes of communication’ (Manchester Guardian, 6 December 1881). A small telephone exchange linked the space of the 1880s to that of the 1940s and again there were examples of contemporary misapprehensions about the future: ‘Having regard to the changes and swift means of communication which at present exist by means of the telegraph between the principal towns in the UK it is extremely doubtful whether there would be much public advantage in establishing telephonic communication between those towns’ (Postmaster General, 1887). The general idea of what was in terms of objects a fairly sparse exhibit, was to connect particular innovations in communications technologies to the city of Manchester and to focus on the world-changing nature of the technologies. The focus was to be on the impact that these technologies made on people’s lives. The team charged with delivering the brief (a curator, designer and a technologist) wanted to present effects in terms of the qualitative impact rather than in terms of abstract facts and figures. The other guiding concept was the idea of parallel technological revolutions. The building itself was the surviving evidence of the first communications revolution, that of the railway 36

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 37

Memorialising the Future

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 1.3 Futures – The Telephone, 1880 (photograph by Penelope Harvey)

and the industrial era, the other was the information revolution, in which the development of the Baby was presented as of key importance. There was also much play with the notion of transparency in the design of the exhibit. The designers used transparent plastic CD pockets to display information and images and photos were printed onto very lightweight, semitransparent gauze which only partially obscured the walls of the building. All the basic wiring and cabling for the exhibit – including the wiring of the Baby itself – were on view, taped onto overhead beams or fitted inside perspex cases running down the wooden vertical supports of the building. The space was very open, so that the building itself became an integral part of the exhibit. However these objects, images and sounds were basically the context in which to present the Baby. The Baby was presented as a huge machine that changed the world. Visitors could view it from close up, separated only by a low barrier made from the chunky shapes of ones and zeros which held people back just far enough so as to avoid contact (see Figure 1.4). Labelling was minimal but recorded information played as visitors approached. There was a panel giving basic facts about the rebuild project, and there were cards to 37

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 38

Penelope Harvey

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

pick up and read for those who wanted more information. There was also a Turing adding machine on display, and classic mistaken predictions about the impact of computers: ‘There is no reason why anyone should want a computer in their home’ (Ken Olsen, Founder of DEC, 1960). ‘We have a computer here in Cambridge; there is one in Manchester and one at NPL (National Physical Laboratory). I suppose there ought to be one in Scotland, but that’s about it’ (unattributed). Finally as a transition into the second half of the exhibit there was a prediction booth, a kind of pod which visitors could enter to record their own predictions for the future. The idea was to edit these and to play extracts on screens in the entrance hall but there were technical problems with this device and it was little used. The second half of the exhibit was built around a display of networked computing. Here a suite of computer work stations and tools such as digital cameras, scanners and printers were made available to the public alongside two state-ofthe-art exhibits both related to the city of Manchester. One of these was an example of the GIS (geographic information system), a computerised mapping technology which enables the overlay of various kinds of information – spatial, social, and demographic. The second was a virtual- reality training device developed at the Manchester Royal Infirmary and used to train doctors in the art of keyhole surgery. Visitors could try to make the precision movements required (moving geometric objects rather than simulated body parts) and the machine would assess the degree of accuracy achieved. Again these exhibits proved too costly to maintain and were eventually removed from the gallery.

Science and Art In many ways Futures exemplified the new ways in which museums display scientific knowledge, and this was done quite self-consciously. The Futures gallery was building on the successful development of a themed exhibit which had replaced the Textiles Gallery. ‘Fibres, Fabrics and Fashion’ was a highly innovative exhibit and was talked about as a third-generation exhibitionary form within the Museum. Museum staff talked of the necessity of doing something different from what they had done before. Some of them wanted to move away from the processes and physical products of the textile, engineering and vehicle industries, to address information, communication and distribution technologies. The science that these third-generation galleries were aiming to display was seen as ‘far more difficult to convey, fugitive and perishable, transient, immaterial, or complicated and uninteresting’.6 The quality of visitor experience was also problematic: the first generation was the Power Hall and Air & Space Gallery – huge, impressive and affective technologies which worked, were dramatic. In the second-generation galleries the 38

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 39

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Memorialising the Future

main structure of the gallery was text and chronology, objects and displays were hung onto this framework. The challenge was to find a way to move away from the textual exhibition, to offer a more emotive, affective, environmental and experiential gallery, to create another language and form, without the huge, wonderful working exhibits of the first generation.7 Thus despite the fact that the Baby, a huge, wonderful working exhibit if ever there was one, was the centrepiece of Futures, and despite the chronological structure, the gallery was conceived as belonging to the innovative genre of designed themed environments rather than a collections-based one.8 There were very few objects on display at all beyond the Baby and the building itself. The idea of objects as interpretative resource had displaced the notion of collections of objects as a knowledge resource in and of themselves.9 Contemporary exhibits such as Futures thus seem to combine two powerful ways of using exhibits as knowledge resource and as interpretative resource. Museums educate visually and successful exhibits allow visitors to take the ‘message’ in at a glance.10 We have seen how in the MSIM there has been a move away from labels towards transparency under an ethos where they try to provide enough information so as not to mislead, but retain an openness that is not dictating. The ideal is to leave the visitor to draw their own conclusions. In that sense messages are left open. In the ‘prediction booth’ visitors were even encouraged to curate a part of the exhibit themselves by recording their own predictions which could then be incorporated into the exhibition. These sentiments support the incorporation of ‘art’ in science museums, in a model of learning that is in many ways reminiscent of renaissance understandings of the relationship between knowledge, art and play. Horst Bredekamp has written about the relations between art, science and scholarship in early modern Europe (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) as manifest in the Kunstkammer, the ‘curiosity cabinet’ that brought together all manner of objects – which challenged the visitor/viewer to imagine possible connections and to acquire through such imaginative reasoning, some sense of natural (divine) creative process. According to the image of deus ludens, the collector, in comprehending the creative process, preserved the reciprocity of useful application and lack of purpose, in order to gain knowledge, ‘while at play’. Just as the earth was viewed as the ‘Kunstkammer of God’, the collector also created a world in a building, indeed a museum, which is a microcosm and a compendium of all extraordinary things. (Bredekamp 1995: 73)

Bredekamp argued that the Kunstkammer brought objects into visual exchange with one another and ‘stressed the metamorphic potential of the materials. Especially since natural objects were mixed with works of art and technology, the historicity of the materials … was conveyed’ (1995: 110). The point I want to draw out here is his insight that an active laboratory of ideas 39

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 40

Penelope Harvey

engaged people with a sense of historicity. Indeed it was precisely that connection which came to dominate the kinds of imaginative reasoning that the Kunstkammer inspired. This idea that museums can facilitate imaginative reasoning is thus an enduring one. The Museum was certainly hoping to provoke people to think again about the technologies that they might well take for granted in their lives and through their engagement with the exhibit open up new ways of thinking about these objects and the differences they have made to people’s lives. Yet the other kind of reason, the notion of objective knowledge that draws science apart from art, is still presented and visible ‘at a glance’ in Futures. For all its openness, Futures also presented ideas that could not easily be scrutinised, not least the notion of technological progress itself and its historical connection to the City of Manchester. And while it is clear that the persuasive techniques of this exhibit did not rest in any straightforward way on the established expertise of the institution, the exhibit and the rituals surrounding the rebirth of the Baby certainly endorsed ideas about knowledge, science and progress which ran counter to many of the other activities within the Museum.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Rebirth of the Baby The rituals surrounding the rebirth of the Baby offer an opportunity to discuss these points. Two key narratives emerged to surround this machine and give it a place in the public imagination. One of these narratives concerned those who originally built the machine, the other those who rebuilt it. The men who actually built the Baby had worked in university research programmes that fed into both military and commercial applications. The second group, the rebuilders set out to produce an artefact for public display, an artefact that would provide a point of origin (in time and space) for a process that at the time was not deemed to have been of any great significance. For these enthusiasts, the rebuild was itself a performative act, surrounded with ritual and ceremony, a self-conscious enterprise with an eye to media coverage. The museum exhibit and the context of Digital Summer 1998 brought these two stories together.11 Two key characters emerged in the media as representatives of the two moments in the history of this machine: Tom Kilburn and Chris Burton. Kilburn, a young mathematician from Cambridge, then in his mid-twenties, went to work with Freddie Williams at the government’s Telecommunications Research Establishment in the ‘race’ to beat the Americans in finding the solution to the storage of digital information. These were crucial technologies for defence systems and early successes were widely circulated (and taken up by the Americans and the Russians) to bring forth future funding. The Baby was 40 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 41

Memorialising the Future

built as an experimental machine, to test ‘the ability of the Williams Tube to read and reset at speed random bits of information, whilst preserving a bit’s value indefinitely between resettings’.12 Kilburn wrote the first programme which worked for the first time at eleven o’clock in the morning on 21 June 1948. Some time later in 1974, Freddie Williams is said to have described that moment in these terms:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

A program was inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was a dance of death leading to no useful result, and what was even worse, without yielding any clue as to what was wrong. But one day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in the expected place, was the expected answer. It was a moment to remember. Nothing was ever the same again.

However, at the time this earth-shattering moment was not greeted with any public interest – the emotion was developed over time! And the scientists themselves moved on to the next step. An experiment successfully completed enabled them to move forward. They continued to change and develop the machine. By the time Chris Burton decided to rebuild the Baby the original machine had long since disappeared – dismantled, reused, discarded – neither its parts nor its original form held any interest for the scientists beyond its original role in the experimental process. This machine only became an historic artefact through the care and motivations of others. Similarly the stories of the scientists themselves, their own characterisation as key players in the development of modern computing became important long after the fact, long after Ferranti (the company that later became ICL) had put a subsequent machine into commercial production. The race to rebuild the Baby was a race against time, a race to meet the deadline around which the project hung – to run the programme again, fifty years since it had first worked – the deadline loomed over the project, eleven o’clock on 21 June 1998.13 The challenge was one of historical investigation and contemporary ingenuity. Not only were there no remains of the Baby immediately to hand (all had to be hunted down, replicated, improvised) but there were no original circuit or engineering drawings and only very few photos. The drawings of Dai Edwards and Alec Robinson, younger members of Williams’ and Kilburn’s team were crucial resources for the rebuilders but their notebooks date from six months after June 1948. ‘The notebook of G.C. Tootill, who had followed Williams and Kilburn from the British radar laboratories, the Telecommunications Research Establishment, did not have circuits but is nonetheless crucial, since it contains the contemporary notes of the 1948 machine, including the first program’ (Agar 1998: 130). So the rebuilders set about the complex process of using diverse sources to try and recreate as exactly as they could a machine that had been discarded 41

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 42

Penelope Harvey

without ceremony by those who had originally built it. The intellectual task of the new generation of computer scientists (the rebuilders) was to overcome the inaccuracies or inconsistencies in these records and actually get the programme to run.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

For Burton the first strategy for ‘back-extrapolation to June 1948’ has been to ‘put ourselves in the minds of the creators’, and when vague to ask the pioneers. The boundary between reliable memory and creation of new knowledge, which to the textual historian is highly awkward, is highlighted – indeed celebrated – by the rebuilders: episodes where pioneers who when distanced from the machine find details difficult to remember remark ‘of course it was like that’ when confronted with the rebuild are eagerly reported. However, likewise, there are cases when a pioneer states, ‘it’s like that’, whereas for Burton ‘it couldn’t have been’. (Agar 1998: 130)

Agar argues that Burton wanted to recreate not only the machine but the original emotional response, to capture the spirit of their invention, to feel how they did about the first computers. Chris Burton was quite explicit about his motivations. In 1989 he had formed the Computer Conservation Society and had set out to make something tangible to mark the origins of the age of computing, the second Industrial Revolution. He wanted something for the younger generation to go and look at, and he wanted to claim a place for Britain in this story to counteract the idea that computers are an American invention. It was of crucial importance to the rebuilders that the machine should actually work, and that this working machine would inspire the viewing public: ‘I hope [visitors] go away thinking, my golly, it started in Britain, in Manchester.’14 It was this idea that was taken up and localised by Manchester’s city authorities as they used this moment to mark Manchester’s place as the origin point for the Computer Age. Throughout the summer of 1998 there were many activities held under the banner of Digital Summer – but two in particular concern the unveiling of the Baby to the world’s press. On 17 June there was a ceremony to open the Golden Anniversary Conference hosted by the University of Manchester. The event was held in the Bridgewater Hall, home of Manchester’s Halle Orchestra, and the city’s most prestigious modern architectural arts venue. The programme blended art and science in a way that was to characterise the memorialisation of this ‘event’. It opened with what was billed as ‘a dramatic reconstruction of the invention of the world’s first storedprogram computer’, followed by Tom Kilburn’s personal perspective on events and then a live satellite link to the MSIM so that the audience could ‘see’ the Baby – which was switched on by Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams’ widow. Speeches were made by representatives of Ferranti and of ICL (the commercial developers of computing in Manchester) and by people working on contemporary applications. Honorary degrees from the University of Manchester were conferred on Chris Burton, Tom Kilburn and Sebastian de Ferranti.15 42

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 43

Memorialising the Future

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Finally the leader of the City Council brought the focus back to the City’s place in the contemporary IT industry and the Digital Summer celebrations. I did not go to Bridgewater Hall, but watched the activities from the Museum end where the TV crew responsible for the satellite link rehearsed Chris Burton as he waited to go on line to talk to Tom Kilburn. He was to be the human face, there to confirm that the machine was indeed switched on and working. My memory is of tense nervous waiting, silence, and gesticulations from the floor manager as she kept urging the compère at the Bridgewater Hall end to shut Tom Kilburn up, they could only sustain the satellite link for seven minutes, if they didn’t switch over to the Museum the link would be lost. There were no tensions as to whether or not the Baby would turn on, but there was a lot of worry about these latest ICTs, could they keep the link running long enough to create the impression that so many had worked so hard to orchestrate? Four days later, at exactly eleven o’clock, Tom Kilburn and Chris Burton were in the Museum, together with crowds of journalists and local worthies, to run the programme. This time I did hear the speeches and the claims made for the city. People crowded in to see, but although the machine was huge and

Figure 1.4 Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill pose in front of the ‘Baby’ for the press on 21 June 1998 (photograph by Penelope Harvey) 43

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 44

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Penelope Harvey

spectacular, its workings and the running of the programme were not visible to most people. What was visible were the scientists, together, posing for photographs, answering the same questions for different news programmes as the message that ‘we’ did it ‘here’ emerged in various forms. At this stage it mattered more to display the scientists themselves, since the ‘pioneers’ authenticated the Baby for the ‘rebuilders’. The object was successfully historicised, while the scientists between them carried the knowledge that was by now as historical as the machine itself. However, it was clear that it was not primarily the knowledge but the effects of that knowledge that were put on display in the summer of 1998. The mathematics and electronic engineering were alluded to in the design of the exhibit but the rationalised, scientific process was subordinated to the human story – the search for the parts to rebuild the Baby, the struggle to recover the process, the desire to replicate (and enhance) that original moment. It is these more personal, symbolic, less rational (and more magical) dimensions of the scientific process which museums (unable to adequately represent the science) in fact recapture with great alacrity. For the challenge is how to make ‘knowledge’ (abstract and rationalised) concrete for display. This was Chris Burton’s aim and he understood that it was only through the drama of this kind of display that Tom Kilburn’s scientific work could be objectified for public consumption. It is in this sense that the Museum display of the rebuilt Baby joined imaginative reasoning with a sense of historicity. They used the drama of the scientists to make the scientific process appear impressive. The size of the computer was indeed dramatic. But the computer in itself does not invoke wonder – except in terms of its self-evident obsolescence. How were they to inspire wonder when what that huge machine could actually do was so disproportionate to its size and to the hype surrounding contemporary computing? Human drama was thus built into the story, the race to recover the original, the struggle and the passion required to make this machine work, now and then. Drama was also made of the gap between the two generations of scientists and the effects of their work. The ‘pioneers’ who developed the knowledge in ignorance of what they were doing, while the rebuilders fashioned an origin and thus a history for both the men and the machine. But the Baby was also part of another exhibit, Futures and the history of communications. Here the Baby appeared as one key point in a history of climactic developments. The Museum exhibit made both these moves, and furthermore located the achievement and claimed it for the city, drawing people in as collaborators – this is your city, your computer, your invention – your future. It was in the NETS play that the potential for symbolic transposition from the field of computing and information technologies to that of a narrative about technology and assisted conception was made concrete. I never heard anyone suggest that Tom Kilburn might be thought of as the Father of the 44

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 45

Memorialising the Future

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 1.5 The Baby as exhibit, with the image of Chris Burton (photograph by Penelope Harvey)

Baby with Chris Burton acting as facilitating specialist. However the play that emerged from the community drama workshop and the fertile imagination of Mike Harris homed in on this connection to produce a wonderfully wideranging mythic tale that drew together some of the major cultural preoccupations of our times. The play fused the genres of political thriller and romantic drama and was set in a futuristic present. A girl fell in love with a piece of software, an artificial intelligence able to download into any object or body. This caused problems for her mother, the Prime Minister of a city state in which she was managing a shaky alliance between her own party which offered full citizenship to clones and the natural human party. The basis of the alliance was a determination to prevent the extension of human rights to cyborgs and Artificial Intelligences (AIs). As the plot developed the artificial intelligences began to disrupt the workings of the system, the cyborg police began to destroy many people who thought of themselves as fully human, the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman were challenged. Many of our most deeply held social ideas were brought out for inspection. At one point the AI downloaded into the body of the girl’s 45

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 46

Penelope Harvey

father, a scenario made possible by the fact that the father had left his body and uploaded his mind on to the net. In a parallel moment (and the play was performed in promenade, with two simultaneous plot lines and a split audience, linked by the use of screens and recorded material), it was revealed that this father, while still a scientist had cloned his ex-wife, the Prime Minister, from his own mother’s DNA. The play ended with a clever and very amusing courtroom scenario in which the artificial intelligence stood trial for illegal sexual relations with the human girl. The arguments about the limits of the self, the body, rights and agencies were all discussed in detail. Finally order was restored through the assertion of dictatorial power, all machines were switched off, the artificial intelligence was erased, people were catapulted back in time to work in a subsistence agricultural economy. The final twist centred on the romantic heroine, the girl, still pregnant at the end, supposedly by a clone who had killed all others from his genetic batch, regained his unique origins and assumed the role of dictator of this new kingdom. She revealed in an aside to her mother, the now deposed Prime Minister, that she had a copy of the AI and was now again carrying his baby. The rest of the cast marched out chanting, ‘the only way forwards is backwards’!

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusions: Partial Enchantment, Divergent Passions The exhibit and its surrounding rituals produced various truths for the visiting public. There was the strong narrative of locality. The story about science was also a story about Manchester, and not just Manchester’s past, but also Manchester’s intrinsic ability to host such projects in the future. The largescale, media-focussed attention given to the Baby was part of the city’s ongoing attempts to build networks for future funding. These rituals do exercise their own magical effects. City authorities have found that there is some kind of intrinsic efficacy in such branding activities which has enabled them to draw money into the city. They may struggle to recreate that sense of an 1830s hub city (although in many ways Manchester’s status in relation to the so-called Industrial Revolution was as much a conscious fabrication as its status in relation to the Information Revolution), but they do actively use this image to draw business into the city today – particularly in relation to the cultural industries. Finally and doubtless most successfully they reiterate the established modern story about technological progress, about origins, about people and scientific experiment and about the sense of scientific knowledge as the motor of change. The drama that surrounded the scientists is a clear example of the use of ritual to create the ideological effect of social coherence. As in Turner’s ritual phases (Turner 1969), both objects and visitors are separated from the mundane world on entering the museum and hand themselves over to the 46 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 47

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Memorialising the Future

dramas and rituals of the museum presentations. Visitors to Futures are asked (and were asked most powerfully on the days of the public ceremony) to enter into the spirit of what it must have been like, to create (and re-create) the first computer. The scientists appear in this drama as living diorama, and today the photograph of the rebuild team stands alongside the baby. Science appears to have been overturned. What we find in its place is a world of passion and excitement, of inaccuracies and compromises, and a world where the scientists themselves have little understanding of the longer-term impacts of their contemporary work. Yet bound into the wider tale of social progress, the visitor can leave the museum assured that science underpins our civilisation, that we need science to live decent, civilised lives. The ritual thus performs its conservative function, and science is celebrated uncritically. However, as more recent theorists of ritual have pointed out, that which fails to be integrated into the dominant ritual vision remains as a source of disjunction around the social issues in question. In the case of Futures there were many less powerful messages, but messages which nevertheless amounted to a critique of science, a call for multiplicity, for the other voices that only emerge in the sound effects of mothers singing to their children in the Chorus installation, or in the mythical nightmares of the NETS play – and presumably in the interpretations and understandings of all those visitors who were not captivated, or failed to engage with the narratives and objects on display. From the Museum’s point of view, the Baby hijacked the gallery, but spaces for alternative interpretations always remain, not least the possibility that the Baby itself became an art object in its new surroundings – a possibility that would have appalled scientists and rebuilders alike. In the seventeenth century the Kunstkammer brought together natural objects with machines, human creations and art forms. The boundary between products of human workmanship and of nature was deliberately blurred, and the huge interest in automata reproduced ancient desires to imitate life by inspiring movement. At the beginning of the twenty-first century museums continue to blur boundaries and these institutions that provide an image of science as integral to the social process continue to depend on the imaginative reasoning of the visiting public and the enduring fascination with huge working machines. However, there is a crucial difference between the Kunstkammer and open interpretations invited in contemporary science museums. In the contemporary world, where ‘big science’/‘technoscience’ holds sway, interpretative knowledge is worth far less than in the early modern period when it was ‘experts’, the social and religious elites who knew the world through imaginative contemplation. There is little evidence of devolution of expertise in the contemporary ‘information society’, just information. Social revolutions in terms of knowledge are about shifts in where expertise is deemed to lie. This brings me back to the place of museums in the contemporary world and the issue of how to relate ‘objects’ to the processes through which these objects 47

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 48

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Penelope Harvey

came into being. The scientists who invented the Baby objectified their knowledge – in the machine, and in their notebooks and diagrams – but their purpose and attention was on continued innovation and development. Their records were in fact quite loose and hard to work from. The Baby itself was simply an experimental model, taken apart and used to build the next machine. Museums arrest the development of objects, and then need to create and build the contexts through which the objects become meaningful again. This recontextualising process is the domain of curatorial expertise, a domain that cannot easily be devolved to visiting publics who come in search of contexts as much as they come to look at objects. Museums have choices in the development of an exhibit as to what kinds of context they wish to provide. The various dramas and artworks that surrounded Futures offered the opportunity to think about machines in relation to people and human activity, but little was done to provide the kind of information that would have enabled a critical history of computing and communication. In that respect the Futures Gallery was a missed opportunity, for by default the exhibit reinstated a model of knowledge as object, authored by single people and thereby undermined in many ways what the same museum was trying to do in other areas. Some within the Museum were working to disrupt hegemonic notions of science and foster a more open-ended interpretative approach to knowledge. The problem is that as science gets assigned to the realm of the intuitive and the instinctual and is shown to be motivated by the passions and dramas of human lives, so too ‘science’ becomes more firmly established as magical – conceptually opaque yet enchanting and captivating as social process. Science museums inevitably get involved in recasting the conceptual basis of science. The use of narrative, art and drama firmly embeds the scientific process in the contemporary passion for collecting and recovering the past and encourages visitors to explore the relationships between people and objects and to challenge the autonomous agency of machines. But the magical effects of science will continue to hold sway as long as the slippage between science as knowledge of the world and science as motor of change is left unexamined.

NOTES 1. The research on which this chapter is based was carried out with funding from the ESRC’s Virtual Society? Programme. Within this programme I was working with fellow anthropologist Dr Sarah Green, and historian of science and technology Dr. Jon Agar. The project within the ESRC programme was entitled Social Contexts of Virtual Manchester. Details of the project can be found at http://www.les1.man.ac.uk/sa/virtsoc/Home.hl. The ideas presented here have grown from conversations with my colleagues on the project, and on the programme more

48 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 49

Memorialising the Future

2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

13.

14. 15.

generally. I have also had very helpful feedback from the session at the 2000 meeting of the European Association of Social Anthropologists held in Krakow, from the Language, Culture and Society Research Seminar at the University of Bradford’s Department of Modern Languages, and from the School of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Manchester. Particular thanks to staff at the Museum of Science and Industry, especially Penny Feltham, Pauline Webb, and to Gaby Porter whose ideas have been very influential in shaping my arguments. Butler (1992: 21). See Samuel (1994), Lowenthal (1985), Wright (1985), and Hewison (1987). See Porter (1991). Gaby Porter, personal communication. Gaby Porter, personal communication. Gaby Porter, personal communication. The generations referred to echo Danilov’s (1982) phases in the development of science museums, as discussed by Stella Butler (1992): ‘Phase One museums are those like the original Science Museum in London or the Conservatorie des Arts et Métiers which simply collect historical material. Museums of Phase Two include the Deutsches Museum and concentrate still on the past, but seek to bring historical exhibits to life by using working machinery. Phase Three museums place little emphasis on collections of historic objects and instead concentrate on participatory exhibits stressing contemporary themes’ (Butler 1992: 56). See J. Bennett’s (1998) discussion of the tension between the inclusivity of collections (as knowledge resource) and the importance of contextual materials for meaningful display (as interpretative resource). He argues that exhibitions can embrace both inclusivity and context. T. Bennett (1998). For a historical analysis of this process see Agar (1998). I am drawing on an account published in Manchester University’s campus magazine This Week Next Week, special edition published on 15 June 1998. Many similar accounts were published and circulated in Manchester at the time. The Museum itself was caught in this race as they tried to get the gallery finished in time to host the anniversary celebrations. At this point tensions among the various groups involved were at their height. The NETS community play were having difficulty rehearsing as the fitters tried to complete the gallery. The University and the scientists were fully focussed on 21 June, while for the Museum this was just the opening of an exhibit which they would have to live and work with for three years or more. However the anniversary had come to dominate proceedings and clearly had a major impact in what the Museum was able to do with the Futures gallery. See Agar interview with Chris Burton, 22 January 1998, transcript held in the National Archive for the History of Computing, Manchester. Michael Brady, currently Professor of Engineering at Oxford University, was also awarded an honorary degree.

REFERENCES Agar, J. (1998) ‘Digital Patina: Text, Spirit and the First Computer’, History and Technology, 15, pp. 121–35. Bennett, J. (1998) ‘Can Science Museums Take History Seriously?’, in Macdonald, S. (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 173–82. Bennett, T. (1998) ‘Speaking to the Eyes: Museums, Legibility and the Social Order’, in Macdonald, S. (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London and New York: Routledge, pp. 25–35. 49

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

01_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:52 PM Page 50

Penelope Harvey

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Bredekamp, H. (1995) The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers. Butler, S. (1992) Science and Technology Museums. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Danilov, V.J. (1982) Science and Technology Centres. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Routledge. Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London: Methuen. Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992) Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, G. (1991) ‘Partial Truths’, in Kavanagh, G. (ed.), Museum Languages. Leicester: Leicester University Press, pp. 103–17. –––––– (1995) ‘Museums and Representations of Domestic Artefacts’, m/s ca. Manchester. Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory, Vol. 1 Past and Present in Contemporary Culture. London: Verso. Tambiah, S. (1990) Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Wright, P. (1985) On Living in an Old Country: the National Past in Contemporary Britain. London: Verso.

50 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 51

C HAPTER 2 U NWRAPPING M UMMIES AND T ELLING THEIR S TORIES : E GYPTIAN M UMMIES IN M USEUM R HETORIC Anna Wieczorkiewicz




Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Secret (Wrapped) Bodies The caption beneath the photograph of an Egyptian mummy in a museum guide reads, ‘This Egyptian mummy has its linen wrapping pulled away from the head to expose its amazing state of preservation’ (Preston 1983: 76). The picture and caption together suggest that what we should be admiring is the state of preservation of the dead body. ‘Priests of science’ appear to have revealed the face of a dead person, buried with the proper rituals; they then publicly display the dead body in the name of values considered superior to those current in the culture of origin. The original ritual becomes, in this way, a form of a picturesque fantasy. Seen in this light, the information quoted above becomes morally ambivalent – as does displaying the mummy in a museum. The museum is not a public place like any other: it expresses and authenticates a society’s established or official values and images. Nor is a dead human body an object like any other: human remains have special significance in all societies. Where such remains have been displaced to become part of museum narratives, the situation is not morally neutral – especially taking into consideration the discourse about plurality of cultures, and their right to their own cults, religion and beliefs. Musealisation of human remains leads directly to an axiologically laden domain where meanings associated with death are located, 51 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 52

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

which may trigger some kind of ‘ritual interpretation’. It is also tempting to use such juxtapositions as museum – temple, or scientists – priests as an interpretative frame. Instead of dwelling upon such value judgements, however, I propose to reflect upon the cultural fact of inserting mummies into museum narratives.1 Mummies are the organisational core of many museum exhibits. They are displayed to attract visitors’ attention in ethnographic, archaeological, and oriental collections, in museums of natural history as well as those devoted to the history of medicine. From a rhetorical point of view, museum discourse takes over the possession of mortal remains and imposes on them its own metaphorical system of meanings. This chapter will address a number of questions: which stories are associated with Egyptian objects? How do we explain ancient History? Which narratives are used to establish the dialectics of Ourselves-Others? I will begin by the drift of various museum narratives concerning mummified human bodies in their possession. I will examine textual and verbal commonplaces that are actively used in many museum displays, in addition to comparing and contrasting exhibits in Manchester and Crakow respectively. Finally, I will relate the ‘Egyptian narrative’ modes to the more general sociocultural context in order to interpret the deployment of dead bodies by museums.

Egyptian Stories

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The fairy tale narratives ‘Ancient Egyptians believed that ...’ is the usual formula for introducing the narrative mode where everything is like a fairy tale.2 Their distant land is full of marvels that we can discover if we follow the thread of the tale. A wrapped mummy, with its sarcophagi and coffins, is the epitome of mystery. The various components of sarcophagus and coffins are arranged like a Chinese box, slanting towards the spectator in a way that enables him or her to admire their ornamentation. Decorated coffins are thus made to reveal successive interiors, leading towards the mummified body hidden inside. This mode of display summarises and evokes narratives of both concealment and revelation of a secret. The visitor is usually encouraged to use more than one set of criteria for evaluating what he or she sees – for instance, both scientific and aesthetic. Judgement based on aesthetic criteria assumes that simple and noble formal solutions (although not free of symbolic references) appeal to us because of their intrinsic, autonomic and eternal qualities. The result is that ‘pieces of Egypt’ are included in picturesque spectacles. An Egyptian death, seen in this way, does not appear to be a real death; it seems instead to be a performance of beliefs, an artistic achievement, and a spectacle incorporating 52 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 53

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

carefully prepared and beautiful artefacts. The narrative suspends our belief in the truth of their religion, or our scepticism about the form of afterlife in which they believed. One very important outcome of the fairy tale narrative mode is that our death and their death do not exist in the same reality.

Ghost story narratives Museum scenarios sometimes adopt ghost story narratives intended to produce excitement and fear. However, the threat should not be too realistic – it is ‘just a play’. Mummies: monsters? - we could read at the entrance to the exhibit Mummies-monsters? at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden /The National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Many people think mummies are creepy, and at first sight they are. Mummies are people or animals who died thousands of years ago. In everyday life, you hardly ever see a dead person. Moreover horror movies and comic strips make matters worse. They often feature mummies which come to life again. Do you dare to enter a room full of mummies?

Although this text is addressed to young visitors, it incorporates some rhetorical devices that are widely used in museum narratives. Should we be scared when looking at mummies? Or should we play at being scared, and eliminating the threat? We may sometimes be persuaded that mummies are people similar (but not equal) to ourselves,3 and that the Book of the Dead is like a tourist guide.4 The whole concept of a journey to the Afterlife is not unfamiliar to computer-games players.5 Sometimes, the ‘Egyptian adventure’ is a nostalgic journey in a picturesque land.6 ‘The voyage of Death./ Death is a different country./ You must voyage to the west, to the realm of the setting sun. Death is a different country ... But it is even better than being alive. You want to stay for ever’ (Leicester, New Walk Museum). Although death seems to be situated somewhere in the past, it belongs in fact to a different kind of time, that is not our time. Arranging Egyptian material in the ghost story frame helps to emphasise the distance between two worlds: ours and the Egyptian one. Meanings belonging to the Egyptian world are unclear to us and their obscurity threatens us. However, museum ghost stories do have definite limits. By the end of the story, ghosts are no longer frightening; indeed, they even collaborate with curators in their task of guiding the visitor: Do you find me frightening?/ Funny?/ Mysterious?/ Once I was a living person like you/ Because of my beliefs/ my body was preserved in Egypt/ Because of your curiosity I am here in Leicester, a nameless woman. Here you will find wonderful things by my people./ Enjoy, then, and imagine what my life was like as an ancient Egyptian. (Leicester, New Walk Museum) 53

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 54

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

‘My body’ and ‘my beliefs’ are situated on one side of the discursive space, ‘your curiosity’ and ‘your enjoyment’ are located on the other. The nameless woman declares herself to be a mediator between the two worlds. When she addresses us, we understand at once that she will not be guiding us in the way that Dante’s Vergilius did; she will instead act as a carnival dance leader, conducting us between market stalls filled with Egyptian tourist souvenirs; she will try to arrange a masquerade that involves everyone in the fun of the game (‘if you were an ancient Egyptian’), leading us to an area where we play unreal life and unreal death using more or less original accessories.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Science and scientists: are they mediators only? Since some of the elements of these spectacles remain obscure to viewers, there is a need for someone who is able to mediate and decode their narratives for us. The most obvious mediators are scientists. ‘Extracting information from tombs’ is one of the central motifs in another set of narratives. Archaeologists excavate pieces of evidence from the earth; scholars then extract pieces of information from these objects, which go into narratives about inquiry and investigation. The story of a buried person gradually changes into another story, which conveys information about (say) beliefs, everyday life and craft. The burial place is deconstructed and its contents classified according to subject and information value. A dead person can also be deconstructed: every bone can be made to tell a different story. Scientific investigation is frequently contrasted with the misdeeds of thieves and robbers who looted burial places in search of rich funerary offerings and vandalised royal tombs. In this respect, the scientific representatives of our world appear to be experts in semiotic and moral judgements about past and present reality.7 Narratives about scientists are associated with strategies for translating funeral stories into the language of life. Egyptians loved life, we are often told; their beliefs and rites were created to suppress or exorcise the threat of death. There is a constant suggestion, moreover, that scientific perspective should be used to reformulate the meanings of other peoples’ cult objects. ‘Nondestructive’ methods of study are part of the self-presentation of science as an ethical approach to reality. Textual and visual information evokes an image of scholars as priests of science, who can remove the successive layers of mummies with an extraordinary skill and explain this process to laymen. The more information can be extracted the greater the value of the object, and the more skill scientists can show. The organisation of scientific knowledge can also be presented as a part of the story. Scientists give the floor to science in these narrative fragments. Science appears able to disclose the mysteries of the universe and report on reality in an objective way. Science, not the scientists, formulates statements 54 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 55

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

such as, ‘CAT scan shows that ..., X-rays testify that ...’. There is no place for interpretation in these statements, only for ‘pure facts’ and ‘evident phenomena’. This is the domain of pure objectivity: labels and information boards give details of scientific criteria, categories, research methods and technologies. The process of imposing categories on phenomena is presented as a discovery.8 Science tells a story about the world which the processes embody: mummies on display are examples of successive stages in the development of embalming methods. For instance: ‘Unwrapped by Dr Margaret Murray in 1908, this mummy is a good example of the poor standard of preservation achieved in the Middle Kingdom’ (1900 B.C.)/ Khnum Nakht mummy/ Manchester Museum. Every mummy on display can be used to exemplify two kinds of process: first, the natural process of drying bodies; second, the evolution of religious concepts, which were ‘produced’ by ancient Egyptians. The rules are the same for both natural and cultural facts:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The earliest Egyptians buried their dead in the hot desert sand, which dried out the body producing a ‘natural’ mummy. As tombs came into use the dry sand no longer came in contact with the body, so it would begin to decay. With the development of complicated religious beliefs, the Egyptians formed their concepts of life after death. They believed that when a person was born a double soul called the ka (‘vital spirit’) was also born and had identical wants and needs. ... To supply the needs of these spirits, it was essential that a person’s body and name be preserved, that a tomb be properly outfitted, and that the necessary mortuary rites be performed. (San Diego, The Museum of Man)

Scientific museum discourse favours reconstructions of general and longterm processes, such as the development of religion and technology. Reality is turned upside down: methods and procedures for conceptualising and categorising reality become more real than the objects themselves. Clear and structured information is the obvious goal of this performance and focus of attention. The result is that certain questions become irrelevant because of the concept of knowledge assumed by the discourse (although not necessarily by real scientists). Beneath the surface of stories about ancient cultures, another story is being told, which celebrates modern Man as Explorer and Discoverer. The audience is presented with a confident and unquestioning belief in the superiority of contemporary civilisation above all others. Death seems in this context to fall into a dialectic: somewhere in-between magic and myth – technology and rationality. This dialectic forms a significant part of the narratives. Placing Others’ beliefs in quotation marks contributes to spectacular global knowledge and also helps to supervise such concepts as ‘tradition’ and ‘nature’. Technology is an essential element in the modern profession of faith. The relationship between technology (an optimistic healer of civilisation) and death 55

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 56

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

(an existential event par excellence) is crucial for the rhetoric used in displaying human remains. Technical equipment may, for example, be presented as something that helps people to act in a better way. Instead of the destructive invasion of other worlds, computer programs enable us to enter the pyramids and study their treasures. The rhetoric involved merely concerns a selected means of communication. When these means are included in exhibitions, however, they participate in the self-description of culture. Science itself may even gain the flavour of a playful adventure. (‘Entering tombs’ is a favourite museum publicity strategy, used on posters and leaflets.) In our world, so the argument goes, we know how to manage the world and how to manage ourselves. We perceive ourselves as free of irrational (‘primitive’) fears and anxieties. The account given above is presented, of course, in rather stark white-black terms. It is not difficult to find examples of the inevitable grey area: the relics of saints, which still maintain their ambivalent identity; or the cult of historic heroes. There are also competing discourses that question the truth of the official museum discourse, as when members of another culture reclaim the bones of their ancestors. Here, science consents to compromise for the sake of a declared regard for other cultures. However, when buried people belong to past or remote cultures, the validity of ceremonies is cancelled out and the dead body may be incorporated into the museum’s message. The line is thus drawn between those (living and dead) who belong to our society, and those excluded from it. This corresponds with a division between people who do not experience irrational fear towards death and those who do. This Self/Other dichotomy is in a perpetual state of negotiation. There is, of course, no one common narrative for all museums. Nevertheless, one feature does remain constant: if death enters the discourse, it concerns Others; our existence is directed towards life. This is an effect of the rhetorical work of drawing the line between Ourselves and Others.9 These stories are told under certain circumstances. It does not mean that there is no hesitation, no doubts about touching the ‘sacred’ of Others. Such feelings and experiences are reported in personal communications by anthropologists, archaeologists and osteologists. However, these motifs disturb, weaken or even change the direction of the leading narrative and so they usually remain ‘personal’ – in the strict sense of the term – and are kept out of museum discourse.

Detective narratives Narratives about Egyptians and about scientists are generated by storytellers of our world. From the narrative point of view, it all starts when we find traces of the past. There is an active set of commonplaces about discoverers and 56

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 57

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

experts who decodify enigmatic meanings. This narrative strategy ‘seduces’ the visitor in the same way as those of detective story narratives:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The narrative machinery of detective fiction may be constantly backward-glancing as it infers causes from their effects and makes visible the crime and its perpetrator from the traces he or she has left behind, but it constantly moves the reader forward. The museum was another ‘backteller’, a narrative machinery, with similar properties. ... The museum conferred a public visibility on these objects of knowledge. (Bennett 1995: 178)

Retrospective prophecies are generated, which confirm that ‘many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen’. As Thomas Huxley put it, ‘the essence of the prophetic operation does not lie in its backward or forward relation to the course of time, but in the fact that it is the apprehension of that which lies out of the sphere of immediate knowledge; the seeing of that which to the natural senses of the seer is invisible’ (Huxley 1882: 132, cited by Bennett 1995: 177). The detective narrative is often used to present scientific procedures as if they were detective procedures. This is a general strategy for activating the logic of scientific examination. The detective figure can also appear in museum rhetoric in a more obvious way. This is the case when, for example, methods of criminal investigation are applied to the scientific study of museum objects, and when the mutual benefits of cooperation between scientists from both fields are reported.10 (I am not, of course, talking about the convergence of diagnostic methods and research, but about the rhetorical effect of the presentation itself.) Detective procedures lead in these cases toward a twofold reconstruction: the reconstruction of past events and processes (which visitors should perceive as important); and the reconstruction of individual biographies (which they should perceive as interesting). The reconstruction of individual biographies is the task of a creative Storyteller. He or she takes up the thread provided by detectives and produces a colourful texture. The rhetorical figure of the Detective is not only present in the narrative itself but can also be identified beyond the textual level. The detective figure represents, or exemplifies, the strategy of constructing a narrative in figurative form. The ideal visitor should be a hybrid creature – Homo sapiens mixed with Homo imaginans. Homo sapiens will be ready for new knowledge about other people’s lives; Homo imaginans will notice the dramatic expression on a mummy’s face. There is perpetual tension between motives appealing to emotions and those which are purely scientific. Yet, the appeal to emotion is in fact compatible with the requirements of scientific knowledge. This kind of tension is present both in textual and visual means of expression. A common set of assumptions underlies both scientific and impressive discursiveness: that we should protect and preserve certain worlds, which are distant in time or in space, and different from our own world; and 57

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 58

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

that one effective way to realise this preservation is as an exhibitionary structure.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Adventure narratives Mummies are perfect objects for creating interesting, intriguing and entertaining stories. There are two particularly effective motifs: ‘the journey to a distant land’ and ‘entering the pyramids’. These are occasionally used in advertisements, leaflets and posters, but they may also form the concept for an entire exhibit. Formulas such as ‘Step back in time to Ancient Egypt’, ‘Explore Ancient Egypt’, and ‘Enter the Pyramids’, introduce the adventure mode. (There are even roles for us in this scenario.) Sometimes, individual biographies of ancient Egyptians are interwoven with romantic narratives about discoverers who explored pyramids in the past. These explorers enter the story and start on their way to real and discursive appropriation of a distant land. Sometimes, the display evokes their image: a mummy’s head under a glass globe, or a bundle of feet under another glass globe with yellowish labels attached,11 respect neither the requirements for maintaining the integrity of an object nor the integrity of the information mediated by an object. Such displays seem absurd and provoke a sense of confusion – so that extra information, concerning past centuries when powder made from mummies was believed to have therapeutic properties, is required. When this happens, mummies refer not only to their culture of origin, but are coated with the residue of centuries dating from various points in time. Temporal distance as a factor contributing to the perpetual transformation of objects’ meanings becomes quite concrete. It is from this point that another story emerges, concerning the lives and works of past explorers, collectors, scholars, and their romantic passions. This is the world where nostalgia is born. The history of how the western image of Egypt was shaped can be included in these stories. Egypt – the land, the culture, and the history – are taken into protection and ‘adopted’ by the West. Narratives present as a discovery that which, from another point of view, could be seen as an appropriation. Signs of our world are implanted in the stories of Egyptian objects, or local European stories are linked with the history of Egypt. This happens, for example, in New Walk Museum in Leicester, where Egyptian history is bound up with local history. This link is mediated through Thomas Cook’s biography. Cook, who was born in Melbourne, in Derbyshire, moved to Leicester in 1841, where he developed his tourist enterprise. This makes good material for the narrative: The first Cook’s tour of Egypt In 1869, 32 ladies and gentlemen led by Thomas Cook himself, travelled by train to Italy then sailed across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, for the first Cook’s tour 58 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 59

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

to Egypt. Soon the firm obtained exclusive rights to run luxury cruises on the Nile – and the river was nicknamed: Cook’s Canal.

There are pictures showing early Cook’s tourists at the pyramids, the first Cook’s tourist steamer, and the poster from Cook’s Nile & Palestine Tour. Thomas Cook’s biography works not only to link the Egyptian world with our own; this narrative also converts ‘pieces of Egypt’ into tourist souvenirs.

Egyptian Bodies

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

What kind of bodies are under the wrappings? Having reviewed various narrative modes, let us return to the material and spectacular aspect of presenting mummies in museums. The wrapped mummy seems to be an obvious symbol of mystery. Unwrapping a mummy is a unique spectacle: it amounts to the revelation of a secret. Unwrapping mummies was a form of fashionable entertainment in the early nineteenth century, culminating in performances such as those conducted by Thomas Pettigrew. Although nowadays such spectacles are dismissed as nonscientific, unwrapping for research purposes retains its prestigious character, especially in the form of complex, interdisciplinary research. Many Egyptian exhibitions want to include the subject of scientific unwrapping, believing that it will make their museum’s message more complex and objective. They also include the history of the research itself: ‘Since the Middle Ages, mummies have been a source of interest to the Western World and in the sixteenth century, they become the subject of scientific description. When it became popular to collect antiquities in the early nineteenth century, the unwrapping of mummies provided a fashionable interest.’ This text, which is taken from an information board at Manchester Museum, introduces an account of studies undertaken by this museum. The Manchester exhibition provides a clear example of the spectacle of ‘revealing a secret’. Examining this spectacle, which is created by objects and words, is helpful in uncovering the rhetorical strategies used for musealisation of dead bodies. The fragment quoted above refers to the unwrapping of a mummy that took place mainly to satisfy curiosity. The account then moves on to more reasonable proceedings and presents (morally justified) scientific approaches. Finally, we reach the key event: ‘Dr Margaret Murray, the first curator of Egyptology at Manchester, unwrapped the mummy of the “Two Brothers” in 1908 before a large audience in a lecture theatre, at Manchester University. She led a team of medical and scientific experts, and her methods and descriptions were not superseded until the 1970 and then only as a result of greatly advanced technological achievements.’ 59 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 60

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

This text delineates some motifs that suggest ways of interpreting the exhibition to viewers including, ‘the explanative potential of science’ and ‘a scientist as a mediator of meanings’. Two photographs underneath the text hint at a very interesting interpretative suggestion. The first is of an invitation to the spectacle of unwrapping a mummy from Thebes in 1850. The second shows ‘Dr Margaret Murray and her team unwrapping one of the “Two Brothers” in 1908’. The latter reminds us of the well-known ‘anatomy lesson’ theme. This juxtaposition can be seen as a metaphor: the museum resembles a huge anatomy theatre where we can observe every detail of the human organism. In Manchester, however, it is more than a metaphor. The exhibition gives an account of the real event:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Since the early 1970s a research team of scientists and specialists in many fields has carried out a major investigation on the twenty-one human and thirty-four animal mummies in the Egyptology collection at Manchester Museum. All the mummies were investigated as thoroughly as possible by non-destructive methods of examination. One mummy – 1770 – was unwrapped, dissected and subjected to intensive examination.

We can follow this path in search of the topoi that govern museum narratives. We learn about the reasons for choosing the mummy 1770 for dissection: ‘Because of its unprepossessing appearance, it had never been on display. ... Mummy 1770 was selected because of its poor appearance and also because preliminary x-rays had revealed interesting internal features.’ The mummy was known by its accession number. It did not have a personality, but it did have a structure that could be discovered by scientists. The scientist’s eye could discern this structure, and build a new mummy personality upon it. The information board tells of the detailed studies that allowed scientists to reconstruct the appearance of the embalmed person. Some of the stylistic inconsistencies in the text are interesting. The passage on facial reconstruction, for instance, has a long, descriptive part presenting scientific analytical procedures. At the end, all the parts are brought together: the information that ‘the general architecture and size of the bones, lack of supra-orbital ridges, size of mastoid bone, size and shape of the teeth and palate, all helped to suggest that the sex was female, ... the state of eruption of the teeth indicated an age of some 13 years,’ is transformed into a bright, vivid portrait: ‘The evidence indicated that this was an early adolescent girl with a delicate nature, a slightly asymmetrical face and persistently open lips.’ This rhetoric reflects the ambivalence of the object, which is a thing-mummy and a person-mummy at the same time.12 The result of the reconstruction is the wax bust of a young girl: pink complexion, long, wavy hair, and costly dress. The ethic of science required that the margin of inaccuracy be marked: ‘Although it does not attempt to 60

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 61

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

provide an absolutely accurate representation, the reconstruction takes into account all the known medical evidence relating to the girl and shows the type of face which she would have had.’ In another place, the information reads: ‘Although it may not be accurate in every detail, this reconstruction represents the type of face that 1770 must have had.’ This narrative is created in the area between ‘the truth’ and ‘plausibility’, between may not be accurate and must have had.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

What kind of life do these bodies lead? In many cases, the museum narratives blur the life-death dichotomy and obscure the fact that the museum only possesses the remains. The border between life and death (in ontological terms) does not matter much in the description of scientific procedures. Narrative has the power to reify and to personalise the body alternately; it can also occasionally substitute a nonhuman body, before reinstating its human identity.13 When reified bodies are dissected, the former disease with all its symptoms is reconstructed, and the body regains sense perception. Throughout, the body also remains a sort of database on ancient times and this stops the humanisation process. However the narrative can always shift to concrete circumstances, to the sufferings and feelings of ‘a real person’, as in the case of mummy 1770 from the Manchester Museum: ‘Mummy 1770 also undoubtedly suffered a good deal of discomfort from this parasite. It is possible that the worm caused so much damage to the legs that they had to be amputated.’ A new personage is created: Mummy 1770 becomes a diagnosed Patient. It is the medical situation that now matters. (Interestingly, the two photographs showing the parasite/guinea worm are from modern patients.) Pathologisation of human remains is a frequent strategy: recall the pictures of human remains prepared for CATscan and x-ray examinations, showing mummies being studied by specialists seeking to discover some trace of former diseases. These mummies seem to be treated as if they were neither living, nor dead. (This ambivalence is present both in visual and textual representations.) These sensitive bodies require special treatment, preferably by noninvasive methods. A constant ambivalence of a mummy (mummy-thing and mummyperson) marks the rhetoric of this kind of display. If the pathologisation of dead bodies is an effective strategy for glorifying Science, it is also a handy method of giving individual features to the bodies. Description of the patient’s body, with all its irregularities or deviations, provides the most personal, intimate and irreducible characterisation. Faced with a trace of the individual fate of a late Person, the scientific consequences of this information are sidelined for a while. A puzzle has to be solved since a personal biography is being told. These ‘interesting stories’ are therefore integrated into a discourse based on 61 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 62

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

scientific research on dead bodies. They are aligned with romantic narratives about explorers and discoverers and with fabulous narratives about the mysteries of history.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

What kind of death do they die? At the entrance to the Manchester Museum there are glass cases with coffins and mummies of Two Brothers. The Brothers are very mysterious personages. The first puzzle is their racial difference – one was black and the other white (only the skull of Khnum Nakht has negroid features. The Storyteller speculates: the mother may have had two husbands; or one of the brothers may have been adopted). The white one was buried in the coffin on which a black face was painted (another speculation: ‘as a colour, black symbolised rebirth for the Egyptians and may have been used thus here, to attempt to ensure Nekht Ankh’s rebirth after death’). We are given hints of intriguing, complicated biographies, about family affairs, and about the Brothers’ diseases. Khnum Nakht had a deformity of the left foot, but did not suffer from arthritis. He had scoliosis in the thoracic region and an extremely rare developmental abnormality in his mouth (‘double germination: [fusion of the teeth] the two central teeth are abnormally large and the left one has two roots’). Nekht Ankg was in his sixties when he died; he was a eunuch. Enigmatic traces of individual lives, inserted into museum discourse, reformulate the message giving a special flavour to the scientific reconstruction of the past. Here museum discourse appropriates a past world with its former inhabitants, who are granted personalities. The fact that they do not exist as persons any more, and that there are only remains, which belong to the museum, is completely overshadowed. The aesthetic mode of presenting objects from Egypt (both artefacts and natural objects) gives the museum message a special flavour. This mode corresponds with fabulous narratives on ‘religious beliefs’, which are frequently introduced by the formula ‘Ancient Egyptians believed that ...’. The spectacle of death, and more specifically that of Egyptian death, is in effect being presented to the contemporary public. The real, material, factual dimension concerning the authenticity and materiality of death, is veiled by the indirect, aesthetic (and mediating) mode of representation. The metaphysical meaning of death, which concerns all human beings (both ancient Egyptian and ourselves), is dispersed. Two modes of dealing with the problem of death when including dead bodies into museum discourse have been identified up to this point. The first involves a strategy of pathologising human remains and medicalising their modern condition, through the work of scientists and curators. The second folklorises human reactions to death in other cultures and societies, distancing 62 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 63

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

and detaching their death-related behaviours from our world. How can these strategies be interpreted in a broader sociocultural perspective? It would be easy to conclude with the sociological cliché about ‘suppressing death in modern culture’. However this conclusion would, I believe, be false. The problem of death is not suppressed, but expressed in a specific way that is compatible with other components of sociocultural life. An exhibited mummy is attractive, even fascinating, in the same way as a skull, which is more attractive than any other bone. A skull marked by an individual biography (with some marks of trepanation, fights and deformations) attracts special attention from visitors and invites them to reflect on events presumed to have taken place in the life of its late owner. Curators know the power of attraction by ‘dead personalities’: for this reason a skull may be placed in a glasscase displaying pieces of jewellery. This has nothing to do with the aesthetic value of the ring, or with the technology of producing earrings (which may be described on a nearby label). The skull was simply found together with the jewellery in the same tomb. But it is so expressive ... On the other hand, as we have seen, dead bodies are often subjected to the clinical gaze (in the Foucauldian sense of the term), which identifies a disease and focusses on it. We are in fact provided with very detailed descriptions of the course of diseases, viruses and bacteria, even though such information is mostly irrelevant to knowledge about the culture of ancient Egypt. The ability to make a diagnosis and knowledge about possible processes in a patient’s body become a primary task. Is it not absurd to make a diagnosis of someone who has been dead for centuries? Actually, it is quite reasonable in terms of defining a specific meaning in a more general sociocultural perspective. Imposing medical categories on the researched material and – in effect – pathologising dead bodies can be interpreted as translating past narratives into the language of contemporary culture. In the contemporary world, we can observe the medicalisation of public and private worries. ‘Vice had been redefined as illness, immorality as pathology. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, sin and crime were blended – in public debate dominated by medical experts – into one, allembracing category of the disease’ (Bauman 1992: 147–8; see also Turner 1994). Zygmunt Bauman argues that the problem of death has been substituted by the problem of health, with the main task being to identify the cause of a disease. ‘All deaths have causes, each death has a cause, each particular death has its particular cause. ... We do not hear of people dying of mortality. They die only of individual causes, they die because there was an individual cause. No post-mortem examination is considered complete until the individual cause has been revealed’ (Bauman 1992: 138). This life strategy also dominates our way of dealing with mummies. We have to ‘do something’ to identify ‘the problem’, to plan how we will proceed and then follow this plan. The question about the cause of death therefore seems very 63

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 64

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

reasonable. This does not mean that death is excluded from the narrative; rather that there is a special mode for dealing with this subject. The Manchester exhibition demonstrates one effective way of employing this mode. The exhibit appeals both to intellectual capacities and to emotions. It respects both scientific (informative) and aesthetic principles of arrangement, but favours the first. It is perhaps useful to compare the Manchester case with another, in which these principles are combined in a different way. The exhibition ‘Gods of Ancient Egypt’ held at the Archaeological Museum in Cracow makes a good comparative case. There are some significant similarities between the Krakow and Manchester exhibits. Both treat research on the mummified body as an important subject. There are even significant similarities between the specimens researched: in both cases specialists studied a young girl with broken legs and a mysterious amulet in the pelvic area. The cause of her death was unknown and nothing had been discovered about her life. It is not the differing interpretations of the facts in each case, but rather the way ‘specimen’ identities are rhetorically constructed, that is essential for my argument.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

To convert mysterious bodies into ritual bodies The ‘Gods in Ancient Egypt’ at the Archaeological Museum in Cracow is a spectacular and impressive exhibit. Blue, a colour typical for tomb ceilings, was chosen for the first darkish room, with a star motif repeated on the vaults (in one place, we can discern an original stone fragment with this motif). The second room, a long corridor with three windows, is light green, which is Osiris’ colour; the last room is in ochre – a popular Egyptian dyestuff. Science has been assigned a very precise place: the scientific approach ‘frames’ the exhibition: an information board with a very detailed description of the research carried out by the museum is positioned at the entrance to the Egyptian gallery. The text is supplemented by photographic documentation, with a video film of the research shown nearby. The video begins with the unwrapping scene, followed by a report of the research process. Finally, we watch scientists rewrapping the mummy. The picture of the mummy mask closes the sequence, representing a significant attempt to reconcile the values held by the culture of origin of the researched body with those of our own culture. The process could also be interpreted as an attempt at developing a completely new ritual. (The idea behind Krakow Archaeological Museum’s studies of the Iset-Iri-Hetes mummy was that unwrapping should be complemented by rewrapping after the research.) But there are more ritual traces to be found in other aspects of the museum spectacle. Entering the first of the three Egyptian rooms, we can abandon the scientific approach and focus on a different way of perceiving the ancient culture. 64 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 65

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

The first thing that we see after passing through the door are mummy masks staring at us from a glass case opposite the entrance. The suggestion is that we are going to meet something or somebody. Glass cases filled with objects from various periods surround a pillar at the centre of this room. The specimens have been classified partly by function and partly according to material. Labels identify objects by name and provenance; few are thematised in any more detailed way. What kind of information should we be looking for? For in actual fact we do not look at, we look for; we do not observe but rather notice. Four intriguing sarcophagi (one incomplete) are located in the dark. We are somehow drawn towards their particular area. We have to bend down, which is when we see a deep space opening up under the sarcophagus. (This effect was obtained by putting a mirror under the sarcophagus and installing micro fibre lighting on top of the glass case.) The exhibition in the green corridor is more traditional with specimens classified according to subjects such as ‘Money in Egypt’, ‘Ostraca’, and ‘Ptolemaic-Roman Pottery’. The corridor is a transit area, not a place to wander or stroll in, unlike the other two rooms where we are free to choose our own paths. The third room returns to the mystery mode of display. Various objects (such as stelas, coptic fabric, bandages with inscriptions from the Book of the Death, masks, ornaments) are on display in the glass cases. Some of the glass cases are pyramid-shaped, which is exactly what the visitors were waiting for. There is a moment of triumphant recognition: ‘So, finally the pyramids!’ Although a ‘mummy mystery’ dominates the scene, this is also where the scientific approach resurfaces. Sarcophagi and mummies are accompanied by textual and visual material concerning the research. The texts concern research methods, technologies and results, while the illustrative material focusses on that most individual aspect of the human body – the face. We can see photographs of the skulls and sections obtained by various methods and many pictures of reconstructions of the appearance of these dead persons. In this way, we occasionally enter the area of scientific discourse in the course of our visit to this mysterious spectacular reality. However, this area of discourse is immanent and constitutive of, and not just supplementary to, the spectacle. The account of scientific procedures and their results, which suggest a complete and objective message, coexists with a different, more open-ended form of rhetoric. Such is the case with the half-open sarcophagus cover, through which we can discern the mummy’s partially exposed face. ‘This is the face’, reads the label, ‘of Aset-iri-Khet-es’. A mirror put under her sarcophagus enables us to admire the normally hidden iconography underneath. Looking at the display involves us physically, emotionally and intellectually. The arrangement encourages us to walk around the glass case, to bend down, to crouch, to look at, inside and under it – to look for knowledge that cannot be fully articulated. The message is open to various interpretations so that the 65

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 66

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

question about what information we have obtained from ‘Gods of Ancient Egypt’ seems beside the point. Cracow has produced a spectacular ritual supported but not obscured by a scientific approach. Krakow contrasts in this respect with Manchester, where the ritual is hidden by the scientific approach. Both exhibitions are places of cultural reflexivity, where individuals and societies can gain a specific knowledge about themselves, but in very different ways.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Why do we want to unwrap them? One of my initial research questions was how Egyptian artefacts are engaged in reinterpreting history in museum narratives. My questions when visiting exhibitions were therefore, ‘Why does it mean in this way?’ or ‘How are the meanings constructed?’ rather than ‘What does it mean?’ Reformulating my questions to make the issue more precise, I now ask: ‘What are the discursive effects of breaking down big narratives and rearranging the material?’ Detective stories, ghost stories and adventure stories can all be used to rewrite history. However, this is not the final aim: more general cultural patterns govern the rewriting procedures. The distance between past worlds and our own world is blurred in museum discourse, which simulates playing with different ‘histories’. We can play the discoverer, the archaeologist, the tourist and sometimes even the ancient Egyptians. However, this is not just a matter of play. Egyptian stories (which in my view are not about Egypt at all) indicate some essential ways of making sense of our world in relation to the past and to the future. The past is something that has to be explained; the process of explanation is figuratively paralleled by the process of examination, which often has a strong medical bias. (It is a kind of project for the future – the procedures are implicated in museum discourse.) Seen from this perspective, the museum provides avenues for intellectual and nonintellectual understandings of the human world. The discursive ‘struggle’ between the different narratives may be conceived of as a (creative) way of dealing with reality or, to put it another way, with the hermeneutics of reality. The outcome of the struggle may be a polyvalent statement about the world, as well as the human condition. Returning to the problem of presenting dead bodies in museum displays, one may ask whether Egyptian death is merely a spectacle. Are stories about particular funerary rites, beliefs and legends the only way of telling Egyptian death? Does a spectacle about life and death in ancient Egypt founded on the decisive detachment of two worlds – ours and the Egyptian one – introduce a qualitative difference between our death and theirs, which is the source of the narratives created? Rather than attempting final and decisive answers, I would like to point out the clue offered by Johannes Fabian’s study ‘How Others Die – Reflections 66 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 67

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

on the Anthropology of Death.’ Fabian begins with the question of why anthropologists have so little to say about death; and why, if something is told, it is done in such a devious way. ‘Death (in the singular) has ceased to be a problem of anthropological inquiry; there are only deaths and forms of death-related behavior’ (Fabian 1991: 174–75). Fabian sees as the main cause the disappearance of a universal level at which the problem of death might equally concern ourselves and others. The Geist of the Romantics, the natural laws of evolution or even the Universal History of diffusionists, once formed a universal frame of inquiry. ‘Once the anthropological concept of culture had lost its universal (albeit elitist) character, it was clear that the discipline simply no longer had a theoretical plane on which to face challenges such as the problem of death’ (Fabian 1991: 175). With the relativist shift toward the parochialisation and folklorisation of the concept of culture, studying the nature and meanings of death finished in various fields. The experience of death was confined to ‘self-contained acts performed for the sake of a selfcontaining social unit’: this concept worked for anthropology a way of escape from the ‘supreme dilemma of life and final death’ (Fabian 1991: 177; quoting from Malinowski’s (1948) Magic, Science and Religion.) The Self-Other dichotomy that emerges from Fabian’s study parallels that embodied in museum discourse. Exhibits that aim to reflect knowledge inevitably also reflect its dilemmas. This is neither the final conclusion nor will I finish with an evasive statement about modern humankind suppressing death. Having considered the predicament of anthropological writing about death, Fabian discusses the possibility of restoring the existential dimension and constructing a metalevel of interpretation, which would include the ethnographic Other as part of the communicative We. It would require, he argues, hermeneutics that comprehends itself as part of the process of reaching understanding. The museum experience may lead, in my view, toward this kind of hermeneutics: this occurs when narratives about Their rites and beliefs and about Our discoveries are suspended for a moment, and when the excitement of looking at a mummy (a real human body) is not stimulated only by the desire to expand our knowledge of ancient Egypt. The mummy is always attractive to visitors, who usually ask, ‘Is it real?’ A reconstruction loses much of its attraction for visitors; the public is more likely to pay attention and absorb the information prepared by curators if it is a real human body. But from the viewer’s point of view, looking at a mummy in a museum may be the definitive (even if momentary) experience or, to put it in another way, it may be a play in Gadamer’s (1993: 101–34) sense. Although Gadamer used this notion to define the existence of a work of art, his concept may be applied to nonartistic exhibits. Gadamer’s play is a meaningful totality that only exists when it is performed. The play’s meaning only emerges in the act of perceiving and interpreting the work of art. Looked at from this perspective the 67

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 68

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Anna Wieczorkiewicz

museum puts on a play which proceeds by bringing certain worlds into being. The performance requires a visitor to enter, along with his or her own world, to fulfil the sense of representation. Interpretation is the essential moment of the play, revealing but simultaneously forming the meaning. The fulfilment of meaning depends on how the dialogic relationship between a visitor and an object is established. On one side is the margin left to the ‘player’ for an individual search for the truth to which the exhibit is supposed to refer, and the search for the player’s individual and particular place in the world. On the other side is the continuity of meanings between the museum’s and the player’s worlds that should be maintained during the play. What does museum rhetoric do with mummies? It balances on the blurry line between banishing mummies from our world and appropriating them into it. ‘Something’ existential evoked by them is a little terrifying. Even if we would prefer this kind of meaning to be pushed off into the domain of Others, we are still conscious that in some way it is also our problem. The point here is the continuous pushing away (although only partly) of the questions, ‘What actually appeals to us? What kind of message is it?’ The borderline between Ourselves and Others is weakened, and the meanings of life and death that were associated with those two domains become somewhat confused. This is where mummies, skulls and skeletons become our fetishes in seeking for meaning. It is not so much a question of including these meanings in an exhibition, as that of employing the cultural mode for dealing with the death/life dichotomy to give it proper (that is, acceptable) form. This may be conceived of as another level in the ritual function of museums, which parallels the celebration of civilisation’s values. The narratives inform us that ‘we’ are civilised people, with science at our disposal, and specific life strategies that we use to solve our problems. But we also have nonintellectual needs, and we arrange some areas of discursive space to satisfy them. Museum narratives are employed in the cultural work of establishing ways of dealing with certain crucial dilemmas: one of these is the dilemma of death.

NOTES 1. I define ‘narrative’ as a coherent meaningful unity expressed by words, images, and the arrangement of space. It can be told as a sequence of events involving certain characters. The museum exhibition itself does not need to include all the elements of the narrative, however the visitor should be able to reconstruct it. I am interested in general preferences toward certain solutions in constructing narratives. Therefore, I did not limit my research to a single type of museum, nor to the museums of one country. (I hope that a random choice of museums may indicate a set of the most active and effective commonplaces in museum discourse about Egypt.) Moreover, this choice reflects the way in which museums are visited. A contemporary tourist moves

68 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 69

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

7.

8.

9.

10.

from the Van Gogh Museum to the Marihuana Museum, from the Museum of Holocaust to the Museum of Sex, and then goes to a wax figures gallery or to Disneyland. Since I deal with museum commonplaces, the examples are meant to show what is frequent and can be noticed in many museums. The quotations are chosen to exemplify the phenomena under consideration in a clear and obvious way. The provenance of quotations – including the time of my research – is specified at the end of the text. Some of my examples are probably no longer to be found in these places. It is a well-known problem that museum reality is ephemeral and transitory. However, it articulates (and reveals) some essential features of our culture. Mummies: human beings! Well...how creepy is that? Or do you have the feeling that something is wrong? After all these Egyptians mummies once were human beings just like us? They were mummified long ago, because ancient Egyptians wanted to control their fear of death. They believed that by becoming a mummy one could conquer death just like the god Osiris. (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden) Book of the Dead: Guidebook for the Hereafter. This is both a guidebook and a passport. It contains illustrations which will become reality, charms and passwords. Many spells deal with the crossing of canals in the hereafter. (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden) Boats and ferrymen Just like Egypt itself the hereafter has many canals which have to be crossed. That is why you have boat models in your tomb. Figurines show however that the goods need boats. If you do not have a boat, you have to go to the ferryman. But mind you: he is unwilling to transfer persons who do not know the password! (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden) Step back in time to/ Ancient Egypt/ Visit/ a land where it never rains,/ where there are no machines/ and money.../ Explore/ a civilisation which has lasted for 3,000 years/ Meet/ Some real ancient Egyptians/ Find out/ About their life and death/ Find out/ something about ourselves. Ancient Egyptians. (Leicester, New Walk Museum). Throughout history, burials of earlier peoples have been robbed for their rich funerary offerings, burial garments, and ornaments. Tombs in Egypt, Peru and other countries have been looted over the centuries, the bones and mummies often left as valueless. Many of these have been rescued and placed in museums where scientific study has given us a window on the past – a view of human life that no other archaeological study provides. (San Diego, Museum of Man) The example: Three main types of mummification have been found: 1) Natural mummification caused by dryness, heat, cold, or absence of air in the burial chamber or grave 2) Intentional natural mummification which took advantage of the natural processes listed above 3) Artificial mummification produced by a variety of techniques which included fire and smoke curing. (San Diego, Museum of Man). Sometimes, a museum discourse aims to question these dichotomies and aims towards blurring the borders. The example may be the exhibit in the museum of African and Oceanic Art in Paris (1999 – 2000) ‘La mort n’en saura rien’. Reliques d’Europe et d’Océanie. Here both Christian relics (mainly skulls) and ancestors’ skulls and trophies from Oceania were labelled relics. Here a twofold effort was made: first, to maintain the sacred, transgressional, existential meanings associated with skulls. Second, to relate our sacred values to the values of Others in an inclusive way. The result was intended to be a kind of ritual in which the link between Ourselves and Others is created and the sacred meanings are activated and experienced. The example from the Manchester Museum illustrates this very clearly. The fingerprints of one mummy from the museum collection were examined by experts from The Greater Manchester Force: The Greater Manchester Force obtained the fingerprints and toe-prints of Asru by devising a special procedure which would not harm the delicate skin tissue. With a special compound now

69 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet_Q3.3_6L 2/9/04 4:48 PM Page 70

Anna Wieczorkiewicz used in the dental profession, it was possible to take impressions of each of the fingers, thumbs and toes; black acrylic paint was applied to each of the moulds and then peeled away. Finally, the acrylic casts were inked and printed in the manner usually employed for living persons. Although not quite as perfect as those of a living person, Asru’s prints were nevertheless remarkable, and showed clearly defined rigid characteristics. This evidence bore out other results in establishing that she had died in her early forties. Examination of her toe-prints showed little evidence of wear, and it was apparent from her figerprints that she had not performed continuous manual work. This accorded with her presumed status as a member of the upper classes. This technique has subsequently been applied by police in some of their own forensic examinations. The role of the Detective is central in this narrative. 11. These are examples from the Museo Archeologico, Naples. 12. I draw on the concept developed by Louis-Vincent Thomas in his (1980) study. 13. See for instance the unit concerning experiments carried out by R. Garner in order: to ascertain the effectiveness and accuracy of the methods of mummification described by Herodotus. Because of their availability and easy handling, dead rats were used, and their internal organs were removed. The experiments on rats are reported in great detail. At the end, the narrative turns to a human body: Although the human body is so much larger than that of a rat, there is every indication that providing sufficient natron was used, its preservation would be complete within the seventy days allowed for pre-burial procedures. (Manchester Museum)

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES Bauman, Z. (1992) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity Press. Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum. London and New York: Routledge. Fabian, J. (1991) ‘How Others Die – Reflections on the Anthropology of Death’, in Time and the Work of Anthropology, Critical Essays 1971–1991. Chur: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 173–90. Gadamer, H.-G. (1993) Truth and Method. New York: Continuum. Second revised edition. Translation revised by Joel Weinshimer and Donald G. Marshall. (Original: Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer pholosophischen Hermeneutik. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1975) Huxley, T.H. (1882) ‘On the method of Zadig: retrospective prophecy as a function of science’, in Science and Culture and Other Essays. London: Macmillan & Co. Malinowski, B. (1948) Magic, Science and Religion: and Other Essays. Glencoe, ILL: The Free Trade Press. Preston, D.J. (1983) ‘Natural History’, in Hoffman, P. (ed.) American Museum Guides: Science. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, pp. 57–102. Thomas, L.-V. (1980) Le Cadavre: de la Biologie à l’Anthropologie. Brussels: Editions Complexe. Turner, S.B. (1994) Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London and New York: Routledge.

70 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 71

Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories

Quotes from museum exhibitions concern:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

San Diego, CA, The Museum of Man: September 1996 – March 1997. (Research was supported by the Kos´ciuszko Foundation) Leicester, The New Walk Museum: November and December 1998. (Research was under the TEMPUS program) Leiden, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden: January – March 1998. (Research supported by the Nuffic Organisation) Manchester, The Manchester Museum: November and December 1998. (The research was carried out under the TEMPUS program) Naples, Museo Archeologico: July and August 1999.

71 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

02_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:54 PM Page 72

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 73

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

PART II S ITE S PECIFICS : THE C ASE OF T ERVUREN

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 74

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 75

C HAPTER 3 C ONGO -V ISION Barbara Saunders




Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction Although this contribution concerns the general possibility of transposing old rituals of authoritarian paternalism into new rituals of catalytic agency, it is specifically concerned with how that transposition might be effected in the Africa Museum of Tervuren, Belgium. I shall first present some theoretical remarks as well as a framework for rethinking its visualising rituals. My aim is to try to reimagine the communities – of conscience, of destiny, of discourse – with which that museum is involved in ongoing practices and forms of collective social life. I shall then amplify these remarks with an example of how the performative ritual of viewing erotic somatisation has served to secure a powerbase of racist paternalism in the Africa Museum. Finally, I shall examine the reach of one challenge to that power, namely the exhibition ExitCongoMuseum, which sets out to question the ideological framework, moral content and capacities of that museum.1 Although the division between the enduring architectonics of the museum and a transient exhibition may suggest an analytic framework within which to conceptualise the Africa Museum, it is that framework which I take to be part of the problem. As my title ‘Congo-Vision’ implies, the ideological premise of the Africa Museum is its radical detemporalisation of vision through distancing devices, its display system of space-time coordinates, its creation of a subject of detached contemplation, and its programme of national, gung-ho chauvinism. This provides an inkling of its dehistoricised scientific epistemology as a set of core signs or codes of modernity, which serves too to open up the other side of the coin, namely the ‘spiritual’ realm 75 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 76

Barbara Saunders

of Art. All this serves to induce the public to enter a register of ‘hegemonic visuality’ vis-à-vis the imaginary of the Congo. The problem can be summarised as ‘the denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983). By that I mean the tendency throughout the histories of anthropology and museology to place the object of study in a time other than the present, and to view that object through a technical discourse in terms of external forms alone. It is these ideological premises that ExitCongoMuseum challenges.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Perduring Value Transposed by the photological apparatus into a new realm, an object’s purpose and value, like its outward size or shape, appears as an intrinsic perceptual property. This appearance is reinforced by conventional museum strategies – labels, catalogue descriptions, guidebooks, references in scholarly essays, security, and the cultivation of an attitude of detached and contemplative reverence. These become norms and expectations that are fused with and hover over the objects, and which generations of observers act to congeal. The museum’s conferring role remains however invisible, with the result that it unconsciously canonises the objects and their new ‘reality’ (see Wieczorkiewicz, Chapter 2 in this volume). A recent example is the new Chase Manhattan Gallery in the British Museum (Peers 2000). The organising principle of this display of Native American objects is the connoisseur’s image of ‘reality and truth’. It invites naturalistic, empirical apprehension to grasp how each item equivocates between the particularity of a ‘token’ and the universality of the ‘type’. A public trained to spot the cues will ‘see’ that intent spontaneously. It is a mode of apprehension that requires the senses to be disciplined to accord with a particular kind of world-picture whose paradigmatic form is found in representational images produced by a mechanical apparatus or instrument. Such images are those of an impersonal or physical subjectivity, divorced from the perspective of any one subject, and which therefore can claim a higher form of reality. Together with the unconscious acts of canonising, this reality helps ramify the museum’s layers of authority. To sustain its authority the museum requires the acquiescence and collusion of the public, staff, and scholars too, who shape and are shaped by that authority, and who together forge the identity of the objects with restricted sets of interpretations (see too, Wolbert, Chapter 8 in this volume). To fix these structures the first line of presentation is typological or aesthetic. Objects on display are fixed either by the time-space coordinates of scientific typologies or through the elevation of objects to the realm of Art. But setting, architecture, the organisation of interior spaces, the attitude of the staff, the nature and display of gifts, and the quality of restaurant facilities too act on the spectator to establish the mise en scène for ‘looking’. 76 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 77

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Congo-Vision

Ironically the quest by market-driven museums for larger publics and audiences is partly responsible for growing discontent with collection and exhibition practices (Hein 2000). Politically sensitised audiences and colonised peoples such as Native North Americans, who do not participate in the traditional museum-goers’ reverence, have felt abused by the manner of their depiction in paternalistic museums. In North America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, museums have shifted away from the model of exhibition controlled from within by the curator. Acknowledging that source communities have cultural ownership of collections, some museums have recognised ethical and intellectual obligations to care for and exhibit collections in a manner appropriate to the community involved (Peers 2000). Such strategies draw attention to the multiple responsibilities museums bear for their collections, and the reassemblage, and framing of those responsibilites. Their mission is no longer aesthetic connoisseurship or scientific taxonomy, nor is their means the systematised, instrumentalised and naturalised discourse of ‘vision’. Rather there is a sense of creating and providing something more deeply engaging, experiential, interactive and justifiable. In some museums curators and source communities have started to experiment with new frames, and frames of frames, to produce new kinds of intersubjectivities and reciprocities. Recognising that looking shares the same set of hermeneutical preconditions as reading, museums have begun to enable different kinds of reception of the visual text, discourse and performance.2 This presupposes that visual perception is the active capacity to ‘read’ or ‘read into’ appropriate structures or events and form judgments about which they ‘speak’. If the object is viewed as hermeneutical, temporally governed, contradictory or paradoxical, it may ‘speak’ not just in one, but in new and multiple ways. It might then be possible to envisage a cat’s cradle of intersubjectivities, in which objects stare back, as in some sense ‘alive’ and vision happens inbetween ‘subjects’. We might try too to imagine that vision is learned, acculturated, like a language and in some sense not ‘natural’. In this changing Zeitgeist, museums that perpetuate the ‘official line’ can no longer rely on the stability and complicity of a monocultural public. Rather they must be prepared to be contested not just on their intellectual and academic grounds but on their social and political ones too.

Bodies on Display: Erotic Somatisation In this section my concern is with the display of naked and seminaked sculptured bodies in the Africa Museum, Tervuren. Opened in 1910 by King Albert I, the Africa Museum was established as an antidote to the image of the exclusively ‘external’ and ‘practical’ pursuit of economic development of the Congo. It fitted a long tradition of speculation concerning the internal and external 77

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 78

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Saunders

in relation to human development – ultimately the material and spiritual aspects of the human condition. Modern entrepreneurial society was associated with the external, while ‘genuine culture’, which the Africa Museum aspired to embody, was an antidote to those ills. It was the pouvoir spirituel of modern Belgium, the role in which it continues today. In response to the present moment, that continuity is disguised by public rhetoric which has shifted from triumphant colonialism to celebratory multiculturalism. It is important to grasp that this kind of multiculturalism-from-above is nothing more than a proliferation of authoritarian paternalisms. Multiculturalismfrom-above multiplies and reverses the role of preserving past traditions. It may for example replace the documenting of history with documenting the future, as in celebratory science museums. However this proposal does not rework the epistemological status of analytical categories: either the evolutionary past mutates into technoscientific destiny, or the semiotics of Primitivity are reversed into Colourful Otherness. Proud panorama of colonial power, public storehouse of its legacy, monument to its tropes, the Africa Museum plays out the parabola of its own moral evolution. Its current theoretical foundations are given by Adorno et al. (1982) who suggest a psychoanalytic model of an unresolved Oedipus complex to explain why racism is the preserve of the urban poor, educationally challenged, and psychologically unstable, as well as our own recapitulationist selves. Moral evolution means ‘ripening’ to the mature values of the liberal middle class as displayed in sensitivity to the Arts and an orientation to Science. The Africa Museum has thus matured from its earlier triumphal colonialism, to its engagement with Art and Science. This of course disguises other realities and temporalities – of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterritorialisation, of an ethnocaust of millions, of the Euro-American support of the kleptocracies of Mobuto and his successors, and of the denial of the world war in Africa. An auto-icon, the Africa Museum now presents itself as a temple of Art and Centre of Scientific Research, offering a multicultural playground in the lifeworld of ‘Others’. But within this rapport de forces the organisation of spectatorial mastery, knowledge and power has not changed at all. Rather, now as then, the Africa Museum mobilises a technology of the all-surveying spectator in an illusion of artistic and scientific completeness. If its artistic productions render the Other by means of naked and seminaked bodies, then its Science calls on the iconographic traditions of the Natural History Museum, in which seriation, tabulation and Cartesian coordinates produce a discontinuous ‘objectivity’ that delivers naked, empirical truths to the spectator. In the visualising regimes of Aristotle, St Paul, and Freud, anatomical distinctions and their signifying surfaces were held to be preconscious, prephenomenal, preontological a priori axioms. The law of prohibition governed their viewing. Leviticus warned ‘The nakedness of thy father or … 78

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 79

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Congo-Vision

mother, thou shalt not uncover;’ and Actaeon was torn to pieces by his own hounds as punishment for coming accidentally on Diana bathing. As too do sex and excrement, nakedness in the western tradition concerns moral decorum.3 If the secular nude’s appearance was dependent on the development in fifteenth- century painting of the notion of a ‘picture’, under certain conditions of patronage and transportation, then artists were encouraged to develop subtle means to stimulate the spectator pleasurably. So the erotic possibilities of depicting nakedness were enhanced, and the spectator caught in loops of hetero and homoerotic ‘seeing’. Before that, the nude’s appearance was regulated by religious norms. The infant Christ is portentous incarnation; stripped for the Passion, he is exposed and humiliated. In contrast, the confident, open-air nakedness of Adam and Eve, thematised as classical personages and mingling Christian and Classical traditions, signifies the lost golden age of perfect happiness in the story of monogenesis. The transubstantiation of monogenesis into social Darwinism, coupled to the fabrication of Hellenomania (Bernal 1987) created the nineteenth-century Aryan racism and sexism that lie at the heart of the Africa Museum. Detemporalised and universalised norms of viewing are themselves the focus of depiction in such works as Francis Bacon’s ‘meat’, Cindy Sherman’s ‘selves’, the ‘inside-out’ of Lucien Freud, and the ironical play on voyeurism in Tate Modern’s dyonisian ‘Brontosaurus’. Similarly in underground video depictions of churning and glistening genitals there is an ironic bid for the title of ‘Last Romantic Landscape of the Body’. In terms too of the feminist struggle especially, the question is raised, whether there is any possibility of presenting an image of a naked woman, as distinct from a man, that can escape sexist and politically repressive modes of depiction.4 To explore the conflict between well-meaning modernist intention and racist and sexist performance in the Africa Museum, I shall concentrate on the display of four sculptural figures by Herbert Ward (1863–1919), four sculptural figures by Arsène Matton (1873–1953), and one tableau vivant by Charles Samuel (1862–1939). I shall put the site of spectatorial response and authority in question, and make Merleau-Ponty’s point: we are no passive observers of these figures; rather in the economy of ‘seeing’, relays are set up which coerce and authorise the spectator to ‘see’ in particular ways.5 These are relations which materially penetrate our bodies without depending on any mediation of ‘representations’ or interiorisations of consciousness, but rather locate the spectator in the role of ‘desirer’. The entrance-cupola at the Africa Museum is redolent of a baroque church. Beneath the dome where transepts and nave would intercept, a crown motif is set in the floor. At this point the visitor is surrounded by allegorical figures placed high on curved marble walls and within the window recesses. As allegories they uncover ‘nature’ according to a unilinear evolution of social and 79

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 80

Barbara Saunders

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.1 Scheme of the placement of sculptures in the Rotunda, Africa Museum (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

moral institutions, dictated by suprahistorical principles, and determined by natural generation (Deleuze 1993; Fabian 1983; Saunders 2001). The point of these figures is to emphasise that Belgium’s special destiny has been to carry that principle forward in the Congo, and their iconography signifies both the ménage à trois of Church, State and Crown as well as the monogenesis of that principle. The four main figures on the curved walls declare the relation of Belgium to Africa. This relation is represented by i. Belgium donating Civilization to the Congo (‘België schenkt de beschaving aan Congo’) Figure 3.2; ii. Belgium lends its support to the Congo (‘België schenkt zijn steun aan Congo’) Figure 3.3; iii. Slavery (‘De Slavernij’) Figure 3.4; and iv. Belgium dispenses Prosperity to the Congo (‘België schenkt de welstand aan Congo’) Figure 3.5. They were commissioned from Matton by the directors of the Africa Museum to illustrate the moral mission of Belgium’s conquest of the Congo. Matton was granted a study trip to the colony, and during his trip in 1911, he made both sketches and body casts of the local population (Morris 2001). Judging by a similar project inaugurated in 1907, at the newly established Department 80

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 81

Congo-Vision

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.2 ‘Belgium grants civilization to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

Figure 3.3 ‘Belgium grants her support to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 81

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 82

Barbara Saunders

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.4 ‘Slavery’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

Figure 3.5 ‘Belgium grants prosperity and well-being to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 82 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:55 PM Page 83

Congo-Vision

of Anthropology of the South African Natural History Museum in Cape Town (Van Kets 2001), taking life casts of local people was common practice at that time. Although Matton claimed his intent was to create allegory not natural history, his methods and techniques amounted to the same thing. Art and Science were engaged in the project of displaying how far removed the Other was from the present, civilised state of humanity. Matton therefore organised his figures by two temporalities: the break between the exteriority of Savagery there, and civil society here; and the break between natural Primitivity there, and Civilisation here. The Other is the object of real exteriority, made intelligible through an apparatus of observation, collection, classification and description; Civilisation in contrast, is depicted by Art. The Other-as-naturalhistory, and ourselves-as-Civilisation serve to maintain what Morris (2001) calls ‘the shit and piss of conquest at a sanitary distance’ (Benjamin’s feces et urinam of class exploitation). She describes how Matton’s ‘België schenkt zijn steun aan Congo’ achieves this. It:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

… depicts a sensual female figure that is, oddly, a personification of male military might. The imagery is of a dominant female warrior/goddess figure with a banner clutched in her hand and, at her side, a kneeling African ‘subject’ gazing upwards, transfixed, toward her face. An African child sits at her feet. In this attempt to simultaneously present and deny the theme of conquest, Matton has made what must surely be his most manic work. Eclectic sculptural genres and classical mythologies are stirred into a breathtaking mix of religious adoration, eroticism and imperialist propaganda. (Morris 2001: 17) The male figure of the African reaches up to her in what could be described as either religious awe or sexual longing. The image of a sensual, naked African man on his knees in front of an almost naked European woman/warrior/goddess, his arm crossing her groin and his hand resting on her thigh, must be the highpoint of mad imperial imagery. (ibid: 18)

The effect, as she says, is to rewrite the historically specific conquest of the Congo as a mythic victory – an effect intensified by another set of figures, with which they interact. These are plaster casts painted black, derived from original bronzes by Herbert Ward (1863–1919), now in the Smithsonian Institution, though withdrawn from display (Arnoldi 1998). These plaster figures represent i. an Artist (‘De Tekenaar’) Figure 3.6; ii. the Chief of the Tribe (‘Het Stamhoofd’) Figure 3.7; iii. the Woodcutter or Idolmaker (‘De Houtsnijder’) Figure 3.8; and iv. Making Fire (‘De Vuurmaker’) Figure 3.9. Like Matton, Ward had spent time in the Congo. He regarded himself primarily as an academic artist, a judgement reinforced by awards from the Paris Salon. For him Art was a symbol of ideal reality, a poem of Truth, and Truth was spiritual harmony. Hence he claimed not to want ‘an absolute realistic thing like wax works in an anatomical museum’, but rather that his 83

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 84

Barbara Saunders

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.6 ‘The Artist’, H. Ward, 1912 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

Figure 3.7 ‘Chief of the Tribe’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 84 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 85

Congo-Vision

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.8 ‘The Idolmaker’, H. Ward, 1906 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

Figure 3.9 ‘Making Fire’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 85 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 86

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Saunders

renditions of Africa should capture ‘the spirit … in its broad sense’ (Arnoldi 1998). Insisting his figures were Art, not Science, like Matton’s figures, their hyperrealism nonetheless relies on contemporary scientific accounts of ‘arrested development’ and popular understandings of ‘ethnographic accuracy’. The realism is both to detemporalise and universalise, both historical and particular, an ambiguity used to persuade the spectator both of their eternal truth and historical verisimilitude. While the elegantly disposed ecclesiastical allegories are larger than life and embody the spiritual and universal, the awkward black figures beneath are less than life and embody the material and particular. As the spectator looks down onto the black plaster casts, and up at the allegories, the gaze performs – enacts – the relation between them, folding the spectator into complicity. As Deleuze (1993: 124) – echoing Aristotle – says, the derivative forces are allotted to the lower area and primal force to the upper reaches, forces which the spectator cannot help but confirm. In gazing upward, the contemplative spectator gives unity to this scheme by grasping that the projection emanates, as point of view, from the summit of the dome: the evolution of humanity as divinely ordained. The very particularity of the black bodies has an animal-like grandeur, being well-proportioned, sinuous and healthy. Yet something’s lacking; each figure is awkwardly displayed, as if devoid of self-consciousness or control. The ‘Chief of the Tribe’ poses one foot gauchely over the other; redolent of a lunatic, he stares blankly into space. There’s no framework to accord him psychic life. Similarly the lower limbs of the ‘Woodcutter’ dangle artlessly over a rock, while ‘The Firemaker’s’ action is less than dignified. His ‘simplicity’ is devoid of ‘natural grace’ associated say, with humble but virtuous peasants. The ‘Artist’ too is posed with awkward ‘spontaneity’. Echoing the classical theme of the birth of painting, compared to his predecessors, he’s childlike, confirming the orthogenetic-phylogenetic theory of development. Noteworthily his ‘drawing’ is not the mimesis of shadow, but free-association doodling, done with one finger in the dirt. Yet unlike the labouring classes at home, with whom they were compared, Ward’s specimens held the promise of redemption. It is almost an Hegelian theme: it is as if, if only they could see themselves, they would ‘see’ they were mere physicality and only just potential, incarnate soul. Of Matton’s four golden allegories one is called ‘the Slaver’. This depiction of the archetypal Arab Slaver exemplifies the rhetoric of the colonial enterprise. Through the latter part of the nineteenth century when the Congo served as Leopold II’s back yard, he’d galvanised the political and business worlds on the pretext of banishing Arab slavery. For entrepreneurs, convinced of their humanitarian mission, anti-slavery legitimated economic and political endeavour. To eradicate this evil was not just practical, economic good sense, but moral imperative and divine injunction too. The figure of the Slaver 86

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 87

Congo-Vision

captures this. He savagely grasps a beautiful naked black girl, violently wrenching her upwards and backwards away from her slain infant’s side. This allegorical figure, replaying images of Pharisees, Infidels, and other villains of orientalist discourse, interlocks the black female body with the spectator’s upward gaze which is itself the reinscription of sexual exchange at the heart of the colonial endeavour (see McClintock 1995; Young 1995). Sublated to the allegory of humanitarian and compassionate mission, this image, playing on secular frameworks of erotic nudes, feeds a lascivious imagination eager for more. It’s a violent image creating a deeply divided gaze between erotic enjoyment on the one hand and moral outrage on the other. As Morris (2001: 17) appropriately says:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The benevolence implicit in the titles that Matton gave to his four sculptures is in stark contrast to the more pragmatic intentions of Leopold II and later the Belgian colonial authority to ‘harvest’ the Congo for all it was worth. In constrast to the suggestions implicit in the titles that Belgium’s aim was philanthropic, that all efforts were aimed to benefit the Congolese, it was clear, to the Congolese certainly and to a number of Europeans at the time, that the direction of the benefits was clearly one directional, from South to North. That these sculptures and their titles still stand in pride of place in the Rotunda, unquestioned and unchallenged, seems to me to demand a response.

What needs to be emphasised is that the continued display of these sculptures is not an oversight but part of a deliberate orchestrated whole. The images are felt appropriate to the self-image of the museum and to the self-image behind that. Whether it is possible to critically examine that self-image and perhaps transpose the Africa Museum into a ‘museum of conscience and destiny’ as, for example, the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa is, is a moot point. If so, the Matton and Ward figures in the Rotunda might well be given pride of place in such a metamuseum. They might be joined by the disturbing tableau vivant by Charles Samuel, located outside the cafeteria (appropriately named ‘Simba’). This tableau, in plaster and real artefact, commissioned for the Brussels-Tervuren Exposition of 1897, depicts an event in the tale of the idealised Noble Savage, Vuakusu-batetela.6 He courageously defends the honour of a delectable naked girl, brutally thrust to the ground by the evil Arab Slaver. What stares any spectator in the eye is the blatant display of the sexually signifying surfaces of her body. Other than to whet the appetite, why might she be so provocatively displayed? Like Matton’s ‘De Slavernij’ the intention is to create the split vision of sexual titillation and moral outrage (as well as to establish a hierarchy of ethnic and moral types, thereby providing an alibi for Belgium). Through this ‘innocent’ display of nipples and crotch, this figure lends credibility to, inviting more of, Belgium’s intervention Figure 3.10.

87 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 88

Barbara Saunders

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 3.10 ‘Vuakusu-batetela protects a woman from an Arab’, Charles Samuel, 1897 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)

Where are the gender-sensitive curators of the Africa Museum who could explain how the seeing of embodied desires plays no insignificant role in directing the emphasis and focus of sexual interest, as these are ramified by racial stereotype and colonial ideology? Where are the questions about how the play between the ‘objective’ and ‘reactive’ attitudes transforms or confirms our self-experience in looking at these bodies? Where is the explanation of how that viewing is not built on any drama evoked by sexual response, but upon the gratifications of scientifically ramified scopophilia? (McKenna 1999). And if anything exemplifies the colonial ‘thrust’ it is this split, scopophiliac gaze of the lascivious moralist. For at the heart of the colonial experience, as many have pointed out, lies the political economy of sex (Young 1995). Compulsory heterosexuality situates anatomy as a critical site in any theory of production (however problematic the notion of ‘production’ might be) and necessitates revising estimates of the position of ‘men’ and ‘women’ within it. The reconstitution of the colonial ‘subject’ can then simultaneously be grasped as the constitution of the site of reproduction. So not only do detemporalised naked bodies serve to vindicate the endeavour at home, and encourage and incite new adventures abroad, but they also serve as an allegory of the violent reproductive imaginary that lies at the heart of colonialism. 88

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 89

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Congo-Vision

Naked black bodies – male or female – materialise the imaginary of Otherness as limpid specimens, erotic nymphs, or fabulous topographies. Located in an ideology in which bodylessness is the precondition of rationality, this ‘natural’ gendering is also the concretisation of race. The carefully moulded and enhanced physiognomies testify to this. Clearly reason is beyond these positioned, posed, exposed, reexposed black bodies. They are bodily specimens, reproduction machines, or totalising metaphorical vehicles – never incarnate soul. However split the viewer’s gaze may be, it is deceptively organised as a one-sided relation, which is wholly instrumental to the museum’s cause, and the wider cause behind that. While ethnographic museums can no longer afford to be colonial museums, and are responsive to wider trends, the Africa Museum is an exception. Even innovative display strategies cannot divest it of its colonial frame. This charges the site, its public space, its contents, its aesthetics and the bodies within it with meanings far beyond their original ideological intent. They concretise particularities, reiterating deep normativities of racial and gender imperatives, determining the ‘beholder’s share’. The continued attempt to locate a monolithic and passive spectator who resonates appropriately to artistic or scientific cues presented as if universal, is not only a failure of ethical imagination, but a denial too of the active power of the ‘look of the thing’ (what might be called depropriation7 or unmastery of the scopophiliac gaze). In the dialectical interplay of reciprocities between appropriation and depropriation, what Jameson (1992) has called ‘the essential pornography of the visual’, is played out by this infolding of the manipulative registers of eroticism and racial somatocentricity. If we delude ourselves that we can gaze innocently at these figures, as knowing subjects, dispassionately contemplating artistic objects, placing ourselves beyond their force, in one-sided spectatorship, we cannot help but collude in their programme of negative magic and insidious aura management. For we do not simply ‘see’ these bodies; rather they show themselves to us, in the ways that locate us in the play of spectatoriality organised by the authoritarian patriarchy of the museum.

Reimagining Communities I have tried to show how the separation of objects of vision and knowing spectators has been opened out and manipulated for anterior, ideological purposes, through the denial of coevalness and the erotic somatisation of race – as two sides of the same coin. In contrast to the previous emphasis on the ‘bodies on display’, in this section I shall, as briefly as may be, discuss ExitCongoMuseum8 – an exhibition which traces the peripatetic social lives of objects on their journeys from the Congo to the Africa Museum. By renarrativising 89

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 90

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Saunders

these stories, the curator of the first part of the exhibition, Boris Wastiau, attempts to displace past authoritarian paternalisms by reassigning value from the objects to the larger ideological projects of the collectors, by challenging connoisseurial and typological norms of display, and by restoring complex, vernacular and intersubjective temporalities. The effect is to engage the public with disturbing questions about the nature of the relationship between Belgium and the Congo, to question the aesthetic and scientific framework into which the objects have been transposed, and to show how the detemporalisation of that framework is no longer self-sustaining. The curator of the second part of the exhibition of contemporary African and African-American art, Toma Muteba Luntumbue, presents artworks authored by renowned contemporary artists, which stand in contrast to the anonymous ‘masterpieces of tribal art’ in the rest of the museum. This part of the exhibition is a meditation on the tensions at the core of ‘African Art’. In the first part of ExitCongoMuseum, the recontextualisation of ‘masterpieces’ upsets the old visualising frame (see Wastiau, Chapter 4 in this volume). Instead of an isolated mask or figure whose uniqueness is stressed by exquisite lighting, objects are ‘wrongly’ lit and ‘masterpieces’ appear as randomly thrown together. Instead of connoisseurial cues, the sources, acts and purposes of collection, and the journeys of the objects to the Africa Museum, are merged in an effort to restore their specificities and temporalities. The stories emphasise that the notion of ‘tribal art’ occludes any proper account of what these objects once were. The contemporary artworks in contrast are forthright. They confront the viewer with statements about the tyranny of place, the tragedy of African politics, the endemic violence that engulfs whole communities, and the haunting detritus of modernity gone wrong. By reinserting the authors of the modern works into public space and by emphasising their political contexts, histories and intersubjectivities, visitors are provoked to compare the anonymous ‘tribal’ artefacts with the complex intertwined temporalities of Belgium and the Congo, the new range of moral questions being raised, what future role the museum might play, how art, politics and culture intertwine, and what purpose has been served in negating the human presence behind the objects. Another mood of ExitCongoMuseum is the establishment of new rituals of catalytic agency (Hein 2000). The traditional distance the Africa Museum established between itself and the source of its livelihood, is in question. Where authority is for the most part vested in the hands of the Africa Museum’s ‘experts’, in ExitCongoMuseum Toma Muteba Luntumbue and the African artists insert their own priorities, values, and temporalities in public space. Not mincing their words about harsh realities, double standards, colonial aesthetics, they point to the ‘“lies” of exclusion and rhetoric’ (Clifford 1986) that have characterised the Africa Museum’s presentation of the-Congowithout-people. They show the erasure of the radical authenticity of life and 90

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 91

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Congo-Vision

contrast it to the truncated aesthetic monsters on display. To confront a public with these counternarratives is one kind of ritual of catalytic agency. They evince moral revulsion, provoke a reevaluation of the standards by which reality and museums may be judged, and set up a metacultural discourse about the ethics of display. One of many narratives found in this exhibition concerns the nature of historiography. It shows how the past like the present, divides and multiplies. Historiography is a present site of struggle and as Mudimbe (1988: 195) says, it is a legend, ‘an invention of the present’. The Africa Museum took anonymous objects and kept African people out of sight and out of history, framing Hegel’s assertion that ‘Africa has no history’. Another narrative is a disquisition on ‘Congo-Vision’ itself. This is the vision that colonises and regulates meaning. It interrogates, maimes and murders. It colludes with and incorporates other oppressive and exploitative visions, and yet it claims to purvey the untainted ‘truth’. Again another narrative concerns the museal framework itself. While the authoritarian paternalism of the Africa Museum is articulated by Art and Science, ExitCongoMuseum seeks a self-critical relationship to the politics of representation and the representation of politics, sometimes by striking juxtapositions, sometimes by exploding canons of decorum, sometimes by deconstructing ‘aura management’, sometimes with historical irony. The attempt is avowedly revisionary. It rewrites, as well as fills gaps in the already written. It challenges received notions of value and asks how appropriate notions of art and aesthetic value are to contemporary African artists. The issue involves debates about craft, available symbolic and material resources, educational opportunities, access to facilities and equipment, and the state of community-based visual traditions. These are issues raised by critical interventions by the excluded and marginalised majority, the effect of which is to produce disturbing, unsettling effects for the Africa Museum. If the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, then ExitCongoMuseum anticipates it. The Africa Museum cast every identity into a pre-fixed, static ethnotribal category. The impulse to collect colluded with the maiming and crippling of its authors, fixating them in a timeless past, denying them action and change, producing a sanitised, aestheticised and scientificised economy of Congovision. ExitCongoMuseum questions that economy in discomforting ways. It sets up innovative comparisons between military and ethnographic campaigns, between traders and missionaries, between entrepreneurial activity and culture, and between aesthetics and pornography. In reassigning value ExitCongoMuseum has taken the power of museums to signify and affirm value and has started to reassign it through the museum’s own resources. It sets out to test the moral capacities of the museum itself, taking responsibility, and beginning a process of self-evaluation. One register of ExitCongoMuseum is remorse, however in that it is alone at the Africa Museum. 91

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 92

Barbara Saunders

While the theme of African Art in transit is not new, the mood that concerns itself with the specific and concrete cooptations, displacements and dispersements of the Africa Museum, is. The ethical and historical myopia and the dishonest rhetoric have never been based on what actually goes on in the Congo. Rather they have been based on what might now be regarded as the perverse imagination that created the Congo in the first place.

NOTES

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

1. For other examples and discussion see Hein (2000: 4). I am also extremely grateful to the excellent thesis of Morris (2001). 2. ‘Reading a text is a paradigm case of a hermeneutical activity. Reading is, or aims at the direct, self-evident, reception of the meaning of a text. Perceiving, likewise, is or aims at the direct, selfevident, reception of the meaning of a ‘text’ … Both reading and perceiving share the same set of hermeneutical pre-conditions, subjective and objective’ (Heelan 1983: 37, 61–75). See too Illich (2001). 3. ‘In the month of May 1961 I produced and tinned ninety tins of artist’s shit … naturally preserved (made in Italy)’ Piero Manzoni, quoted in Blazwick and Wilson (eds) (2000: 109). 4. In response to the question of whether it is possible to present an image of a naked woman that can escape sexist and politically repressive modes of depiction, Morris (personal communication) says: I am inclined to think there is not. A few years ago I painted a series of female body-builders in response to this problem and as an exploration of the possibility of an ‘anti-pornography’. Since most paintings of naked or semi-naked or even fully-clothed women over the last four hundred years have been for the visual titillation of male viewers, I reversed the odds and painted women that the majority of men would find unattractive. The female body-builders offer a ‘come-on’ with their blond hair, lipsticked lips set into fixed smiles and tanned, oil bodies, but they negate that ‘come-on’ with their aggressive postures. It is only within a certain sub-culture that the bodybuilders are considered beautiful. The irony … is that the judges in the competitions in which these ‘athletes’ take part are principally men. This influences the manner in which the women develop their bodies.

5. Aristotle, Whitehead, James, and Dewey have also proposed continuity and ‘reciprocal perception’ with a vibrant responsive world. 6. Full title: ‘Vuakusu-batetela protects a woman from an Arab’. 7. Whitehead (1961: 176) speaks of this as ‘the concern that is provoked in a recipient’ (where the recipient is not passive). 8. On display from November 2000 to June 2001.

REFERENCES Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunszik, E., Levinson, D.J. and Nevitt, S.R. (eds)(1982) The Authoritarian Personality. Abridged edition. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company. 92

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 93

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Congo-Vision

Arnoldi, M.J. (1998) ‘Where Art and Ethnography Met: the Ward African Collection at the Smithsonian’, in Schildkrout, E. and Keim, C. (eds), The Scramble for Art in Central Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baxandall, M. (1991) ‘Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display of Culturally Purposeful Objects’, in Lavine, S. and Karp, I. (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 33–41. Bernal, M. (1987) Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1, The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. London: Free Association Books. Blazwick, I. and Wilson, S. (eds) (2000) Tate Modern, The Handbook. London: Tate Publishing. Clifford, J. (1986) ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds), Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, pp. 1–26. Deleuze, G. (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Transl. Tom Conley. Minneapolis MI: University of Minnesota Press. Doane, M.A. (1988) ‘Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body’, in Michelson, A., Krauss, R., Crimp, D. and Copjec, J., (eds), October: The First Decade, 1976–1986. Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Heelan, P. (1983), ‘Perception as a Hermeneutical Act’, Review of Metaphysics, 37, pp. 61–75. Hein, H.S. (2000) The Museum in Transition: a Philosophical Perspective. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Illich, I. (2001) ‘Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show’, transl. B. Duden. Previously published 1995, ‘Die Askese des Blicks im Zeitaler der Show – INTERFACE’, in, Klaus Peter Dencker (Hg.), Weltbilder, Bildwelten. Computergestützte Visionen. Hamburg: Verlag Hans Bredow Institut, pp. 206–222. Jameson, F. (1992) Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge. Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Locke, J. (1964/1689) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A.D. Woozley. New York: Meridien. McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. McKenna, J. (1999) Sexual Desire and the Aesthetic Experience: Exteriority and Meaning Within the Intentional Objects of Desire and Aesthetic Appreciation. Unpub. ms., Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Morris, W. (2001) ‘Both Temple and Tomb: Difference, Desire, and Death in the Sculptures of the Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren,’ (University of South Africa). Proving Difference, Creating Distance: Visual Authorisations of a Colonial Project. Unpubl. Masters thesis, University of South Africa. Mudimbe, V.I. (1988) The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press. Peers, L. (2000) ‘Native Americans in Museums: a Review of the Chase Manhattan Gallery of North America’, Anthropology Today, 16(6), pp. 8–13.

93 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

03_Bouquet 23/8/04 2:56 PM Page 94

Barbara Saunders

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Saunders, B. (1999) ‘The Photological Apparatus and the Desiring Machine’, Focaal, 34, (special issue Academic Anthropology and the Museum, guest editor M. Bouquet), pp. 23–39. Also in Bouquet, M. (ed.), 2001, Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 18–35. –––––– (2001) ‘Lafitau’s Denial of Coevalness’, unpubl. paper at the 22nd American Indian Workshop, Bordeaux, France, April. Van Kets, R. (2001) ‘From Negative to Positive Moods in South African Museums’, unpubl. paper at the Fictions and Art History Conference at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, March. Whitehead, A.N. (1961) The Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press. Young, R.J.C. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London: Routledge.

94 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 95

C HAPTER 4 T HE S COURGE OF C HIEF K ANSABALA : THE R ITUAL L IFE OF T WO C ONGOLESE M ASTERPIECES AT THE R OYAL M USEUM FOR C ENTRAL A FRICA (1884–2001) Boris Wastiau

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.


Once the object stops being defined by its function, its meaning is entirely up to the subject Baudrillard, ‘The System of Collecting’

Metamorphosis From October 2000 through June 2001, 125 iconic ‘Congolese art masterpieces’ that have spent most of their existence in Belgian showcases were part of the exhibition ExItCongoMuseum. A Century of Art with/without Papers held at the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Such figures, along with so many ritual artefacts of African origin, have been involved in the ritual practices of Belgian collecting and museology ever since western hands appropriated them. This chapter sketches the ritualised display of two of these pieces over the past 117 years and interprets aspects of the resulting performativity and ‘magic’. Of particular interest is how the displays in which the two artefacts were included participated in the continuous creation of a changing image of Congo among the Belgian public. .

95 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 96

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Boris Wastiau

When I became involved in museum ethnography in the mid-1990s, I was struck by the fact that most museum objects were poorly documented in terms of their original and intended use and meaning: only a minority of objects were collected by professional ethnographers. Furthermore, it had rarely been deemed relevant to document their historical and ethnographic uses from the moment they entered the collections and the exhibition displays to the present. Museology, the art (or science, according to some) of presenting objects often remained unquestioned from within museums, objects being displayed as if they ‘represented’ some external objective ‘reality’. In Tervuren, this ‘reality’ appeared to lie somewhere in Africa, although the displays were blatantly at odds with my own practical experience of that continent. Specifically, the older displays about Congo, inherited from previous generations of curators, corresponded to what Barbara Saunders has called a hegemonic ‘Congo-Vision’: ‘…images delivered by the observing eye to the spectator are true renditions of a world as it is in itself ’ (Saunders, Chapter 3 in this volume). However, other studies have shown how some devices, such as the use of western-made anthropomorphic sculptures, aimed at ‘proving distance’ and ‘creating difference’ between the colonisers and the colonised (Morris 2001). Anthropologists have perhaps been more reluctant to engage in self-examination and reassessment of taken-for-granted practices in ethnographic museums than has been the case in other sorts of museums. This reluctance has posed problems in the field of anthropology at large (Shelton 1997), and in specific museums such as Tervuren (Saunders 1999 and this volume). Furthermore, subjective practices have traditionally featured a quest for exoticism and interest in the most ‘excessive’ behaviours and radical ‘alterity’. As a consequence, ‘[p]aralysed by their interest for the bizarre knowledge that they study, ethnologists most often forget the bizarre character of the credited knowledge that they do not even consider worth being a possible research subject’ (Latour 1983: 206).1 Hence the lack of self-criticism.2 Let us begin with the examples in question: two ‘Tabwa cephalomorph wood carvings’. The ‘traditional’ view is that the nature and ritual use of these two objects were established once and for all around the date of their ‘collection’ in 1884. Mikisi figures are identified as central African power-objects, or ‘fetishes’, whose making and ritual use are more or less extensively described in catalogues of African art. They have a precise ethnic designation associated with a clear location and dating. Properly measured, numbered (RG 31663 and RG 31664) and registered in 1930, when they were acquired by the Museum, they were subsequently analysed by biologists who ‘discovered’ the wood from which they were carved (Ficus mucoso and Erythrina abyssinica). Exhibitions in which the objects are shown, catalogues in which they are reproduced, are most likely successfully to elaborate on these aspects, possibly including comparisons with contemporary ‘traditional’ artistic or ritual practices as well as a full description of the context of appropriation and 96

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 97

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.1 Tabwa cephalomorph carvings, two ‘masterpieces’ of the Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by R. Asselberghs, 1994)

deportation of the pieces (see, for example, Maurer and Roberts 1985; Roberts 1995). But why not extend the ethnography of the pieces to their present-day ritual use and their history to the 117 years since their appropriation? Also, engaging in critical deconstruction of established disciplinary knowledge would reveal the social and cultural condition of its production, the arbitrariness of its boundaries, which would be a deviation from the role traditionally assigned to ‘museum ethnographers’ – at least in Belgium. However, if the project started and the results were to be exhibited (these two items belong to a 125strong masterpiece collection), how could the pieces be displayed? The idea of exposing the life-stories of some of the pieces against the background of a critical history of colonial collecting and displaying, so as to ‘delaminate’ the different ‘meanings’ they have had in the course of their ‘museum careers’, was born. The process of becoming acquainted with the objects in collections and with their histories, with the epistemology of museology as historically practised in an institution and with past historiographies, is a time-consuming 97

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 98

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Boris Wastiau

business. Uncovering the specific uses of certain objects and the intended effects of particular displays is arduous, especially since these are traditionally poorly recorded. Indeed, at the time of their creation showcases were often considered as the ‘obvious thing to do’, with few questions asked until very recently. What is generally left for the record are a few photographs of the displays, labels, catalogue captions and descriptions, as well as a list of exhibitions in which the pieces were included. The motives or criteria for the selection are seldom recorded and descriptions or analysis of the conceptual and practical aspects of the ‘making of ’ exhibits are rarely available in publications or archives. The fact that the objects in question were displaced in precolonial, colonial and postcolonial times, having been incorporated into new rituals, private or public, in and out of Africa, means that they have much to tell us historically. However, there is very little data to recover on the ritual viewing of particular objects by visitors to temporary or permanent displays. Much of what follows therefore relates to the fragmented formal aspects that were recorded in texts or photographs, while the subjective response of the viewers can only be inferred. After briefly stating what ‘Tabwa carvings’ may stand for today, I will review 1. their original use in the context of Belgian colonial expansion; 2. their transformation into personal war trophies by collector Lieutenant Emile Storms; 3. their subsequent transformation into ‘national trophies’ at the Museum of Belgian Congo; 4. their recognition as works of art and masterpieces of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Finally, I will describe their inclusion in the exhibition ExItCongoMuseum. Each transformation corresponds to a displacement in space and an inclusion in a new ritual display. As such, the objects always relate to specific events and to a specific architecture: they are systematically framed, literally and figuratively speaking, in a marked-off space where they are attributed a new meaning. Following Hay, I am also mindful that in the study of intercultural exchanges of art and material culture, ‘The operation of displacement has to be excavated to become visible, through an effort to see the artwork as event rather than object, embodying and catalysing desire’ (Hay 1999: 9). According to Toma Luntumbue, guest curator for contemporary art in the exhibition, the Museum is primarily an expression of the Belgian collective subconscious in relation to Congo, so that the ritual display of artefacts within the museum’s walls cannot be fully discussed without an analysis of the social and political context that historically structured its limits (Luntumbue 2001; Wastiau 2000). Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter, which will instead focus on the successive meaningful transfers of specific objects from specific categories to others. From the moment of their violent appropriation in 1884, the Tabwa carvings lost their originally intended function to be appropriated by powerful 98

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 99

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

hands in which they were, literally, useless. Why, then, have they been preserved for so long? Any object can clearly have another function than that of being used. As Baudrillard (1972: 11) has put it, ‘The objects are not exhausted in what they serve for, and it is in their excess of presence that they take their signification of prestige, that they “designate” not the world any longer, but the being and the social rank of their possessor.’ The history of the pieces is the convergence of individuals’ stories, memories, and a neverending flow of viewers who seemingly admire them as mere objects.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Collection Pieces: Tabwa Carvings in the Tervuren Collections These Congolese artworks are presently among those that the general and specialised publics demand to be exhibited as ‘masterpieces’ (interviews with the public and ‘connoisseurs’, visitor’s book). Few will know all the aspects of their biographies, the multiple meanings and uses they have had in the course of their ‘lives’, especially during their ‘career’ at the museum. Almost everyone apprehends them as part of a specific ensemble, which seemingly constitutes the objective and timeless class or category that best defines their identity and from which ‘meaning’ or an ‘interpretation’ are inferred. There are a few established classes in which they may be included, such as the ‘nkisi power figures’, the ‘masterpieces collection’ or ‘Tabwa art’. This is as much the case for the curatorial staff as for the public and the connoisseurs. Generally, in the permanent displays, objects are presented as ‘samples’ of an African expressive culture, as if the ensemble in which they are included ‘represented’, ‘illustrated’ or ‘transcribed’ a culture (cf. Coquet 1999: 18–19). In this context, African art, perhaps more than any other, tends to be identified by means of an ethnic grid of classification: ‘this is Tabwa art’. The general public ignores the fact that the ‘ethnic’ (read ‘tribal’) label, as opposed to attribution to an individual artist, is highly reductive and is also oblivious of the fact that ‘[t]he majority of objects in present ethnographic museums are testimonies of the past’ (Röschenthaler 1999: 82) and not of present times. Yet for some visitors, such as ex-colonials, memories of a largely imagined story of ‘the’ Congo are equally invested in these mementoes, which are constitutive parcels of the Museum itself as ‘lieu de mémoire’, however true or false these memories may be. Their ‘meaning’ will be different again for a Congolese of the Diaspora or the African artist. These multiple mental inclusions of the objects, which reveal a ‘distributed identification’ among viewers, have seldom been taken into account in the display of the pieces. This synecdochic aspect of the collection also refers to various imagined worlds and the various meanings attributed to the objects, even though curatorial practice traditionally asserts one interpretation to the detriment of others in the displays. The trivialising opposition of ‘art’ vs. ‘ethnographic’ approaches to 99 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 100

Boris Wastiau

non-western art derives in a comparable way from a wholly nonreconstructed modernist perspective. The intention with ExItCongoMuseum was that of ‘unsettling the meaning’ (Shelton 2001), the established meaning, as well as the traditional ‘Congo-Vision’.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mikisi: Late Nineteenth-Century Tabwa Political Art The two artworks under discussion were first intended as ‘statement art’ for a chiefly lineage of the expanding Tabwa sociocultural formation around 1880. They were probably made at the time the armed forces of the International African Association were overpowering the Afro-Arabs and the autochthonous chiefs in the eastern half of the projected colony: ‘Beginning in the mid-to-late 1800s, there was a conscious invention of tradition among Tabwa, especially those in closest contact with centralised states, which included the inheritance of royal names and the definition of bounded lands’ (Roberts 1985: 14). Mikisi ancestral figures allegedly incarnated the chiefly power of a matriline that claimed political leadership over a specific territory. Lineage elders were in charge of keeping the mikisi, ‘…which most frequently represented mipasi or mizimu spirits of ancestors renowned for being “clever” ... These figures had specific names associated to them, and were felt to protect and offer active assistance’ (Roberts 1985: 11). Nevertheless, they could be afflictive as well when they wanted to be remembered. If properly addressed in ritual, they also enlightened and cleared the twilight to favour people’s success in hunt, health and otherwise. With these chiefly figures, the Tabwa royal line, mainly anxious to compete with the consolidating Luba Empire, asserted its growing power and status (Roberts 1985: 11). Tabwa, as an ‘ethnic identity’, can hardly be determined geographically, linguistically, politically or in any other sense, today as in the past. ‘What is the basis of social identity in this region then? Who one says one is, is a matter of social process and local-level politics, and is reckoned differently according to the circumstances’ (Roberts 1985: 7). As with most sociocultural formations, late-nineteenth-century central African Tabwa also had multiple or distributed identities, and ‘[i]t was in the colonial period that order was imposed to sort out the complexities, presumed vagaries and contradictions of multi-referential social identity, a process of “tidying up” through what the Belgians assumed was a return to ethnic tradition’ (Roberts 1985: 8). What is therefore the significance, today, of systematically associating a specific ‘ethnic’ name with the two artworks in all ritual displays in and around the museum without discussing the question of ethnicity and the role of its redefinition at the time of Belgian conquest? The most important function the pieces ever had in their ‘traditional’ context was perhaps that of associating a discernible style with an emerging polity. Once accessioned to the collections, 100 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 101

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

the Museum’s agenda was to integrate these art forms in the classificatory narrative of colonial African art.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Looting Art, Making Trophies If such artworks were fetishes, the Devil’s work materialised, to Christian missionaries, for the military they were insignias of power which, if not subservient, were symbols of undominated force and therefore potential trophies. The practical art of war then prevailing among Europeans prescribed the seizure of artworks as an act of domination. Lieutenant Emile Storms, who spearheaded the fourth expedition of the International African Association to Central Africa, established an outpost in Mpala, on Lake Tanganyika, in 1883. ‘(He) felt that “all authority which is not based upon force is null and illusory”, and pursued a “game of wars and allegiances” which included the armed conquest of several important chiefs around Mpala, including Lusinga’ (Roberts 1985: 18). When Chief Lusinga threatened Storms’ men with decapitation if they entered his territory, the lieutenant answered … that ‘if he has the misfortune to execute such a project, his own head could one day reach Brussels with a label on it, for it would figure well in a museum’ (Roberts 1985: 18). And reach Brussels it did: for his defiance, Lusinga was shot and decapitated, fifty to sixty men were killed, 125 were made slaves, villages were razed to the ground and art looted. Despite all this, an heir to Lusinga was appointed shortly afterwards. However, he in turn was defeated by Storms in his kinsmen’s village Kansabala where Storms, adding insult to injury, seized the two figures presented here, which represent Kansabala’s lineage. Storms certainly knew what he was doing, since he greatly enjoyed participating in rituals of allegiance and blood pacts. Both his own ethnographic notes (Jacques et Storms 1886) and the archival record leave no doubt that he knew the added value that his spoliation could have on military victory. The objects were brought back to Belgium in 1885, where they became personal war trophies in Storms’ Ixelles (Brussels) house. At some point, they were placed in the centre of two framed panoplies, fixed on walls, which featured mostly African weapons, a few carvings and stuffed animals. As a window into the ‘heart of darkness’ for the visitors to the Storms home, the trophies can also be understood as transitional objects or ‘mementoes’ (cf. Parkin 1999), curios taken on the voyage back, used to reconstruct the self upon return to the home country after eighteen perilous years in the field. The Tabwa carvings acquired new ‘auratic value’ (cf. Röschelthaler 1999) in metonymic relation to their owner. Private viewings of the objects, material and tangible proof of the exploits of the master of the house and national hero, may have been an opportunity for personal recollection, but it was also 101 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 102

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Boris Wastiau

Figures 4.2 and 4.3 The two Tabwa carvings exhibited as trophies in the middle of panoplies in General Storms’ Ixelles (Brussels) house (Anonymous photographer (circa 1929) © Royal Museum for Central Africa) 102

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:00 PM Page 103

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

a way of building aura and fame in Belgian society of the time. Although no description of the rituals that may have surrounded contemplation of the objects is available, it is likely that they existed since visitors are invariably received into a home with signs of ritualised welcome. This can involve ‘showing the house’ (Bouquet 2000) and entails specific and regular treatment of the visitor in the time and space of the visit. After Storms’ death in 1918, the objects remained in his widow’s possession until 1930, as family relics, metonyms of the deceased, and probably thereby implying new ‘rituals’ of remembrance and devotion.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

From Private to Public Memorials: Making National Trophies Transfer of the objects from house to museum, as a generous gift by General Storms’ widow in 1930, transformed private mementoes into nationally significant pieces. ‘Collecting’ being ‘the desire of museums’ (Elsner 1994: 155), they were prominently displayed in public galleries, along with numerous other objects collected by the officer. These by-products of ‘colonial travel’ (Clifford 1997) became in the process naturalised to the museum system and incorporated in its never-ending collection, which has many more properties than the sum of its constituents. ‘Collections of objects are representations of power’ (Röschenthaler 1999: 85), the more so if they comprise military trophies! As such, the objects became distinctive ‘places’ of collective colonial memory, testimonies to Belgian victory over the reluctant colonised and they participated in the manufacturing of Belgian identity (cf. Asselberghs and Lesage 1999; Clifford 1988; Jewsiewicky 1991; Saunders 1999). ‘Places’, because people literally project their memories into the moveable space or volume of the material object (rather than pictures, for example). Furthermore, they constituted what might be termed a ‘memorial’, with an ‘auratic value’ in proportion to the memory of their collector’s greatness, exhibited as they were in exclusive showcases in remembrance of Storms. Such displays doubtless aimed at conveying ideas of victory and domination. ‘Collecting’ and displaying had achieved one of their most powerful effects, and viewers may have responded with a sense of belonging to the victorious party. The Tabwa pieces were, in the 1930s, along with most central African art, referred to as ‘Negro’, ‘Black’, ‘primitive’, or, more rarely, ‘melanean’ art. Such works were generally considered to be the product of a culture rather than of an individual. The question of authorship was hardly ever asked since the presumed ‘ethnic identifier’ of the dispossessed was all that was required to establish once and for all the definitive identity of the pieces. The objects also became museum and state ‘patrimony’, in a much ‘sited’ place that integrates a gigantic collection in an ostentatious neoclassical building, itself framed by a prestigious park and arboretum, all built by order of King Leopold II. 103 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 104

Boris Wastiau

However, in contrast to some private collections that seem to ‘settle’ on one meaning and one presentation (Elsner 1994: 155) upon entering a museum, the mise en scène of these pieces was never arrested. Indeed, this was the beginning of a rich, new ritual life.

Becoming Art Masterpieces

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

With the development of art history at Tervuren, from the 1950s onwards, objects such as the ‘Tabwa carvings’ were increasingly presented as ‘Tabwa art’, with no reference whatsoever to colonial conquest. Now labelled as artworks in the classical western sense, the trendily displayed objects began to mesmerise art lovers possessed by an ‘illusion of the absolute’. They were subjected to an ‘analysis of essence’ (cf. Bourdieu 1992) and to aestheticising gazes in search of ‘formal universals’. It was at this stage that the ‘ethnographic gallery’ of the allegedly scientific institution drifted towards becoming an ‘art gallery’, or at least began to

Figure 4.4 The two Tabwa artworks in the exhibition TABWA. The rising of a new moon, Royal Museum for Central Africa (Anonymous photographer, 1985 or 1986) 104

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 105

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

restrict its presentations to ‘artworks’. This was reinforced in the decidedly art-oriented displays refashioned after the independence of Congo in 1960, when the colonial project collapsed and abruptly stopped being a motive for exhibiting. These displays mainly exhibited masks, carvings and weapons along ‘ethnostylistic’ themes. This new appreciation, in which the pieces were given a much higher status (higher for instance than that of the collector), is the expression of a socially recognised hierarchy of ‘cultural competence’ enabled by acquired cultural knowledge (cf. Bourdieu 1979: i). It was as if the museum redeveloped its galleries with no other motive than to display its patrimony, thereby reinforcing the newly acquired status of the objects as ‘art pieces’:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

…the public institutions, such as museums, which have no other purpose than to offer for contemplation works of art that have often been created for rather different purposes (such as religious paintings, dance or ceremonial music, etc.) effectively found the social caesurae which, tearing the works from their context of origin, strips them of their diverse religious or political functions, reducing them in such a way, by a sort of épochè in deed, to their properly artistic function. (Bourdieu 1992: 478)

This is in fact a syndrome of unreconstructed ethnographic museums, which have recently found it easier to promote their treasures against a background of universalist aesthetics than to question their reason for being and producing new concepts. Presenting the objects as works of art implied forgetting the conditions of their appropriation and the reasons for their inclusion in the museum’s collection. This clearly focusses the meaning of their presentation on a seemingly unproblematic alleged interest in ‘cultural diversity’. Bourdieu (1992: 537), by contrast, has argued that ‘[o]ne must thus admit that it is historical analysis that allows an understanding of the conditions of “comprehension”, the symbolic, real or fictitious appropriation, of a symbolic object that may be accompanied by this specific form of enjoyment which we call aesthetic.’ Growing interest in the cultures of origin enabled partial recovery of the originally intended ritual use of the objects, which appears in both catalogues and exhibition texts. Until the 1980s, there was little interest in the artistry of the objects nor the individual artists who may have created them. The question of authorship in African art and its implications in terms of public image making has only recently received serious attention. The catalogue of the 1986 exhibition TABWA. The Rising of a New Moon, states, ‘This publication and exhibition are an attempt to present Tabwa visual arts in their cultural context and so enhance the aesthetic experience by elucidating the philosophical and mythical associations of the objects’ (Maurer and Roberts 1985: vii). There was a clear curatorial attempt to change the viewer’s perception of African art, to raise his/her consciousness of its complexity whilst s/he went through the 105

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 106

Boris Wastiau

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

exhibition. The occasional inclusion in major publications and displays steadily added to the ‘auratic value’ of the Tabwa, making them internationally known and ultimately acclaimed as unquestioned masterpieces. Yet, unlike western art, it is not necessary to understand the master’s message and precise motivation about which, in this case, next to nothing is known. It is purely a question of subjective discernment. However, the transformation of the pieces into masterpieces was not that simple and univocal. The aesthetic or the ethnographic interest of the pieces will be emphasised depending on the type of display. Most viewers, moreover, are not actively trying to revise their opinions about these masterpieces of ‘primitive’ art, which their ‘well-formed taste’ enables them to recognise and appreciate. The museum participates in establishing the judgement of taste in this field through its displays and rituals of exhibition (cf. Bourdieu 1979; 1992). This process culminated in the presentation of 250 major pieces in the 1995 exhibition Hidden Treasures of the Tervuren Museum.

Figure 4.5 Chief Kansabala’s ancestor figures in the exhibition Hidden Treasures of the Tervuren Museum, Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by J.-M. Vandyck, 1995) 106

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 107

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Yet Another Round of Meaning Making In January 2000, I was assigned the temporary redisplay at the Royal Museum for Central Africa of the masterpiece collection on its return from a two-anda-half-year round trip of nine major art museums in the United-States, Canada and Europe.3 This exhibition had been a conspicuous success, in terms of popularity and appreciation, in the field of African art exhibits despite lacking a specific concept relating elements of the selection – apart from the fact that they all were Masterpieces from Central Africa or Hidden Treasures of the Tervuren Museum4 (LaGamma 1999). This voyage also confirmed, among other things, the ‘universal aesthetic quality’ of these great artworks, just as it confirmed the Royal Museum for Central Africa’s role as a major keeper and loaner of central African art, very able to circulate and promote its patrimony. My initial question, when reflecting on a concept along which to present this exhibit, was why we should present a collection originating in colonial travel and practice as art in the first place to the public today? If we do so, how? Why display the taste of a handful of ‘arbiters of taste’ to the public at large? It emerged that a fuller ethnographic perspective on the ritual use of the objects and their successively attributed meanings would need to refer not only to their original ritual use but also to subsequent reinterpretations by their custodians. The project thus became to expose visually aspects of the history of collecting, recategorising and displaying, in such a way that most visitors would understand that their own history, that of the objects and that of the allegedly anonymous Congolese artists who produced them, as well as that of the Congolese people in general, have something in common, which a study of the pieces can help us recover and debate. The mise en scène, visual associations with archival photographs, maps and the building’s architecture would need to be such that everyone would have to ‘take a position’ with regard to his/her past, the objects and the history of our relationship to the Congolese artists, traditionally conspicuous by their absence from displays and labels. The point was not comfortable suspension of disbelief but rather to compel a critical visit. The problem was how to involve the public in this approach without relying on heavy texts and concepts in the displays. Is it possible to avoid using the categorical synecdoches referred to in the introduction and such questionable correlated generalising assumptions as ‘ethnicity’? I proposed a guided and explicit use of newly made synecdoches, regrouping objects around one aspect of their common history. The idea was to conceptualise anew the given collection of masterpieces (as objet trouvé) in relation to the traditional historiography of the colonial practice of collecting and exhibiting African artefacts. Contemporary art was also proposed as a way of introducing another discourse on colonialism and the museum itself. The categories 107 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 108

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Boris Wastiau

were ‘military trophies’, ‘missionary fetishes’, ‘administrator’s samples and mementoes’, ‘a doctor’s collection’, ‘collectors’ items’, ‘pieces from the art market’, ‘ethnographic samples’, ‘museum glassboxes’, ‘primitivism’, ‘elements of taxonomy’ and ‘contemporary art perspective’. In every case, except that of ‘ethnographic samples’, the objects were displaced from their usual museological category to fit in new and unexpected ones. Concomitant to this critical reinvention of display categories, the idea was to suggest, visually, the different associated ‘eyes’ that had discriminated these central African artworks, first as collectibles, then as possible exhibits. The exhibition was mounted in the whitewashed, recently refurbished, upper galleries of the first floor of the museum that runs parallel to the old display on the ground floor. Two spiral staircases providing access at each end of the floor were marked by the interventions of the architects and of an artist respectively, articulating the experience of the temporary exhibition with that of the old permanent galleries. All objects were grouped in long, narrow showcases oriented on the North–South axis, which is the geographical axis of the relations between Congo and Belgium, with a scenographic progression from darkness to light. The Tabwa carvings appeared in a showcase of the first main room of ExItCongoMuseum, which was dedicated to the role of military men in the creation of Congolese art: in defining the borders of a colony named Congo; taking possession of objects as trophies; facilitating the transit of increasing quantities of artefacts by way of colonials, traders and porterage routes; developing internal boundaries that prevented a simultaneous flow of the people who created the objects. The carvings were displayed prominently, as part a set of eight impressive artworks that were all collected by military officers, and stood as synecdoches for this subcollection. Artefacts had simple, deceptively traditional labels, featuring place and culture of origin, collection date and the name of the officer who collected them, topped by a mention of ‘unknown artist’ in bold print. This presentation was consistent throughout the exhibition, in which the names of only three artists could be given. Projections of archival photographs behind the eight selected pieces showed, or in some cases suggested, the location of the objects in their former context over the 125 years or so that separate us from their making: a succession of pictures of military men in the field, seized artefacts, trophies, panoplies and other memorabilia in Belgian houses. Maps placed on a large board showed the ‘tracé’ of military expeditions, the porterage routes along which objects were sent away, and outposts of colonial expansion such as the fort which Storms had built in Mpala. This fort was close to where the carvings were seized; it was later given by Storms to missionaries to serve as the foundations of a mission station. Again, the concept was to enable the viewer to position these elements in time and space

108 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 109

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 4.6 Kansabala’s ancestral figures in the display of works of art collected by military personnel during the colonial period in the exhibition ExItCongoMuseum. A Century of Art with/without Papers, Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by Boris Wastiau, 2001)

and to position him/herself in confronting the object together with the evocation of its history. This form of ‘critical museology’ was, together with an essay (Wastiau 2000), a way of conveying a personal analysis of the history of collecting and displaying the art of the colonised since the 1897 world exhibition in Brussels, at which Tervuren’s ‘Palace of the Colonies’ was to form the embryo of the Congo Museum itself. ExItCongoMuseum reassessed past and inherited modes of cultural production, historiographies and museologies, based on notions of the African primitive, on the one hand, and an uncontested ‘scientific’ superiority on the other. The anthropologist–curator is no mere analyst. S/he is a decisive imagemaking agent in the organised interplay of agencies and remembrances in the exhibition, able to foster some aspects while playing down others. ExItCongoMuseum played down the usual ‘aesthetic approach’ by wilfully and cunningly ‘concealing’ masterpieces in uneasy angles, very low and dimly lit. Although displays looked conventional from a distance, closer inspection of 109

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 110

Boris Wastiau

the aesthetics of the exhibition’s architecture disturbed most conservative connoisseurs and collectors. They could not see the point of not being shown the same things in the same light all over again. Lighting was shown to be a basic element in the structuring of the museum as ritual site (Duncan 1995). The exhibition architects, Blocks and Van De Gore, developed a diffused form of lighting, mainly from below, in such a way that the shadows cast were more important than the properly lit surface. The political aspects surrounding the display of the pieces over the course of a century were rendered through the large-scale projection of over 150 black and white slides of archival photographs, which created a relatively brighter area that diverted the gaze from the objects.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Where the Exhibition Exceeds the Text ‘Scientific samples’ or ‘facts’, like trophies, are only meaningful and useful if and when they are brought back by ‘collectors’ to ‘home base’, where they produce ‘simulacra’ that substitute for the viewer’s lack of personal experience of that to which they allude. This is one of the main ideas in Latour’s (1983) now famous article on ‘le Grand Partage’. These necessary displays and simulacra, which effect a major metamorphosis of objects and facts, are as much the driving force behind museums today as they were in colonial times. The aim of ExItCongoMuseum and its accompanying essay guide (Wastiau 2000) was to provoke an act of consciousness by interrupting viewers’ (from various sectors of the public) traditional ‘suspension of disbelief ’ when they enter the museum. This was motivated both by experimental interests and the critical-historical tradition informed by such authors as Bourdieu.5 This type of historicism can be applied to delaminate the various layers of meaning historically coated onto specific objects and the results analysed without necessarily aiming to unravel the ‘original’ conception that gave birth to the piece and its primal interpretation and appreciation, which was the traditional work of ‘ethnography’. The aim here was to show how specific objects could be translated into successive systems of interpretation and presentation that have been entirely up to the possessors or curators of the pieces. Such historicism corresponds to a form of cultural production that is clearly opposed to the traditional hierarchisation of historical, ethnographic and museological practice. Reactions to the display of Kansabala’s carvings in ExItCongoMuseum confirm the efficacy of unsettling the meaning by collapsing categorical boundaries and projecting a continuous flow of unexpected archive pictures. How could anyone dare to present a ‘masterpiece’ of central African art from the Royal Museum for Central Africa as a ‘military trophy’ or a ‘colonial trophy’ today? The story of Storms’ looting may, of course, be recalled, in small print at the back of a slick catalogue, but then you call it ‘collecting’, not ‘looting’. Objects 110 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 111

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

were presented in such a way that it was impossible to move around them without bumping into maps, texts or a slide projection, which immediately obliges the viewer to take a position, spatially and temporally, vis-à-vis the objects grouped in those apparently conventional displays.6 Some angles in the first section of the exhibition, which architecturally were reminiscent of a ship’s hold sheltering its valuables, were indeed impossible to catch. Since labels were not provided inside the vitrines, objects had to be understood as part of such ensembles as ‘trophies’, ‘fetishes’, ‘collectibles’ and ‘samples’, although there was no traditional or common(sensical) typology to be seen. Most dealers and collectors with whom I discussed the displays regretted the lack of information about the ritual use of the objects. When it was explained more emphatically that this exhibition was about all the possible ritual uses of the objects, they remained adamant that there could be no comparison between the ‘real ritual use’ and the subsequent ‘employment’ of the objects.7 Well-known Brussels art dealers complained that masterpieces, ‘many of them religious objects’, did not receive the ‘respect’ they deserved in the presentation. One dealer could not stand seeing the masks without mounts and ‘proper lighting’.8 Fond of early military collectors’ stories, collections and memorabilia, he was expecting a grateful acknowledgement to collectors for having salvaged those works of art from the climate, woodworms and neglect of former owners – quite a syndrome among some collectors and dealers (cf. Price 1989). Of course, as a number of his colleagues had previously suggested, he could have shown us how to do better… None of these critics ever pointed to the falsity of the exhibition statements, they only said that the Museum was ‘not the right place’ to make them, and that ‘masterpieces’ should not be used for this purpose. The most violent reactions to the displays however came, as was to be expected, from those most closely involved over two decades in the painstaking development of the scientised aesthetism that dominates the field of ‘classical’ African art today. The inclusion of contemporary artworks and critical installations by Toma Luntumbue, Barthelemy Toguo and Audry Liseron-Monfils, among others, proved unsettling.9 The reluctance to embrace cross-perspectives tends to confirm guest curator Toma Muteba Luntumbue’s view that the Tervuren museum is a mere expression of the Belgian subconscious and that, perhaps, it is more the public that shapes the museum than the other way round. In his view the museum materialises ideas about ‘the’ Congo shared by the dominant public, in the first place, rather than by curators as such. In the overall ritual work of the museum this would mean that curators themselves were cultural products rather than producers of culture (Luntumbue 2001). We need to remind ourselves here that the general public always expects to derive sense from museum objects which, as Hunt (1993: 222) suggests, 111

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 112

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Boris Wastiau

are perceived as taboo material, polluting and dangerous: ‘All such materials are kept within explicitly defined locations whose boundaries are signified and protected by more or less complex rites of passage. All these materials have moved over from a context of use and effectiveness to a state of decay, i.e. to a condition of meaning without purpose. As anomalies they represent a threat to ordered perception and must therefore be committed to a classificatory Gulag.’ The French term ‘conservateur/trice’ may actually better reflect this notion. One of the exhibition strategies was to dissolve the apparently objective relationship between objects and their accepted ‘class’ or ‘meaning’ by gently disrupting their usual, formal mise en scène, and by enumerating the multiplicity of meanings historically imposed on them since they were appropriated and ceased to be used for their original purpose. This seems to engender the kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ that is dear to artists and investigative minds but abhorrent to those who visit museums to reassert their long-established convictions. The vast majority of visitors, whether specialised academics, laymen or journalists, welcomed the exhibition as a long overdue exercise in historical criticism (Arnaut 2001; Corbey 2001). Yet, even they could be disturbed by some of the visual information, which at times went far beyond what they expected. There was disbelief at the tiny proportion of the colonial collections that was gathered by scientists, as well as the fact that only two of the colonial curators from the museum ever went to the field. It struck me thus that visitors could be moved by one of two radically opposed things: some by learning about the history of the making of African art masterpieces, others by feeling exposed. In both cases, the museum ritual failed them as a restatement of their own aesthetic and intellectual expectations. In both cases, the museum as ‘site of memory’ and the objects as unexpected pieces of historical evidence about their relationship to the maintenance of the museum’s tradition, unsettled them by conjuring up disturbing images of the past. These images demanded a personal reassessment of past and present relationships between the traditional ‘collectors’ and ‘collected’. It is the object that inspires passion, because it is the horizon of my disappearance. (Baudrillard 1994: 179)

NOTES I wish to thank the editors, Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto, for their comments on this chapter, as well as Zachary Kingdon. 1. This, and subsequent quotes were translated from the French by the author.

112 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 113

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

2. In my own case, I began to study museum natives at the same time that I became a real one myself, in the course of 1996, when I was appointed to the Section of Ethnography of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. 3. This is one half of what had been shown in the 1995 Hidden Treasures of the Tervuren Museum exhibition. 4. This title conveyed the idea that the artworks had remained hidden from public view for a long time, which hardly applied to the majority of the objects. 5. ‘The reminder of the historical determinations of reason may constitute the principle of a real freedom as regards these determinations. Freethinking must be conquered through a historical anamnesis capable of unveiling everything that, in thought, is the forgotten product of historical work. The resolute act of consciousness of historical determinations, a true new conquest of oneself, which is exactly opposite to the magical fugue in “essential thought”, offers a possibility to really control these determinations’ (Bourdieu 1992: 508). 6. A former professor who used to indulge in ‘pure aesthetic contemplation’ after duly having ‘contextualised’ the objects in their former ethnographic background, and who ‘knew’ the collection very well, complained bitterly that the objects were barely visible. A colleague whom he asked to explain replied that perhaps he had never actually seen the objects and never would …! A bewildered gaze stopped the conversation short. 7. I was told that I must be confused to be blind to this. 8. Although in private he is capable of using one of his own absolute masterpieces as an ashtray, just to provoke you. 9. ‘Le citoyen Wastiau s’est planté! Un nègre blan! ’ exclaimed a retired academic, who likes to remind anyone interested that still today ‘there is no such thing as an African intellectual, stricto sensu’, sometimes cordially adding: ‘and believe me I deplore it !’ These words echoed in my head the words of G.-D. Perier who replied, when asked in 1927 why Belgian artists did not submit themselves to the influence of Congolese aesthetics as the ‘Paris school’ had done: ‘Is it not better to paint the Congo as it is to us, seen by a white man and not by a fake Black?’ (quoted in Salmon 1992: 193, italics in the original). See also Corbey (2001), Arnaut (2001) and Vanhee (2001), for a review of other reactions, including that of a former curator.

REFERENCES Arnaut, K. (2001) ‘ExItCongoMuseum en de Afrikanisten: voor een etnografie van de Belgische (post-)koloniale conditie’, Forum (Association Belge des Africanistes), pp. 26–34; or http://home-4.worldonline.be/~ababva/e-Forum-1/ExitCongo Museum_KA.htm (26-04-2001). Asselberghs, H. and Lesage, D. (1999) Het Museum van de Natie: van kolonialisme tot globalisering. Brussels: Yves Gevaert. Baudrillard, J. (1972) Pour une critique de l’économie politique du signe. Paris: Gallimard. –––––– (1994) ‘The System of Collecting’, in Elsner, J. and Cardinal, R. (eds), The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books, pp. 7–24. Bouquet, M. (2000) ‘Showing the House and Visiting the Museum’, in Driessen, H. and de Jonge, H. (eds), Miniature Etnografiche. Nijmegen: SUN, pp. 106–109. Bourdieu, P. (1979) La distinction: Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Editions de Minuit. 113

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 114

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Boris Wastiau

–––––– (1992) Les Règles de l’Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire. Paris: Seuil. Clifford, J. (1988) The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. –––––– (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Coquet, M. (1999) ‘Des Objets et de Leurs Musées: en Guise d’Introduction’, Journal des Africanistes, 69(1), pp. 9–27. Corbey, R. (2001) ‘ExItCongoMuseum: the Travels of Congolese Art’, Anthropology Today, 17(3), pp. 26–28. Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge. Elsner, J. (1994) ‘A Collector’s Model of Desire: the House and Museum of Sir John Soane’, in Elsner, J. and Cardinal, R. (eds), The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books, pp. 155–76. Hay, J. (1999) ‘Towards a Theory of the Intercultural’, Res, 35 (Spring), pp. 5–10. Hunt, C. (1993) ‘The Museum: a Sacred Arena’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 118, pp. 115–123. Jacques, V. and Storms, E. (1886) Notes sur l’Ethnographie de la Partie Orientale de l’Afrique Equatoriale. Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique. Jewsiewicky, B. (1991) ‘Le Primitivisme, le Post-colonialisme, les Antiquités ‘Nègres’ et la Question Nationale’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 31(1-2), pp. 191–213. LaGamma, A. (1999) ‘Masterpieces from Central Africa: The Tervuren Museum’, African Arts, Summer, pp. 15–17. Latour, B. (1983) ‘Comment Redistribuer le Grand Partage?’, Synthèses, 3(10), 203–36. Luntumbue, T.M. (ed.) (2001) ExItCongoMuseum: Art Contemporain. Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa. Maurer, M.E. and Roberts, A.F. (1985) Tabwa: the Rising of a New Moon: a Century of Tabwa Art. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Museum of Art. Morris, W. (2001) Proving the Difference: Visual Authorisations of a Colonial Project: a Consideration of Belgian Sculptural Representations of Africans in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren. Unpublished M.A. dissertation. University of South Africa. Parkin, D. (1999) ‘Mementos as transitional Objects in Human Displacement’, Journal of Material Culture, 4(3), pp. 303–20. Price, S. (1989) Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Roberts, A. F. (1985) ‘Social and historical contexts of tabwa art’, in Maurer, M. E. and Roberts, A.F. (eds), pp. 1–48. Tabwa: the Rising of a New Moon: A Century of Tabwa Art. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Museum of Art. Röschenthaler, U. (1999) ‘Of objects and Contexts: Biographies of Ethnographica’, Journal des Africanistes, 69(1), pp. 81–103. Salmon, P. (1992) ‘Réflexions à propos du Goût des Arts Zaïrois en Belgique durant la Période Coloniale (1885–1960)’, in Quaghebeur, M. and Balberghe, E. (eds), Papier Blanc Encre Noire en Afrique Centrale (Zaïre, Rwanda et Burundi). Brussels: Labor, pp. 179–201. Saunders, B. (1999) ‘The Photological Apparatus and the Desiring Machine’, Focaal, 34, 23–39. Shelton, A.A. (1997) ‘The Future of Museum Ethnography’, Journal of Museum Ethnography, 9, pp. 33–48. 114

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 115

The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

–––––– (2001) ‘Unsettling the Meaning: Critical Museology, Art, and Anthropological Discourse’, in Bouquet, M. (ed.), Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 142–61. Vanhee, H. (2001) ‘ExitCongoMuseum: Een Recensie van een Tentoonstelling en een Essay over Materiële Sporen van onze Koloniale Geschiedenis’, Mededelingsblad van de Belgische Vereninging voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis, s.n., pp. 25–29; or http://www.flwi.rug.ac.be/modernhistory/publicaties_nstge.htm (26-04-2001). Wastiau, B. (2000) ExItCongoMuseum: An Essay on the Social Life of the Masterpieces of African art of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Tervuren: Royal Museum for Central Africa.

115 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

04_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:01 PM Page 116

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:03 PM Page 117

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

PART III E NCOUNTERS , P ERFORMANCES AND U NPREDICTABLES

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:03 PM Page 118

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:03 PM Page 119

C HAPTER 5 PARADISE IN THE M AKING AT A RTIS Z OO , A MSTERDAM Natasha Silva




Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction Every culture creates images of how it sees itself and the rest of the world. Incidental to these images of self-definition are definitions of ‘the other’. Numerous scientific studies reveal that the nature of our relationship with animals and the ways in which we ‘see’ them are based on how we as humans see ourselves and our place in the pattern of existence. If this is the case, then approaching Artis Zoo as a social institution and as a ‘museum with a difference’1 provides a revealing perspective on Dutch culture and on the ways that nature is perceived and (re)constructed in the Netherlands. Though the ‘classical’ zoo has mainly western origins, zoos are now a feature of almost every country in the world. Since the time that these institutions changed from menagerie to zoological garden and opened their gates to the general public, they have been involved in a complex transformative process. As with all social/cultural institutions, the changes that took place were consistent with societal, political, legal and administrative as well as cultural, educational and scientific parameters of their time. Zoos – as microcosmic presentations of the natural world, endowed with symbolic meaning and anthropomorphic projections – with their collections of wild and exotic animals seem to exercise a magnetic pull on human beings. Zoos are popular in western society, increasingly drawing visitors on a mass scale to see a unique collection of (mainly exotic and often endangered) living, breeding and dying ‘wildlife’. Artis Zoo, situated in the centre of the Dutch 119 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:03 PM Page 120

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Natasha Silva

capital city of Amsterdam, attracts more than a million visitors annually.2 Moreover, Artis is visited by a broad public of all ages, educational, social, economic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, with correspondingly varying levels of knowledge, ranging from general to highly specialised. The fact that zoos in general attract such a diverse public is a characteristic seldom seen in similar institutions.3 Zoos have also received ample attention from the fields of veterinary science and zoology. However, they have been largely overlooked in anthropological and museological texts. This chapter aims to stimulate the reader to see the zoo as a special kind of ritual site: a liminal space in which cultural expressions of nature are affirmed, contested and transformed. The ritual qualities of zoos activate a range of emotions based on both attraction to and revulsion by its collection; an ambiguity which is at the heart of Artis experience. For instance, visitors to the zoo feel awe and respect for animal subjects, but also guilt, anger and sadness reflecting the sacrifice involved in their confinement for human pleasure. Conversely, modern zoos see themselves as fulfilling a crucial role in conservation management. As environmental resource and conservation education centres, they provide a safe haven for numerous endangered species and inform the public about their predicament. In the following passages I would like to provide the reader with a glimpse of the visiting process in all its complexities by first describing a guided tour. Embarking on such an account of practice allows one to taste, in condensed form, meaning-making processes as well as deep levels of signification constructed among three major actors at the zoo: visitors, animal exhibits and zoo personnel. My account is based on six months’ ethnographic fieldwork, in addition to ten years’ experience as a zoo guide. I go on to argue that Artis is a distinct and complex ritual site and that the guided tour is a special kind of performance within this particular ritual site.

Touring the Zoo It is 10:45 on a Sunday morning in May as we approach the entrance to the zoo. Even before entering the gates we hear parrots squawking, the highpitched, melodious and somewhat sad-sounding calls of the gibbons and the lions’ powerful roar. Having passed through ticket control, we make our way down ‘Parrot Lane’, where colourful macaws entertain and are entertained by visitors entering and leaving the zoo. We head towards the ‘Monkey Rock’, where the standard ‘Wild Tour’ will commence at eleven. Four tour guides with identity badges wait and talk among themselves. They keep an eye on the growing crowd and check their watches. Suddenly one of them takes the initiative to welcome the visitors. She introduces herself and her fellow guides and splits the crowd in four. 120

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 121

Figure 5.1 A Map of Artis Zoo

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

121 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 122

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Natasha Silva

We follow our guide, an older man, who tells us that Artis Zoo guides are volunteers. He gives a summary of his background and experience as a tour guide. After a short briefing on the duration and route we will follow, the tour begins. We learn that the Zoological Society Natura Artis Magistra, commonly known as ‘Artis’, was inaugurated in 1838 and is one of the oldest zoos in the world. Its history is reflected in the garden landscaping and the many statues, in the architecture of its historical buildings as well as numerous animal enclosures. In fact, one can literally see more than 150 years of zoo development in physical form throughout the garden – from trophy gallery and curiosity cabinet, original postage-stamp-style enclosures, the ‘encyclopaedia of life’ legacy, to modern-day, high-tech and minimalist ecodisplays. As the Netherlands’ oldest zoo, Artis is interesting in several respects. In the years following its founding, the zoo expanded by incorporating eighteen additional plots of land, which included different homes/estates, parks/ gardens and a cafe/brothel (1863), the latter having become the contemporary wolf, racoon, maned wolf and African hunting dog enclosure. These and other historical artefacts, handed down from different periods of zoo development, have been preserved for contemporary viewers. Much of Artis’ architecture is typical of its nineteenth-century origins as an urban zoo, with influences from the Romantic and Neoclassical period as well as eclectic styles. It is visible in the plant collection and gardens, and in the architecture of several buildings and animal enclosures in the zoo, such as the ‘Grote Museum’ (1855) on the Plantage Middenlaan, the aquarium (1882), the Minangkabauan house (1916) and the zebra enclosures (1920). Such a congregation of architectural and exhibit styles within a fourteen-hectare landscaped garden has led Artis’ diverse character to be described by some as ‘a mess’, ‘a confusion’ and/or ‘old-fashioned’ (see Wennekes, 1997). Yet, it is exactly this profound mixture of styles and its historical atmosphere that visitors see as giving Artis its special charm and ambience (see Frankenhuis 1998; Mieras 1998; Silva 1999). Still standing at the Monkey Rock, we briefly ponder whether animals have culture while watching the inhabitants, Japanese macaques, washing their food before eating it. We make a move and cross a bridge leading over the former Nieuwe Prinsengracht4 to take a look at different bird exhibits. As we pass the great cormorant and stork display, we learn that they are semiwild populations, of which the offspring may leave the garden at will. Besides housing numerous exotic species, Artis also displays European animals, such as European ibex, lynx and beaver, even participating in reintroduction programmes. The garden also offers a home to several ‘uninvited’ guests, which can give rise to problems such as the fishy faecal bombs regularly dropped by the in-house breeding population of wild grey herons onto the footpaths below. 122

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 123

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

At the Kerbert Terrace, named after one of the zoo’s former directors, we learn about the feeding habits of the Artis pride of lions, as well as necessary contraceptive measures used to regulate the often overproductive feline, exsitu populations. A walk along the ‘Carnivore Gallery’ takes us back to a time when postage-stamp-like exhibits were the norm. The gallery underscored the original zoo philosophy of an encyclopaedia of life, giving at a glance an impression of the diversity of the carnivore kingdom. Though the actual enclosure size has increased by reducing the number of species kept, a constricting façade defies contemporary standards. This historical relic will, fortunately, disappear in the near future, leaving eleven other historical buildings5 on the site. Our guide discusses the paradox of Siberian tiger populations (dwindling numbers in the wild and surplus in zoos) and the problems with reintroduction programmes (how does one teach a zoo-bred tiger to hunt and survive in the wilderness?). Viewing the Carnivore Gallery and the impressive tigers, Raspoetin and his new partner Emilia, elicits a mixed reaction from the public – they are in awe of the fearsome yet magnificent animals, but appalled by their living conditions in small, ‘outdated’ cages. We then make our way through the classical Dutch garden6 and approach the kitchen of the ‘Small Mammals House’,7 which is our first actual glimpse behind the scenes. We walk in single file along an overgrown side passage intended for zoo personnel only. Through a large window the kitchen comes into view. Another passage leads us into the warm and humid room, where numerous food trays can be viewed, catering to a range of dietary preferences – from pure carnivore to specialist vegetarian. As we enter the kitchen, the zoo keepers retreat. A tray lies before us with what looks like a deluxe fresh salad and we learn that the contents are of supermarket quality. Another tray contains a salad with yoghurt and honey dressing, specially made for the sensitive stomachs of lemurs. Yet another tray reveals its diner’s preference for meat: boiled oneday-old chicks tell us that this is for a true carnivore. Numerous jars containing dry food, vitamin supplements, powdered milk, honey, tea, seeds and mealworms decorate the windowsill – all part of the daily rations – as well as small plastic containers with live meaty snacks such as crickets and grasshoppers, whose chirping song fills the room. The freezer holds packs of frozen chicks and the refrigerator contains bits of horse and beef, cut to size. On the stove a pan filled with chicks is being brought to a boil in order to neutralise salmonella as well as to deter certain residents’ artistic habits.8 The importance of dietary research as well as optimising/customising an animal’s diet is discussed. We learn of the different dietary preferences, the importance of dietary research, as well as additional supplements, which are all necessary to keep zoo animals healthy. Instead of in-situ diets, animals in Artis thrive on fresh and frozen regional produce. The guide then shows us a jar containing a chip/transponder no bigger than a fingertip. All the animals 123

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 124

Natasha Silva

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 5.2 Eye to eye with a raccoon (photograph by Natasha Silva)

of the Small Mammal House have been chipped for identification and registration purposes: a unique code appears when a decoder is held to their bodies providing, when linked to a computer, all the information we need to know about the individual. One drawback is that the decoder only activates the transponder at close range. This brings us to the topic of the different ways of catching zoo animals (a crush, a mobile trap-cage, a butterfly-net-like bag for small animals, a blow pipe and a tranquilliser gun for large mammals) and the risks of anaesthetic as well as transportation. We leave the kitchen in order to view its diners. Our tour continues past the tiny, hoofed Chevrotains, the Listz-monkey (with hairdos similar to the composer), the tea-drinking white-faced Sakis, the pygmy marmoset (probably the world’s smallest monkey), the highly sociable mongoose (who care for their weak, ill and elderly), several species of south American rodents, more marmosets, tiny Fennec foxes, a motionless two-toed sloth whose coinhabitants (red-bellied marmosets) have elected him their soft and warm hammock, and a playful family of otters. We slowly make our way around and exit through glass doors leading to the Owl Ruin and several monumental buildings. We pass many old trees and newly planted, sweetly scented and brightly 124

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 125

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

coloured flowerbeds and head toward the wolves’ (who are a bright white and could pass for large German shepherd dogs), African hunting dogs’ (strangely, half the pack is tailless) and raccoons’ (who spend most of their day sleeping) enclosures – all located around a central ‘house’ that used to be a former barrestaurant-brothel.9 We find ourselves eye to eye with three Asian elephants – the females Jumbo and Suseela and the impressive 47-year-old bull ‘Murugan’.10 Closer inspection reveals that Murugan’s tusks grow at different angles. Long ago his youthful curiosity drove him to dig into the enclosure’s foundation, breaking it twice. Moreover, Murugan has a preference for sleeping on his left side, which has worn down the outer part of his left tusk. Despite such imperfections, Murugan impresses with his stature, sheer will power and strength, and also by his surprising gentleness (according to staff ). The guide disappears behind a door and swiftly returns with a black bucket filled with an Asian and African elephant molar, a piece of broken-off nail and a jar of ‘musk’ scraped from Murugan’s cheek gland. The guide gives more information about these objects. Suddenly the guide frowns and moves us away from the enclosure. Murugan has spotted us and according to our guide enjoys nothing more than sandblasting a visiting crowd, which he successfully manages with a flick of his powerful trunk. Most visitors laugh heartily at the incident while dusting off their faces, clothing and hair. One child, rather upset by the incident, softly cries while the parent laughingly brushes the sand away. After some apologetic words and a chuckle, the guide continues his story. Murugan has passed his prime and zoo staff are still waiting anxiously for his first ever offspring: ‘The problem is that Murugan does not know how to do it, having missed seeing his peers engage in the complex mating ritual as he arrived in Amsterdam at a very young age. Now his keepers hope to give him a helping hand.’ The solution is artificial insemination. Murugan is now being accustomed to the act of physical stimulation by his keepers. Some time in the near future Murugan’s sperm will be tapped off and inserted in another zoo’s cow – a highly complex operation, since elephant sperm cannot at present be frozen in for later use. The entire operation needs to be completed within eight hours. Anecdotal information on elephant love life as well as their astounding intelligence is left to sink in as we head towards the Minangkabauan House. This unique construction was locally made in Sumatra and brought back by a sea captain and donated to the zoo. Put up in 1916, it represents the architectural/folkloric taste during the zoo’s ‘romantic period’. It now houses roe deer, Chinese hog deer and Pudu, in pie-slice-like enclosures that surround it. We continue southwards, via the bridge through Wolf Valley, towards the former Masman family’s nineteenth-century country retreat, which now houses several species of ibis, pass the ‘Pheasantry’11 and approach the aquarium. By now, we are over an hour into the tour. 125

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 126

Natasha Silva

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The aquarium is an impressive and conspicuous building reflecting the eclectic taste of its designer, the architect G.B. Salm.12 Completed in 1882, it was the largest and most modern aquarium of its time.13 The main hall was recently restored and the aquarium now includes an ultramodern addition, containing four large ecological displays: two coral reefs, an Amazon flood plain and an Amsterdam canal display. We enter through one of several solid wooden doors and make our way up the impressive marble stairs and through the historical ‘great hall’ with geobiological aquariums. At the far end we pass through two large wooden doors that separate us from the rest of the public. The same aquariums are now viewed from above, which seems to be an entirely new experience: ‘it all looks so different from this angle.’ The old facade is visible all around us, supplemented by modern technology. The noise behind the scenes impairs communication. The pumping, gurgling and splashing sounds of more than a million litres of water and machinery in operation drowns our voices. The guide speaks slowly and loudly but can hardly be heard and the group reforms into several more intimate groups who shout in each other’s ears. There is a faint saline odour and in numerous smaller aquariums we can view fish in quarantine and sickbay, as well as young hatchlings and live snacks for carnivorous fish – an aspect not visible to the general

Figure 5.3 Elephant bull ‘Murugan’ (photograph by Natasha Silva) 126 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 127

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

public. We follow a narrow staircase down and enter the dark and humid catacombs containing tropical fresh and salt water, where the noise is even louder. Here we view the large filter system and manage to pick up something about its important role as a hideout during World War Two. A supplementary account of water management techniques and the difficulty of keeping fish healthy, let alone getting them to breed successfully, is given. On rare occasions fish eggs manage to pass the filters and hatch in one of the sediment basins, such as a shark many years ago. Leaving behind the darkness of the aquarium and the many mysteries it contains, we enter daylight and make for the ‘warmth-loving’ Black-footed Penguin colony and its coinhabiting gannets, on the north side of the building. The penguins, of Southern African descent, brave Dutch winters but do not necessarily enjoy them. However, careful monitoring and maintenance, as well as pioneering research, have been good for the Artis penguins. Today this is one of the largest colonies in captivity and an important export product for the zoo. Formerly, penguin sales to other zoos were an important means of income. Since 1994, when a European Endangered Species Breeding Programme (EEP)14 was established, the penguins have been transferred free of charge. Instead, a small exchange fee is paid to the Dutch zoo fund for nature conservation.15 This payment is then forwarded to the account of the South African National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB) to support their work, which includes cleaning up oil-spillage victims, as well as nursing wounded and sick penguins and reintroducing them to the wild when they are fit and able to fend for themselves. The touring visitors gaze at these ‘amusing’, ‘little’, ‘best-dressed birds’ in their black and white ‘tuxedos’, shuffling back and forth, keenly feeding and preparing for the moulting season in June. After nearly two hours, our tour has reached an end. Before departing our guide gives us a final briefing on special births, general changes at the zoo, as well as feeding times of the pink pelicans, crocodiles, big cats, penguins and Californian sea lions. Then he leaves us with a farewell and a smile. The group disperses to continue their zoo visit.

The Magic of Life Artis Zoo epitomises what is understood by the term ‘biopark’. Its holistic approach enables visitors to view not only a diverse animal collection comprising some 775 species, but also thematic glasshouses and a varied outdoor plant collection, a geological and a zoological museum, an aquarium and a planetarium as well as numerous works of art displayed throughout the garden. This comprehensive exhibit, which requires upkeep by some 160 zoo personnel, aims to draw attention to the relationship between humans, animals and their (shared) environment; and also, at a higher level, between the earth, its 127

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 128

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Natasha Silva

life forms and the universe. Artis’ aim is to emphasise the diversity of life ‘from Big Bang to Elephant’. As a ‘Museum of Life’, Artis is a unique naturalhistory presentation, in which animate and inanimate subjects form part of the greater theme. However, this deeper meaning is often overlooked by the general public. Most visitors simply come to the zoo with the primary goal of ‘looking at the animals’, with a definite preference for the zoo’s animate rather than inanimate subjects. Curious to know more about the zoo in general and its animals in particular, as well as being enticed by the notice ‘behind the scenes’ posted at a central point just beyond the zoo’s entrance, they embark on a guided tour. Visitor research in Artis16 revealed that most of those following a Sunday tour were repeat visitors who consciously chose another guide each time in anticipation of a different experience. Many tour visitors expect a relaxing and educational experience. First timers are often surprised to learn that guides are volunteers. They assume that the guide was an animal caretaker, a zoo expert, or part of the salaried staff. On hearing of the guide’s voluntary status, visitors are surprised by the guide’s wealth of knowledge. Many visitors join the tour behind the scenes hoping to see animals at close range and to be able to interact with them. This latter point proved a disappointment to the uninitiated, while repeat visitors hoped to visit other places behind the scenes. Tour visitors were, nevertheless, generally positive about the experience and especially appreciative of new information, being able to visit places not normally accessible to the general public, and the fact that the guide focussed their attention on animals they would normally have passed by. Many animals and aspects of collection management that were previously unknown or not considered worthy of attention now suddenly seemed fascinating. According to the visitors, the guided tour was a new or different type of experience, which gave more meaning to their visit as well as a new perspective on zoos in general. If tour visitors’ reactions are generally positive, despite the disappointment of not being able to touch or see an animal close up, then the volunteer guide has achieved the set goal of adding recreational and educational value to the visitors’ day at the zoo. All the thirty-odd zoo guides have been through an intensive six-week training course, followed by an interim period with a mentor-guide, before they finally do the job alone. Candidate guides come from all walks of life, but basic knowledge and interest are prerequisites and motivation is a must. Since their ultimate task is to increase the zoo’s attractiveness and underscore the zoo’s mission, guides must also be competent at transferring information in different ways and at different levels to a highly variegated audience.17 Throughout the tour, information on zoo history, development and collection management, as well as conservation efforts, is interlaced with veterinary, biological and behavioural details. Normally lasting about an hour and a half, 128

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 129

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

it often includes volunteer guide favourites such as the penguins, (large) primates, elephants, big cats, the aquarium and the small mammal house. Anecdotes and stories concerning animal dramas at the zoo are a significant component of the tour; love, hatred, deaths and births, as well as animal tricks, triumphs and disasters – all pass in revue. We learn that many animals at the zoo are thinking, feeling individuals with definite likes and dislikes, as well as minds of their own. Visitors get to know the animals by sharing these secrets and stories, and learning to see through the eyes and experience of the guide. The zoo-animal soap opera involves visitors at an emotional level. Consequently, we feel outraged on hearing about the murder of a hyena by a zoo visitor, in awe of a beaver’s clever escape into the Amstel river and resisting capture for some weeks, sad about the mourning male Siberian tiger and excited by the current episode of the honeymooning Andean condors (will their marriage be successful and produce offspring?). However, there is far more going on during a guided tour. Goffman’s (1969) notion of frontstage/backstage proves very useful in coming to a more comprehensive understanding of the complex of activities taking place in the zoo context as well as during a guided tour. Goffman sees social (inter)action as a dramaturgical performance: the activity of a given participant on a given

Figure 5.4 A guided tour (photograph by Natasha Silva) 129 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 130

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Natasha Silva

occasion influences that of the other participants. The audience, observers and coparticipants contribute to one another’s performance. Seen in terms of the zoo performance the guide, as a ritual specialist and agent, carefully manages zoo experience by employing backstage–frontstage dialectics to communicate a specific point of view. The desired effect is that tour visitors are both intellectually and emotionally engaged, by instilling a feeling of fascination, respect and admiration for diverse animals and nature in general. Zoo guides take their role as advocates seriously and want their personal enthusiasm to ‘rub off ’ on their audience. Apart from managing the information conveyed, guides also control what is (re)viewed by actively avoiding areas and topics considered negative by themselves and the public, and focussing instead on more agreeable aspects. Pursuing the frontstage-backstage dialectics, the guided tour enables us to see the frontstage as a place where the zoo’s performance is presented and the backstage as a place where the performance is prepared, where the suppressed facts make an appearance and where performers (zoo personnel and animals alike) relax. The backstage is also a place where there is a familiarity among members of the performing team, where solidarity develops and where secrets are kept and shared that might otherwise give the performance away. Moreover, backstage is the place where illusions/impressions are constructed, readjusted and contested out of sight of the audience. We will see how this applies to Artis in general as well as to the guided tour. The frontstage/backstage notion also allows us to see contradictions in the working consensus and attitudes towards the audience. The special position of volunteer guides – the fact that they work part time and for free – has given them an ambiguous status within the zoo. Though guides are considered to underscore the zoo’s goals of recreation and education, they are not considered real personnel by many Artis employees. A certain tension exists between guides and zoo employees which often flares up in misunderstandings and mutual irritation as well as disagreements about public protocol. Accumulated tension may result in a heated discussion, sometimes in front of a touring group, and lead to a break in the working relationship or mutual avoidance. Many zoo-keeper–guide relationships are nevertheless good, with guides often receiving special privileges. Goffman asserts that when an individual appears before others, (s)he will have motives for trying to control and sustain the impressions others receive by applying and managing certain techniques. The guides’ training and performance bear this out, as does their general attitude, which is pro-Artis. Some aspects of the performance are expressively accentuated when frontstage, while others that might discredit the impressions fostered, are suppressed. This is also the case for the guided tour. Backstage, on the other hand, is normally cut off from the performance by a partition and guarded passageway. This deliberate division of front and backstage prevents outsiders from coming into a performance that is not addressed to them. However, for zoo visitors, 130

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 131

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

interacting with zoo keepers or with volunteer guides allows them to go backstage and share in secrets that would otherwise remain unknown to them. Such participation may increase visitors’ feelings of solidarity with the performers. At the same time, backstage/frontstage mobility creates tension between different types of personnel about which secrets should be shared with the general public and how. Zoo keepers whose backstage area is visited during a guided tour also have to contend with the fact that their work is routinely interrupted. However, it is the information issue that causes most friction: keepers may argue that guides get their facts wrong, especially concerning the more intimate details of zoo operation and individual animals, such as specific dietary elements and maintenance. As mentioned above, such tensions may come to a head in a heated discussion before an audience, embarrassing the guide in question. Goffman (1969: 116) also states that through the process of ‘[work] control’, individuals try to buffer themselves from the deterministic demands that surround them. In the zoo context, this especially applies to zoo keepers but also to volunteer guides who, by controlling (outsiders’) access to backstage areas, are actively asserting power. In one potent instance, a zoo guide demonstratively held up ‘the magic key’ for all to see – the key that, in the hands of an official zoo guide, opens doors normally not accessible to the general public. Considering all this, it is scarcely surprising that there are regular clashes between guides and ‘real’ personnel, since they often have very different attitudes towards the staged performance and the audience. In the end, the actual backstage that tour visitors are presented with remains a kind of intermediary region that is sanitised of ‘normal’ backstage aspects: there is little death or decay, no sick animals, or anything else that might (further) tarnish the presentation. Off-duty guides and certain privileged visitors are rarely given access (still carefully controlled) to the ‘real’ backstage. Zoo keepers fascinate visitors because of their direct and intensive contact with the zoo’s animals. Even when there is no animal in sight, a zoo keeper visibly cleaning an enclosure will draw quite a crowd. However the zoo generally promotes a ‘hands-off ’ working policy as far as possible – for animal behavioural reasons as well as staff security. Physical and emotional ‘contact’ does, nevertheless, occur between keepers and ‘their’ animals. Balancing animal and visitor needs with the educational mission of the zoo presents a complex challenge and creates many areas of tension. Modern developments tend towards the visitor-friendly, while keepers try to defend their own and their animals’ needs. The public, who generate a large part of the zoo’s income, often ‘win’: animals who prefer privacy are encouraged to remain visible to the public, increasingly naturalistic enclosures take much effort to keep clean and presentable, animal shows and acts such as feeding-time sessions for otherwise motionless animals, are laid on to amuse the public. Many keepers therefore have mixed feelings about the often critical and ‘disturbing’ zoo 131

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 132

Natasha Silva

visitors who, when they are not behind the scenes, will eagerly approach them with all sorts of questions, robbing them of their precious time needed to complete the day’s chores. Their high-profile job also receives much media attention in the Netherlands. Perhaps it is their special position in relation to zoo animals that mesmerises the public. In practice, they operate in a contact zone between animals, the public and colleagues. Their ambiguity towards the animals, because of the emotional strain that living charges exert upon them, is matched by a certain ambiguity toward the public, who compromise their work. All this helps to account for keepers’ typically reserved behaviour, both in relation to the animals and the public. However, this aspect is often only picked up by zoo ‘insiders’, including keen visitors who have contact with certain zoo keepers and develop an ‘understanding’.

A World Apart

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The extensive animal and garden/plant collection as well as the zoo’s history and diverse architectural styles are said to give Artis its special and peaceful ambience. This effect can be felt when passing through Artis’ entrance: the

Figure 5.5 The Minangkabauan House (photograph by Natasha Silva) 132 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 133

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

contrast between the urban surroundings (noisy, busy, construction, brick buildings) and the zoo (green, quiet, with a ‘sleepy/dreamy/peaceful’ quality, [exotic] animal sounds) is striking. The zoo has maintained a surprising feeling of space despite its relatively small size and the many winding paths that instil a sense of adventure. The zoo attracts a highly variegated public, some 85 percent of whom visit as part of a group outing (family/friends) with varying interests and goals. Many visitors, especially the elderly, refer to ‘being out and about’ in the open air and in a green, pleasant and safe environment, as a reason for going to the zoo. Visitors come ‘to look at animals’, ‘to be close to animals’, and ‘to learn18 about animals’, respectively. It is the special combination of relaxation, enjoyment and education that entices visitors to the zoo and keeps them coming back for more. Many visitors come especially to see young animals. As special births often make regional and even national news, there may be a considerable temporary increase in visitors from near and far. Frequent visitors often make a tour of new and young animals, finding satisfaction in watching them settle in or grow. The chance to be close to animals is considered quite unique to Artis, where animals can be viewed at close range and physical contact is often possible. Having physical contact with or being able to get close to the animals is considered by many, both child and adult, to be an important factor in their enjoyment of the zoo and features strongly in Artis experience. Many people living in the city look upon Artis as a ‘back garden’: a place where they can relax and recreate – draw/paint, film/photograph, read a book, have a picnic, look at and interact with people and other animals, enjoy the floral/lush scenery, frolic or doze on one of several greens on warm and sunny days. The fact that this ‘park/garden’ contains numerous exotic animals gives it an added dimension. Moreover, many visitors extend their zoo experience by taking home memories in different forms: toys and other souvenirs, photographs, notes, sketches/paintings and even bits of animals, such as feathers and porcupine quills. The overall picture is not however entirely positive. There is, in the zoo’s development and in its present form, a – perhaps inevitable – conscious mastery over nature. It is not that Artis has deliberately set out to create such an image but in many ways it still typifies certain themes of Modernity: domination, assertion of superiority and manipulation (see Ehrenfeld 1995: xvii–xviii). These are precisely the elements that are being challenged by the general public in relation to Artis Zoo today. Visitor critique involves especially animal-welfare issues.19 Many believe that an active animal20 is a healthy and happy one and that small enclosures contravene that state.21 Such matters are of considerable concern to many visitors who, during their tour of the zoo, experience an array of emotions, including feelings of sadness, guilt, protest, suspicion, anger and frustration. These more negative aspects almost always feature in the guided tour, when the zoo’s representatives are asked to 133

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 134

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Natasha Silva

explain their dated exhibits. The guide will answer honestly that Artis is currently taking such critique to heart and is putting its master plan into action, although it will take some years before the zoo’s less pleasant side is mitigated. Negative emotions formed by what visitors see coexist with positive ones, resulting in a zoo experience that is as ambiguous and diverse as its public. Interestingly, such concerns alter after having been on a guided tour. Although visitors do not necessarily become less critical or entirely change their viewpoint, they come to see things in a different light through hearing the same story told by an educated and well-versed insider. The situation becomes less ‘black and white’, more grey, and although perhaps just as disturbing as before, much more complicated than initially suspected. It is interesting to note that barred and ‘dated’ enclosures face much critique but more naturalistic enclosures score positively, regardless of their actual size and whether they meet the animal’s needs. This brings me to the discussion of Carol Duncan (1995), who compares the museum visit to a ritual. Duncan believes this secular ritual site to be a place of enactment. Like the theatre, the ritual involves an element of performance, structuring the museum’s central meaning around specific ritual scenarios. For contemporary Dutch zoos, the primary focus in relation to their public is ‘experiencing’, ‘feeling’, and ‘discovering’ nature, thereby (ideally) becoming more involved with and sympathetic towards zoos and their conservation goals (see Linde 1997). Although Duncan specifically discusses art museums, her viewpoint can also be applied to similar institutions. It may be argued that Artis Zoo and (specifically though at another level) the guided tour contain elements of performance by providing both the stage set and the script, thereby structuring visitors’ experience. Duncan (1995: 20) believes that the ritual experience – which contains elements of sacrifice, ordeal or enlightenment – has a purpose: that of transformation, by conferring or renewing identity or restoring order in the self or in the world. Duncan (1995: 10) furthermore says that museum space, like ritual space, is carefully marked off and designated a specific function – that of contemplation and learning – which is also one of Artis’ goals. Being marked off in space and time promotes a mode of consciousness outside the everyday. The museum is a place where time seems suspended and where individuals can temporarily distance themselves from the practical concerns and social relations of everyday life, look at themselves and their world (or some aspect of it) with different thoughts and emotions. In a way this also applies to Artis. On entering the gates one clearly steps into another world – a special place containing a collection of exotic beings – which is clearly marked off from the rest of urban life – considered by visitors to be a relaxing and pleasant (and educational) experience. Similarly, anthropologist Nelson Graburn (1995) argues that museums offer something akin to a religious experience. This reverential experience is 134

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:04 PM Page 135

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

thought to fulfil the public’s need for ‘ ... something higher, more sacred, and out of the ordinary than home and work are able to supply’ (Falk and Dierking 1992: 15). Graburn’s museum is a place of peace, fantasy and of awe, where visitors can escape the mundane, everyday world. Graburn believes that people think of museums as places where society’s treasures are preserved, whether these are objects or ideas. People enter museums to see and learn about things outside their everyday experience – things of great historical, cultural or scientific importance; precious and/or unusual things. Experiencing such things inspires a reverential feeling, though Grabrun states that for most it is a subconscious process. Likewise, this applies to Artis Zoo with its collection of exotic and endangered animals in a beautiful and serene, parklike environment. According to Graburn, the alienation of today’s urban fast-paced society has made nature, history, rural people and areas, key elements in tourist nostalgia. Museumification of these key concerns has made such experiences more easily available (museum, cultural centres, theme parks and other ‘artificial’ amusements are becoming the most popular and profitable tourist attractions in the Netherlands). Artis undoubtedly meets many of these nostalgic needs and is highly popular, as visiting numbers show. Moreover, there seems to a strong trend in thinking that ‘authenticity’ lies outside the everyday modern urban life (in which there is a proliferation of reproductions), in the past, the countryside and nature, and in the lives of more ‘natural’ people (Graburn 1995: 169). This coincides with the general trend in zoos toward increasingly naturalistic displays, which may even include such special effects as tidal pools, unusual underwater encounters and tropical rain showers. However, modern tourists travel in search of icons that confirm that the world ‘out there’ is how they believe it should be. When the experience is different from their expectations, they become concerned about its authenticity. Likewise, Artis is commonly questioned about its authenticity, since visitors’ views are laced with romanticism as well as with impressions formed by spectacular nature documentaries. The ultimate aim of many museum rituals is the experience of enlightenment, revelation, spiritual nourishment, restoration or rejuvenation. Similarly, Dutch zoos increasingly collect objects that relate to ideas, stories and themes. The total experience is supposed to be both educational and soothing/relaxing, with conditions designed to enhance enjoyment and pleasure. While this is also true of Artis and of the guided tour, there is much more at stake in the zoo experience, not all of which is positive. The zoo experience is much more complex, as the different perspectives afforded by the analysis of the guided tour demonstrate. Zoos may, in the final analysis, be considered sanitised versions of nature where the ideal and the romantic have been deliberately heightened through design and supplemented by ornamental bushes, trees, flowers and statues. 135

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:05 PM Page 136

Natasha Silva

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 5.6 Visitors watch grey meerkats sunbathing (photograph by Natasha Silva)

Meticulously clean gardens and carefully managed exhibits bespeak cultural conditioning and human control. Human intervention in the zoo context tones down Nature’s nastiness, death and disease, as well as species/individual incompatibility. There is no live prey for carnivores, no aggressive behaviour (only compatible animals/species), no illness, and death occurs behind the scenes, away from the public gaze. Visitors are spared the less pleasant aspects that are normally part of natural life, thereby perpetuating the peaceable-kingdom myth of the natural world. The zoo’s representation of the natural world can sometimes assume ‘hyperrealistic’ (see Graburn 1995: 166) proportions: copies of the original (in another setting) which have assumed the form of a perfected version of the original. Despite all this, visitors ‘enlightened’ by television nature documentaries as well as those who have ‘seen the real thing’ may discredit zoos when they do not match up; or conversely, they may enjoy them for what they are. Research in Artis Zoo shows that visitors’ thoughts and perceptions follow the zoo’s mission to a certain extent (see Silva 1999: 117–35). However, visitors also make their own personal ‘play’ based on that with which they are presented. Physical proximity and contact with animals feature prominently in Artis visitors’ (ideal) experience. In this sense, animals can be considered 136

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:05 PM Page 137

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

as having highly transformative powers, although in many more ways than conceived of by Duncan (1995) and Graburn (1977, discussed by Falk and Dierking 1992: 15). The experience resulting from zoo ritual is not only or purely one of enlightenment, revelation, spiritual nourishment, restoration and rejuvenation. Although Artis presents something out of the ordinary, it features more than peace and fantasy. Artis’ ritual experience also involves the notion of sacrifice (of the animals’ liberty) and ordeal regarding the animals’ general wellbeing.22 Artis, in its present state, is incapable of calming minds and creating a purely reverential, purifying, transformational and restorative experience, even though it is considered a place where one can temporarily step out of everyday life and in a sense make a mental journey to far and fabulous places and see living testimonies. Furthermore, as I have shown, there are many points of view regarding the ritual process. This is where Graburn’s view becomes too narrow, since visiting Artis proves too complex to compress the different scripts into a single outcome. The same situation is open to diverse interpretation; it all depends on where you stand and how you look at it.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Eden Effect Artis can thus be considered as having strong transformative powers with, as its greatest distinction and strongest trump card, the possibility for closeness and physical contact in a green environment. In Artis people gather out of almost reverential feelings or simply for fun and relaxation, to be entertained by young sloth bears riding on their mother’s back, to mourn dead gorillas, to watch crocodiles being fed or, in one extreme case, to kill a hyena. Both positive and negative feelings are entwined in Artis experience, as already noted. Artis is a place where deep-seated cultural values find material expression, in a complex mix of intellect and emotion. The zoo (re)presents and transforms reality; at the same time, it is a place where new and diverse realities are created by those who engage in its performance. Artis offers a retreat, a refuge and a balance to an otherwise fast-paced urban lifestyle. The transformative power of being able to get close to wild animals in a peaceful environment features strongly in drawing a crowd. Both visitors and personnel consider that the zoo has many valuable aspects and leads to positive experiences despite its negative facets. Nor is Artis simply a sanitised version of nature since human nastiness continually disturbs any such idealistic/nostalgic representation and enlightening experience. However the less pleasant aspects of nature are not to blame, since death and disease are still mainly an offstage issue, but rather certain characteristics of human nature that shatter the peaceable kingdom/Garden of Eden effect. Domination, assertion of superiority, human intervention, control and manipulation, 137 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:05 PM Page 138

Natasha Silva

the selfish appropriation of nature, and subsequently issues of privacy and welfare are still part of the frontstage area at the zoo, producing an ambiguous space that keeps minds open. However, as Artis and zoos in general continue to transform into naturalistic and hyperrealistic institutions, and as the difference between zoos and nature reserves diminish (with animals considered healthy and happy in both), questions pertaining to ethics and authenticity may gradually fade away. In a country where nature and animal-welfare organisation membership, as well as specific awareness, is on the increase, Artis has unintentionally become a contested site and a place for debate with Dutch society, history and tradition: it tells how it once was and what is wrong with how it now is. Artis thereby directs attention to what is difficult and painful to contemplate in a completely different way than its script ideally intends. Nevertheless, the blending of repulsion and attraction, condemnation and celebration, in all its ambivalence, reveals that critique does not necessarily erode appeal, since visitor numbers remain high. Drawing upon Duncan’s ideas: Artis – far from being neutral in the configuration of its space as well as in the way of presenting its collections, reflects specific values and beliefs about individual, social and political identity.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusions In this chapter I have discussed the zoo as a specific and complex ritual site where three major actors (zoo personnel, animal exhibits and visitors) affect the performance that is staged. My analysis of the zoo’s (re)presentation and its backstage management, the many points of view in the ritual process, as well as the multiple experiences going on at the same time, goes beyond Graburn’s discussion and underscores Duncan’s arguments. Moreover, the volunteer guide as a ritual specialist provides a specific script that transforms individuals (if only temporarily) and (re)constructs identities through a ritual process that operates especially on groups, through the manipulation of perceptions and emotions. Despite the complexity of the zoo setting, a kind of unity of experience does take place. For zoo guides (who are appropriately educated volunteers, well versed in and committed to ecology) visiting the zoo is a way of affirming their citizenship, building an ‘Amsterdamian’ location and contributing to ecological awareness; whereas for visitors it is (mostly) a family/group experience, Amsterdam consumer location and a kind of ecological conversion.

138 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:05 PM Page 139

Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

NOTES 1. According to the Dutch Museum Association (NMV), a museum is: ‘a permanent, non-profitmaking institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which collects, preserves, researches, presents and informs about the material evidence of humans and their surroundings, for the purposes of study, education and enjoyment’. This definition includes more traditional museums, but also visitors centres, planetaria, botanical and zoological gardens – the latter being unique in that it houses a living, breeding, behaving and dying collection. See also Silva 1999: 31–38. Moreover, Artis contains a geological and zoological museum and a planetarium on its premises. 2. Of which an estimated 10,000 follow a guided tour (unofficial figures for 2000). 3. See NVD 1991, IUDZG/CBSG 1993, and Hancocks 1995. 4. One of several canals that flows through the city’s centre and which used to separate the original zoo from land bought for expansion purposes. 5. Many buildings on the site have been declared national monuments, which means that rules and regulations of the ‘Wet Monumenten Zorg’ apply. 6. The classical Dutch garden contains the Westerman Monument (1891) which was placed here in the year following his death of one of the zoo’s inaugurators: Gerard Frederik Westerman (1807–1890). 7. One of the larger and more modern buildings, built in 1977 to house small mammals, who are displayed in indoor as well as outdoor enclosures. 8. Some monkeys had the habit of smearing the dead chicks’ juices (yolk) on the enclosure’s glass panels. This soon hardened to form a sticky yellow screen which had to be labouriously removed by the keepers on a daily basis. 9. Called the ‘Eik en Linde’ (Oak and Lime), situated on annexed land bought in 1863. 10. The elephants Murugan and Suseela were official gifts. Murugan was donated to the Dutch youth by President Pandit Nehru of India in 1955. Suseela was donated by the Indian youth. 11. Built in 1888 and renovated in 1985. 12. Architect Salm designed other buildings on the Artis terrain, including the Carnivore Gallery (1859). 13. Today it is one of the oldest aquariums in the world. 14. In order to secure future zoo populations, European zoos have set up 127 breeding programmes for endangered species, as well as 51 genealogical registers. 15. The nature conservation fund ‘Stichting Dierentuinen Helpen’ (1997) is a joint fund of the Dutch Zoo Association (NVD) – inaugurated in support of various in-situ as well as ex-situ conservation projects. 16. As researched by and described in Silva 1999: 102–35. 17. Guided groups normally consist of approximately twenty persons. According to a survey carried out by biologist, teacher and zoo guide Lieke Kievits (1997), ‘Wild tours’ attract an average of 36 persons a week, which have an adult-child ratio of 1:1. Conversely, specially requested tours have an adult-child ratio of 3:1. The latter type of tour is on the increase as more businesses have discovered the zoo as an ideal location for meetings/gatherings of all sorts. 18. ‘Learning’ as described by visitors especially involves looking at animals and discussing the animals being viewed and to a lesser degree, reading zoo labels. 19. The contemporary visitor may be more informed, though not by definition well-informed. Many visitors are influenced by nature documentaries that show an entire life cycle in 45 minutes or by zoos who produce hyperrealistic presentations of nature. 20. Often the public is misled by nature documentaries displaying a sequence of shots spaced over a year, but compressed into a forty-five-minute program. This makes the public suspect that our pride of lions, who spend most of their day ‘relaxing’, must be suffering in their cramped conditions (see Note 21). However, in the wild lions spend at least half the day ‘lying about’,

139 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

05_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:05 PM Page 140

Natasha Silva just as domestic cats do. Contrary to public opinion, Artis lions are displaying natural behaviour. 21. Most visitors equate space with wellbeing – the more space the better. As many enclosures in Artis are relatively small (which, conversely, increases human-animal contact – a positive aspect in zoo experience), visitors automatically assume that an animal’s wellbeing is at stake. 22. This applies especially to persons above a certain age. Young, preschool children had no negative feelings regarding the zoo and animal wellbeing. Often their parents did but complied with their children’s wishes to visit Artis because their children considered it exciting and great fun.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New York: Routledge. Ehrenfeld, D. (1995) ‘Foreword’, in Norton, B.G. et al. (eds), Ethics on the Ark: Zoos, Animal Welfare and Wildlife Conservation. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. xvii–xix. Falk, J.H. and Dierking, L.D. (1992) The Museum Experience. Washington, DC: Whalesback Books. Frankenhuis, M.Th. (1998) Variaties in Artis: Over Paren en Baren en Mensen en Dieren. Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Nieuwezijds. Goffman, E. ([1959]1969) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Graburn, N. (1995) ‘Tourism, Modernity and Nostalgia’, in Akhbar, A. and Shore, C. (eds), The Future of Anthropology. London: Athlone Press, pp. 158–78. –––––– (1977), ‘The museum and the visitor experience’ in Draper, L. (ed.), The Visitor and the Museum. Washington, DC: American Assoc. of Museums, pp. 5–32. Hancocks, D. (1995) ‘Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh No!’, in Norton, B. et al. (eds), Ethics on the Ark, pp. 31–37 IUDZG/CBSG (1993) The World Zoo Conservation Strategy: the Role of the Zoos and Aquaria of the World in Global Conservation. Chicago: Chicago Zoological Society and IUDZG, The World Zoo Organisation. Linde, I. van der (1997) ‘Mamma, Ik Heb nog Geen Olifanten Gezien’, Intermediair, 7 August, pp. 11–19. Mieras, M. (1998) ‘Een Facelift voor Artis’, Intermediair, 11 June, p. 41. Nederlandse Vereniging van Dierentuinen (NVD) (1991), Dierentuinen en Natuur-en Milieueducatie: een Beleidsvisie van de Nederlandse Vereniging van Dierentuinen. Amsterdam: Nederlandse Vereniging van Dierentuinen. Silva, N.J. (1999) Signifying Zoos and the Zoo Experience. The Meaning of Zoos and Their Creation of Meaning. Master’s diss., University of Utrecht. Wennekes, W. (1997) ‘Vergeleken met Andere Zijn Wij Slechts een Postzegel’, NRC Handelsblad, 12 August.

140 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 141

C HAPTER 6 T HE N ATURAL M AGIC OF M ONTE S AN G IOVANNI : AUTHORIT Y, AUTHENTICIT Y AND R ITUAL IN S ARDINIA 1

Tracey Heatherington

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.




Figure 6.1 The road to Monte San Giovanni, Orgosolo (photograph by Tracey Heatherington) 141

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 142

Tracey Heatherington

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Nature on Display Monte San Giovanni is one of the most celebrated peaks of central Sardinia (Italy). On a clear day, they told me in Orgosolo, from its height of 1,316 m, you can see clear across ‘from Arbatax to Oristano’, the Mediterranean coasts on both sides of the island. This panorama attracts tourists and local residents, as well as the forestry lookout maintained throughout the summer when fires can quickly threaten the landscape. Monte San Giovanni is Orgosolo’s gateway to the famous Supramonte, the high plateau linked to a romantic history of anti-colonial resistance, rugged transhumant shepherds, outlaws, and kidnappers. With its dramatic calcareous formations, Monte San Giovanni has long been a distinctive symbol of the town of Orgosolo, and in 1997, the town council petitioned to have the peak named as a national monument. It is frequently also adopted as an emblem of the proposed ‘Gennargentu National Park’. If the park is made, Monte San Giovanni will constitute an important designated visitor area. What I call the ‘natural magic’ of Monte San Giovanni refers to the way that the components of an open landscape are made available to the social and the ecological imagination. This chapter explores how three qualities – authority, authenticity and ritual – structure the special kind of ‘museum effect’ at Monte San Giovanni. Svetlana Alpers has suggested that a museum is characterised by ‘a way of seeing’ that releases objects from their original, locally-defined frames of meaning and history and heightens the power of aesthetic imagination (1990). By comparing a national park to a museum, I highlight the ways in which a national park decontextualises an ecosystem from its cultural milieu, displaying local species and geographic features as aesthetic objects and objects of knowledge in themselves. Inasmuch as Monte San Giovanni constitutes a prominent feature for ‘display’, whether as part of a national park or as a part of Orgosolo’s communal heritage, it is located at the centre of continuing debate. Palumbo (2001) argues museums in Italy are foci of social tactics and social poetics mediating relations between nation state and local community, as well as public and private spaces. Macdonald’s (1996) analysis of several recent case studies has shown that the ‘museum experience’ is not predetermined but open to negotiations of meaning and representation throughout the processes of production and consumption associated with the displays. As Kevin Hetherington (1996) has convincingly shown for Stonehenge in that same volume, the museumisation of unenclosed spaces can carry with it a particularly dynamic, ongoing process of negotiation over symbolic power. Parks and natural reserves are open to a play of discourses and cultural practices with regard to history and environmentalism, generated within a range of political, institutional, and social contexts. The ‘nature’ of the magic at Monte San Giovanni is thus ultimately in the eye of the beholder. 142 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 143

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

Rituals of Environmentalism

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

What is a National Park, in reality? The National Park is an important structure for the protection of nature, a space that is not subjected to human interventions, exploitation and destruction, in which animals and plants live and reproduce in a wild state. But it is also a place where one can go, to visit and know the environment better, observe plants and animals, entering silently into the solemn and intact temple of nature. (APN 1999: 2)

A Park Authority attempts to superimpose order on the way visitors ‘see’ a landscape and in so doing, it affirms a set of stories about environment, history and citizenship. These visions of ‘nature’ are instruments used to negotiate cultural and political identities. Although contemporary advocates of protected areas are concerned about the connections between parks and their peripheries, and ‘resident peoples’ are increasingly appreciated as participants in habitat conservation (Brosius, Tsing and Zerner 1998; West and Brechin 1991), the concept of a ‘national park’ continues to be defined by the idea of a space ‘set apart’ from human use (IUCN 1980; Wright and Mattson 1996). It is this very act of ‘setting apart’ that establishes a landscape as a kind of sacred space. Like other kinds of official narratives, the environmental discourses of ‘the State’ entail moral and symbolic dimensions that come to be legitimised or even taken for granted through the enactment of ‘secular rituals’ (Moore and Myerhoff 1977; see also Moore 1993). National parks create contexts within which the relationships enacted between individuals, communities and the environment become idealised and ritualised as well as regulated and controlled. The growth of the parks system throughout Italy is an important focus of the ‘moral rationality’ (Prato 1993) cultivated by various ‘green’ lobbies in the Italian context. Italy’s first national park was inaugurated in Abbruzzo in 1922 and its exhibition leaflet, ‘Park Effect’ illustrates the narratives of environmental citizenship current during the late 1990s. After several expansions, the Abbruzzo National Park occupies 44,000 ha and receives about two million visitors per year. Its work to protect areas of primary forest, endangered species and biodiversity is represented as having positive links to various levels of cultural identity. The leaflet celebrates the park’s beneficial influence on local culture, as ‘ecodevelopment’ is shown to have provided markets for traditional cheese, biscuits and honey (shown in photographs with the ‘DOC’ mark of the national park) (Centro Parchi 1997: 8). It asserts the park’s centrality to a flourishing national culture of environmentalism, noting its accessibility from Rome and Naples, and the many NGOs and individual volunteers in Italy who collaborate in park improvement. Finally, the leaflet sets the park within the context of ongoing Europeanisation by noting its official status as a ‘green region of Europe’ and calling it ‘a splendid jewel in the European Crown’ (Centro Parchi 1997: 12). Cultural-political identities are thus subsumed within a master narrative of environmentalism. 143

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 144

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Tracey Heatherington

How do nature excursions engage the mind and the senses in the manifestation of ecological self/identities? In the Abbruzzo National Park leaflet, the park is seen as an opportunity for ‘discovering nature: with your eyes, with your heart and with your hands’ (Centro Parchi 1997: 10). In the promotional literature and conferences on the Gennargentu National Park (Camboni 1991; Colomo and Ticca 1987; Scuola di Pubblica Amministrazione et al. 1992; WWF 1998), there are repeated references to how people may become ‘closer’ to Sardinian ‘nature’ by visiting, seeing, learning about and appreciating places like Monte San Giovanni. Pictures in an information leaflet featured campers in the Supramonte, while the text implied the ritual context of their experience by describing the aesthetic and spiritual rewards to be derived from ‘entering silently into the solemn and intact temple of nature’ (APN 1999: 2).2 A park visitor who seeks out visual and sensory knowledge of plant and animal species ritually emulates scientific processes of empirical observation and, through selfmonitoring against littering, lighting fires, or disturbing plants, shares in the project of scientific conservation. The ‘ritual bodies’ (Bell 1992: 98) of park visitors can be directly engaged with the surrounding ‘wilderness’ and metonymically aligned with the larger project of scientific ecology. Excursions within a national park, then, can be seen as a means of ritually structuring direct contact with a richly imagined and often personified ‘nature’, in a special domain ‘where nature is sovereign’ (Centro Parchi 1997: 4). Ethnography among some Sardinian forest rangers3 suggests the centrality of such nature excursions to the enactment of environmentalist identities in Italy. Sharing several months’ training in environmental protection as well as their daily work, many of these individuals identified themselves as interested in the environment, pursued hobbies such as nature photography or spelunking on their off time, and expressed pleasure in hiking through isolated countryside over the course of their patrols. Soon after I had introduced myself as having a critical interest in the park project, among themselves they adopted a project to show me the living sight of a moufflon, an endangered species of indigenous wild mountain sheep. After two excursions with no sign of the animals, it became a point of concern among my hosts. At last we did glimpse a pair of moufflons some distance away, and whenever I appeared at the station for awhile after, someone else would inquire to confirm approvingly, ‘so, you’ve seen the muflone then?’ From the perspective of these forest rangers, such direct visual/experiential contact with real examples of Sardinian flora and fauna was germane to the development of my interest in environmental issues.

Scientific Authority and the Authenticity of Nature The richness of a protected area lies not in what man has constructed, but in all that he has left intact and natural. (APN 1999: 4) 144

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 145

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.2 Geological formations at Monte San Giovanni (photograph, courtesy of Francesco Pili)

At Monte San Giovanni, a range of geological formations and indigenous wild plants and animals can be found in a striking, beautiful setting. Orgosolo’s own nature enthusiasts – members of the hiking club, ecotourism guides, forest rangers, as well as herders and others – talk about the naturally occurring ‘botanic garden’ in the forest at the foot of the mountain, and comment on the inspiring presence of rare moufflon herds and royal eagles in its environs. The objects of scientific and aesthetic discourses of ecology are thus directly available to the senses. When a conference of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) was held at Orgosolo in 1997, excursions to Monte San Giovanni and the Supramonte were planned. Monte San Giovanni is frequently chosen for school excursions from all over the island, as a relatively accessible and educational day trip. The immediate, vivid experience of authentic nature is framed by a meaningful discourse of environmentalism. Great educational and scientific value is perceived to reside in national parks (cf. Tassi 1998). These ecological museums derive authority from scientific models of vision, that is, from epistemological models that isolate specific objects of inquiry and celebrate empirical observation as the means 145

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 146

Tracey Heatherington

of legitimate knowledge. One biologist from the University of Florence exhorted the value of central Sardinia as an ‘open book’ of science:

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The relatively uninhabited landscape of the territory of the park is a book open to the naturalistic perception, [open] to ecological reading, to the reflection and admonishment of that which nature can be and often, unfortunately, no longer is. (Prof. Pier Virgilio Arrigoni in APN 1999)

What our Florentine scientist has in common with the WWF (cf. Colomo and Ticca 1987; WWF 1998) is an understanding that the ecological wealth of indigenous flora and fauna in the Supramonte has flourished in relative isolation from human activities, rather than benefited from the custodianship of local communities. The landscape is described as resisting human influence.4 It is the powerful visibility of accepted symbols of indigenous nature, and the equally powerful invisibility of contrasting signs of modern human inhabitation, which potentially render the tourist’s experience of the local environment genuine and transformative from this kind of environmentalist perspective. There are notably few elements of recognisably modern architecture visible upon the landscape around Monte San Giovanni: apart from some springs, picnic areas and special animal enclosures maintained on the commons by the town, there are only a few simple cement shelters and animal enclosures built by herders themselves and scattered thinly, away from the road. There are some buildings maintained by the forestry service at the foot of Monte San Giovanni, where the government has already been supervising the planting and harvesting of trees for several decades. There are no houses, since Sardinians continue to favour a pattern of aggregated villages and there are legal restrictions to any construction in the highland countryside. The area around Monte San Giovanni is considered by experts to be both representative of central Sardinian wilderness, and a memorable example of it. If a museum is a place of pilgrimage made powerful by human art and science, a park is a site where the features of a ‘natural’ landscape are taken to enshrine, without apparent artifice, a potent source of knowledge and aesthetics. The ‘authenticity’ of ‘nature’ is essential to the idea of a national park, since it is designed as a means of ‘protecting’ or ‘preserving’ what are considered to be ‘typical’ examples of physical features and biogenetic resources. The techniques of park management – zoning, trail making, monitoring of flora and fauna, and so on – are imagined as custodial techniques, techniques that simply discipline human intervention in the ecosystem and facilitate the natural balance of local ecologies.

146 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 147

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Museumisation of Monte San Giovanni? How does the environment ‘set apart’ as a protected area become part of strategic everyday debates about cultural identity and difference? The Sardinian case involves a contested national park in an area of Italy that is stereotypically associated with ‘banditry’ and ‘backwardness’. Monte San Giovanni constitutes a focus of alternative narratives about how ‘culture’ shapes the local environment. The mountain is also used by different groups of people – that is, the area around the peak is integrated into different patterns of cultural, political and economic practice – in ways that evoke vastly disparate expectations about the categories of social belonging, exclusion, and legitimate entitlement. The regional and national governments first began planning to create a ‘Gennargentu National Park’ in the late 1960s. This was related to a European Economic Community campaign to increase the percentage of land devoted to natural reserves, and it was expected that a national park would promote economic development through increased tourism to the Sardinian interior. In central Sardinia at that time there was a particularly intense period of what state discourses referred to as ‘banditry’ – that is, increased problems of homicide, blood feud, kidnappings, theft and so on. Because Sardinian criminality was seen to be linked to an economy still dependent on transhumant shepherding, a number of economic development initiatives were focussed on generating alternative employment opportunities. In Orgosolo, most households included one or more full-time herders who depended upon access to communally owned lands, ‘su cumonale’ (the commons), including the valleys flanking Monte San Giovanni. These same lands, as well as the forestry-service-managed area of ‘Montes’ including Monte San Giovanni itself, were targeted for incorporation into the new park, and herders quickly became alarmed at their potential exclusion from these areas. Local responses to the 1960s park project were extremely negative; residents of Orgosolo contested the loss of the commons in 1969 and ultimately maintained control over it (see Moro 1982). Local authority over land management was nevertheless gradually eroded through legislation and, in the late 1980s, the decisive expansion of the regional forest-ranger corps. Although the economy of Orgosolo has transformed and diversified, many residents continue to view the commons as a source of economic security and potential economic development. In 1989, a new ‘framework’ law 394 was passed, outlining a system of new parks and reserves to be created in Sardinia. The Gennargentu National Park reappeared here, and although the revised project5 won tentative support from some local residents, many saw the spectres of clientelism and corruption looming in the background. In 1998, the region and the state signed the final agreement defining the Gennargentu National Park. The legislation was suspended for review after another large 147 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 148

Tracey Heatherington

demonstration at Orgosolo highlighted ongoing local controversy, particularly given some last-minute enlargements to the park perimeters. In central Sardinia, competing discourses about the park and the future of Orgosolo’s commons emanate from various contexts, including politicaladministrative spheres and informal social spheres and categories. In the first category we find Italy and the European Union, the Autonomous Region of Sardinia, the province of Nuoro, municipal governments, and environmental lobbies as well as the Sardinian Forestry Service and the Sardinian Regional Forest Ranger and Environmental Protection Corps. In the more ambiguous second category we find tourists themselves, and the various interest groups (especially occupational classes) present within local communities.6 The World Wide Fund for Nature has remained particularly active through internet campaigns and attempts at public education (WWF 1998). Some moderate advocates of the park such as the Legambiente movement have supported calls to renegotiate the 1998 agreement in a way that better acknowledges the democratic process in local communities (see Chironi 1998; Diana 1998; Scroccu 1998).

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Time on a Landscape: Science and Social Practice Advocates of the Gennargentu National Park favour the creation of a single, centralised institution for environmental management. Environmental lobbies and members of government bureaucracies often recognise the ongoing work of the forestry service and the corps of forest rangers, as well as the innovative, scientifically informed initiatives of Orgosolo’s agricultural cooperative, in maintaining and improving the quality of the local environment. References to scientific authority, however, support calls for more comprehensive and systematic ecological management techniques. Technical discourses of environmentalism tend to model time in a linear way, gathering agency and moral authority over the landscape into the expert hands of institutions.7 They presume the history of human cultural ecology to have progressed from naive resource management on the part of isolated traditional rural cultures to inadequate resource management by transforming and economically developing societies as they become more open to the outside world (Heatherington 2001). For example, a technical report for the U.N.’s Man and Biosphere Project indicated that traditional methods of pastoral production in the Mediterranean had been subverted by a new cultural-economic context, and so transformed into the source of ecological disequilibrium (Tomaselli 1977). Some government sources contend (see for example IASM 1983) that local institutions for common property management have recently fostered ‘irrational’ resource use in central Sardinia. The 148 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:08 PM Page 149

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

ongoing problem of forest fires is often linked to pastoral traditions and local ‘ignorance’.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Small-scale, community-based natural resource regimes are typically dismissed as an aspect of the cultural past, which no longer ‘works’ within the contemporary world.8 The perceived failure of local management structures has been used to legitimize the appropriation of rural environmental resources by centralized institutions, to satisfy the needs of a larger, national community with a large urban population. Alfonso Alessandrini, national director for the mountain economy and for forests in Italy during the late 1980s, has claimed that the public interest in forests transcends the immediate needs of those who depended upon exploiting them in ‘traditional’ ways. (Cerrina 1987: 87)

The politician visualised rural populations as uninterested in proper forestry management, and believed only scientific authority, in the form of ‘data’ that were ‘true, controllable and up-to-date’ (Cerrina 1987), could support good resource management. Modernist tropes often represent authentic environmentalism to be the outcome only of public institutions supported by an ‘educated’, forward-looking, urban citizenship. In national park literature, landscapes become enwrapped in a scientifically authorised discourse about large-scale changes in cultural ecology.9 These sweeping historical narratives often obscure the variety of structural possibilities for comanagement and decentralised rural ecodevelopment, in favour of ‘monumentalising’ historical landscapes – or rather, archetypal representations of them. Herzfeld has persuasively argued that efforts at historic conservation enable institutions and governments to affirm ideologised, monolithic versions of history, which he calls ‘monumental time’ (Herzfeld 1991). Monumental time can be written into spaces, so that state bureaucracies attempt to reify nationalist visions by controlling the preservation, reconstruction, and conversion of architectural landscapes. The linear histories told to explain and support initiatives to ‘conserve’ ecosystems are similarly inscribed, I argue, upon the ‘natural’ landscape, through the exercise of environmentalist ‘ways of seeing’. In contrast, residents discussed ways to preserve, reauthorise and gradually transform an existing traditional ecology. Their everyday social practices enveloped the commons in a reforging of dynamic ties between past, present and future; such local discourses fixed the landscape not in time, but rather, within a definitive cultural space. The fluid time of Orgolese ‘tradition’ corresponds rather well to what Herzfeld describes as ‘social time’: the unkempt flow of experience, managed and remembered by pragmatically and socially oriented actors. Herzfeld sees social time, like monumental time, as written into material spaces by human protagonists. In the case of Orgosolo, we can see how residents contested the national park by ‘inscribing social time on a landscape’ (Herzfeld 1991). 149

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 150

Tracey Heatherington

Contested ‘Ways of Seeing’

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Gino is a partner in a thriving ecotourism enterprise that provides outdoor lunches for large groups and small charter tours of Orgosolo’s commons. Cultural tourism (cf. Satta 2001) began to play a role in Orgosolo’s economy only after the Second World War, while two or three guiding businesses with jeeps began to promote ‘ecotourism’ during the 1990s. In July of 1998, Gino picked up four tourists and drove us all out of town, continuing on past the end of the paved highway to navigate rugged roads that begin near the foot of Monte San Giovanni. We trundled through forested areas and along steep slopes. The visitors were enthusiastic, assured of penetrating hidden landscapes. Gino produced a lively, well-informed account of local ecology that subsumed elements of environmental discourse within a master narrative of indigenous culture. The itinerary included sites of prehistoric archaeology (nuraghe Mereu, domus de janas, tombe dei giganti) and geographic landmarks (the source of the Cedrino river, Monte San Giovanni). The ‘cultural’ and the ‘natural’ wonders of the communal territory were presented as intrinsically

Figure 6.3 ‘Lunch with the Shepherds’: Egidio Manca demonstrates cheesemaking for Sardinian schoolchildren (photograph by Tracey Heatherington) 150

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 151

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

bound together throughout history: the traditional and semitraditional animal shelters and shepherds’ huts marked ongoing ecological bonds between the people and the land. Our guide pointed out both wild and semidomesticated animals as we passed near their haunting grounds; he pointed out eagles overhead, spoke with reverence of the beauty of the mufflons and told us about the adaptive characteristics of indigenous cattle kept on natural pastures. The perception of inherent blending of nature and culture on the local topos informed Gino’s subtle argument against the institution of a Gennargentu National Park by the state: ‘il parco già c’è’ (there is already a park), he said. ‘Il parco, l’abbiamo fatto noi’ (We have made the park ourselves). Gino explained that Orgosolo’s forest was ‘l’unica foresta vera’ (the only true forest) in the area designated to become a Gennargentu National Park. Orgosolo’s sar Vaddes is a very rare example of mature oak forest at the heart of its communal territory, long treasured, used and husbanded by shepherds and by the town administration. When we reached this area of living sanctuary, we found oaks of astonishing size, a few small cows of indigenous breed, a sow with a litter sired by an indigenous wild boar, and both ‘traditional’ (old shelters fashioned from rock and juniper) and semitraditional animal enclosures. The landscape itself was represented by our guide as a testament to pastoral traditions. A couple of lovely old stone shelters were now roofed by garish plastic; according to Gino this was the result of a mistake on the part of the forestry service, which had forbidden the herders to use juniper branches to make traditional-style rooves. When the tourists marvelled at a dead trunk of magnificent girth, Gino said that this ‘patriarch’ oak had been hit by lightning in 1994. ‘Ci sono pastori che hanno pianto per quell’albero quand’è morto,’ (There are shepherds who cried for that tree when it died), he told us. The authentic symbiosis of herders and forest was a key theme in Gino’s narrative. The shepherds had made the place ‘un giardino’ (a garden), he said, since by pruning juniper branches for their enclosures and shelters they rendered the shape of the trees aesthetically pleasing, without harm to the ecology. Our picnic lunch provided by Gino featured distinctive local meats and cheeses to further persuade us that pastoral traditions at Orgosolo remained authentic. The climactic finale of the day trip was the view from Monte San Giovanni. We left the jeep and climbed up towards the peak. Midway up the mountain slope there was an animal shelter still in use, built from natural materials by contemporary herders. Once we attained the view from the summit, Gino explained that evidence of Orgosolo’s ‘traditional’ pastoral life was spread out for the eye to see, since around the base of the mountain there are high plateau areas of the commons used extensively for pasture. Gino showed us the outlines of a chapel on the mountain crest used during medieval times, and noted that Catholic processions were made on foot to visit the mountain once a year until just after the Second World War. Gino also introduced us to local 151

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 152

Tracey Heatherington

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

men stationed by the forestry service to watch for fires. We were offered local wine by the men and shown around the lookout, transformed from tourists into guests by the cultural magic of hospitality. Our view from the peak of Monte San Giovanni was therefore not the distanced vision of a wilderness from on high, but a social vision anchored within a web of ongoing, distinctively localised and personalised relationships. How does a landscape become a story, a narrative testament to the structure of time, and the ‘nature’ of history itself? Where scientific eyes have seen wild spaces, rare species, the odd anachronistic shepherd, and the potential to ‘preserve’ an historical ecosystem, Gino saw signs of traditional, cultural habitation not only in prehistoric architecture and old-fashioned shepherds’ huts, but also in the rich forests, the pure springs, and the profusion of wildlife. Gino did not see the Supramonte of Orgosolo in a state of historical isolation, where the impacts of the world system have led to the abandonment and degradation. Rather, his vision of the landscape powerfully situated the commons in fluid social time, the time of a self-regenerating, custodial and adapting pastoral community. The creation of a new Park Authority would reorganise both land use and the means of self-portrayal available to people in Orgosolo. Herzfeld (1991) suggests that the ‘museumisation of the landscape’ tends to favour official narratives of identity, yet contrasting historical visions and political agendas may also be inscribed in key spaces. As a ‘natural cathedral’, Monte San Giovanni is in fact a strategic and sensual site for the representation of contested histories.

The Cathedral of Orgosolo Santina, what can you tell me about Monte San Giovanni? Monte San Giovanni is the ‘cathedral’ of Orgosolo. Why do you say that? In general, everyone presents the most precious things to their friends. We take them to Monte San Giovanni if time and the weather permit. It has a high symbolic value, [an aesthetic] landscape value, also [it is the focus of] an attachment to the land. I mean to say that it is the most vital site of, let us say, the feeling of being owners of the land. Here it becomes most manifest. There is a symbiosis between man and the environment that here, at least, is more marked than in other places … It is the most representative part of the whole territory in this particular sense. The ‘cathedral’ would be the point where a citizenship gathers, let us say, in the deepest, most spiritual moments, and so we have Monte San Giovanni, though of course we also 152

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 153

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

have churches … [it is] the most beautiful thing that I can show, that I can offer [to guests], and with a great, great sense of pride. Santina Cossu, Orgosolo, April 2000

The eloquent comments of Santina, former president of the nature-hiking and spelunking club at Orgosolo and an independent member of the town council, suggest that we can see the mountain as a special place to which the people of Orgosolo are drawn to confirm meaningful relationships to a community, a cultural tradition, and the land itself. Cultural identity is strongly invested in Monte San Giovanni, so that the very ‘purity’ of nature itself is seen to bear witness and tribute to cultural authenticity. Both air and the water from ‘Fantana Bona’ at the foot of Monte San Giovanni are considered salubrious, and people make family excursions to the area for picnics in summertime. Popular magical lore also specifies how to gather herbs around the mountain at auspicious times, to make natural medicines. From a local perspective, true Sardinian history – a history based in pastoralism and the commons – becomes manifest in the taste of spring water, the freshness of the air, and the healing properties of herbal remedies. So, just as ritual bodies and the senses are key mediators of environmentalist discourses for outside visitors, they also mediate the cultural discourses generated in the town. Local residents think of Monte San Giovanni as a special place inscribed with deep traces of indigenous human history. Archaeological ruins in the neighbourhood of the mountain are a source of interest and pride for local people, and the ruins of the Catholic chapel tie the mountain top into stillvibrant traditions of festival procession from the town into sacred places in the landscape. In their own visits to the site, ‘ritual bodies’ are aligned with their own perceptions of the past: by going out to the mountain, they sample and reenact the experience of pilgrims as well as that of herders who once lived for months at a time in the surrounding countryside. They also reconfirm the ongoing presence of the community, and thus their own part in shaping the aesthetic landscape. The centrality of authentic local food to gatherings in the countryside emphasises how the landscape is incorporated within a local system of social reciprocity and cultural practice that self-consciously celebrates its pastoral roots.

Cultural Authority One may ‘see’ Monte San Giovanni as a symbol of the global environment, or as a symbol of local culture, or as a mixture thereof, depending on how one is introduced to the spectacle. Legitimate authority over ‘nature’ is not currently taken for granted – rather, the thirty-year-old debate about whether or not to create a Gennargentu National Park in Sardinia has generated a range of narratives about the Sardinian environment that engage wider 153

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 154

Tracey Heatherington

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 6.4 Roundup on the commons (photograph by Tracey Heatherington)

discourses about ‘science’ and ‘culture’ in very different ways. Visitors to Monte San Giovanni may in fact position themselves (or find themselves positioned) in relation to two different kinds of authority over landscape and ecology: scientific authority and cultural authority. Reference to cultural authority recognises the historical importance of local ecological knowledge, and the role of local commitment to pastoral and communitarian traditions in maintaining the quality of the environment. In particular, some ethnonationalist-style discourses have emphasised that the resistance of local communities to the land privatisation schemes of the nineteenth century functioned to protect areas of common land from deforestation (see Salis 1990; Zucca 1992). Orgosolo’s rare old growth forest, for example, lies in a remote area of the municipally controlled commons rather than the area of Montes (around Monte San Giovanni and Monte Fumai) that has been managed by the government forestry service. Local opponents of the park scheme sometimes argue that a Park Authority would be guided not by science, but by a corrupt politics they believe to be ubiquitous throughout Italian public institutions. In contrast, residents say, they themselves depend upon the commons and it is their custodianship that has made the landscape desirable for a national park. 154

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 155

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

One’s position with reference to ideas about both scientific and cultural authority over the environment frames actual visions of the mountain and its surroundings. Although the creation of the Gennargentu National Park may immanently privilege the former, it is important to recognise that local residents, tourist guides, and forest rangers with sensitivity to issues of local identity and welfare will continue to play a role in mediating the experience of Monte San Giovanni to visitors. Many of these individuals blend discourses of scientific and cultural authority together in their stories and explanations to outsiders, as Santina and Gino have done. Visitors themselves may arrive predisposed to witness elements of either nature or culture in the panorama before them. The ‘museum experience’ associated with a park or a landscape is therefore as much a product of processual negotiations over self-identity and representation as in any more conventional museum.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Entangled Authenticities The authenticity of ‘nature’ is deeply complicated by the way that local history and culture continue to be inscribed upon the landscape. Orgosolo’s public image as a ‘traditional’ shepherd village inevitably heightens the historical mystique of the landscape. One typically encounters cattle, sheep, pigs, goats, horses and herders themselves in the environs of Monte San Giovanni, and they are easily visible along the main road followed by tourists seeking to visit the peak. Still more thrilling for some tourists is the idea that the undomesticated landscape below also harbours the secrets of historical and contemporary bandits, outlaws and kidnappers. I once attended a special outdoor May Day concert held high on the slopes of Monte San Giovanni in honour of sequestration victim Sylvia Melis. Some thought that Melis herself might be held in one of the numerous caves or hidden features of Orgosolo’s Supramonte; if so, she would actually hear the music. Many local residents were insulted and skipped the concert, but a strong turnout of tourists and nature enthusiasts from outside suggested that the venue appealed to the imagination. What is the link between ideas about the authenticity of ‘nature’ and the prevailing stereotypes of local culture? Notions of ‘wilderness’ in Sardinia are intrinsically connected to a vision of cultural wildness associated with shepherds and bandits (Heatherington 2001). Environmental discourses commonly represent the landscapes associated with ‘traditional’, rural societies as more ‘natural’ than those associated with ‘modern’, industrial or urban societies. It is important to consider how representations of cultural authenticity may be used to reinforce the idea that the landscape itself remains much as it was in the past. 155 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 156

Tracey Heatherington

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Natural Magic The ‘natural magic’ of Monte San Giovanni is an example of the ‘museum effect’ possible with a landscape on display. In museums, objects are physically taken out of their original social and cultural contexts; the creation of a national park entails a similar process by setting legal and symbolic boundaries between park and community, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and excluding some traditional activities such as hunting from the reserve area. To ‘set apart’ an area of ‘genuine nature’ and evoke discourses of scientific authority with which to give it meaning is a powerful alchemy. The sensuality of immersion in the ‘wilderness’ adds a special quality to what Steven Greenblatt (1990) has called the ‘resonance and wonder’ of museums. And, because our cultural relationship to ‘the environment’ is increasingly important to our ideas about who we are (or would like to be) as moral persons and citizens, our visits to parks and nature reserves often acknowledge a sacred character to the landscape. Yet issues of authority, authenticity and ritual structure the museum effect at Monte San Giovanni in ambivalent ways, cautioning us against a simplistic idea of how the museumisation of the landscape actually works. Monte San Giovanni constitutes a key symbolic space for both local residents and tourists, not to mention environmentalists. Ritual action is clearly a component of their visits to the mountain, as they perform politically relevant self-identities and seek the sensual affirmation of an imagined connection to history or the environment. A community of nature lovers and environmentalists and a cultural tradition of conservation may well be the most important points of reference for some visitors, so that the sensory appreciation of the landscape is linked to a discursive framework of scientific ecology. Other visitors may seek a tourism experience that allows them to appropriate ‘otherness’ by means of pilgrimage to an exotic cultural landscape. Within Orgosolo itself, only some residents continue to work on the land, and there is considerable diversity in how they themselves envision their pastoral heritage. There is significant fragmentation in the interpretation of tradition in the town despite the tendency to represent ‘local culture’ as a reified whole. Santina and Gino had extensive reading knowledge of local flora and fauna and were outspoken critics of pollution, arson, and overgrazing in their own community. They represent a growing nucleus of indigenous environmentalists who found value and authority in local knowledge and objected to the museumisation of the landscape. What is distinctive about Monte San Giovanni is that it not only allows space for contesting narratives of ecology and identity, it establishes alternative structures of authority, authenticity and ritual orientation. The symbolic boundary between ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ landscapes in central Sardinia continues to be highly permeable. The museum effect is thus a paradox: although aspects of local ecology have been objectified and abstracted in the 156 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 157

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

public imagination, they are never irrevocably deprived of their sociocultural context. The area designated to become a park is actually fixed in space relative to local communities, and local people frequently play a role in mediating the ‘naturalistic perceptions’ of visitors. Visions of nature ultimately remain embedded in multiple frames of experience including those of local historical self-identities. Monte San Giovanni casts many different spells upon its wondering visitors, and while some are intent upon reading the scientific secrets of ecology, others celebrate an intrinsic symbiosis of pastoral culture and the Sardinian environment.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

NOTES 1. Research in Baunei, Sardinia (1991–92) was supported by Fonds FCAR with additional assistance from the M.A.R.E. team at McGill University. Research in Orgosolo (1996–98) was supported by Fonds FCAR, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies at Harvard University, and the Mellon Foundation. An additional visit in early 2000 was assisted by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Special thanks to Francesco Pili, Gino Dore, Pietrino Cossu, Santina Cossu, Franco Dettori, Maurizio Bassu, Gavino Diana and many others in Sardinia. I am grateful to the editors and reviewers of this volume for helpful comments. 2. There is an abundance of environment and outdoor sports magazines in Italy that elaborate cultural discourses around wilderness adventure hiking. 3. During fieldwork in the town of Baunei, another community whose extensive local territory has been targeted to become part of the Gennargentu National Park, I spent considerable time with a large group of forest rangers drawn from all over Sardinia, including Orgosolo. At that time (1991–2), most of this group favoured the creation of the park but were often critical of how higher levels of government treated local communities and herders (Heatherington 1993). 4. Throughout central Sardinia, however, areas of the high plain were used for cereal agriculture in a mixed agropastoral system until recent decades (Angioni 1989; Meloni 1984). 5. Note the changing philosophy of national parks since the 1960s and integration of both traditional activities and local development projects in the new park plan (Masnata 1989/90; Sanna and Boccone 1989/90; Regione Sardegna 1996). From the perspective of towns such as Orgosolo and Baunei, which are targeted to contribute large areas of their communal lands to the project, the lack of clarity about how development funds and access to lands will be allocated has been problematic. 6. In Orgosolo, the most prominent groups today are the shepherds, the agricultural and construction cooperatives, the unemployed, the tourism operators, the forestry service workers and other wage workers (see Heatherington 2000). 7. Greenhouse (1996) has explored how linear representations of time shape the parameters of legitimate social agency. 8. Italian forestry experts have insisted on the need to introduce scientific principles to the practice of herding in Sardinia, as they complain about ‘the free and uncontrolled wandering of ever larger and hungrier herds’, ‘wild forms of pasturing’ (Podda 1986: 257), and ‘uncontrolled pasturing’ (Casu et al. 1984: 31). Angioni notes that Sardinian shepherds have frequently been portrayed as the ‘prototype of the pyromaniac’(1989).

157 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 158

Tracey Heatherington 9. Models drawn from scientific ecology have animated landscape architecture traditions in the American context. See Conan (2000) for discussion of environmental rhetorics and philosophies in landscape planning.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES Alpers, S. (1990) ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Lavine, S. and Karp, I. (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. pp. 25–32. Angioni, G. (1989) I Pascoli Erranti : Antropologia del Pastore in Sardegna. Naples: Liguori. APN (Amministrazione Provinciale di Nuoro) (1999) Cos’È Il Parco del Gennargentu? Official information pamphlet. Bell, C. (1992) Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brosius, P., Tsing, A. and Zerner, C. (1998), ‘Representing Communities: Histories and Politics of Community-Based Natural Resource Management’, Society and Natura Resources 11, pp: 157–68. Camboni, G. (ed.) (1991) Il Gennargentu. Cagliari: EdiSar. Casu T., Lai, G. and Pinna, G. (eds) (1984) Guida alla Flora e alla Fauna della Sardegna. Nuoro: Archivio Fotografico Sardo. Centro Parchi (1997) Effetto Parco / Park Effect. Rome: Public information leaflet. Cerrina, F. (1987), ‘Alla Ricerca del Bosco Perduto’, Gardenia, 43, (Nov.), pp. 85–95. Chironi, G. (1998) ‘Superior Stabat’, Nuoro Oggi, 11(3/4), pp. 9–10. Colomo, S. and Ticca, F. (eds), (1987) Sardegna da Salvare: Un Sistema di Parchi e Riserve Naturali per le Grandi Distesi Selvagge della Nostra Isola, Vol. 1. Nuoro: Archivio Fotografico Sardo. Conan, M. (ed.) (2000) Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks. Diana, G. (1998) ‘Cinica Partita sulla Pelle delle Popolazioni’, Nuoro Oggi, 11(3/4), pp. 7–8. Greenblatt, S. (1990) ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Lavine, S. and Karp, I. (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 42–56. Greenhouse, C. (1996) A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Heatherington, T. (1993) Environmental Politics in a Highland Sardinian Community. M.A. thesis. McGill University, pp. 153–76. –––––– (2000) ‘As If Someone Dear To Me Had Died’: The Orgosolo Commons and the Cultural Politics Of Environmentalism. Ph.D. thesis. Harvard University. –––––– (2001) ‘Ecology, Alterity and Resistance in Sardinia’, Social Anthropology, 9(3), pp. 285–302. Herzfeld, M. (1991) A Place in History. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 158 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 159

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni

Hetherington, K. (1996) ‘The Utopics of Social Ordering: Stonehenge as a museum without walls’, in Macdonald, S. and Fyfe, G. (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. London: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 153–76. IASM (Istituto per l’Assistenza allo Sviluppo del Mezzogiorno) (1983) Gli Usi Civici in Sardegna, document. Cagliari: Dipartimento EAT Assistenza Tecnica agli Enti Locali. IUCN (International Union for the Conservation of Nature) (1980) World Conservation Strategy, Washington, DC: World Wildlife Fund. Macdonald, S. (1996) ‘Theorizing Museums: an introduction’, in Macdonald, S. and Fyfe, G. (eds), Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World. London: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 1–18. Masnata, C. (1989/90) ‘Sviluppo Economico e Sociale nei Parchi’, Regione Autonoma della Sardegna, Enti locali notizie, 1, pp.13–14. Meloni, B. (1984) Famiglie di Pastori : Continuità e Mutamento in una Comunità della Sardegna Centrale, 1950–1970. Nuoro: Istituto Superiore Regionale Etnografico, Rosenberg & Sellier. Moore, S. (ed.) (1993) Moralizing States and the Ethnography of the Present. Washington DC: American Anthropological Association. Moore, S. and Myerhoff, B. (1977) ‘Introduction: Secular Ritual: Forms and Meanings’, in Moore, S. and Myerhoff, B. (eds), Secular Ritual. New York: Van Gorcum, pp. 3–24. Moro, G. (1982) ‘Le Lotte di Orgosolo (1966–1969)’, in Lussu, E. (ed.), Lotte Sociali: Antifascismo e autonomia. Conference proceedings, 4–6 January. Cagliari: Edizioni della Torre. Palumbo, B. (2001) ‘The Social Life of Local Museums’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 6(1), pp. 19–37. Podda, L. (1986) ‘Rapporti tra Pascolo e Bosco’, in Camarda, I. et al. (eds), L’Ambiente Naturale in Sardegna. Sassari: Carlo Delfino, pp. 247–58. Prato, G. (1993) ‘Political Decision-making: Environmentalism, Ethics and Popular Participation in Italy’, in Milton, K. (ed.), Environmentalism: the View from Anthropology. London: Routledge, pp. 174–88. Regione Sardegna, Assessorato alla Difesa dell’Ambiente and Provincia di Nuoro (1996) Studi per l’Istituzione del Parco Nazionale del Gennargentui. Public document. Gruppi di Coordinamento della Provincia e della Regione. Salis, G. (1990) Orgosolo tra Storia e Mito. Cagliari: Ettore Gasperini. Sanna, E. and Boccone, P. (1989/90) ‘La Stima di Accettabilità dei Parchi’, Regione Sardegna, Enti locali notizie, 1, 22–26. Satta, G. (2001) Turisti a Orgosolo: La Sardegna Centrale come Attrazione Turistica. Naples: Liguori Editore. Scroccu, G. (1998) ‘Gennargentu, un Parco “Storico”’, Nuoro Oggi, 11(3/4), pp. 11–12. Scuola di Pubblica Amministrazione e Governo Locale di Nuoro, Università degli Studi di Cagliari, and Assessorato all’Ambiente della Provincia di Nuoro (eds), (1992) Il Parco del Gennargentu: un’Occasione da non Perdere. Conference proceedings, Desulo. Tassi, F. (1998) Parchi Nazionali in Italia: Missione Impossibile? Rome: Ente Autonomo Parco Nazionale d’Abbruzzo. 159

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

06_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:09 PM Page 160

Tracey Heatherington

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Tomaselli, R. (1977) ‘Degradation of the Mediterranean Maquis,’ in Mediterranean Forests and Maquis: Ecology, Conservation and Management. Man and Biosphere Technical Notes 2. Paris : UNESCO, pp. 33–72. West, P. and Brechin, S. (eds) (1991) Resident Peoples and National Parks: Social Dilemmas and Strategies in International Conservation. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature, Sezione Regionale Sardegna and Sezione Gennargentu) (1998) Parco Nazionale del Golfo di Orosei e del Gennargentu: Facciamo chiarezza. Public document. Wright, R. and Mattson, D. (1996) ‘The Origin and Purpose of National Parks and Protected Areas’, in Wright, R.G. (ed.), National Parks and Protected Areas: Their Role in Environmental Protection. London and New York: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 3–14. Zucca, P. (1992) ‘Il Dovere di Opporsi a Operazioni di Colonizzazione’, in Il Parco del Gennargentu: un’Occasione da non Perdere. Conference proceedings. Desulo. Scuola di Pubblica Amministrazione et al. (eds). Cagliari: EdiSar.

160 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 161

C HAPTER 7 T HE P ERFORMANCE OF H ERITAGE IN A R ECONSTRUCTED , P OST-A PARTHEID M USEUM IN N AMIBIA Ian Fairweather




Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction Every Wednesday and Friday a luxury coach leaves the world-famous Etosha national park in Namibia. Its European occupants have spent the last few days viewing big game in the park. Their only contact with indigenous Africans has been with the well-groomed, English-speaking staff at the park’s luxurious lodges. For most tour operators, the next destination is one of the well-established tourist attractions in the south of Namibia, but for the occupants of this bus, the next item on the itinerary is to ‘experience the real Africa close at hand.’ In order to do this they will cross the ‘red line’, a cordon sanitaire into the communal areas to the north. There, among ‘the beautiful plains of Northern Namibia, amidst the makalani palms, mahangu fields and Owambo homesteads’ (museum publicity leaflet 1997) they will find their destination. The Nakambale museum is situated 5 km from the tarred road and 8 km from the town of Ondangwa, in the village of Olukonda. The museum occupies the premises of the first Finnish Evangelical Lutheran mission station in the region, and its name ‘Nakambale’ comes from the local name for the first missionary leader, Martti Rautenen. It is supposed to refer to a straw hat he wore. 161 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 162

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ian Fairweather

Here the visitors are guided through the physical space of the mission house, where they view several collections of objects, explained by an Englishspeaking Owambo1 guide. They are also taken into the old church and cemetery and around a ‘traditional homestead’, reconstructed on the site. More recently the tour has come to include a visit to a local homestead where they see mahangu (pearl millet) pounding and cooking in progress. There are also demonstrations of basket weaving and ‘hair making’, the local term for the creation of elaborate coiffures using plastic hair extensions. After the tour visitors are given a demonstration of ‘traditional’ dancing, and served a ‘traditional’ meal in ‘traditional’ Owambo bowls. They are also given the opportunity to buy woodcarvings from local sellers. Hence visitors are confronted not just by a collection of objects, but also by a performance that involves a significant number of local people. Satisfied by their ‘African experience’ the visitors return to their bus to be taken to their accommodation in the town of Oshakati. The museum staff, their friends and local people who have taken part sit down to consume the remains of the ‘traditional’ meal, before returning home. What has taken place here is not only a staged performance for the benefit of the visitors, but a moment of ceremonial interaction in which local boundaries are transcended and individuals meet on a kind of imaginary level which is to some extent shared. Participants, both locals and tourists act out predefined roles that allow the creation of this imaginary space for the exchange of cultural information. Nakambale museum is at the forefront of a developing tourism and heritage industry in North-Central Namibia, aimed at wealthy Europeans visiting the Etosha national park. Although the main ‘tourism product’ of the region is its distinctly local culture and ‘traditions’, the discourse of heritage makes it clear that in order to take part in this arena it is necessary to transcend the local and become part of a ‘regional product’ and a ‘national system’ in order to appeal to a ‘global market’. In Olukonda, the local discourse about ‘tradition’ and its meaning suggested that in the context of a museum and a developing heritage industry, talking about ‘tradition’ is modern. This chapter examines the meaning of the categories ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘global’, as well as terms like ‘traditional’ and ‘cultural heritage’ to the inhabitants of what is essentially a small rural community in Olukonda.

The Meanings of ‘Heritage’ and the Importance of the ‘Traditional’ In 1992, years after Namibia’s independence, the old missionary church at Olukonda was restored with the stated intention of ‘keeping the building as original as possible’ (proposal to the National Monuments Council, Dumeni 1992: 1). In the same year, at the request of Bishop Dumeni the church, 162

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 163

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

mission house and cemetery were declared a national monument, because of their historical importance. The Church council then began restoration of the mission house in 1995 with the intention of creating a museum so that, in the words of the local pastor, ‘people could come and see the history of this place’.2 Once this project was complete, a ‘traditional homestead’ was constructed which was intended as an ‘open air museum of its own’ (museum publicity leaflet 1997), in which guests could sample Owambo food and watch demonstrations of ‘traditional’ activities. It is significant that none of the people involved in this project saw any contradiction in the idea that a European mission station should be the venue for a museum dedicated to the preservation of Owambo tradition. I want to consider the meaning of ‘heritage’ and especially museums in the local context. It is interesting to note that the upsurge of interest in things traditional is articulated largely among the members of educated elites. Furthermore it comes at a time when speakers of Oshiwambo dialects who trace their roots to the rural north are filling positions of power in the young nation of Namibia. Despite its modernising, unifying rhetoric, the new government does not want to be seen as the enemy of traditions and cultural activities. Even the president, himself an Oshiwambo speaker, and leader of a party who for forty years have fought under the banner of modernisation and national unity has recently spoken out about the importance of preserving Namibia’s cultural heritage. The preservation of ‘traditions’ and ‘culture’ has ideological dimensions associated with Namibian nation building. Furthermore the ideological importance of ‘heritage’ is not new to Namibians who have been exposed to the ethnic policies of an apartheid regime. Many people are well aware of the wider implications of identifying one’s self with a particular ‘culture’. A local official at the Ministry of Basic Education and Culture wrote: ‘In the past culture was misused and this has left the impression that talking about culture means talking about invaluable things aimed at separating people’ (Nandi 1994). He refers of course to the apartheid era, when the South African administration, with the participation of traditional leadership, organised ‘cultural activities’. These activities were seen by many as a means of distracting people from oppression and emphasising cultural divisions between Namibians. The Nakambale museum clearly celebrates the arrival of the missionaries and Christianity, at the same time as seeking to preserve the local customs and traditions that missionaries are often supposed to have suppressed. The museum staff and the community manage this tension by reclaiming a colonial history of missionisation as their own. Whilst the museum displays create a picture of unchanging rural life and tribal organisation into which missionaries entered as a dynamic force for change, this sits uncomfortably with the dress, words and manner of the local people involved. For them Christianity 163

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 164

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ian Fairweather

is not something externally imposed, but an important aspect of their identity. In the local context their participation in ‘traditional activities’ in the museum associates them not with the ‘traditional’ past, constructed in opposition to Christianity, but with the Christian present. As they perform the story, Christianity becomes their own property, whilst ‘the traditional’ is put in its proper place – preserved in the museum. The villagers of Olukonda, newly emerged from the traumas of apartheid and war, look hopefully towards the future and the wider world. They frequently distinguish between the categories of the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’, but far from glorifying a precolonial past, they enthusiastically embrace what we might call the symbols of modernity, from Christianity to Coca-Cola. In fact, they are reluctant to reminisce about a past that they describe as a realm of paganism, illiteracy and isolation. Though they are certainly aware that the museum has the function of preserving things that might otherwise be forgotten, this is not its primary importance to them. Rather they are engaged in a continuous process of reconstructing their culture and the transformation of Nakambale’s house from mission to museum is an outward expression of this process. In North-Central Namibia the discourse of modernity is linked, via the tourism and heritage business, to a heightened concern with objectified and commoditised notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’. Oshiwambo speakers are in the process of constructing a meaningful category that they call the ‘traditional’ in opposition to the ‘modern’. By doing so they are able to place themselves firmly in the latter category, and the museum is an important part of this process. Firstly, it serves to circumscribe and contain those aspects of local identity that are categorised ‘traditional’. Perhaps more importantly however, this chapter will show that by presenting the story of the community’s development into a centre for trade and missionary activity, the museum celebrates its transition to ‘modernity’. Owambo ‘traditions’ have been shaped in the course of a long encounter with Europeans and thus ‘owe their meaning and shape to that encounter as much as to anything “indigenous”’ (Piot 1999: 1). Furthermore, like the Kabre of Piot’s study, the people of Olukonda found in the ‘traditional features’ of their lifestyles a means of entering the modern world. If tourists come to seek the ‘traditional’, locals welcome them precisely because they value cosmopolitanism and modernity. This makes for an interesting and revealing encounter. The work of Jean and John Comaroff (1993) highlights what they consider to be a particularly European myth, ‘a narrative that replaces the uneven protean relations between “ourselves” and “others” in world history with a simple epic story about the passage from savagery to civilisation’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xii). Although the Comaroffs suggest that this story is one told by Europeans from their own point of view, it is also a story 164

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 165

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

frequently told in Namibia, and clearly displayed in the Nakambale museum.3 The idea that modernity is the end point towards which nonwestern societies move in a teleological fashion may be characteristic of Euro-American social thought, but for Namibians and Oshiwambo speakers in particular the movement from a ‘traditional’ past to a state of ‘modernity’ is perceived as a reality to be striven for. Their place in the ‘modern’ world, long promised and struggled towards is perceived to be just around the corner, but in order to demonstrate when one has reached the state of ‘modernity’, it is necessary to have a clear understanding of what is ‘traditional’. The category known as ‘modernity’ is thus defined only in contrast to tradition. The myth of passage from savagery to civilisation is reproduced frequently in North-Central Namibia, in ways that valorise local people’s participation in this journey. The Nakambale museum presents a particularly graphic retelling of this story, which has developed from an interaction between Oshiwambo speakers and Finnish missionaries that lasted over one hundred years and continues in the present day. For this reason, it is a privileged site for an analysis of the conjunction between global forces and local historical trajectories.4 The buildings of the mission station are in one sense monuments to the missionary movement that accompanied European colonialism, and the museum itself is in part produced by the current global interest in heritage and cultural tourism, but its success is made possible by the specific forms of interaction that occurred between missionaries and local people at the end of the nineteenth century, and is currently occurring again between villagers and tourists, ironically in a space created by the previous interaction, which acts as a contact point for the present one. Nakambale Museum publicity states its aim to ‘introduce to the public, the church, mission and local cultures of the North with respect to both past and present’ (museum publicity leaflet 1997), thus representing itself as a cultural centre for the whole region.5 We will see that the Nakambale Museum is not only a central place in the current domain of tourism, but also a means through which the community of Olukonda represents itself as being at the very heart of the former ‘Ovamboland’6 in the past. It does so by emphasising the role of Nakambale’s church in uniting and modernising the Oshiwambo speakers as well as connecting them to the outside world. This is a paradox, for it is not Olukonda’s role as a cosmopolitan centre from which new ideas diffused into North Namibia that attracts the tourists. Rather tourists come in search of ‘the real Africa’, the image projected by the tourism industry of the rural African village, a small, stable, bounded community with a homogeneous local ‘culture’ which they can sample. In the domain of the tourism sector, outsiders move through a landscape populated by ‘locals’ who remain static in both space and time. It is the changeless rural existence and the continuity of traditions that tourists are supposed to want to see. Local people are expected to benefit in terms of revenues and employment 165

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 166

Ian Fairweather

opportunities, but they appear in some sense as exhibits rather than participants. Despite the necessity of providing this image, people consistently unseat this notion by their active engagement with the outside world. The movements of outsiders are important to local people, and not just as a source of income. The unique history of the area, from the people’s enthusiastic acceptance of Christianity, to Namibia’s internationally orchestrated transition to independence has given Oshiwambo speakers an outward-looking perspective. Not only wealth but also status and prestige in the local context can be achieved by demonstrating one’s relationships to outsiders, and links to the wider world. Tourism provides a new opportunity to forge these links, and for that reason is attracting a lot of attention in North Namibia.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Claiming the Colonial Past The reclaiming of a colonial past that takes place at Nakambale Museum is possible because of the particular historical contingencies of colonialism in North-Central Namibia, and the ambiguities of memory that have allowed Martti Rautenen, a nineteenth-century Finnish peasant, to become a twentiethcentury Owambo folk hero. Despite much recent writing encouraging anthropologists to regard their subjects as active agents of history,7 it is still all too easy to regard colonialism and mission Christianity only as an imposition of the cultural values of a dominant foreign power upon a purely local culture. Oshiwambo speakers, however, have never regarded their Christianity in these terms. The people of Olukonda remember the colonial era in terms of a cleavage between those who developed a close identification with Finnish mission Christianity and those who did not. In order to understand how this cleavage came to be such a powerful social fact we must return to the late nineteenth century, when the first Finns arrived in the territory then known as Owamboland. In the mid-nineteenth century, southern Namibia was evangelised by the London Missionary Society and the Rhenish Missionary Society. The two societies worked closely together and their outlooks had important similarities. Northern Namibia however was not fully incorporated into the German colonial polity, and remained a largely autonomous labour reserve. When Rhenish missionary Hugo Hahn visited Owamboland in 1866 the Owambo kings were insistent in their demands that he send them missionaries. The RMS itself lacked the manpower to open up a new field, and so when Hahn returned to Europe and addressed a gathering of the newly constituted Finnish Missionary Society, he invited them to come to Owamboland. The Finnish Mission Society had been formed in 1857 with the aim of sending Lutheran missions to the Finno-Ugric speakers of northern Russia, who were linguistically and ethnically related to the Finns, but were practically 166 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 167

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

pagan. The Lutheran church had always been implicated in the development of a Finnish national consciousness and so this aim was consistent with the emergence of Finnish nationalism, but when the Tsar refused the Finns permission to preach in Russia, they were left with little choice but to accept Hahn’s invitation, and the first missionaries arrived in Owamboland in 1871. The attitudes of Finnish missionaries differed from those of many others. Unlike British and German missionaries, they had no interest in spreading their own language in Namibia. Instead they made a great effort to master local languages. Furthermore they believed that religion should be a matter of individual choice and that, as in Finland, church and state should coexist independently. They saw their duty as preaching the word of God and no more (Du Plessis 1911). The fact that Finns were engaged in a project of cultural nationalism at home made them very sensitive to issues of culture, nationality and religion. They saw themselves in one sense as guardians and protectors of the ‘Owambos’ and their traditional way of life, but at the same time were ready to denounce most African traditional behaviour as unacceptable and unchristian. Although missionaries were prepared to defer to kings in all matters that they considered to be secular, they were increasingly prepared to defy them in matters of religious conscience. From a local perspective, it was precisely these matters that constituted the greatest challenge to the king’s authority. At the same time they offered literacy and education to all who would accept it and empowered their converts by making them teachers and pastors. This implicit challenge to a traditional system of authority increasingly weakened by the encroachment of the colonial power certainly encouraged local acceptance of the missionaries’ message. For Oshiwambo speakers in North-Central Namibia the twentieth century has seen an unprecedented amount of historical change but their performative8 social order has tended to assimilate itself to historical contingencies so that ‘circumstances [we]re often marked and valued for their differences’ (Sahlins 1985: xii), because they allowed people to reconstruct their social conditions. The colonial history of North-Central Namibia presents Oshiwambo speakers with a set of ambiguities. They value its beneficial elements, roads, schools and hospitals, but the memory of oppression and terror, whilst rarely brought out into the open, lurks just below the surface. As a forward-looking people, the tendency is to move on and to think of the past only in terms of its usefulness today. In the experience of Oshiwambo speakers, it was not their own traditionalism, but the apartheid state that restricted their access to the benefits of modernity offered to them by the Finnish mission.9 It was their party, SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation) that demanded modernisation, whilst the apartheid regime tried to emphasise tradition. What does this mean for a heritage industry aimed at preserving local Owambo traditions? A close look at the heritage movement reveals how 167

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 168

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ian Fairweather

Oshiwambo speakers are once more incorporating a received idiom into their own understandings in response to the dilemmas of postcolonial nation building. Since Owambo history is one of intrusion and domination by Europeans it is tempting to see current developments, including the heritage movement itself, as reproducing the dominant European order. Museums after all are a western cultural idiom that has been incorporated into postcolonial African societies. ‘It is only recently that peoples or groups, nations and even cities have felt that to be represented in a museum was to be given recognition as a culture’ (Alpers 1991: 30). Alpers argues that museums are conditioned by a particular western way of seeing that she calls the ‘ritual of attentive looking’. Objects are selected for visual interest and displayed in ways that transform them by isolating them from their contexts and offering them up for attentive looking. Therefore not all cultures lend themselves to representation in a museum since some have more artefacts of visual interest than others. The Europeans who helped create the Nakambale Museum had in mind this particular way of seeing and so it is inherent in the layout of the displays, but that in itself may have a local significance. Although many objects in the museum are still to be found in use today, those in the museum are out of context and are regarded by locals as ‘old things’. As such they are considered to be of interest to foreign visitors, and also legitimate representations of ‘the traditional’. The museum itself is not only about seeing. It is also a site of ceremonial performance during which, many objects are encountered in context. With each visit, the particular version of the past presented by the museum is enacted, and thus given meaning in the present. Now in a climate of postwar reconstruction the villagers are taking advantage of this opportunity to reclaim past events. The tourism and heritage movement gives them an opportunity to tell history from their own point of view rather than simply reproducing colonial and postcolonial hegemonic narratives precisely because that history is performed rather than written. Media images directed at tourists present racial and ethnic differences as natural and unchanging characteristics. At the same time they attempt to rewrite history by projecting current ideals of a unified nation into the past. These images contrast the ‘traditional’ nature of rural Namibian life with the modernity and cosmopolitanism of the capital, but despite the images of rurality and locality projected in the discourse of tourism it is in fact cosmopolitanism that is celebrated at Nakambale Museum. The central places on the tourist map are central precisely because they are where people both local and foreign come together. They are also places defined by ceremonial performances in which local history and culture are presented to outsiders. These performances reflect the perceptions of tourism developers and local people of what tourists want to see, whilst struggling to conform to the official narrative of Namibian nation building. Nevertheless 168

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 169

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

the performances themselves are an opportunity for local people to express their identities and to portray themselves in the ways in which they want to be seen. These presentational strategies may conflict with the narratives of nationalism and cultural tourism being performed, but, at Nakambale, they are successfully woven together into a complex whole that is meaningful to both locals and visitors. This is not a conscious subversion, for the performers at Nakambale museum would not regard their culture as antithetical to modernity. For them the museum itself serves to demonstrate their history of successful incorporation of the foreign and new. The past importance of this place is a source of pride to the people of Olukonda, and I argue that this comes through in their performances for tourists at the museum. Whilst they are reenacting a ‘traditional’ past in the shell of an old colonial building, they are claiming the place, and its potential to bring in coach loads of outsiders as their own. The museum’s displays may present a story told through the eyes of the missionaries, but it is precisely because it celebrates the community’s past links to the rest of the world that it is a source of pride in the present. If the tourists come to see a presentation of the local and the traditional, local people want to present the cosmopolitan and the modern. The museum performance results from a compromise between the two. This compromise is made possible because of the different understandings of the categories ‘traditional’ and modern’ on the part of locals and tourists and the different meanings attached to the museum itself. The people of Olukonda refuse to be simply living exhibits in the museum. In fact, after spending a long time in Olukonda I came to see that from a certain angle it is the tourists who are on display as local people gather to meet them. When thirty or so tourists file into a local homestead to see people engaged in ‘daily life’ they find it full of local visitors who are not interested in the mundanities of millet pounding and cooking, but in the ‘modernities’ of cosmopolitan social interaction. Both villagers and tourists are engaged in an encounter with an exotic other and both bring their own meanings and understandings into play. This opens up space for what Sahlins might call a ‘creative misunderstanding’ (Sahlins 1985), which confirms and enriches the participant’s sense of agency and individuality. It does this because both locals and tourists have different understandings of what is actually taking place. This brings me to the museum itself and its importance in this compromise, for museums are unequivocal symbols of modernity. Only those in a position to forget the past have a need to preserve it. For the villagers there is an obvious continuity between Olukonda as the centre for the church, and Olukonda as a centre for the tourist trade, and this comes from a sense of the community’s success in adapting to change. From the point of view of the people of Olukonda, the museum represents this success, and this is the underlying impression conveyed in the museum performance. 169

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 170

Ian Fairweather

The Museum as a Site of Ceremonial Performance

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The performative nature of the regular interactions between local people and tourists at the Nakambale Museum is particularly striking. Museum tours are complex communicative events, combining visual displays with verbal and nonverbal interactions that leave considerable room for improvisation. As such, no two visits are the same, but all are acceptable versions of the museum story. There is however a considerable amount of standardisation in these performances. The displays remain fixed and the tour always takes the same format. Guides tend to stop at the same points and the similar narrative fragments are inserted in response to particular displays. Tours therefore combine ritualised repetition with spontaneous performative moments. For this reason I treat them as ‘ceremonial performances’. Ceremonial rites and everyday routines are all forms of symbolic practice. As the Comaroff ’s (1993) observe, applying the study of ritual to mundane meaningful practice and detaching it from the sacred we allow the possibility that ritual may be created in practice, transforming rather than reproducing the environment in which it occurs. These secular rituals or ceremonies can be seen as vital elements ‘in the processes that make and remake social facts

Figure. 7.1 A plan of the Nakambale Museum showing the route of the guided tour and highlighting several important stops on the tour (from a handout given to visitors at the start of the tour) 170

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 171

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

and collective identities everywhere’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xvi). Intricately situated performances like those at the Nakambale museum have complex historical potential. The Comaroffs (1993) among others have shown that the ongoing revaluation of signs has always been a feature of African creativity. Ritual innovators have long redeployed colonial introductions including Christianity to ‘craft novel forms of practice, and offer commentaries on African history as it unfolds’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxii). Most importantly, this has often been accomplished without written words or texts and the Nakambale Museum performances accomplish precisely that. The production of new wealth often depends on appropriating the productive resources of others, while collaborating to some degree in their authority. Ceremonial performances like those at the museum make this possible because they are able to express ambivalent and ambiguous motives that both contest and confirm aspects of the dominant orders. As guardians of collective memory, museums partake of the larger cultural struggle over conceptions of shared history and ways of speaking about the past (Katriel 1992: I). Despite their reproduction of the collective master narrative (Katriel 1992: II), museums provide opportunities for an appropriation and rewriting of this narrative, in the performances of local individuals,

Figure 7.2 Local schoolchildren perform ‘traditional dances’ at the Nakambale Museum (photograph by Ian Fairweather) 171

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 172

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ian Fairweather

or the understandings of their audiences. This accounts for the power of the heritage movement as a means of ‘reconstructing the past and nurturing cultural roots’ (Katriel 1997: 3). At Nakambale Museum, tourists not only interact with the guide, but also with the family whose homestead they visit, the performers of the local dance group, the ladies who cook and serve the meal, craft sellers and sundry spectators from the community. Although these interactions are very limited they are a part of the overall performance experienced by the visitors and as such all these individuals contribute to the construction of the museum experience. All museums draw on the cultural assumptions of their makers. Some elements are emphasised at the expense of others, some truths are asserted and others ignored (Karp and Lavine 1991: 1). Thus, by its nature the exhibiting of cultures is a contested terrain. In the present climate of globalisation and multiculturalism, ‘the inherent contestability of museum exhibitions is bound to open the choices made in those exhibitions to heated debate’ (Karp and Lavine 1991: 1). It is usually taken for granted that the role of museum guides and those who perform reenactments in museum settings is to increase the visitor’s sense of identification with the museum’s version of the past. The ‘inherent contestability’ of museum displays however suggests the possibility of simultaneous, multiple interpretations of the past being presented. Museums can no longer be regarded as objective models of reality, but are better conceived as a ‘forum’ for debating the past (Cameron 1972: 201). If we allow this possibility we are forced to consider, which version of the past does the museum performance encourage identification with? European visitors to the Nakambale Museum come in search of an encounter with the exotic. The job of the performers and guides is to stimulate their interest by bringing the displays to life. They act as mediators between the world presented in the museum and the world of the visitors, and the identification they seek to create is a two-way encounter. I have argued that despite the images of a localised, ‘traditional’ society that attract visitors to the museum in the first place, Owambo cultural identity has long been articulated in an ongoing interaction with the global system. The story of Martti Rautenen’s arrival in Ondonga, and the subsequent conversion of Oshiwambo speakers to Christianity is an important turning point in that interaction and is remembered as such by the villagers of Olukonda. It is from this starting point that local people interpret the museum narrative, as cosmopolitan citizens of a ‘modern’ world that they share with the visitors. The museum story thus serves as a way to link visitors to a world that the locals situate in the past at the same time as it situates locals in the contemporary world of independent Namibia. The museum narrative of progress and civilisation is presented in reverse, a kind of journey back into a pagan past. On entering, the visitor is immediately confronted with a display of traditional Owambo weaponry, apparently 172

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 173

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

setting the scene for our tour, but this first impression is dislocated when we read that the weapons were donated by the missionary museum in Helsinki, disturbing our sense of the locality of these items. The contrast is emphasised when we see that this display stands back to back with one devoted to the ordination of the first local pastors and is located in a room dedicated to the ‘development of the church’. From the comforting familiarity of contemporary Owambo Christianity we are led into a reconstruction of Nakambale’s study and through a room filled with items collected from old mission stations: lanterns, medical instruments, sewing machines and old shotguns. Only in the last two rooms do we encounter the ‘traditional household’ and ‘traditional society and livelihoods’. Here the exotic and the unusual are emphasised in displays of hunting and fishing equipment, ivory and ostrich eggshell jewellery, wooden statues, gourds and pots. Among all this exotica however we find the museum shop, selling ‘traditional’ baskets, T-shirts and soft drinks. The layout of the museum thus contrasts the ‘traditional’ with the ‘modern’ Owambo way of life, but it also charts the rise to importance of the community of Olukonda as the centre of the church, and emphasises its current renaissance as a centre for tourism. The story of missionisation and the gradual permeation of European ideas into the Owambo way of life can be, and is, presented as a success story, for the community’s fortunes are linked intimately with the development of the Lutheran Church. The museum’s publicity proudly announces that ‘throughout the German colonial time, it [Olukonda] was the “capital of The North”’ (museum publicity leaflet 1997). It became so because of the arrival of Nakambale and the Finnish missionaries and the museum’s raison d’être is to celebrate this event. For a time Olukonda became the centre of Christianity, and the arrival of the missionaries’ ox carts from Swakopmund bringing cargoes from Europe brought both wealth and prestige to the community. Its importance grew as Christianity spread until it became a centre not just for the kingdom of Ondonga, but also for the whole region. At the end of the last century, Olukonda was the undisputed centre of the rapidly growing Finnish mission church, which by then spread from Ondonga to the neighbouring kingdoms. From this centre came the voice of the church’s folk hero, Martti Rautenen or Nakambale, a figure who, according to the stories, was even able to assert his authority over the kings on occasion. One important stop on the tour is at the staircase to the attic where visitors are invited to climb up and experience the stifling heat of the cramped space below the roof. The guide explains that sometimes, young women would run to the missions to escape the dreaded Efendula initiation ceremonies for girls.10 Sometimes the girl’s parents, or even the king, would come to take them home, but Martti Rautenen would hide them in the attic until they could be baptised and thus exempted from the ceremony. The king, we are told, knew that the girls were there but he did nothing because he was afraid of Nakambale. The guide who 173

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 174

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ian Fairweather

tells this story makes it clear that Efendula is as foreign to her as it is to the visitors, and we are left with a comforting sense of Nakambale’s protective power. The relationship between the museum displays and the museum performance is a multilayered one. The displays and their contexts set the limits for the performance as well as acting as triggers for performative acts. These acts are ceremonial in that they are repeated in each performance and are intended to produce certain meanings. They include the explanatory narratives of the guides at the various stops along the tour, but also nonverbal performances like the serving of the meal in Owambo bowls in the reconstructed homestead, and the millet pounding and cooking in the ‘real’ homestead. On one level these acts reaffirm the meanings encoded in the displays themselves – that is they demonstrate the exotic, ‘traditional’ nature of Owambo society, but this is not all they do. By elevating the museum story from the level of visual display to that of personal interaction they serve to render its meaning more complex. Local people figure largely in the displays, and especially the photographs, which come from mission archives and ethnographic collections. However these present images of ‘natives’, partially clothed, exotic looking and in some cases posing at different angles for the camera. What is brought into focus by the arrangement of objects and photographs in the collections is the civilising mission of the Finnish missionaries. In a report on the Nakambale museum, Werner Thaniseb, of the National Museum in Windhoek, notes that the museum presents a ‘very colonial picture’ (Thaniseb 1998: 1). He argues that the subjectivity of the displays influences the visitors’ understanding of history, particularly if they are foreigners with little understanding of Namibia’s past. However the staged performances or ‘ceremonial interactions’ that take place at Nakambale museum allow local people and their audiences to construct ways of interpreting the displays ‘that do not merely rehearse traditional western ways of organising experience and that respond imaginatively to the presuppositions of visitors not acquainted with the areas involved’ (Karp and Lavine 1991: 7). That the museum’s displays appear to present a colonial view of Owambo history is partly a reflection of its stated aim, to celebrate the history of the church in North-Central Namibia, and partly due to the influence of the church in its development. Nevertheless the villagers did not seem to feel that they were engaged in a project which did not do justice to their own understanding of the past, or which presented only the views of a colonial minority. The fact is that, for better or worse, the history of the people of Olukonda is bound inextricably to that of the Lutheran church and any attempt to disassociate them would lead to misrepresentation. What Thaniseb’s report does not comment upon is the way that the church’s message is appropriated by local people in their performances for visitors. It is not by open contestation or deliberate subversion that local people transform the message encoded in 174

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 175

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 7.3 A reconstruction of Nakambale’s study which forms part of the display entitled ‘Translating the Bible’ (photograph by Ian Fairweather)

the museum displays. Rather their infectious enthusiasm and obvious enjoyment of the interaction invite the visitor to share their own orientation to the story of the mission in the north. This is most apparent in the performances of the guides. Each guide has her own ‘patter’, which is repeated with only minor changes in each tour. Certain displays are always pointed out and similar stories told. Two of the most important displays are situated at the beginning of the tour. The first, entitled ‘Translating the Bible’ is positioned beside the reconstruction of Nakambale’s study where the first Oshindonga bible takes pride of place in a display cabinet surrounded by examples of early literature. The second is a display board headed ‘Olukonda as the ‘capital’ of Owamboland’, which bears five old maps showing old travel routes from Swakopmund, the port that connected colonial Namibia to the rest of the world. On these maps Olukonda is clearly marked, along with larger towns in the south like Outjo and Omaruru. At these points the guide stops and draws her audience’s attention to the display by dramatically removing a dust cover. In the former case she gestures 175

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 176

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Ian Fairweather

to the reconstructed study and explains that it was here that Martti Rautenen sat and translated the bible into Oshindonga. The latter display requires further explanation, describing the old missionary route and the dangers it involved. The key moment however is when she proudly points out that the nearby towns of Ondangwa and Oshakati are not marked on the maps, because at that time they did not exist. In these two examples the guide invokes a sense of the importance of this place in a historical chain of events that involved the whole world. Olukonda was quite literally ‘on the map’ with regard to the spread of Christianity. These displays present Olukonda as a ‘central place in a nationwide network’ (Werbner 1973), which links it to the international arena. What is being celebrated here is not just the arrival of the missionaries, but also the arrival of literacy, and trade with its attendant prosperity, and most of all the incorporation of Olukonda into a wider sphere. Interaction with outsiders is portrayed as a positive thing, in which Oshiwambo speakers actively engaged. The coming of the missionaries brought the wider world to Owamboland and with it, literacy, healthcare and a sense of belonging to a larger community. These were perceived as beneficial by many people and accepted to such an extent that by the 1920s local headmen were complaining to the native administration that the numerous bush schools of the Finnish mission were undermining their authority. Another strategy employed throughout the tour is what Katriel (1997) calls ‘identification within distance’, a kind of enacted ambivalence to the museum displays, which seems to convey the performers’ sense of distance from the objects under scrutiny. A revealing demonstration of this strategy takes place at a popular stop on the tour in the room entitled ‘Owambo culture’. The guide points out a display case filled with heavy copper ankle rings and explains that these were worn by young women when they were betrothed. The number and size of these rings displayed the wealth of the woman’s fiancé but, the guide explains in conspiratorial tones, they also made it impossible for her to walk to the next village to find another husband. In sharing this information, the guide also shares the European women’s sense of outrage at this practice. It is clear from her dress and demeanour that this independent, respectable young woman, employed in an important position, would never subject herself to this kind of control. This form of ‘identification within distance’ is employed by all the participants in the performance, including those who do not speak. Their participation in ‘traditional activities’ clearly invites identification, but at the same time their actions and attitudes convey their own sense of distance from what is portrayed. This is particularly apparent in the way everyone, the local ‘visitors’ who await the tourists in the local ‘homesteads’, the cooks and even the children in the ‘traditional dance group’ always wear their best western clothes for the performance. It is as if the displays of Owambo ‘traditional 176

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 177

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 7.4 Copper anklets, part of a display of ‘Ladies’ Ornaments’ in the section entitled ‘Traditional Personal Belongings’ (photograph by Ian Fairweather)

culture’ in the museum serve as a kind of background against which contemporary Oshiwambo speakers can demonstrate the cosmopolitan nature of their culture today. Thus even whilst demonstrating their ‘traditional’ culture, local people enact their own versions of modernity, and demonstrate their own agency in embracing change. The impression given is not the unambiguous story presented by the displays alone for the performers use the objects on display, and the physical space of the museum to create a kind of collage. The objects and images are arranged in ways that suggest a changeless tribal society awaiting the advent of the missionaries in order to become civilised, thus reproducing the colonial myth of passage from savagery to civilisation. The demonstrations, the dancing and the serving of the meal all call to mind the traditional, but at the same time bring the performers into contact with a wider world of which they feel a part. The local staff of the museum, the young dancers and the ‘performers’ who demonstrate ‘traditional’ activities do not feel themselves to be enacting a story of European words and deeds, but one of their own struggle to become the people they are today. This story includes their acceptance 177

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 178

Ian Fairweather

of Christianity with its attendant benefits of literacy and healthcare, and their adoption of European clothing and technologies. This ritualised performance in its entirety draws the visitors more deeply into the world of the local participants in which they construct themselves as a community that has welcomed change. The result is a complex juxtaposition of present and past, which highlights both contrast and continuity. It reaffirms villagers’ understandings of themselves as independent actors in the very act of performing the hegemonic narratives of church and state, and providing the visitors with the experience of ‘traditional Africa’ they sought.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Conclusion This chapter developed from research focussing on issues of identity in a postapartheid state by collecting life histories and historical narratives in the community of Olukonda.11 The intention was to understand how people used the remembered past to position themselves in relation to the community and the nation state by analysing the way they expressed their experiences of colonialism, from conversion to Christianity to participation in the liberation struggle. Most people, however, were reluctant to talk about the past, as if they did not regard the momentous events of the last century as significant events in their lives. Instead they wanted to distance themselves from the past, or to project current realities like Christianity back in time. Retrospectively it seems that people placed me in their own categories as a kind of glorified tourist, for is not the traditional object of anthropological enquiry very similar to the traditional African village that cultural tourism demands? My questions about the past were projecting my own notions of a rural, local society caught up in global processes of change onto them, and they in turn were resisting these notions by emphasising their cosmopolitanism and modernity. The context of the heritage movement however allowed people to present the past on their terms rather than mine. To be the object of the anthropologist’s (or the tourist’s) attention implies being part of a narrow, bounded, local society. The villagers of Olukonda did not regard themselves as confined by any such category. In contrast, to be a participant in the tourism industry is to be part of a translocal phenomenon. To talk about how different things were in the past is to identify one’s self with the ‘traditional’, whereas to preserve one’s traditions in a museum is an eminently modern thing to do. Owambo understandings of heritage unseat the categories of local/global and traditional/modern. By performing ‘heritage’ for tourists at centres like the Nakambale Museum local people create links to the wider world and so transcend locality. Furthermore this interaction opens up new ways to express the 178 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 179

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

past and to reclaim it for a reconstruction of themselves as ‘modern’ subjects. It is therefore no paradox to say that in the rural hinterland of post-apartheid Namibia, the exaggeration of the distinctively local as ‘traditional heritage’ realises cosmopolitanism and the reenactment of the ‘traditional’ expresses modernity.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

NOTES 1. The Owambo people are the largest ethnic group in Namibia today, occupying the North-Central region, as well as being dispersed throughout the country. In precolonial times they were divided into a number of culturally similar but distinct polities or kingdoms. The name ‘Owambo’ was used by colonial officials to refer to the inhabitants of all these polities, but it remains uncertain that they ever used the term themselves. In post-apartheid Namibia the term Owambo has political associations with apartheid, and many people prefer the term ‘Oshiwambo speakers’. I have tried to use this term also when referring to the people themselves, but retain the term ‘Owambo’ when referring to objects or abstract entities such as ‘Owambo culture’. This also reflects local usage. 2. Personal conversation with Rev. Johannes Mvula, pastor of Olukonda, November 1998. 3. The Nakambale museum was the most important site in which I conducted my fieldwork. I stayed there for a total of eighteen months between November 1997 and September 2000 and was able to witness its development from a small-scale attraction, catering mainly for those with an interest in the Lutheran Church, into one of the most important tourist attractions in North-Central Namibia. 4. The Comaroffs call for analyses that ‘do justice both to the global forces that have driven the colonial and postcolonial histories of large parts of Africa and ‘the specific local and cultural conditions, conjunctures and indeterminacies have imparted to distinct African communities their own particular histories’ (Comaroffs 1993: xii). The regular performances at Nakambale Museum are unwitting attempts to do exactly this. 5. At the time of writing it was the only fully operational tourist facility attempting to present ‘Owambo culture’ in the north, but many more were in the planning stages, including a centrally located ‘museum of the seven kingdoms’, referring to the seven traditional Owambo polities within present-day Namibia. The management of Nakambale Museum were already making plans to meet this challenge to their hegemony. 6. The discourse of tourism has potentially far-reaching implications, particularly in its insistence upon treating former Ovamboland as a single unit, the ‘cultural heartland of Namibia’ (Denker and Schalken 1998). The past existence of ‘Owamboland’ is treated as unproblematic but it has no official existence under present circumstances outside the discourse of tourism since it does not correspond to any sociopolitical reality that is publicly recognised. It is however roughly contiguous with the ‘traditional realm’ (Werbner 1977) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church, which was established and had its first regional headquarters at Nakambale’s mission in Olukonda. 7. See for example Sahlins 1985 or Comaroff and Comaroff 1992. 8. I use the notion of a performative culture in Sahlins’ sense, which is to say that, culture is created in the course of the daily interaction between the ideal cultural order and the actual lives of ordinary people. During this interaction the received meanings of persons and things are applied to actual persons, their practical projects and social arrangements. In so doing they are

179 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 180

Ian Fairweather subjected to a process of continuous reevaluation. Relationships are continually made out of practice, so that culture reproduces itself in a flexible way. As Sahlins observes,’The more it stays the same the more it changes’ (Sahlins 1985: 31). 9. In the 1930s the South African administration came into direct conflict with the Finnish Mission Society over the issue of native education, resulting in the closure of most of the bush schools operated by the mission. Space does not allow me to discuss this conflict in detail here but I have dealt with it at length elsewhere (Fairweather 2004). 10. Efendula ceremonies were by no means dreaded by everyone, and still take place today in some villages, but in Olukonda they would seem out of place. The way this story is told surrounds them with an aura of fear and superstition. 11. This research was conducted for my Ph.D. thesis in Social Anthropology, presented at the University of Manchester in July 2001. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and involved eighteen months’ fieldwork in Olukonda, Northern Namibia (see Note 1 above).

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES Alpers, S. (1991) ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Karp, I and Lavine, S. (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institute Press. Cameron, D. (1972) ‘The Museum: a Temple or a Forum’, Curator, 14(1), pp. 11–24. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L. (1992) Ethnography and the Historical Imagination. Boulder, Westview Press. Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L. (eds) (1993), Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Denker, H and Schalken, W. (1998) Tourism Survey in the Four ‘O’ Regions. Windhoek: NNEP with NACOBTA. Dumeni, K. (Bishop) (1992) Letter to the National Monuments Council, Republic of Namibia, 10 February, 1992 (unpublished). Du Plessis, J. (1911) A History of Christian Missions in South Africa. London: Longmans. Fairweather, I.S. (2001) Identity Politics and the Heritage Industry in North Central Namibia. University of Manchester, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis. –––––– (2004) ‘Missionaries and Colonialism in a Postcolonial Museum’, Social Analysis, 48(1), pp. 16–32. Karp, I. and Lavine, S. (eds) (1991) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institute Press. Katriel, T. (1997) Performing the Past: a Study of Israeli Settlement Museums. London: Lawrence Erlbaum. Nandi, D. (1994) ‘Working towards a Cultural Rejuvenation’, New Era, 27 Jan.–2 Feb. Piot, C. (1999) Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. 180 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

07_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:11 PM Page 181

Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sanders, T. (2000) ‘Rain Witches in Tanzania.’ Paper presented to the Slatterthwaite Colloquium, April 2000 (unpublished). Sahlins, M. (1985) Islands of History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Schildkrout, E. (1995) ‘Museums and Nationalism in Namibia’, Museum Anthropology, 19(2), pp. 65–77. Thaniseb, W. (1988) The Nakambale Museum, Olukonda. Report for the National Museum, Windhoek (unpublished). Werbner, R.P. (ed.) (1977) Regional Cults. London: Academic Press.

181 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 182

C HAPTER 8 H AUNTED A RT: V ISITING E XHIBIT IN W EIMAR 1

AN

Barbara Wolbert




Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction The art exhibit ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’2 caused a great stir in Germany in 1999. This exhibit was one of the events of the cultural pilgrimage to Weimar during its regency in 1999 as Cultural Capital of Europe.3 The small Thuringian town, with an average of a million tourists a year (Gerlach 1992: 20), attracted seven million visitors that year (Jacobsen 1999; see also Frank 1999 and Roth et al. 1999). The reactions to this exhibit, which took place in a museum and a hall that functioned for the first time as an exhibition site, motivated me to rethink Carol Duncan’s concept of the art museum as a ritual of citizenship (Duncan 1995). My analysis of the Weimar exhibit will explore Duncan’s understanding of the museum and the limits of the role she allots to the visitor. Unlike any other art show in Germany in that year, ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ drew enormous public attention. Altogether about 1,500 articles, comments, and reports on this show have been published in the press alone (Baake 2000: 305). The exhibit was covered not only in the regional press but also in the major German tabloids, newspapers, and weeklies.4 Even The New York Times reported on it.5 Strangely enough, the Weimar exhibit was – in one breath – compared to ‘defamation ... in the Nazi time’,6 seen as ‘a “scandalous relapse” into the Cold War era’,7 and understood as ‘an expression of the West German victor’s mentality’.8

182 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 183

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

A number of artists wanted to withdraw their paintings from the show. One of the lenders to the exhibit, a Leipzig bank, was successful in pulling out a piece.9 A fistfight even erupted between two artists and one of the curators when the latter tried to prevent the artists from taking down their works. He became violent and then left the site. This happened half an hour before the visit of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was expected (Tannert 1999). Another artist sued and the art show became an issue to be dealt with in two courts.10 A couple of weeks after the opening, more than thirty works that had been in the show were no longer on display.11 The exhibit took place in two buildings, had three curators, and consisted of three parts, each covering a certain period of time.12 The first part, on display in the castle, focussed on the beginning of the twentieth century. The second and third parts, both set up in the hall, presented the period from 1933 to 1945 and the time between the end of the war and unification, respectively. It was the third part, entitled ‘Official/Un-official: The Art of the GDR’,13 that caused the great stir.14 With 110,000 visitors, it drew a larger audience than the other two parts.15 A team of students and graduates of the local university, Bauhaus-Universität, had prepared this part of the exhibit. The team was led by Achim Preiss, an art historian, trained in North RhineWestphalia, and since 1993 a professor of history of architecture in the university’s Department of Design, who was for the first time entrusted with an exhibit of considerable size and prominence.16 At some point in the summer it even seemed likely that the exhibit would be forced to close its doors early. The high cost of precautions that had to be taken to preserve the paintings in a hall that had never before been used as exhibition space were given as the reason, when in fact the second and third parts of the show, which were supposed to stay open until November, were closed down as early as in September (Wershoven 2000: 35). But was the art of the GDR really the main issue? Did the debate the exhibit initiated actually reveal a deep gap between East and West German views? How did this exhibit address German politics almost a decade after unification? The problems of the exhibition were, as it seemed, all embodied in a circular wall called ‘The Panorama’.17 This wall surrounded the centre space of the exhibition hall containing paintings from GDR art collections. These paintings were loans from the Weimar Art Collection, the Saxony Art Fund, the German History Museum in Berlin, which had inherited the GDR Museum for History, the collection of the Combine Maxhütte near Saalfeld, and from the documentation centre Burg Beeskow, a depot for artworks that had belonged to dissolved GDR enterprises.18 According to the first court’s sentence, the lighting, the hanging, as well as the display material were intolerable. The paintings were hung in irregular, narrow distances, side by side and one on top of the other. They were arranged 183

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 184

Barbara Wolbert

neither by collection, motif or style nor chronologically. This, as it was argued, did not allow the paintings to receive individual attention, but created the impression that this art is a ‘mass product’.19 Moreover, the material used as covering for the exhibition walls, a grey plastic film, also used for trash bags, was deemed to devalue the paintings.20 A title page of the regional magazine Weimar Kultur Journal visualised the nervous debate of that summer. This magazine cover shows two identical views of the wall in question, two copies of the same picture, both enlarged to the same size. They were digitally manipulated in different ways: in one of the pictures, the wall is left blank and appears as a white background behind the paintings; in the other one, the grey plastic film and the beams of the spotlights are visible but the fields within the frames of the artworks are left blank.21 When the press did address other sections of the exhibit, they contrasted these to the rotunda to prove that the display of the GDR art was ‘derogatory’ and ‘disgusting’.22 When I saw the exhibit, I was therefore surprised that, as I will demonstrate, the display of the rest of the exhibit was not any less questionable. Why then did the majority of the journalists focus only on the third part of the exhibit? Why did the critique centre especially on the display in the rotunda and why was this wall depicted in every second illustrated article?

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

The Sites To understand this exhibit and the debate it launched, which indeed uncovers politically significant sensitivities in Germany ten years after the fall of the Wall, we have to go beyond the limitations of the debate mentioned above and analyse the exhibit’s spatial setting. Weimar is situated between Frankfurt and Dresden, in the western part of former East Germany. As home to Goethe and Schiller,23 the founding place of the first German Republic,24 and the town in walking distance from the concentration camp Buchenwald,25 it is itself a politically vexing place. The exhibit made visitors tour significant places of this political trajectory of Weimar. They started at a classic site, the castle, rebuilt after a fire in 1774 under Goethe’s supervision,26 and since 1923 a museum.27 Just as the Louvre, which Carol Duncan (1991: 89–90) sees as a ‘prototype’ of a national art museum inviting one to a ritual of citizenship, this provincial museum is built upon the collection of a regent, here the Grand Duke, that was housed in his residence. This art collection, which was accessible to the public and later, during the Weimar Republic, turned into a museum, can also be seen as a secular temple defining local and national identity. To continue viewing the exhibit the visitors walked to a so-called ‘MultiPurpose Hall’, the second exhibition site. This hall borders the largest square 184 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 185

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

in Weimar, Karl August Allee (Karl August Avenue), named after the Duke who was Goethe’s contemporary. This name strives not only to gloss over the location’s earlier saints but also to whitewash the character of a space that had been named Adolf Hitler Platz (Adolf Hitler Square). During the American military government of Thuringia, before the Americans exchanged control over this part of Germany for a share of Berlin, the square was renamed KarlMarx-Platz. Today, this square, which had been planned for rallies at the Gauforum (Loos 1995: 341–42), is a parking lot. The hall itself remained an incomplete, indestructible, and unused skeleton with a hoarding façade (Loos 1995: 345) until 1967, when it was converted into depot, office, and production space. At this time, lamellas were attached on the outside, which give the building a vertical structure; an annex, equipped as a cafeteria, was added; and the interior of the hall was divided into storeys. Because commodities from the West, which played a crucial role in the GDR’s currency politics and economic strategies, were stored in this building, it was under special observation by the state’s security police (Wirth 1999: 47).28 Originally planned as Halle der Volksgemeinschaft 29 the building was part of the Gauforum designed by Hitler’s architect Giesler (see Korrek 1996; Loos 1995; Wirth 1999; Wolf 1996). Even though Hitler had been passionate about erecting such representational administrative complexes in many other places as well, Weimar was the only NS-Gauhauptstadt – capital of a National Socialist administrative region – where a structure of this kind was actually realised.30 Astonishingly, in the mid-1990s, the Gauforum became a postcard motif promoting the Cultural-Capital-of-Europe project (Loos 1995: 333). This building, referred to as ‘Multi-Purpose-Hall’, represented thus by no means a neutral space. The hall as remaining product of Nazi Germany recalls German engagement in National Socialist politics in Weimar, Thuringia, and most other towns and regions. As a construction for the first time in use in the late 1960s, its appearance is a result of East German design and it is a reminder of the GDR centralised economy and the surveillance of GDR citizens. As part of the castle, the art gallery refers to Weimar as a place of the German classic and to the feudal order and federal structure in Germany’s past. As a museum, the art gallery reminds one of democratic achievements and republican institutions. These two different locations, the hall and the gallery, which incorporate the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany, the visitors’ obligatory procession from gallery to hall, and the title of the exhibit ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, which forebodes tragedy, are crucial when trying to understand the extreme reactions to the show. As already mentioned before, Carol Duncan (1991: 90–91, 1995: 7–20) and others have compared a visit to a museum to a ritual.31 The visitors stride – as they did here – through a definite and structured space, which gives their visit the form of a passage. This anthropological concept, borrowed from Arnold van Gennep and Victor 185

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 186

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Wolbert

Turner, defines the experience principally as a transformative one.32 It is this transformative potential of a visit to a museum that is of interest to us when we investigate the causes of the extreme reactions. This study of ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ will follow Duncan’s idea of the museum as a site of ‘civilizing rituals’ (1995) in order to explore whether this exhibit and the reactions to it touched sensitive issues in the German nation-building processes almost a decade after unification. However, dealing with two different museum environments, an art museum and an exhibition site that is neither a museum nor a traditional place for royal or clerical treasures, this case study will question Duncan’s concept of the museum and take her ideal visitor to task. Focussing on the museum site, Duncan analyses the museum’s history and its purpose. She describes the building, its space, and its interior and interprets the message they contain. She sees not only a ‘stage’ inscribed into the museum space but a ‘script’ (1995: 12) or narrative – a concept adopted by scholars in museum studies.33 This script refers to the interconnectedness of elements in an exhibit that lends meaning to the ensemble and presumes visitors who read it.34 However, according to Duncan (ibid.), visitors can ‘misread’ the narrative or ‘resist the museum’s cues’ and ‘actively invent, consciously or unconsciously, their own programs’. My criticism of Duncan’s understanding of the visitor’s role is not grounded in the fact that her work is not based on interviews with visitors or on observations of visitors’ behaviour. It is based on her disregard of the actual relationship between curator and visitor: not only does she interpret the exhibit exclusively from the museum’s view, but her concept of the museum identifies a site with an institution and an institution with the curator. By calling the museum the ‘impresario, or more strictly a regisseur’ (Duncan 1995: 12), she personifies the museum and idealises the curator. The museum setting is, according to Duncan, a structure ‘that constructs its personae dramatis’ (Duncan 1995: 13). She explains that these characters, the visitors, ‘are, ideally, individuals who are perfectly predisposed socially, psychologically, and culturally to enact the museum ritual’ (ibid.). However, it is not only her concept of the ideal visitor, but her implicit idealisation of the curator that I want to throw into relief. The curator handles the ‘sacra’ (Turner 1967: 103–108) – artworks and other treasures as well as display elements – and prepares the ritual ground. Thus, the curator prescribes the narrative and the visitor pays, more or less consciously, attention to it. In the case of ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ it is not enough to understand the curator’s narrative. Here, we have to consider the question of agency. Moreover, we also have to study the visitor’s story independently. Furthermore, we need to reexamine the museum space and investigate the limits of a museum’s institutional authority.

186 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 187

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

A Visit

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

To compare the disputed display with the rest of the exhibition design and to analyse the narrative I would like to invite you on the tour you might have taken as a visitor to the exhibit in summer 1999.35 Let’s cross the castle’s courtyard, pay the admission fee, and walk up the marble stairs. A ticket check and we are on the first of two floors of the first part of the exhibition trilogy. We should not miss looking at the unlighted back of an exhibition wall placed in the foyer on the second floor. There we see a series of pictures by the local court photographer that contextualise the ambivalent history of modern art in Weimar.36 In the adjoining rooms, we learn that, while still rejected in Wilhelmenian Berlin, neoimpressionists like Paul Signac and Georges Seurat were already exhibited in Weimar. We are introduced to German artists like Paul Baum, Carl Herrmann, and Christian Rohlfs, who were inspired by their French colleagues. Their views of Weimar and its surroundings are presented in the show.37 Then we become acquainted with the metropolitan Graf Kessler, who presented these paintings to Weimar’s permanent art collection, which was still dominated by the naturalist Weimar School of Painters (Scheidig 1971). Graf Kessler motivated modern artists, Edvard Munch for

Figure 8.1 A view of the courtyard of the castle, which hosts the Weimar art collection and, in summer 1999, the exhibit ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 187

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 188

Barbara Wolbert

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 8.2 A view of the display of Graf Kessler’s portrait by Munch in the castle. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)

example, the author of a portrait of Kessler, which was displayed in the exhibit, to come to Weimar.38 We learn that Kessler’s activities were not unanimously appreciated and that eventually he was forced to resign from his honorary post as the director of the Grand Duke’s art collection.39 Let us take a second look at the display wall with Kessler’s portrait! It blocks a door without entirely covering it. Was this intended? Did the designer see this as a way to emphasise Graf Kessler’s appearance rather than Munch’s painting? Looking at the middle-school poster-board type of display on the wall with Kessler’s portrait, we may doubt that the people in charge were professionals who were aware of the effects of their display decisions. The means of other instructional displays – computer printouts and glue, and a pathetic easel holding a poster board – seem to confirm our conjecture. However, the square hole that allows us to see the painting on one of the walls behind the exhibition wall makes us realise that it was indeed a curator’s and designer’s ambition that was responsible for this display. But the weak lighting and clumsy overlay of a temporary onto a permanent exhibit in mostly 188

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 189

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 8.3 An exhibition wall with a painting by Rohlfs, depicting a Weimar street, and an opening that allows a view of the paintings from the permanent collection on the wall behind it. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)

narrow rooms and hallways make it difficult to actually see either display, the paintings from the permanent collection or the paintings brought together for this show. The introduction to the catalogue by Rolf Bothe, the director of the Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, who was together with his cocurator Thomas Föhl, the associate director of the museum in the castle, responsible for this part of the show, provides an explanation. The catalogue explains that the choice of the site and the decision not to remove the paintings and the furniture should demonstrate ‘the contrasts and parallels between the courtly society and the democratic new art’ (Bothe 1999: 9–10). But because of the flaws of the display this objective was not achieved. Rolf Bothe also mentions the scarcity of local exhibition space as the reason for the decision to overlay paintings (ibid.). However, this decision compounded the display problems even further. On the third floor, where the exhibition about the history of modern art in Weimar is continued, we do not find this overlay but here, too, the lighting is poor. The narrative of this section which deals with the local history of 189

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 190

Barbara Wolbert

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

modern art after World War One repeats the story line of the first narrative: we learn that when the castle as residence had become a museum accommodating the temporarily public art collection, its first director, Wilhelm Köhler, devoted a central position to the works of Feininger, Klee, and Kandinsky. We are then told about the ban on modern art in Weimar: anticipating the art politics of 1937 as early as 1930, the first National Socialist to occupy a governmental post, Thuringia’s minister of education, supported by the local press, forced Köhler to replace these works with pieces classified as ‘German’ art.40 As we leave the museum in the castle, we understand a lot about art and politics, European art connections and national restrictions, and federal leeways and local power plays. We now leave the castle and after a short walk reach our next station, the Multi-Purpose Hall. Huge letters, white on black, spell the exhibition’s title, ‘Art to the People – The Adolf Hitler Collection’41 horizontally on the facade. To enter the hall we walk through a foyer and pass a series of photographs attached to panels flanking the entrance of the exhibition hall. This display appears like snapshots for sale, quickly put up in a photographer’s window after a public ceremony: while passing by the window, the participants in these

Figure 8.4 A view of a part of the Gauforum complex with the annex building of Multi-Purpose Hall and a banner of the exhibit’s second part ‘Art to the People – The Collection Hitler’. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 190

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:13 PM Page 191

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

events would have checked if they had been in any of the photos and, if so, they would have ordered a copy. This was most likely also the way these pictures by Ella Beyer-Held, the daughter of the local court photographer, had been on display in the Weimar studio in 1930, after she had taken these pictures of Nazi parades and festivities in Weimar.42 Many of the photographs depict women and men marching and leaders carrying signs. One of the signs reads Fachgruppe Bildende Kunst, indicating that this is a group of politically organised artists. Who were these artists? How did they understand their work? How did they become involved in Nazi politics? Questions like these the exhibit will not answer. It contains nothing more than 120 paintings, a selection of Hitler’s collection.43 The display allows us to look at each picture from every conceivable distance and angle, but it does not offer any insights into either art politics in Weimar during the Nazi regime or Hitler’s relation to art. The Weimar story, the prehistory of Nazi seizure of power as seen through the lenses of the local art world, is not told.44 The omission of this story trivialises fascism, rendering it harmless. The two curators of this part of the exhibit, Thomas Föhl and Achim Preiss, avoided any explicit comment. Yet they arranged the paintings tamely and tacitly according to topics and thus legitimised their claim to realism. In the catalogue, Achim Preiss explains his efforts to make this part of the exhibit appear more acceptable: works of better technical quality were selected for the show and landscapes were underrepresented in their numbers, because more of these would have appeared ‘too dull, banal, and boring’.45 He rationalises the fact that pieces showing Nazi emblems, for the most part in U.S. archives, could be neglected here, since they would ‘in terms of style not represent specifically national socialist art’.46 He concludes, ‘...the collection is on the whole more mediocre and banal than this exhibit’ (Preiss 1999a: 407). In other words, these curatorial decisions made Hitler’s collection classier and distracted from its full banality. Preiss proudly emphasises that these paintings, discovered in an Austrian cavern and stored in Munich, were now, for the first time, available to the public in such large numbers (ibid.). However, the pictures seem to have been here forever. The display alludes to an art depot, although an actual depot would look quite different. The slanted boards seem to allow the works to rest. Rather than seeing these pictures pulled out into the scrutiny of daylight, we come in to share their space. And it is certainly an intimate encounter with Hitler’s treasures. Visiting Hitler’s collection is of course not necessarily an appreciation, but it does imply acknowledgement. Now we have to exit, because the entrance to part three is outside, at the south side of the same building. We enter through the building’s top floor after climbing a ramp, which is covered with a blue tarp with huge yellow letters attached to the hall. The inscription reads – ironically in an upward stroke – ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern: Official/Un-Official: The Art of the GDR’.47 The improvised entrance is framed with partly torn and faded posters 191

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 192

Barbara Wolbert

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 8.5 A view of the presentation of Hitler’s art collection on the first floor of the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)

Figure 8.6 A view of paintings, a.o. by Schult, from Hitler’s art collection on the first floor of the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 192

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 193

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 8.7 A view of the ramp leading to the entrance of the exhibit’s third part ‘Official/Unofficial: The Art of the GDR’. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)

of the exhibit.48 We pass through the doors, which do not augur well, and find ourselves in a huge hall. But before we have a chance to look at any painting in the hall, we are whisked into a makeshift gallery with low ceilings. Inside, the small formats and objects recall exhibitions in school hallways. We learn about the reintroduction of Bauhaus ideas at the local college of art and about their modifications according to the educational and economic politics at the end of the 1940s.49 Then, finally, we are released into the hall with the GDR art. As far as the eye can see: monumental paintings on the right and small formats – documentary photographs – lined up in a neon-lit showcase set into the wall on the left. We are overwhelmed by the colours of the celebrated German Democratic Republic and the greys of the real East Germany. No background information. No comment. The large paintings, some of them triptychs, sit on the concrete, leaning against the wall.50 Unlike Hitler’s pictures, which kept their prestigious frames, these canvases are deprived of their original trimming and framed in heavy strips of cheap, unfinished wood. Vent’s ‘People at the Beach’,51 Heisig’s ‘Ikarus’,52 Neubert’s ‘Yesterday and Today’,53 Willi Sitte’s ‘The Red Banner – Struggle, Pain, and Victory’54 and all the other paintings had been exhibited in the Palast der Republik before it closed down. But here they are not really exhibited. They do not look like being stored either. Rather they appear as if they have just been taken down. 193

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 194

Barbara Wolbert

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Figure 8.8 A view of ‘the curve’ with paintings from the Palace of the Republic in Berlin by Vent, Heisig, Neubert, and Sitte in the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)

This is the very point of transition for the visitors. They become engaged. They don’t want to repeat a historical mistake. Isn’t this exactly what the curator’s dramaturgy has prescribed for them at this point? They have by now passed ‘The Curve’ – as this section is called – and are dismissed into the rotunda. The visitors should now finally be prepared to realise the banality of the pictures painted at the behest of the Party and the State. They should be ready to share the curator’s idea of ‘three styles of the Anti-Modern of the twentieth century: the academic-conservative art …the image production of the National Socialism …[and] the Socialist Realism’ (Preiss 1999b: 10). But they might finally refuse to follow the curator’s narrative trajectory! They might even want to say something! They might write entries in the guestbook.55 Journalists from all parts of Germany respond with articles. They portray the curator as arrogant Wessi and engage in protecting the GDR artists. Artists whose works are displayed feel betrayed and try to detach themselves from this show. Representatives of institutions react as well: The Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts declares the exhibit a defamation of GDR art.56 The Artists’ Association encourages an artist to bring a lawsuit on behalf of a group of colleagues and funds the suit. Thuringian politicians, its 194

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 195

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Minister of Culture for example, hurriedly distance themselves from this Cultural Capital project.57 Even the President of the German Parliament, Wolfgang Thierse, raises his voice in protest.58 Let us follow the visitors who did not engage in such public action. When they enter the rotunda, they realize that there is only one small triangular section left to be toured. This section, called ‘The Wedge’ contains mostly abstract paintings representing, as announced in the title, the ‘Un-official’. Knowing that they have almost finished their tour, they can now take the time to walk along the wall or to rest on one of the many plastic garden chairs and look around the rotunda.59 They might attempt to figure out if there is any plan to the hanging. They might compare the paintings, and – as trained consumers – pick and choose which ones, as they might say, ‘are actually not so bad’. They might recall commentaries about the exhibit they have heard on the radio or read in the newspaper and make up their own minds. But despite the much criticised presentation, these paintings receive a lot of individual attention, definitely not any less than the works of Seurat, Munch, or Feininger presented in the dark of the castle. I want to finish our tour at this point. No one was able stay very long, since there was an acrid stench in this hall that was simply overpowering.

Figure 8.9 A view of ‘the panorama’ with garden chairs and paintings from GDR collections in the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 195

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 196

Barbara Wolbert

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Imaginary Witnesses Many visitors, both journalists and tourists, perceived the exhibit as a provocative display. Rather than sharing the curators’ additive concept of a series of three versions and periods of anti-modernism in a contemplative mood, they found themselves in a politically explosive situation. They started their tour in the Weimar art collection. The ennobled spirit of this museum space and the authority of art history purified the actually disturbing display of that part of the show.60 The audience followed the curatorial narrative about the lost battle of modern artists and their sponsors. The visitors were reminded that the works of expressionists and other modern artists had been removed without rousing considerable protest. This narrative reinforced German pity and shame about the past and, at the same time, reclaimed the expelled paintings as part of the legitimate Weimar and German heritage. This art museum, borrowing Duncan’s words, ‘gives citizenship and civic virtue a content without having to redistribute real power’ (Duncan 1991: 94). Here, we found a museum which allowed for a ritual of citizenship to happen. Its visitors resembled Duncan’s ideal visitors. Then the visitors had an unexpected intimate encounter with Hitler’s favourite pictures. When entering the Multi-Purpose-Hall, most visitors will have remained in receptive mode. After all, they were just seeing another part of the same exhibit, again under the direction of the same museum. We could say that part two functioned like a trap because, at this point, the visitors, who had entered this exhibit as faithful museum audiences, were no longer in the sphere of influence of a museum’s purifying forces. Although Hitler’s collection actually belongs, since 1998, to a museum, the German History museum, in the Multi-Purpose Hall the objects were not marked and framed as a national museum’s property.61 Furthermore, in spite of its use for exhibition purposes, the hall was not consecrated as a museum.62 Just the opposite, it was a space haunted by the ghosts of the Nazis. Here, these ghosts, so carefully locked away in the Buchenwald monument, surfaced suddenly in the town of Weimar. This exhibition site thus worked like a time machine. The visitors lost the safe distance that the museum guarantees through its institutional authority. They became spectators. Hitler’s intact collection turned works and viewers into contemporaries. After the tour of art’s suffering, having dragged themselves up the ramp63 again into this scary house, like pilgrims doing the stations of the cross, the visitors had finally become highly sensitised. Viewing the paintings produced in GDR times represented for most of them a first immediate encounter or the first public reencounter after unification. With the lesson about Klee’s, Feininger’s, and other artists’ works being removed without rousing considerable protest – this embarrassing constitutional part of national history – still on their minds, how could the visitors not be subliminally affected by the confrontation with pictures that were sitting on the 196 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 197

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

floor? They might have felt as if they were forced to silently partake in the act of ‘taking down’ paintings by GDR artists. Of course, a taking-down has never occurred in this place. One of the press articles mentions that the exhibition walls would not even have been strong enough to support the heavy paintings (Stadler 1999). Whether deliberately or not, the positioning of the paintings evoked memories of the places from which they had in fact been removed. This particular section of the Multi-Purpose Hall thus re-placed the Gallery in the Palace of the Republic, one of the many places that are, physically or symbolically, no longer accessible. The Palace of the Republic, for example, housed the East German Parliament and functioned, at the same time, as a popular cultural and gastronomical centre, where people went to a concert, ate out or danced. The building also provided space for an art gallery. After unification, this building was closed down. A seemingly endless debate ensued as to whether it should be torn down or reconstructed and reopened. After the Palace was closed, the paintings had been transferred to the archive of the German Historical Museum. In the Weimar exhibit, these paintings were once again presented to the public, alas, with their backs to the wall. Hence, a dearrangement was enacted in Weimar. In other words, it was not the paintings from the Palace that were on display but a humiliating gesture. The memory of acts of political violence against artists, whose works were no longer appreciated by the newly established curators and museum directors, was evoked, but not controlled by the director of this stage. Thus a lieu de mémoire (Nora 1989) generated the public outcry.64 Why then did the critics of the exhibition seem to disregard the huge paintings leaning against the wall? Why did everybody point to the grey plastic film, the lighting, and the hanging? In this respect, the visitors had indeed followed the curator. He and his team had prepared the ‘ritual ground’ by means of a floor plan.65 They themselves had in fact directed the visitors’ anger toward the ‘panorama’ wall. They had constructed the section with the paintings leaning against the wall as a ‘curve’, as a passage, which leads to the ‘panorama’. They had thus created a forum, a place for confession and protest. To the curator’s dismay the visitors’ criticism hit the walls and not the paintings. The fact that parts two and three of the exhibit were only organisationally authorised as a museum initiative is crucial here. The absence of such an institutional framework leaves the curator in a position unforeseen in Carol Duncan’s concept of the museum as ritual of citizenship. Visitors do read the curator’s narrative only more or less correctly, as Duncan admits. But not only do the visitors read the curator’s narrative more or less correctly, the curators themselves write their scripts effecting only more or less the reactions they want in the reader. The museum’s monumentality has the potential to back the curator and function as a corrector. The Weimar exhibit shows that the institution, the site, and the curator are much more unpredictable components of the museum than Carol Duncan suggests. The museum’s 197

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 198

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Wolbert

composition, however, has to be taken into account in every single case. Only then can the visitor’s narrative be fully understood. The visitors experienced themselves in the role of witnesses. They became imaginary witnesses of an act of violence. This was their script. By criticising the exhibit or even protesting against it, they had written themselves into the play as heroes. As if obliged to revise an unhappy ending, they attempted to rewrite the curator’s play, announced as a tragedy. The artists who had been caught unawares, finding themselves as supporters of the curator’s script – the exhibition team failed to invite them or even inform them about their paintings being on display – could take down their own work in protest. The visitors who felt uneasy about the exhibit, by contrast, had to find other ways to express their resentment. Rather than this one single display, the wall wrapped in grey plastic film, it is the compressed historical self-concept of the audience as potential resistance fighters that leads to the protest. In this regard, we may understand the experience caused by this exhibit as a transformative one. The curator directed but did not intend this liminal experience. The visitors identified with the victims and adopted a protective role – a role that in fact only very few people had played in Germany’s past. Now we understand why, according to visitors’ individual perspectives, the exhibit could be interpreted simultaneously as a second Degenerate Art show, a repetition of Cold War propaganda, and an act of West German conquest. What has been discussed in the press, the East–West conflict about art, was only one thin layer of meaning. Moreover, the fact that all the newspapers, whether based in the west or the east of Germany, and the politicians representing westerners and easterners criticised the exhibit makes us understand that although the exhibit itself was controversial it did not divide the public. This interpretation that reduced the problematic of the exhibit to an east–west conflict, which was favoured by the media, concealed another sensitive issue: the relation of post-Wall Germans and the Nazi past. It hid the questions at stake such as issues of agency, responsibility, and the role of the spectator. These issues became prominent topics in the following summer, after racist violence had again dramatically increased.66 No week went by without several attacks on refugees, immigrants and people in exile in Germany and the lack of Zivilcourage, the courage to stand up for one’s beliefs, became a popular topic in the German press. Unintended and uncontrolled, these questions had already come up in the context of a sloppy art exhibit, set up at an awkward site in a German town with an ambivalent past, which was given the honour of representing European culture in the year of ultimate millennium excitement.

198 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 199

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

NOTES 1. My first thanks go to Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto for convening and chairing the extraordinarily stimulating EASA panel session ‘Science, Magic, and Religion: The Museum as Ritual Site’ in July 2000 in Cracow. In this panel I had the chance to present a paper, a short version of this chapter, which benefitted greatly from Sharon Macdonald’s contribution as commentator and from Mary Bouquet’s and Nuno Porto’s editorial suggestions. I presented another short and in some parts different version of this chapter at the panel session ‘Cultural Capital and “Capital of Culture”: Exhibiting German Art’ at the conference of the German Studies Association in October 2000 in Houston, which was organised by Mark Rectanus, moderated by Karen Achberger, and commented by H. Glenn Penny. I am also very grateful to all three of them for their criticism and inspiration. On one aspect of this exhibit, which was not part of the previous papers, I elaborated in the panel session ‘Arranging Places: Regions, Nations, and Museums in Europe’ organised and chaired by Jane Nadel-Klein and commentated by Margaret Rodman at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association 2000 in San Francisco. I thank them as well as the copresenters and the audiences of all three panels for their comments. I am grateful for the invitations to the German Department at the University of California (Berkeley) and the Centre Canadien d’Etudes Allemandes et Européenes at the University of Montreal, where I had the opportunity to discuss my Weimar research in more detail. I am further thankful to Reinhard Spier for giving me access to the BBK collection of newspaper articles on ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ and to him and Herbert Mondrey for informing me about the court case the exhibit caused. I thank Deniz Göktürk and Silke Roth for discussing their views of the Weimar exhibit with me. Peter Jelavich and Heather Mathews I thank for their comments on my description of the show. I am grateful to Dr Ulrike Bestgen, Office for Public Relations, Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, for allowing me to take photographs at the 1999 ‘Aufsteig und Fall der Moderne’, and for permission to use a selection of those photographs for this chapter. For her revision of earlier manuscripts as well as of this final version of my chapter, I thank Renate Wise. The shortcomings of this article are, of course, my responsibility. 2. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne’ is the German title. I will follow the translation published in the The New York Times, ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ (see Cohen 1999). In Art in America the same translation is used by Galloway (1999). 3. The twelve ministers of the European Community assigned to cultural affairs in their countries decided on 13 June, 1985, to choose every year another town within the EC as Cultural Capital. The first cities to be chosen were Athens, Florence, Amsterdam and Berlin (Dittrich von Weringh 1988: 473). In 2000, nine cities were elected as cultural capitals – Avignon, Bergen, Bologna, Brussels, Cracow, Helsinki, Prague, Reykjavik and Santiago de Compostella (Jacobsen 1999). In 1999, however, Weimar alone performed as Cultural Capital, in German sometimes referred to as either Kulturhauptstadt Europas (Cultural Capital of Europe) or Kulturstadt Europas (Cultural City of Europe). Weimar as Kulturstadt is also the subject of a sociological study developed by Silke Roth and conducted by her, Susanne Frank, and Caroline Buchartowski, under the supervision of Dieter Hassenpflug, Professor of Sociology and Social History of the City at the Department of Architecture of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Roth, S., Frank, S. and Beinert, A., n.d.). 4. Most of the German papers I checked reported on this exhibit more than once. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, published at least four articles dealing with this exhibit; the Tagesspiegel published at least five articles; and another daily newspaper in Berlin, the Berliner Zeitung, informed their readers in at least eight articles. 5. Cohen (1999).

199 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 200

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Wolbert 6. Winfried Bullinger, an expert in artists’ copyright and the attorney of the suing artist, hired by the artists’ association Bund Bildender Künstler, was cited in BILD 1 June 1999: ‘Diffamierungen solchen Kalibers gab’s zuletzt in der Nazi-Zeit’ (‘Skandal-Ausstellung in Weimar’). 7. This statement by the Vice President of the Academy of the Arts Berlin-Brandenburg was cited in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as well as in other newspapers. The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: ‘Die Akademie der Künste Berlin-Brandenburg hatte die Weimarer Ausstellung als ‘skandalöser Rückfall’ in Zeiten des Kalten Krieges kritisiert’ (‘Café Deutschland’). 8. This statement by the painter Wolfgang Matteuer was also cited in several newspapers, for example, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: ‘Das ist Ausdruck westdeutscher Siegermentalität’ (Café Deutschland ). I cite the translation of this quotation in The New York Times (Cohen 1999). 9. The Leipziger Sparkasse withdrew their painting ‘Schuld der Mitte II,’ a work by Hans Hendrik Grimmling (‘Wut über den Wessi’). 10. The sentence of the first trial in the Landgericht, the communal court in Erfurt, was announced on 17 June 1999. The second trial, which ended with a settlement, took place at the Oberlandesgericht, Thurigina’s state court in Jena on July 28, 1999. 11. See ‘Kai Uwe Schierz. Weimar’. 12. Rolf Bothe cooperated with Thomas Föhl as the curators of part one. Thomas Föhl cooperated with Achim Preiß as the curators of part two. Part three was curated by Achim Preiss alone. 13. The German title was ‘Offiziell/Inoffiziell – Die Kunst der DDR.’ 14. In contrast to the German press, which focussed on the third part of the exhibit, the aforementioned article in The New York Times mainly discussed the exhibition of paintings from the Nazi time. 15. The first part, which was closed in August, had 85,000 visitors and the second part, closed in September, had 95,000 visitors (Wershoven 2000: 35). 16. Achim Preiss has his Ph.D. from the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms Universität in Bonn. He taught at the Bergische Universität-Gesamthoch-schule Wuppertal until his Habilitation in 1991. 17. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne III’: 1. 18. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne III’: 3–4. 19. See the court’s sentence, ‘Urteil in dem einstweiligen Verfügungsverfahren der Künstlerin Ellena Olson gegen die Stadt Weimar, Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar und Weimar 1999 Kulturstadt Europas GmbH wegen Urheberrechtsverletzung, verkündet am 17.08.1999’ Landgericht Erfurt 3 u O 16/95: 8. 20. The following titles of newspaper articles take up this comparison: ‘Exhibiting the Art of History’s Dustbin’ by Cohen (1999); ‘Weimar, die Kunst und der Schrott’ [Weimar, Art and Garbage] by Beaucamp (1999), a title which alludes to the controversial performance of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s theatre production in Frankfurt entitled ‘Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod’ [Garbage, the City and Death]; and ‘Kulturkampf mit Müllhaufen’ [Cultural War with TrashHeap] by von Klinggräff (1999), a title which plays with the term for the struggle between church and state 1872–1882. 21. The photograph of this title page, entitled ‘A Rise and Fall in Weimar,’ was taken by Jörg Behrens. The visualisation for this title was prepared by Klaus Nerlich. (Weimar Kultur Journal. Zeitschrift für Weimar, Erfurt, Jena, Apolda, Vol. 8, No 7, 1999.) 22. Very few articles described and criticised the display in the first and second part of the exhibit as well. The third part, for example, was honorably mentioned by Beaucamp (1999) in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In one sentence Jenssen (1999), writing for the Berliner Zeitung mentions the exhibit in the castle as the site of the ‘good prewar-art’: ‘Schon die Orte folgen einer Regie der Denunziation. Im Schloss wird die gute Vorkriegskunst, in einer garstigen Mehrzweckhalle die Kunst der beiden Diktaturen gezeigt’. The display in the castle was

200 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 201

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

23.

24. 25.

26.

27.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

28.

29. 30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

criticized by Bisky (1999) in the Berliner Zeitung and by Knapp (1999) in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who initially followed Duke Karl August’s call to his court in 1775, was a high administrator in Weimar, where he also devoted himself to scientific research and literary work and later became the director of the theatre. After sojourns in Italy, Goethe returned to Weimar where he continued working as a writer and scholar until he died in 1832. Friedrich von Schiller went to Weimar in 1787 where he worked on historical, philosophical, and literary publications and translations. He died in 1805 in Weimar. Goethe’s and Schiller’s influence shaped the cultural and politic life of Weimar and beyond. It has ultimately made the town a centre of tourism. The ‘Weimar Republic’ lasted from 1919 to 1933. Buchenwald, founded in 1937 and situated only eight kilometers from Weimar, was the largest concentration camp within Germany. More than 40,000 persons, about as many people as Weimar had inhabitants at that time, were murdered there (Schley 1999). The ground of the castle was the location of a feudal residence for 1,000 years (Hootz 1968: 405). A former castle called Wilhelmsburg, built in 1651, burnt down in 1774 (Dehio 1991: 314). Goethe coorganised the reconstruction. The castle underwent reconstruction between 1790 and 1803, 1835 and 1840, and 1913 and 1914 (Salzmann and Zühlke 1971: 100). This municipal art collection is called ‘Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar’. The castle hosts part of the collection and its administration. Thus Weimar’s population associated the hall with Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski who was in charge of the so-called ‘KoKo’, the ‘Commercial Coordination’, a section of the GDR Ministry for Foreign Trade. He was involved not only in the GDR’s trade with Arab, Asian, and African countries but also in the negotiations with West German politicians and the government of the Federal Republic of Germany, which included credits of billions of Deutschmarks granted to the GDR. When the Wall fell, he moved to West Germany and, after German unification, he was accused of violating the narcotics laws, fraud, misappropriation, and espionage. This information was provided by the data service LeMO by the Fraunhofer Institute, the German Historical Museum, and the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany at www.dhm.de/lemo. The title translates as ‘Hall of the People’s Community’. Rather than central planning, it is the high ambition of Thuringia’s Reichsstatthalter, Fritz Sauckel, residing in Weimar, that is seen as decisive for the realization of the construction project (Ehrlich, John and Ulbricht 1999a: 29). Antjé von Gaevenitz introduced a similar idea in her contribution to the 1986 XXVIth International Congress of the History of Art. She applied the concept of ritual to certain works of art considering also the role of the exhibition space of a museum or gallery in this context (Graevenitz 1989: 588). Duncan refers to Les Rite de Passage by Van Gennep (1908)1960 and to Turner’s Drama, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (1974). See, for example, Irit Rogoff ’s ‘From Ruins to Debris’ (1994: 223–49). Victor Turner conceptualises a ritual as a process that intensifies the neophytes’ reflexivity and sees this reflexivity as originating stories. These narratives, in turn, lend meaning to the whole experience (Turner 1982). My snapshot photographs used as illustrations were taken on 27 July, 1999. Since the exhibit was changed a couple of times, they represent, of course, only this particular state of the exhibit on the day before the trial in the second court. These photographs by Louis Held were also used in the catalogue (see Bothe and Föhl 1999). See the painting on the exhibition wall in Figure 8.3. Christian Rohlfs. Strasse in Weimar (Gasse in Ehringsdorf ) 1889, oil on canvas, 40x50 cm, Kunsthalle zu Kiel.

201 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 202

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Wolbert 38. Edvard Munch, Portrait Harry Graf Kessler, oil on canvas, 200x84 cm, 1906, Staatliches Museum zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie Inv. B 50. 39. See also the articles in the section ‘Weimar 1890: Der Aufbruch in die Moderne’ and ‘Das Neue Weimar 1902-1918’ in the catalogue of the exhibit (Bothe and Föhl 1999: 14–245). 40. See also the articles in the section ‘Tradition und Avantgarde in Konflikt’ in the catalogue (Bothe and Föhl 1999: 246–385). 41. ‘Die Kunst dem Volke – Die Sammlung Adolf Hitlers’. 42. Ulbricht (1999) describes Nazi parades and festivities in Weimar. 43. Whereas in the catalogue (1999: 407) and in his booklet (1999: 45), Preiss states that this presentation of Hitler’s collection contained 140 paintings, in the exhibition brochure the number is given as 120 paintings (‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne II’: 1). 44. Findings by historians who studied Nazi leaders’ practices of collecting art and who wrote about Hitler’s collection, such as Petroupoulos (1998: 181–86), are neither mentioned in the catalogue nor in the exhibition brochure. 45. ‘...zu eintönig, banal und langweilig...’ (Preiss 1999a: 407). 46. ‘...weil es sich nicht um eine im stilistischen Sinne spezifisch nationalsozialistische Kunst handelt’ (Preiss 1999a: 407). 47. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne: Offiziell/Inoffiziell - Die Kunst der DDR’. 48. Such an understated entrance to an exhibition may lead to an insider-tip show in some subculture contexts, but in the context of a prominent European Cultural Capital event it is rather unexpected. 49. The curator of this section was, as the volume in which it appeared after the exhibit reveals, Dr Anne Hormann (see Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar 2000: 20). Hormann has also written an article in the catalogue (Bothe and Föhl 1990: 422–39). 50. While the critique concentrates on the display in the rotunda, this section of part three of the exhibit is hardly mentioned by the press. Exceptions are the articles by Stadler (1999) and Knapp (1999) who wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung ‘An die Wand gestellt’ (Their backs to the Wall). 51. Hans Vent, Menschen am Strand [People at the Beach], oil on plywood, 1976, 280x552 cm, Federal Republic of Germany (permanent loan), former Palace of the Republic, East Berlin. 52. Bernhard Heisig, Ikarus, oil on plywood, 1975, 280x540 cm, Federal Republic of Germany (permanent loan), former Palace of the Republic, East Berlin. 53. Willi Neubert, Gestern und Heute [Yesterday and Today], mixed technique on plywood, 1975, 280x345 cm, Federal Republic of Germany (permanent loan), former Palace of the Republic, East Berlin. 54. Willi Sitte, Die rote Fahne. Kampf, Leid und Sieg [The Red Banner, Struggle, Pain and Victory] oil on plywood, 1975/1976, 280x300 cm, Federal Republic of Germany (permanent loan), former Palace of the Republic, East Berlin. 55. The unusual number of guestbook entries is mentioned in an article in the newspaper Tagesspiegel (see ‘Umstrittene Weimarer Ausstellung’) and in an article in Die Welt (on-line) (Berg, ‘Kunst neben Agitations-Klecksereien,’ www.welt.de/daten/1999/05/25/ 0525ku66895.htx, by 4 June 1999). Not even a month after its opening 20,000 visitors had seen the exhibit and 166 entries had been left in the guestbook (Stadler 1999). 56. ‘Umstrittene Weimarer Ausstellung.’ 57. ’Bankrotte in Weimar.’ 58. ‘Die neue ‘Entartete Kunst’?’ 59. The chairs chosen for this exhibit were plastic garden chairs, which German stores sold for less than ten marks or 5 Euros respectively. In summer 1990, these chairs were for the first time available in stores in eastern Germany. They found homes on private porches, in snack bars, in garden restaurants, and in many other areas. They became a visual marker for East Germans’ start into western consumer culture.

202 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 203

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar 60. No journalist who covered the exhibit wrote about the irony that lies in the fact that once more in this place an audience was hindered from seeing modern art. 61. This fact is only mentioned in the catalogue, the brochure, and the booklet sold at the entrance (see Preiss 1999a: 407; Preiss 1999b: 44; ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne II’: 1). 62. Besides, because of its enormous dimensions, this construction did not fit into the reassuring classic environment. 63. Visitors might have associated this construction, which the exhibition’s architect might have simply chosen as a means to enable wheelchair users to visit the exhibit, with cattle transports to slaughterhouses or the ramps the Nazis built to facilitate deportations. 64. This idea is eleborated in my article ‘De-Arranged Places: East German Art in Unified Germany’s Museums’ in The Anthropology of East Europe Review. 65. Achim Preiss based the interior design on the work of his student Eva-Maria Schüler, an architect, who had received her degree for this plan (Preiss 2000: 15–17). 66. A ban on the NPD, the right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany, was widely discussed and a huge demonstration against xenophobia was organised for 9 November 2000.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

REFERENCES ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne II, Die Kunst dem Volke – erworben: Adolf Hitler’. Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, 1999. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne III. Offiziell/Inoffiziell – Die Kunst der DDR’. Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, 1999. Baake, B. (2000) ‘Anatomie einer Aufregung. Ein Blick auf 1.500 Rezensionen, Berichte, Nachrichten, Kommentare’, in Der Weimarer Bilderstreit. Szenen einer Ausstellung. Eine Dokumentation, Kunsthalle zu Weimar, ed. Weimar: VDG Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften: 305. Beaucamp, E. (1999) ‘Weimar, die Kunst und der Schrott. Wie man die Ästhetik nich entsorgen darf: “Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne” in drei Akten’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 May. Berg, M. (1999) ‘Kunst neben Agitations-Klecksereien. Volkes Stimme spricht: Kommentare in der Ausstellung “Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne”’, Die Welt. Kultur Online at www.welt.de/daten/1999/05/25/0525ku66895.htx; accessed 17 June 2000. BILD (1999) ‘Skandal-Ausstellung in Weimar: Berlinerin klagte ihre Bilder raus’, 1 June. Bisky, J. (1999) ‘Sattes Behagen in der Mehrzweckhalle. Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne: Warum die Ausstellung in Dresden ein Desaster ist’, Berliner Zeitung, 12 May. Bothe, R. (1999) ‘Vorwort’, in Bothe, R. and Föhl, T., (eds), Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne. Weimar: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 9–10. Bothe, R. and Föhl, T. (eds) (1999) Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne. Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Cohen, R. (1999) ‘Exhibiting the Art of History’s Dustbin: Dictator’s Treasures Stir German Anger’, New York Times, 17 August. Data service LeMO, Fraunhofer Institute, the German Historical Museum, and the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany: www.dhm.de/lemo. 203 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 204

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Wolbert

Dehio, G. (1991) Handbuch der Kunstdenkmäler. Vol. Band I: Mitteldeutschland. Unveränderter Nachdruck der Ausgabe Berlin, Wasmuth 1905. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag. Der Spiegel (1999) ‘Wut über den Wessi: Mit der DDR-Kunst hat es sich die Weimarer Ausstellung leichtgemacht. Das saloppe Kunterbunt bringt Maler und Kenner in Rage’, p. 22. Dittrich von Weringh, K. (1988) ‘Die Entdeckung der Kultur Europas’, in Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch, 38(4), pp. 473–78. Duncan, C. (1991) ‘Art Museum and the Ritual of Citizenship’, in Karp, I. and Lavine, S. (eds), Exhibiting Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 88–103. –––––– (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums, London and New York: Routledge. Ehrlich, L., John, J. and Ulbricht, J.H. (1999a) ‘“Das Dritte Weimar”: Ausgangspunkt, Herausforderungen und Grenzen einer Kulturgeschichte Weimars in der NS-Zeit’, in Ehrlich, L., John, J. and Ulbricht, J.H. (eds.), Das Dritte Weimar: Klassik und Kultur im Nationalsozialismus,. Cologne, Weimar, Vienna: Böhlau, pp. 7–34. –––––– (1999b) ‘Die völkische und nationalsozialistische Instrumentalisierung der kulturellen Tranditionen Weimars. Bilanz eines Forschungsprojekts’, in Ehrlich, John and Ulbricht (eds), pp. 335–51. Frank, S. (1999) ‘“Angriff auf das Herz der Stadt”. Festivalisierung, Imagepolitik und lokale Identität: Die Rollplatz-Dabatte in Weimar, Kulturstadt Europas 1999’, Tourismus-Journal, 3(4), pp. 513–30. Galloway, D. (1999) ‘New Light on Weimar’, Art in America, 87(7), pp. 36–41. Gerlach, H. (1992) ‘Woran man sich halten kann. Vom Umgang mit dem Zeitgeist’, in Laher, L. (ed.), Der genius loci überzieht die Stadt. Beiträge zum Symposium der Salzburger Autorengruppe. Berlin, Vienna, Mühlheim a. d. Ruhr: GuthmannPeterson: 20. Graevenitz, A. von (1989) ‘Rites of Passage in Modern Art’, in Lavin, I. (ed.), World Art: Themes of Unity in Diversity. Acts of the XXVIth International Congress of the History of Art, Washington, DC: Pennsylvania State University Press, pp. 588–92. Hootz, R. (ed.) (1968) Deutsche Kunstdenkmäler. Ein Bildhandbuch, Vol. I, Thüringen. Ausgewählt und erläutert von Friedlich und Helga Möbius. Munich, Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag. Jacobsen. D. (1999) ‘Jetzt bloß nicht den Abstieg riskieren! Ein Jahr Europäische Kulturstadt Weimar: Keine vollen Kassen, dafür aber volle Gassen’, Die Zeit, 16 December. Jenssen, J. (1999) ‘Westkunst gegen Ostkunst’, Berliner Zeitung, 26 May. Junge Welt, ‘Kai Uwe Schierz. Weimar: Sagt Herr Press die Wahrheit? Interview mit Ulrike Schulz’, 25 June 1999. Klinggräff, F. von (1999) ‘Kulturkampf mit Müllhaufen. Ein Vernichtungsfeldzug gegen die DDR-Kunst oder doch bloss Dilettantismus? Eine Podiumsdiskussion zur umstrittenen Austellung in Weimar’, Die Tageszeitung, 5/6 June. Knapp, G. (1999) ‘An die Wand gestellt. Wie die Weimarer Ausstellung die DDR-Kunst abqualifiziert’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 5 May. 204

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 205

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar

Korrek, N. (1996) ‘Das ehemalige Gauforum Weimar – Chronologie’, in Vergegenständlichte Erinnerung: Perspektiven einer janusköpfigen Stadt, Bauhaus Universität Weimar. Der Referent für Öffentlichkeit und Medien Reiner Bensch. Weimar: Universitätsverlag. Kunstsammlungen Weimar (ed.), (2000) Der Weimarer Bilderstreit: Szenen einer Ausstellung; eine Dokumentation. Weimar: VDG Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. Landgericht, Erfurt: ‘Urteil in dem einstweiligen Verfügungsverfahren der Künstlerin Ellena Olson gegen die Stadt Weimar, Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar und Weimar 1999 Kulturstadt Europas GmbH wegen Urheberrechtsverletzung, verkündet am 17.08.1999.’ Landgericht Erfurt 3 u O 16/95: 8. Loos, K. (1995) ‘Das “Gauforum” in Weimar. Vom bewusstlosen Umgang mit nationalsozialistischer Geschichte’, in Heiden, D. and Mai, G. (eds), Nationalsozialismus in Thüringen. Weimar, Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, pp. 333–48. Nora, P. (1989) ‘Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire’, Representations 26, pp. 7–25. Petropoulos, J. (1998) Art as Politics in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Preiss, A. (1999a) ‘Die Kunst dem Volke - Die Sammlung Adolf Hitlers’, in Bothe, R. and Föhl, T. (eds), Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne. Weimar: Hatje Cantz Verlag, pp. 406–21. –––––– (1999b), Abschied von der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts. Weimar: VDG. –––––– (2000) ‘Die Debatte um die Weimarer Ausstellung “Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne”’, in Bestgen, U. (ed.), Der Weimarer Bilderstreit: Szenen einer Ausstellung; eine Dokumentation/ Kunstsammlungen Weimar. Weimar: VDG, Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, pp. 9–26. Rogoff, I. (1994) ‘From Ruins to Debris: The Feminization of Fascism in GermanHistory Museums’, in Sherman, D. and Rogoff, I. (eds), Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses,Spectacles. Minneapolis, MI: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 223–49. Roth, S., Frank, S. and Beinert, A. n.d, Die Arena in der Arena – Weimar, Kulturstadt Europas 1999 (AidA) – Analysen und Daten zur Politik des Events. Weimar: Hassenpflug, D. ed., Bauhaus Universität Weimar, Fakultät Architektur, Professur für Soziologie und Sozialgeschichte der Stadt. Haus der Europäischen Urbanistik. (Report). Salzmann, M. and Zühlke, D. (1971) Weimar und seine Umgebung. Ergebnisse der heimatkundlichen Bestandaufnahmeim Gebiet von Weimar und Bad Berka Werte unserer Heimat. Ergebnisse der heimatkundlichen Bestandsaufnahme in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin. Geographisches Institut. Arbeitsgruppe Heimatforschung. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Scheidig, W. (1971) Die Geschichte der Weimarer Malerschule 1860–1900. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger. Schley, J. (1999) ‘Die Stadt Weimar und das Konzentrationslager Buchenwald 1937 bis 1945’, in Ehrlich, John, and Ulbricht (eds), Das Dritte Weimar, pp. 311–34. 205

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

08_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:14 PM Page 206

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Wolbert

Stadler, S. (1999) ‘Wer die gelbe Karte zeigt. Klärendes Gewitter: Ein Forum zur umstrittenen DDR-Kunstausstellung in Weimar’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No.4, June. Süddeutsche Zeitung, ‘Bankrotte in Weimar’, 20 May 1999; ‘Café Deutschland: Kritik an Weimarer Ausstellung’, 21 May 1999. Tagesspiegel, ‘Umstrittene Weimarer Ausstellung: Künstler sollen gehört warden’, 26 May 1999; ‘Die neue “entartete Kunst”? Weimar-Schau ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne’ wird umgehängt’, 24 May 1999; ‘Wir lassen uns nicht als Spielball benutzen: Bilderstürmer Rainer Stagl und Hans Scheib über ihre Aktion. Interview mit Nicole Kuhn’, 31 May 1999. Tannert, C. (1999) ‘Handgreiflicher Bilderstreit: Künstler entfernen am Sonnabend in der Weimarer Ausstellung “Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne” demonstrativ ihre Bilder’, Berliner Zeitung, 31 May. Turner, V. (1967) The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. –––––– (1974) Drama, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. –––––– (1982) From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play, New York City: Performing Arts Journal Publications. Ulbricht, J.H. (1999), ‘Von der “Heimat” zum “Trutzgau”. Kulturgeschichtliche Aspekte der “Zeitenwende” 1933’, in Ehrlich, John, and Ulbricht (eds), Das Dritte Weimar, pp. 163–218. Van Gennep, A. (1908) 1960, The Rites of Passage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Weimar Kultur Journal. Zeitschrift für Weimar, Erfurt, Jena, Apolda, ‘Ein Aufstieg und Fall zu Weimar: Anmerkungen zu ‘Offiziell/Inoffiziell – Die Kunst der DDR’, Vol 8, No. 7, 1999, Title page. Wershoven, H. (2000) ‘Chronik’, in Der WeimarrBilderstreit. Szenen einer Ausstellung. Eine Dokumentation, Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar (ed.) Weimar: VDG, Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften, p. 35. Wirth, H. (1999) ‘Das Weimarer “Gauforum”: Geschichtszeugnis - Sachzeugnis – Denkmal’, in Zimmermann, G. and Wolf, C. (eds), Vergegenständlichte Erinnerung – Über Relikte der NS Architektur, Weimar: Universitätsverlag, pp. 47–53. Wolbert, B. (2001) ‘De-Arranged Places: East German Art in Unified Germany’s Museums’, The Anthropology of East Europe Review, 19(1), pp. 57–64. Wolf, C. (1996) ‘Das Gauforum als typische Bauaufgabe nationalsozialistischer Architektur – überlegungen zu frühen Planungen’, in Vergegenständlichte Erinnerung: Perspektiven einer janusköpfigen Stadt, Bauhaus Universität Weimar. Der Referent für Öffentlichkeit und Medien Reiner Bensch. Weimar: Universitätsverlag.

206 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 207

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

PART IV D ILEMMAS OF E NCHANTMENT

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 208

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 209

C HAPTER 9 E NCHANTMENT AND ITS D ILEMMAS : THE M USEUM AS R ITUAL S ITE

A

Sharon Macdonald




Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Introduction Museums have often been compared to religious sites: temples, churches, cathedrals, mausoleums, tombs. Moreover, in some cases the boundaries between the two are far from clear-cut. In Krakow, Poland, where the workshop on which this book is based was held, churches brim over with splendid artworks and artefacts, museums are packed with religious treasures; one of Krakow’s synagogues has been restored for use as a museum; and nearby, and also on the tourist trail, lies Auschwitz-Birkenau – itself a kind of large museum with a disturbing tangle of visitor information areas, artefacts of past atrocity, graves and religious memorials. Museums and religious sites may also share an aesthetic: hushed tones, dimmed lighting, a sense of reverence – of being in communion with the sacred; they may emanate an aura of age, the past, anachronism. There are also similarities in contemporary debates about them: in particular, a prevalent concern with demise – the anxiety that they are institutions of yesterday which are unlikely to have much place in the world of tomorrow. At the same time, however, and paradoxically considering the discourse of demise, there is considerable evidence to the contrary. Rather than the disappearance of religion, what we witness globally is the emergence of numerous new religious movements and fundamentalisms. And museums likewise seem to be undergoing an efflorescence, with not only extensive numbers of new museums 209 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 210

Sharon Macdonald

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

opening in many countries, but also new variations on the museum theme, new exhibitions and architectural innovations which seem to be propelling museums to greater prominence in public culture. In this chapter I seek to explore the museum-religion analogy in order to reflect upon these changes and the apparently contradictory discourses in which they are enmeshed. In doing so, I draw especially on attempts to characterise so-called ‘new religious movements’ which suggest that these reflect a particular, and increasingly prevalent, formation of ‘religiosity’ – entangled in changing conceptions of authority and subjectivity – in the late modern world. At the same time, I look at museums as ritual sites in which science and magic are mediated, and, moreover, as sites dedicated to such mediation. Museums can be regarded as ritual sites in that they are culturally demarcated spaces of concentrated meaning involving a degree of culturally regularised collective performance (cf. Duncan 1995). Furthermore, they involve a particular kind of mediation of, and interplay between, authoritative knowledge (science) and enchantment (magic) – an interplay which to some extent varies across time and space, and across different kinds of museums and their relatives. What a reading of certain commentaries on new religious movements suggests, however, is that the nature or balance of this interplay may be changing, to some extent at least. This may involve a greater explicit recognition of – and even increasingly rationalised attempts to manufacture – enchantment and subjective experience.1 This, however, can raise dilemmas for museums and museum-like sites, especially those which seek to deal with ‘difficult’ subject matter – such as the Holocaust or National Socialist history. It is to some of these dilemmas that the final part of this chapter is addressed.

Beyond Secularisation The idea that society would become progressively more secular has been shared by a broad array of commentators, many accepting, albeit in more sophisticated form, Sir James Frazer’s Enlightenment assumption of an evolutionary progression from magic, to religion, to science. In many contexts, aspects of what has come to be called the secularisation thesis do seem to hold (Martin 1978). In particular, established churches in many parts of the world – though by no means all – seem to have experienced declining attendance and aspects of conventional religious practice have disappeared. Moreover, greater institutional differentiation seems to have led to religion in many contexts becoming progressively more institutionally discrete from other domains, such as law and politics; though this does not necessarily mean that churches come to be irrelevant to such domains for ‘religions are everywhere influencing public affairs in the contemporary world’ (Hann 2000: 14, discussing Casanova 1994). It is the continued, and in some contexts even 210

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 211

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

increased, influence of religions in public affairs, together with the growth of so-called ‘fundamentalisms’ and ‘new religious movements’, the latter of which have also been associated with ‘the rise of a new religiosity within established religions’ (Beckford 1986: vii), that has thrown the secularisation thesis into question and has even led some to posit an ‘antisecularisation thesis’ (see Kurtz 1995: 163). Globally the picture is highly varied and we should not, perhaps, expect or attempt an account which transcends so much deep-rooted historical and cultural specificity. Yet, the ‘second life’ of religion in countries such as the United States and those of western Europe (which tend to act as implicit models in secularisation discussions), nevertheless clearly highlights the fact that certain forms of religion continue to hold a good deal of popular appeal (see Beckford 1986; Castells 1997: Ch.1; Kurtz 1995; Wilson 1999). Of contemporary religious movements, two that have attracted particular attention are fundamentalisms and new religious movements, the latter term being used both as a fairly loose category to cover all kinds of new sects and cults, whether still fairly closely affiliated with established religions or not, as well as a term to describe what are sometimes called ‘alternative religious movements’ (Kurtz 1995: 192), especially those involving a type of ‘detraditionalized’ religiosity with a particular emphasis on ‘self-spirituality’ (Heelas 1996, 1999). Fundamentalisms and new religious movements are sometimes regarded as almost diametrically opposed developments: fundamentalism as a ‘pursuit of certainty’ (James 1995) and unquestioning acceptance of a set of canonically defined absolutes; and new religious movements as more individually expressive and syncretic, with relativity of commitment permissible rather than ‘belief ’ being a crucial lynchpin. In practice, such distinctions may be harder to pin down (new religious movements may, for example, have their own canon which must be accepted, and fundamentalisms may be more syncretic than they typically admit). More importantly, however, rather than seeing them as opposed and contradictory developments, some commentators have suggested that they are both part of a response to a similar set of latemodern anxieties: both involve the pursuit of some kind of deeper meaning and ontological security in the face of perceived instabilities and uncertainties in the world today (see Beckford 1999 for discussion). The list of forces implicated in such instabilities and uncertainties is sometimes cryptically condensed into terms such as ‘globalisation’, the ‘risk society’ and ‘late modernity’, but otherwise is long and heterogeneous, including, inter alia, declining optimism that science and technology will be able to provide answers to world problems and even a growing sense that they are responsible for environmental and medical ‘bads’, a related need to rely on expertise coupled with a greater distrust of many forms of expertise themselves, a growing critique of ‘consumer culture’ and ‘materialism’ in relation to which individuals are often conceptualised as losing hold of ‘more important’ or ‘deeper’ meanings, and 211

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 212

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sharon Macdonald

a more general apperception of being uprooted and without sufficient anchorage in a context of increased social and geographical mobility. If fundamentalisms seem to offer a relatively straightforward retreat from the late-modern sense of impending danger and burgeoning doubt into apparently ‘older’ and self-proclaimedly ‘foundational’ bastions of certainty, the reflex of new religious movements is in some respects more complex. Rather than looking to what have been called ‘paternalistic’ forms of authority (see Greenwood 2000: 10), new religious movements entail an emphasis on individual subjectivity and experience. In such forms of religiosity the self often comes to be regarded both as an authentic source of real meaning and as an appropriate object in itself of religious attention. As such, new forms of spirituality often become entangled with other technologies of self-realisation which offer the opportunity to access the ‘inner’ or ‘deeper’ self.2 (Indeed, one version of the secularisation thesis has it that the modern cultural emphasis on notions such as ‘individual autonomy’ and ‘self-expression’ can be seen as part of ‘a sort of invisible religiosity’ (Kurtz 1995: 207).) Experience is a category which is given particular privilege in such constellations because it is conceived as fundamentally subjective and the route to such access. Moreover, as this access is regarded as relatively direct and unmediated, ‘experience’ is foregrounded as especially ‘authentic’. One institutional correlate of this is that new forms of religiosity are not so likely to involve legislative and paternalistic forms of religious leadership but put the emphasis instead on more interpretive forms of religious mediation which allow for more individualised practices and expressions of spirituality. The decline of the canonical in favour of a quest to discover whatever set of religious (or other) practices best allow individuals to realise their inner selves also predisposes new religious movements – and established religion too – to change and adaptation as they search for means to allow their devotees to get in touch with themselves. In the overall religious marketplace this is likely too to lead to an appearance of proliferation and experimentation as new cults and off shoots of the formerly new appear (and disappear).

Sites of Science and Magic Museums, I have suggested, have always involved an interplay of science and magic, authoritative knowledge and enchantment. Whether their subject matter be art, science and technology, ethnography or history, museums have sought to present to their audience knowledge grounded in disciplinary expertise. This canonical knowledge, the museum equivalent to the Holy Truth, has also, however, always been entangled with a kind of magic in its realisation into exhibitions. This magic consists of both the relatively calculated enchantment of museums – the architectural and aesthetic exhibitionary 212

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 213

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

strategies used to attract the visitor – and also the magical excess provided by objects, which allows visitors to read their own ‘occult’ (in the sense of alternative to the Holy Truth) meanings into that which is displayed. The ‘established church’ of the museum world is surely the nineteenthcentury public museum – that confident expression of, especially, nation state identity, of the worthiness of public learning, of progress and the achievements of science and the arts, and of the ambition of civil society itself. Although many national and municipal museums formed on this nineteenthcentury model continue today, they have, especially since the 1970s, come under increasing criticism and at the same time there has been a considerable increase in new kinds of generally independent, local and specialist museums and museum relatives, such as heritage and science centres, as well as other spaces in which leisure time might be spent, including zoos and nature parks. In response to this, and particularly in response to falling attendance in a political climate in which visitor numbers are one of the justifications for public funding, many established museums, as well as new museums, have developed new philosophies, new forms of working, new exhibitions and building programmes. In doing so, they have sought to redefine their role and their place in public culture. What light do discussions of new religious movements throw on these museum developments? In raising such a question, my intention is neither to try to identify analogies for their own sake nor to embark on an extensive empirical investigation. Rather, my aim is to draw on aspects of the analysis of new religious movements to identify some areas to which we might direct attention in thinking about museums. In doing so, however, I also want to try to keep the categories of ‘science’ and ‘magic’ in the investigative frame in order to think about the nature of the interplay between them. The level of my account here is intentionally schematic, though it draws on my reading about museums and ‘museum watching’, as well as on some of the material presented in this book. What I hope is to explore more fully the conventional religion–museum analogy than is usually the case and thus to open up more of its potential for helping us to understand museums. My discussion is organised around the following overlapping areas: (1) institutional forms, philosophies and forms of mediation; (2) relationship to subjectivity and knowledge/experience relations; and (3) public culture and controversy.

Forms and philosophies As in the religious sphere, the last several decades in particular have witnessed a proliferation and diversification of museums. Eco-museums, heritage and science centres and museums of unusual and specialist subjects, such as packaging, lawnmowers or the museum of emotions mentioned by Anthony 213

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 214

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sharon Macdonald

Shelton (paper presented in the Krakow workshop), are just some of the many new types – not all of which are uncontroversially credited as ‘museums’. Zoos – whose history overlaps with that of museums – have also experienced a similar challenge, in part from nature parks (see Silva, Chapter 5, and Heatherington, Chapter 6, this volume). Just as there has been debate about what counts as ‘religion’ – the extent to which it incorporates new-age therapies and alternative medicine, say – so too, new ‘museum-like’ forms have prompted a good deal of boundary discussion about the nature of museums and what might constitute their ‘key’ characteristics. An apparent leakiness of boundaries in the field of new religiosity, whereby religion has been suggested to have become invisibly more pervasive in modern culture, could also be argued to characterise the museum field, the museum perhaps losing its walls (as Malraux 1954 expressed it) and practices of ‘collection’ and ‘heritage’ seeping into more and more areas of consumer culture and domestic life (see e.g. Dorst 1987) – sometimes to include peoples themselves, as described in rather different contexts in the chapters here by Ian Fairweather (8), Barbara Saunders (4) and Anna Wieczorkiewicz (3). This all has implications for established museums too; and these have adopted presentational strategies pioneered in ‘new museums’ – especially the use of reproduced ‘total environments’ and sets, interactive exhibits and drama, and they have mounted exhibitions on unusual, popular and sometimes controversial subjects (for example Wolbert, Chapter 8 in this volume). No longer is there a canon of what might be expected in an established museum: exhibitions and approaches change as often as do the liturgies in the Church of England (for which a software program called ‘Worship Master’ is now available to guide through the myriad alternatives; Flanagan 1999: 152). Of course, new approaches are taken up to varying extents by different museums; and more ‘fundamentalist’ authoritative strategies (emphasising the primacy of curatorial scholarship) may well still be mobilised in certain contexts and fundamentalist arguments remain of importance in political debates within and between museums. Individual museums may cope with their different constituencies and demands by a collage of approaches: trying out one strategy for one type of exhibition and another for the next. A museum such as the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, discussed here by both Barbara Saunders and Boris Wastiau (Chapters 3 and 4), is strikingly illustrative of this, showing great sensitivity to the semantics of labelling exhibits in one exhibition (Wastiau) and a remarkably insensitive colonialist representation in its entrance hall (Saunders). This ‘pick and mix’ approach – sometimes referred to as the ‘multimuseum’ concept – may itself be justified in terms of providing choice for the visitor (see Macdonald 2001). While a similar motif of ‘choice rather than fate’ has been claimed as a feature of many new religious movements (Heelas 1999: 64), in some ways museums are much more adaptable in this regard, for religious movements, although they may change over time, generally have less scope for the kind of experimentation possible in 214

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 215

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

museums. Moreover, while adherents to new religious movements may well change from one ‘faith’ to another much more often than was typical in the past, sampling Buddhism for a year or so followed by trying out Shamanism then Neopaganism, and while there are reported to be visitors who go to their local museum every Sunday afternoon, commitment to a religion is nevertheless conceptualised as a deeper and more long-term matter than is visiting a museum. The demise of a canon and the attempt to provide variety and novelty also have implications for the role of the museum priesthood. A much broader consortium of participants is now typically involved (in the UK at least) in making an exhibition than was previously the case; museum directors and curators being supplemented by specialist designers, practitioners in the subject matter, education consultants, visitor researchers and, crucially, visitors or ‘members of the community’ themselves. Disciplinary scholarship-based subject expertise no longer provides the guiding dogma but is just one of the ‘voices’ worthy of being heard in the museological practice of exhibition creation. The role of museum staff is not so much to provide ‘the Truth’ but, in a manner analogous to that of the scientists in the case of ‘the Baby’ discussed by Penelope Harvey (Chapter 1), to contribute to a more discursively produced and possibly contested ‘truth’. That is, they are generally expected to adopt less paternalistic priestly roles and instead to act rather as ‘spiritual managers’ or the ‘focalisers’ of the Findhorn Community new religious movement, a role which is intended to be entirely mediatory rather than authoritative, and which is dedicated towards enabling religious aspirants to ‘find’ and express themselves (Heelas 1999: 73). At the same time, however, in an apparent paradox also noted in discussions of new religious movements, alongside the ideology of ‘responsibility without authority’ (quoted in Heelas 1999: 73) there may well be very marked authority in practice exercised by particularly charismatic figures. In the museum field this has in some instances become institutionalised in the adoption of ‘star’ curators or designers who are given ‘artistic licence’ to create exhibitions with relative autonomy (as in the exhibition discussed by Wolbert).

Subjectivity and experience One of the most frequently discussed features of new religious movements is their emphasis on ‘individuals’ and ‘the self ’, and such movements have been described in terms of ‘the turn to the self ’ (Charles Taylor, in Heelas 1999: 75) and a late-modern imperative of ‘self-discovery’ (Heelas, ibid.). While individual salvation might be argued to be a feature of many religions, what is said to be distinctive about these new forms of religious movement is that the self per se becomes both the subject and object of religiosity. ‘Truth’ is 215

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 216

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sharon Macdonald

then sometimes talked about as that which is ‘within’; and the goal of many religious practices is not to acquire knowledge as a correlate of belief (for example knowing catechisms or scriptural texts by heart) but to discover ways of ‘finding’ this inner self and gaining understanding on the basis of ‘experience’. The practices of new religious movements are, therefore, likely to be directed to accessing ‘experience’, something which may well involve ideas about removing perceived ‘impediments’ to such access, perhaps by avoiding aspects of modern life (such as certain foods, consumer culture, noise and pollution) which are deemed detrimental to ‘getting in touch with oneself ’. Inner-directed contemplative practices such as meditation and unstructured prayer are often characteristic of such movements. So too, however, may be practices intended to provide a sense of direct contact with ‘nature’ or the ‘sublime’, or transcendence through denial or hedonism. Within the newer museum formation, experience could also be said to have gained some ground relative to knowledge; a shift which we might also characterise as a relative shifting of the balance from science and towards magic. Although many museums certainly still do seek to provide information or to encourage ‘learning’ (a term which is used in preference to ‘teaching’ in the less paternalist ethos), the balance of emphasis in the ‘new museums’ may be tilted towards other matters such as providing enjoyment, entertainment or spectacle. In some types of museums, this is reflected in an emphasis on fun and play, the attempt to create ‘whole’ or ‘total’ environments, and the use of interactivity, animation, installations and drama. While such experiential modes of presentation may be argued to assist learning, the direct appeal to visitors’ sensory subjectivities is regarded as a relevant component in itself of ‘the museum effect’ (see Heatherington, Chapter 6 in this volume). So too is direct appeal to, and mobilisation of, the enchanted properties of objects. Rather than as an ‘excess’ to the illustration of an authoritative narrative, the aesthetic, mysterious, intriguing and magical qualities of an object may be presented as most noteworthy (for example, as in some ancient Egyptian exhibitions, as discussed here by Wieczorkiewicz, Chapter 2; see also Bann 2003). One mode of harnessing this entails an attempt to ‘strip away’ the appearance of mediation in order to try to provide the visitor with as ‘direct’ an experience of the enchanted object as possible. This is described in attempts to put ‘the Baby’ computer on display in Penelope Harvey’s chapter here (1); and also in the emphasis on ‘fully natural nature’ in the contexts of zoos and nature parks in the chapters by Natasha Silva (5) and Tracey Heatherington (6). The production of the appearance of a lack of mediation or of ‘naturalness’ generally requires careful mediation, of course, as these chapters illustrate, and as contributions by Ian Fairweather (7) and Barbara Saunders (3) also show in different ways. It is also potentially problematic in its openness to alternative readings as I discuss in the final section of this chapter. Rather than the unmediated approach, museums may instead seek to emphasise the ‘magical’ 216

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 217

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

qualities of objects by using display techniques such as dramatic lighting, background noise or music, and labels which use suggestive questions (addressing the visitor in direct, individualised terms: ‘What does this object say to you?’), cryptic quotations or fairy-tale-like narratives (Wieczorkiewicz, Chapter 2). The magical and spectacular qualities of museum spaces or buildings themselves may also be played up – visually arresting and sometimes outlandish architectural designs, which strive to make individual ‘style statements’, being one of the signatures of the current museum movement (cf. Prior 2003). Where new religious movements couch their appeal especially in terms of individuated self-seekers, the established church often seems keener to mobilise a more collective discourse of ‘community’. In museums too, while established museums undoubtedly have often adopted a discourse of individuated ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’, this has frequently run (sometimes uncomfortably) alongside agentic notions of ‘the public’, ‘community’ or ‘citizenry’. As has been pointed out by those such as Benedict Anderson (1983), museums (especially national and other public-funded museums) have been one of the key institutions through which collective identities have been imagined; but, of course, this process is not a ‘once and for all’ matter but needs to be constantly reiterated and perhaps revised (Ringrose and Lerner 1993). While established museums may, then, continue to be called upon to imagine communities, the discourse of ‘the public’ and ‘the community’ is simultaneously part of the way in which they imagine themselves. It is through such idioms (to some extent at least) that established museums define their own worth and perhaps even seek to morally elevate themselves over their newer counterparts. The idioms are, however, used flexibly (this is part of their rhetorical advantage) and may be conceptualised in a more plural manner than previously – ‘community’, for example, may be used as synonymous with ‘multicultural population’ (cf. Baumann 1996; Welz 1996). ‘Reaching out to’ the community and ‘bringing the community into the museum’ are strategies frequently discussed and enacted in museums today; and they involve such experiments as consulting local populations on future exhibitions and letting people make interventions in museum displays (as in Sheffield City Museum’s recent ‘Memory Gems’ exhibition in which members of the Afro-Caribbean lunch club were invited to work with a curator to insert their own photographs and commentaries into display cases throughout the museum). In this way, museums also position themselves as ‘facilitators’ (Walsh 1992: Ch.8), as agencies capable of representing communities in the public sphere.

Public culture and controversy The capacity in some circumstances to claim to speak on behalf of communities is, for both museums and churches, one factor in their (in some respects 217

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 218

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sharon Macdonald

surprising) presence and influence in public affairs in the late twentieth, and into the twenty-first, century. In multicultural societies, cultural and religious differences have become matters of considerable, and sometimes potentially explosive, political sensitivity; and this has as a corollary that institutions which manage or represent culture and religion are both called upon for their expertise in these matters and at the same time easily find themselves entangled in political controversy. This is perhaps especially the case for ethnographic museums, and chapters here by Saunders and Wastiau (3 and 4) illustrate some of the areas of difficulty, though, as other chapters illustrate, other kinds of exhibitions are far from immune (see especially Wolbert, Chapter 8). The recognition of the politics of dealing with cultural difference has also been accompanied by a more widespread public acknowledgment of ‘culture’ as political (something reflected in academic attention too) and representation as potentially highly socially influential. This recognition has also been reflected in the politicisation of museums – the increased political intervention in their organisation. At the same time, the recognition of the plural or multifaceted nature of ‘the public’, together with a relativisation of knowledge, has to a degree freed museums from representing either a canon or occupying consensual positions. This has enabled them to create exhibitions which do not necessarily represent either the viewpoints or the constituencies which would traditionally be represented in established museums; and this has led to the creation of sometimes controversial exhibitions which challenge the status quo or received knowledge (see Macdonald 1998 for discussion of various examples). One reason why some such exhibitions have been controversial, however, is that museums are widely seen as inappropriate sites for the representation of perspectives deemed marginal or that adopt explicitly positioned or unorthodox standpoints. Just as religious institutions are widely regarded as ‘morality experts’ (Bauman 1992: 203) even by ‘nonbelievers’, established museums in particular are mostly understood as authoritative (if fallible) ‘knowledge experts’. Moreover, it is the provision of such expertise, a source of anchorage in a perceivedly mobile world, that might be argued to play a part in the ongoing efflorescence of museums (and religious movements) and their public position. This gives them a respectability in public culture which makes some feel that it is irresponsible for them not to seek to provide viewpoints that are as consensual or ‘true’ as possible. This is a perspective shared by some, perhaps many, who work in museums. While on the one hand museum staff may recognise the existence and even validity of alternative knowledges and truths, and while they may have come to understand their own role as mediatory rather than legislative, they rarely fully embrace relativism. Although ‘truth’ in many museums may be understood as negotiated and plural, as Penelope Harvey notes (Chapter 1), it is unlikely to be fully discarded. 218

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 219

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

Museums’ presence in public debate, then, is partly a consequence of the fact that they continue to be seen as possessing authority, expertise and some kind of privileged access to ‘truths’ in the cultural domain. Although that expertise today is not so likely to be seen to rest on special access to any single source so much as on their expert and increasingly professionalised mediatory and representational capacities, it remains a significant source of influence. This means that museum representations not only remain political but that museums have become to an even greater extent regarded as institutions which can, and perhaps even should, deal with controversial and ‘difficult’ matters.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Dilemmas of Enchantment and Profanity It is to museological attempts to deal with subject-matter deemed ‘difficult’ that I now turn. Such attempts highlight the delicate balance between magic and science, between enchantment and authority, that museums may have to negotiate. As I try to show, there are contexts in which museum magic and the semireligious aura of ritual sites themselves can pose exhibitionary and even moral dilemmas. The main case on which I focus here is the former Nazi party rally grounds in Nuremberg, Germany. This is an apt case to consider in relation to these questions because it was originally designed as a site of popular enchantment and the whole area has, to an extent, been defined as a museum. Its postwar history is replete with attempts to cope with its potentially enchanting residue as well as instances of reenchantment; and it illustrates the deployment of a range of different museological strategies and, as such, the varying cultural and political work of which museums may be capable. The Nazi party rally grounds (the Reichsparteitagsgelände) were intended explicitly as a ritual site.3 They consist of a large area of architecturally imposing ‘monumental’ buildings and marching fields in which the ritual-packed week-long party rallies were held between 1933 and 1938. The site was to form an impressive backdrop for Nazi propaganda, such as Leni Riefenstahl’s famous Triumph of the Will; it was an area of very carefully choreographed enchantment whose aim was to generate a collective ‘Volk’ identity and to fuel the ‘Führer Myth’. The Nazi building programme was never fully completed, however, and after the war Nuremberg was left with a partial building site with constructions which were variously complete, partly finished, only just begun or war-damaged. Nevertheless, the ‘Colosseum’ building (modelled on that at Rome but, in typical Nazi gigantomania, larger) or Congress Hall, the Zeppelin building – with its podium at which Hitler was so often filmed ranting to the gathered masses on the marching ground in front, the Luitpold field with its war memorial, and the Great Road were undeniable reminders 219 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 220

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sharon Macdonald

of the area’s former use. What to do with the area became a major problem for the city. In the immediate postwar years it was mainly used for mundane purposes such as storage; though some prewar usages, such as motor racing, and even the German equivalent of Remembrance Day, were resumed there. Parts of the area were also blown up and grassed over, though in 1973 it was designated as ‘worthy of protection as a monument’ (denkmalschutzwürdig) under Bavarian state law, a designation which meant that Nuremberg was compelled to try to maintain the site, though with some subsidy from the state. In a sense this designation defined the rally grounds as a museum – as a site of artefacts of historical significance which should be preserved for the future. Some in Nuremberg were uncomfortable with this ‘museumification’, however, for it seemed to fulfil to some extent the Nazi’s own aspiration to create buildings which would endure over time (for a thousand years); and indeed the city of Nuremberg sometimes failed to comply with the preservation requirements where these were especially costly. Yet to let the buildings fall to ruin was argued to be an equally dangerous strategy by members of the city government, such as the culture minister Hermann Glaser, for this would give them a romantic allure (which architect Albert Speer had also looked forward to), something which he feared was especially attractive to the German psyche.4 His own argument was to neither restore the buildings nor to allow them to become ruined, but to leave them in their partly finished and rather unkempt state. This was part of a strategy for which he coined the term ‘profanieren’ – a strategy of ‘profaning’ the site. This strategy also entailed using the site for banal and ordinary uses such as storage, practice rooms for the Nuremberg orchestra, car parking, building exhibitions, twice-yearly funfairs and even pop concerts. That the site could be put to new everyday use – while preserving it to some extent – was up to a point a counter to its conservation and museumification. Despite the ‘profanieren’ strategy, however, some parts of the site were restored; and some were destroyed even after the application of the conservation legislation. Thus in 1983 the so-called ‘Golden Hall’ (also originally called the ‘Hall of Honour’) inside the Zeppelin building was partially restored to its former glory, complete with its marble cladding donated by Mussolini and its golden ceiling which features an intricate ‘meander’ design from classical antiquity. This design was similar to that in the Zeppelin building’s galleries which had been destroyed in 1967, officially due to their structurally insecure and dangerous state. In 1965, shortly before the decision to destroy the galleries had been taken, however, a visiting Israeli student had accused the city of still having swastikas (officially banned in postwar Germany) on open public view. He was referring to the pattern on the ceiling of the galleries of the Zeppelin building – a pattern which can be seen as made up of swastikas. City officials reacted angrily and defensively, calling in 220

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 221

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

an art expert to say that such patterns would be found in many places in the classical world and that to see them as Nazi symbols was absurd. Nevertheless, their destruction of the galleries in the wake of this accusation made it possible for the city’s actions to be read as a reaction to the accusation. Restoring the Golden Hall was both an appeasement to the state monument conservation office (showing the city to be spending money on the buildings – something over which there had long been discord) and could perhaps also be seen as a belated validation of the official position that the ceiling design should not be regarded as a display of swastikas. The Golden Hall was not simply opened to the public as an unmediated example of a Nazi interior, however. Instead, in the continued intricate tacking back and forth between the politics of enchantment and profanity, it was used as a site of plays and exhibitions critical of Nazism. These included various touring productions and installations and then, from 1985, a more permanent exhibition designed specifically for the site called ‘Fascination and Violence’ (Faszination und Gewalt). This sought specifically to address the connection between fascination – enchantment and propaganda – and violent power under the Nazi regime, and included commentary on the party rallies and their location. In its presentational form, the exhibition also used the ‘profanieren’ strategy: information was presented on large rough wooden boards, and these were placed not only in the Golden Hall but also in some of the damp, dingy and decaying side rooms. While being welcomed as an attempt to at last address the nature of the site, rather than to ignore, bury or blow up the past, the exhibition also initially received criticism for putting too much emphasis on ‘fascination’ and too little on ‘violence’ – an emphasis which some said was highlighted by its location in the Golden Hall. In response to this the exhibition was soon extended to also address matters such as racism in order to try to make the link between aestheticisation and violence more explicit still. Nevertheless, it was still suggested in the Nuremberg press that the exhibition was, perhaps, an ‘alibi’ for the city – a minimal and inadequate appearance of addressing the Nazi past and Nuremberg’s role in it so that Nuremberg could say that it had done something and then forget all about it. With such an alibi in place the city could go ahead with its ‘profanieren’ strategy and ignore the previous meanings of the site in the search for usages which would help to pay the bills of the costly maintenance of the buildings. Disquiet over ‘profanieren’ came to a head in 1987 when a private company put forward proposals to turn the Congress Hall building into a leisure and shopping complex, complete with golf drives, jogging avenues, and luxury hotel suites. At first the city welcomed the proposals but after a group of concerned citizens argued that this was a ‘historically inappropriate’ usage for the site the plans were shelved.

221 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 222

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sharon Macdonald

In the wake of this, various proposals were put forward to create permanent artistic installations in the rally grounds which would, sometimes rather obliquely, remind of, and comment on, the history of the site. None of these was deemed to strike quite the right chord, however; and there was a particular fear that the developments might themselves unwittingly sacralise the site and thus make it even more attractive to neo-Nazi pilgrims. Whether artworks, with their own particular kind of magic, would be capable of intervening critically in such a monumental and large-scale site was doubted by some, particularly given a fear of also falling into monumentalism and gigantism – both of which are regarded as Fascist styles. Proposals were also made for replacing the existing ‘Fascination and Violence’ exhibition; though these too stalled, one of the sticking points being the city’s argument that the cost of any major development at the site should not be borne by Nuremberg alone as the Nazi party rallies were the responsibility of the whole country. In 1997 this argument finally succeeded and the German Bundestag (the national government) as well as the Bavarian state agreed to help finance a new exhibition development in the rally grounds to replace ‘Fascination and Violence’. This opened in 2001. According to those involved, however, it is not a ‘museum’: instead, they refer to it as a ‘documentation centre’, a matter on which I was corrected several times when I began my research on their project. The term ‘museum’ was seen as inappropriate, I was told, because this was not a place where visitors would come to look at objects. This was not to say that the exhibition space would lack authentic period artefacts: original documents and film (including a considerable quantity of original footage which has never been shown before) would be central to the exhibition. What were deemed ‘inappropriate’ were ‘memorabilia’ – objects valued for their original association with the period itself rather than for their informational and educational value. This distinction was made clear to me one day in one of the offices where the exhibition was being created. I was shown a box of rolled-up papers which, I was told, were ‘really interesting’ – they had also been something of a surprise discovery. These were the original plans for the rally-ground buildings and showed alterations made during the planning (such as the increased dimensions demanded by Hitler of several buildings). Above the box were some shelves scattered with a motley collection of party-rally commemorative items such as beer steins, badges and brochures. ‘Would these also be going on display?’ I asked. The project worker with me laughed and said not: these were items which had been given by local people but were ‘just kitsch’. Unless they could be embedded in strongly educational narratives, the placing of such items in the documentation centre risked turning it into a museum – a site with the power to accord value to artefacts just by the fact of their being there, and a site which would invite a kind of gaze which the exhibition makers wished to deter. In fact, a few such items are included in the finished exhibition. However, the visitor gaze is carefully controlled by 222

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 223

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

presenting them unlabelled and simply as illustrative of the fact that many such items were produced for the party rallies, and by positioning them fairly inconspicuously and a long way into the exhibition and thus thoroughly embedded in its overall narrative. The dangers of inviting the ‘wrong kind of gaze’, of adding to the aura of the site, and even of sacralising it, were given a great deal of creative and sensitive thought in the planning of the exhibition and its linked ‘learning and study forum’. The architecture of the documentation centre was the most obvious – and to some extent most problematic – example. The new exhibition was to be housed in the Congress Hall building rather than the Golden Hall – something which would give more room and scope for organising the internal space as well as avoiding the potentially dominating aesthetic of the Golden Hall. However, the monumental aesthetic of the Congress Hall was also a concern and the organisers wished also to avoid beautifying the building by restoring it further. The winning architectural design, by Austrian architect Günther Domenig, achieves this by leaving the building mainly in an unrestored state and locating the documentation centre in a structure of glass and steel which is described as a ‘stake’ slicing diagonally through the building in ‘a deconstructive cut ...[intended to] break the monumentality and the strict geometry of the Nazi building’ (project outline, my translation). Other parts of the building continue to be put to ‘profane’ usages, such as storage, to further help to counter the possible enchantment. Within the exhibition too, the project workers have faced many problems of potential enchantment in representing the subject matter. To give just one example, at one stage in the planning the designers wanted to include a large photograph of Hitler at the end of a corridor in order to lead into a section about the construction of the ‘Führer Myth’. However, the panel of external advisors which periodically scrutinises the plans was concerned that this would replicate for visitors an experience of being under Hitler’s gaze – a gaze often described as enchanting – and that this would not necessarily lead them to critically appraise this experience. In response, the designers initially decided to still include a large photograph of Hitler at this position – but of the back of his head instead. Later still, however, this was still seen as problematic, arguably inviting visitors to identify with Hitler looking out over the masses, and it was decided that being literally faced by Hitler was appropriate to the ideas being conveyed. The large photograph is, however, rather blurry, helping to mute any possibly enchanting effect. Those creating the exhibition at the party rally grounds have, then, had to think extremely carefully about the ways in which the exhibition might possibly be read by visitors and this has meant that they have taken a much more authoritative and legislative approach than that typical of many other museum developments today, as described above. This does not mean that they have not carried out visitor research or involved inhabitants of Nuremberg. On the 223

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 224

Sharon Macdonald

contrary, they have done both, but this has been oriented around finding ways in which to educate about the Nazi period and its perceived continuing dangers as clearly and unambiguously as possible. So, work with school children, for example, has been dedicated particularly to working out the best language and media in which to speak to them. And artefacts (as with the party-rally memorabilia) or interviews contributed by local people are only included in the exhibition where they can be embedded in the educational and political message that is the rationale of the exhibition itself.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Concluding Comments The example discussed above highlights something of the struggle with enchantment which may be involved in the representation of certain subjects. The dilemma arises in part, I have suggested, from the magical dimensions of the museum form itself – in particular, its capacity to ‘sacralise’ spaces and objects. So often when we are being shown encased objects in an exhibitionary space, we are being invited to a form of ‘enchanted looking’ that Steven Greenblatt calls ‘wonder’ (1990) (see also Heatherington, Chapter 6 in this volume): this is one of the cultural modes of looking associated with the ritualised experience of the museum visit. It is partly for this reason that the experience of visiting sites such as the Nazi party rally grounds and Auschwitz, and especially viewing the objects on display at the latter, can be so disturbing. Positioned on the one hand as tourists, on the other we are called upon to adopt a gaze very different from that at most tourist sites.5 How to draw on the other potential of the exhibitionary form – its educational potential – in a way which will still make people wish to visit but without allowing them to be enchanted by the subject matter itself, and especially by its original intended enchantment, is the dilemma in cases such as these. This dilemma is not, however, exclusive to such cases. In less dramatic ways it is a dilemma faced in many exhibitions. Moreover, it is a dilemma which in many cases is exaggerated for exhibition makers by the shift of emphasis away from curatorial authority and towards trying to make as much space as possible for subjective experience, visitor input and the magic of objects. In making such space, they also open up the exhibition to new readings, not all of which, perhaps, will be desirable. Looking at the museum as a ritual site and exploring the analogy with religious institutions and movements helps to highlight the often delicate interplay between science/authority and magic/enchantment. It also helps to illuminate some of the subtle shifts underway in museological developments as well as their patchy distribution and sometimes contested acceptance or rejection. Hopefully, it also helps to show why museums are not only ritual sites but also deeply political agencies in contemporary public culture. 224 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 225

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

Acknowledgements I wish to thank all of the participants at the Krakow workshop, especially Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto for organising it. I also wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for funding my attendance at the workshop as well as my research in Nuremburg. I am also very grateful to Eckart Dietzfelbinger and Hans-Christian Taübrich of the Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände for assistance with my research.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

NOTES 1. The term ‘enchantment’ bears a Weberian inflection, Weber having argued that modern society was characterised by increasing rationalisation which involved increasing ‘disenchantment’. For a discussion of this, together with an argument that a concomitant quest for enchantment continues in the modern world, see Jenkins 2000. On the manufacture of ‘enchantment’ see also Ritzer 1999; though some critiques of Ritzer’s neo-Weberian arguments are also applicable here (see Smart 1999). 2. The kind of subjectivity constructed in this regard is rather essentialised and does not, therefore, fit the postmodern notion of a decentred or fragmented self (see Heelas 1999). Indeed, it is perhaps partly this that makes new religious movements attractive (ibid.). 3. Information on the Nazi rally grounds and rallies is drawn from a range of primary and secondary sources including Dietzfelbinger 1990,Ogan and Weiss 1992, Geschichte für Alle 1995 and Zelnhefer 2002. 4. Interview with author; see also Glaser 1989 – an article in which he set out this idea. 5. For a discussion of American Jewish tourism in Poland, including Auschwitz, which includes very interesting discussion of the ritual nature of such tourism (as well as of alternatives to a religious analogy), see Kugelmass 1992. For a more general discussion of the history of representation and memorialisation at Auschwitz see Young 1993.

REFERENCES Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Bann, S. (2003) ‘The Return to Curiosity: Shifting Paradigms in Contemporary Museum Display’, in McClellan, A. (ed.), Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millenium. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 117–30. Bauman, Z. (1992) Intimations of Postmodernity. London: Routledge. Baumann, G. (1996) Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckford, J.A. (ed.) (1986) New Religious Movements and Rapid Social Change. London: Sage. 225

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 226

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Sharon Macdonald

Beckford, J.A. (1999) ‘Postmodernity, High Modernity and New Modernity: Three Concepts in Search of a Religion’, in Flanagan, K. and Jupp, P.C. (eds), Postmodernity, Sociology and Religion, Second ed., Basingstoke: Macmillan, pp. 30–47. Casanova, J. (1994) Public Religions in the Modern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castells, M. (1997) The Power of Identity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Dietzfelbinger, E. (1990) Der Umgang der Stadt Nürnbergmit dem früheren Reichsparteitagsgelände, Nuremburg: Pädagogischen Institut. Dorst, J. (1989) The Written Suburb: An American Site, An Ethnographic Dilemma. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press. Duncan, C. (1995) Civilising Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge. Flanagan, K. (1999) ‘Postmodernity and Culture: Sociological Wagers of the Self in Theology’, in Flanagan and Jupp (eds), Postmodernity, Sociology and Religion, pp. 152–73. Geschichte für Alle (1995) Geländebegehung: Das Reichsparteitagsgelände in Nürnberg. Nuremberg: Geschichte für Alle. Glaser, H. (1989) ‘Rumpelkammern im Deutschen Kolosseum’, Rheinischer Merkur, 16 June. Greenblatt, S. (1990) ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Lavine, S. and Karp, I. (eds), Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Greenwood, S. (2000), Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld: an Anthropology. Oxford: Berg. Hann, C.M. (2000) ‘Problems with the (De)privatization of Religion’, Anthropology Today, 16(6), pp. 14–20. Heelas, P. (1996) The New Age Movement: Religion, Cultural and Society in the Age of Postmodernity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Heelas, P. (1999) ‘De-traditionalisation of Religion and the Self: the New Age and Postmodernity’, in Flanagan, K. and Jupp, P.C. (eds), Postmodernity, Sociology and Religion, pp. 64–82. James, W. (1995) ‘Introduction: Whatever Happened to the Enlightenment?’, in James, W. (ed.), The Pursuit of Certainty: Religious and Cultural Formations. London: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Jenkins, R. (2000) ‘Disenchantment, Enchantment and Re-enchantment: Max Weber at the Millennium’, Max Weber Studies, 1, pp. 11–32. Kugelmass, J. (1992) ‘The Rites of the Tribe: American Jewish Tourism in Poland’, in Karp, I., Kreamer, C.M. and Lavine, S. (eds), Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, pp. 382–427. Kurtz, L. (1995) Gods in the Global Village: the World’s Religions in Sociological Perspective. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Macdonald, S. (ed.) (1998) The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London: Routledge. –––––– (2001) ‘Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum: Knowing, Making and Using’, in Bouquet, M. (ed.), Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 117–40. 226

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 227

Enchantment and Its Dilemmas

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Malraux, A. (1954) ‘The Museum without Walls’, in Voices of Silence. London: Secker and Warburg, pp. 13–128. Martin, D. (1978) A General Theory of Secularization. Oxford: Blackwell. Ogan, B. and Weiss, W.W. (eds) (1992), Faszination und Gewalt: Zur politischen Ästhetik des Nationalsozialismus. Nuremberg: W. Tümmels Verlag. Prior, N. (2003) ‘Having One’s Tate and Eating It: Transformations of the Museum in a Hypermodern Era’, in McClellan, A. (ed.), Art and Its Publics: Museum Studies at the Millenium. Oxford: Blackwell. Ringrose, M. and Lerner, A.J. (eds) (1993) Reimagining the Nation. Buckingham: Open University Press. Ritzer, G. (1999) Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Revolutionizing the Means of Consumption. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press. Smart, B. (ed.) (1999) Resisting McDonaldization. London: Sage. Walsh, K. (1992) The Representation of the Past: Museums and Heritage in the PostModern World. London: Routledge. Welz, G. (1996) Inszenierungen kultureller Vielfalt. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Wilson, B. (ed.) (1999) New Religious Movements. London: Routledge. Young, J.E. (1993) The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zelnhefer, S. (2002) Die Reichsparteitage der NSDAP in Nürnberg, Nuremburg: Museen der Stadt Nürnberg.

227 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

09_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:17 PM Page 228

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

10_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 229

N OTES

ON

C ONTRIBUTORS




Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Mary Bouquet teaches Cultural Anthropology and Museum Studies at University College Utrecht, The Netherlands. She has conducted ethnographic research on museums in Portugal, the Netherlands and Norway, and been guest curator of a number of exhibitions. She has published several articles and books about interpreting collections and making exhibitions, and edited Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future, Oxford: Berghahn (2001). Ian Fairweather (Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, Manchester) is currently a temporary lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, Manchester University, with a regional specialisation in Southern Africa. He conducted fieldwork in North-Central Namibia among Oshiwambo speakers and has interests in museums and the heritage industry, the performance of ‘heritage’ and its implications, and the importance of the discourse of ‘heritage’ in the construction of national and ethnic identities. His publications include ‘Showing Off - Nostalgia and Heritage in North-Central Namibia’, Journal of Southern African Studies, (2003); and an edited collection of papers on ‘Anthropology, postcolonialism and museums’, Social Analysis, (2004). Penelope Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Manchester. She has a long-standing research interest in the politics of communication and has done fieldwork in Peru, Spain and Manchester. She has published widely on language, power, technology, knowledge and modernity. She is the author of Hybrids of Modernity: anthropology, the nation state and the universal exhibition, London: Routledge (1996), and is currently completing a book on Being Bilingual in the Southern Peruvian Andes: A study in the politics of language, landscape and history. Tracey Heatherington (Ph.D. in Anthropology, Harvard University, 2000) is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

10_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 230

Notes on Contributors

completed two years’ ethnographic fieldwork on the contestation over environmental projects in central Sardinia, and is working on a book exploring the political ecology of Sardinian ‘ecodevelopment’ in the context of globalisation and Europeanisation. She is the author of ‘Ecology, alterity and resistance in Sardinia’, Social Anthropology (2001). Sharon Macdonald is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of Sheffield. She is currently carrying out research on post-War approaches to the Nazi past in Nuremberg, Germany. Her most recent book is Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (Blackwell, 2002). Nuno Porto is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Department of Anthropology and Coordinator of the Museum of Anthropology at Coimbra University. He has conducted research on colonial museology in Angola. His current research deals with the relations between colonial concepts and practices of ‘traditional arts’ in the production of national arts in Angola.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Saunders (Ph.D. Utrecht) is currently Research Professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leuven. Her research interests focus on colour, the anthropology of perception, the history of anthropology, the ethnohistory of the Northwest Pacific coast, the shifting ideologies of museums, and scientific practice, on all of which she has published a variety of articles. She is also a member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. Natasha J. Silva studied Biology (B.A. University of Amsterdam), Cultural Anthropology (M.A., University of Utrecht) and Museology (Reinwardt Academy), and works for the Education department of the Amsterdam Zoo. She is interested in cultural diversity and attitudes towards wildlife, and in issues of interpretation within the context of zoos and museums. Her current research examines conservation education and visitor experience in Dutch Zoos. Boris Wastiau (Ph.D. University of East Anglia, U.K., 1998) has been curator of Central African Art and Ethnography at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Tervuren, Belgium) since 1996. His current research includes museology, ethnographic photography, and trans-ethnic initiation arts from southwest Central Africa. He is author of ‘Mahamba: The transforming arts of spirit possession among the Luvale-speaking people of the upper Zambezi’ (Fribourg: Fribourg University Press, 2000), and ExItCongoMuseum: An Essay on the ‘Social Life’ of the Masterpeices of the Tervuren Museum. Tervuren: RMCA.

230 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

10_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 231

Notes on Contributors

Anna Wieczorkiewicz (Ph.D. in Humanities from the Polish Academy of Sciences) is a Fellow of the Polish Academy of Sciences, at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology. Her research interests include: cultural representation, interdisciplinary research on literature and culture, the anthropology of museums, and the anthropology of tourism. Her publications include Muzeum ludzkich cia ł. Anatomia spojrzenia (Museum of Human Bodies. Anathomy of the Gaze), Gdansk: Slowo/Obraz, Terytoria 2000; and Wędrowcy ficyjnych światów. Rycerz pielgrzym i w łócz ęga (The Knight, The Pilgrim and The Rough. Travelers in Fictional Worlds.) Gdańsk: S łowo/ Obraz, Terytoria 1997.

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Barbara Wolbert (Ph.D. University of Cologne) teaches at the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). She is currently working on a book about art, politics and diversity in Germany. Recent publications include Multicultural Germany: Art, Media and Performance, (forthcoming special issue of New German Critique, of which she is guest editor, with Deniz Göktürk (UC Berkeley); and ‘The Visual Production of Locality. Turkish Family Pictures, Migration, and the Creation of Virtual Neighborhoods.’ Visual Anthropology Review (2001).

231 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

10_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 232

Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 233

I NDEX

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.




A Abruzzo National Park, 143–44 Adorno, T.W., 78 aesthetic approach, 109 connoisseurship, 77 Africa, 161–63, 165–68, 171, 178, 179n.4, 180n.9 African art history, 104 Agar, J., 41, 42 agency, 4, 12, 186, 198 catalytic, 75, 90, 91 curatorial, 12 visitor’s, 19 Alpers, Svetlana, 142, 168 American Anthropological Association, 199 Amstel river, 129 Amsterdam, 120, 138 analysis of essence, 104 Anderson, B., 217 animals (zoo), 119–20, 122–24, 127–32 animal welfare, 133, 138 anthropological place, 15 Anti-Modern, 194 apartheid, 163–64, 167, 178–79, 179n.1 aquarium, 126–27, 129 Arapesh, 2, 22 Archeological Museum, Crakow, 64 architecture, 217 Aristotle, 78 Arnaut, Karel, 12, 112–13 Arnoldi, M.J., 83, 86

art African, 90, 91 contemporary, 98, 107, 111 modern, 187, 189, 190, 203–204 in science museums, 32, 38, 39, 42, 47, 48 tribal, 90 Art to the People – The Adolf Hitler Collection, 190 Art Transpennine, 33 Artis (Amsterdam Zoo), 6, 13–15, 119–23, 127–28, 130–32 experience, 120, 133, 137 Artists Association, 194 Aset-iri-Khet-es, 65 Asselberghs, H. and D. Lesage, 103 attentive looking, 168 Augé, Marc, 15 auratic value, 106 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 209, 224, 225n.5 authenticity, 144, 146, 153, 155–56 automata, 47 B Baake, B., 182, 203 ‘Baby’, 5, 7, 8, 13, 30, 35, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 47, 48 Bann, S., 216 Barry, A., 7 Baudrillard, Jean, 96, 99, 112 Bauhaus, 193, 199, 205, 206 Baum, Paul, 187 Bauman, Zygmunt, 63, 218

233 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 234

Index

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Baumann, G., 217 Baunei, 144, 157n. Beaucamp, E., 199, 203 Beckford, J., 211 Behrens, Jörg, 199 Belgian colonial expansion, 98 Bell, Catherine, 144 Bennett, Tony, 14, 57 Berg, M., 202, 203 Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts, 194 Bernal, M., 79 Beyer-Held, Elly, 191 Biopark, 127 Bisky, J., 199, 203 Blain, D., 33 Bothe, Rolf, 189, 200–203, 205 Bouquet, Mary, 9, 11, 12, 103, 199 Bourdieu, Pierre, 104–6, 110, 113 Bourdieu and Darbel, 20 Bredekamp, H., 39 Brussels-Tervuren Exposition of 1897, 87 Buchartowski, Caroline, 199 Buchenwald, 184, 196, 201, 205 Burg Beeskow, 183 Burton, C., 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 Butler, S., 31, 49n.2 C Cameron, D., 172 Casanova, J., 210 Castells, M., 211 categorical boundaries, 110 Centre Canadien d’Etudes Allemandes et Européennes, University of Montréal, 199 ceremonial interaction, 162, 174 performance, 168, 170–71 Chase Manhattan Gallery in the British Museum, 76 christianity 163–64, 166, 171–73, 176, 178 church, 162, 169, 174 Council, 163 Mission, 165, 173 Lutheran, 167, 173, 179n.2, n.6 classificatory narrative, 101 Clifford, James, 103 Cohen, R., 199, 200, 203

colonial collecting, 97, 110 era, 166 frames, 89 ideology, 88 past, 164, 166 practice, 103, 107 subject, 88 travel, 107 colonialism, 165–66, 178 Comaroff, Jean, 164 Comaroff, John, 164 Comaroffs, 167, 174, 179n.4, n.7 Combine Maxhütte, 183 communications, 30, 31, 33, 35, 44, 48 Computer Conservations Society, 35, 42 computer networks, 29, 33, 38, 43, 44, 46, 48 Congo, 77, 86 Congo-Vision, 96, 100 Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, 1, 23 context, 31, 48 controversy, 217–19 Cook, Thomas, 58, 59 Coquet, Michèle, 99 Corbey, Raymond, 12, 112–13 cosmopolitanism, 164, 168, 178–79 Cracow (exhibit), 52, 64, 66 critical history, 97 cultural authority (over the landscape), 153–55 Cultural Capital of Europe, 182, 185, 199 cultural tourism, 150 culture exhibiting, 172 industries, 46 local, 162, 165 and modernity, 169 and museum recognition, 168 Owambo, 176 and presentation, 168 public, 217–19 curator, 11–13, 17–21, 26, 90, 109, 112, 184, 194, 197–98, 202 gender-sensitive, 88 curatorial decisions, 191

D Dante, 54 dealers, 111

234 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 235

Index

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Deleuze, G., 80, 86 Denker, H., 179n.6 debate, 183–84, 197 Degenerate Art show, 198 Dehio, G., 201, 204 dichotomy, life/death, 61, 68 dichotomy, Self/Other, 56, 67 Dierking, Lynn D. and John H. Falk, 135, 137 Dietzfelbinger, E. 225n.3 Digital Summer, 30, 33, 35, 40, 42, 43 disenchantment, 20 displacement, 97, 98 display, 183, 186–91, 196–98, 200, 202, 204 display material, 183 distributed identification, 99 Dittrich von Weringh, K., 199, 204 Documentation Centre Nazi party rally grounds, 222–23 Domenig, G., 223 Dorst, J., 214, drama, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48 Dumeni, Bishop, K., 162 Duncan, C., 3–5, 8, 11–13, 17–20, 31, 110, 134, 137, 138, 182, 184–86, 196–97, 201, 204, 210 Du Plessis, J., 167 Dutch Museum Association (NMV), 139n.1 Dutch Zoo Association (NVD), 139n.15 E East-West conflict, 198 Eco, Umberto, 1, 23 ecological museums, 145 ecological self/identities, 144 ecotourism, 150 education, 163, 167, 180n.9 Edwards, D., 41 Efendula, 173, 180n.10 Ehrenfeld, David, 133 Ehrlich, L., 204, 205, 206 enchantment, 212, 219–24, 225n.1 entrance, 191, 193, 202, 203 environmental citizenship, 16, 143 Epistemology of museology, 97 Ethnographic Museums, 96, 104 ethnostylistic themes, 105 Etosha, 161–62 Euro-American, 165

European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA), 2, 199 exhibition hall, 190, 183 ExItCongoMuseum, 6, 11, 12, 75, 89, 90, 91, 95, 98, 100, 108, 109, 110 experience, 212, 216, expertise, 31, 47, 48, 218 F Fabian, Johannes, 66–67, 76, 80 Fairweather, I., 4, 6, 8, 16, 17, 19, 23, 180n.9, 214, 216 Falk, John H. and Lynn D. Dierking, 135, 137 Feininger, Leonel, 190, 195–96 Ferranti, S. de, 42 Finland, 167 Finnish Evangelical Lutheran mission 161, 166–67, 173, 176 Mission Society, 166, 180n.9 missionaries, 165, 167, 173–74 Finnish Missionary Society (FMS), 166 Finno-Ugric speakers, 166 Finns, 166–67 Flanagan, K. 214, Föhl, Thomas, 189, 191, 200–203, 205 formal universals, 104 forum, 172 frames, 184, 193 Frank, Susanne, 182, 199, 204 Frankenhuis, Maarten, 122 Fraunhofer Institut, 201, 203 Frazer, Sir James 210 frontstage/backstage, 129, 130–31, 138 fundamentalism, 209, 212 Futures, 30, 34, 35, 39, 44, 47, 48 G Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 67 gallery, 185, 193, 197, 201 Galloway, D., 199, 204 Garden of Eden, 137 Garner, R., 70n.13 Gauforum, 185, 190, 205–206 GDR, 183–85, 191, 193–97, 201 Gell, Alfred, 20, 21 Gennargentu National Park, 15, 142, 144, 147–48, 151, 155 Gerholm, Thomas, 19 Gerlach, H., 182, 204

235 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 236

Index

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

German Democratic Republic, 193 German Historical Museum, 201, 203 German History Museum, 183, 196 Geschichte für Alle, 225n.3 Glaser, H., 220, 225n.4 global system, 172 globalisation, 35, 172 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 184–85, 201 Goffman, Erving, 14, 129–31 Graburn, Nelson, 134–38 Graevenitz, Antje von, 201, 204 Graf Kessler, Harry, 187–88, 202 Great Exhibition, 29 Greater Manchester Force, 69n.10 Greenblatt, Steven, 156, 224 Greenwood, S., 212 Grimmling, Hans Hendrik, 199 H Hahn, Hugo, 166–67 Halle der Volksgemeinschaft, 185 ‘hands-off ’ working policy, 131 hanging, 183, 195, 197 Hann, C., 210 Harris, M., 33, 45 Harvey, P., 4, 5, 7, 13, 17, 215, 218 Hay, J., 98 Heatherington, T., 4, 6, 15, 17, 19, 216 Heelas, P., 211, 214, 215, 225n.2 Hein, H.S., 77, 90 Heisig, Bernhard, 193–94, 202 Held, Louis, 201 Helsinki, 172 heritage, 23, 161 and business, 164 and culture, 162–63, 168, 171, 178, 179 discourse, 162 industry, 162, 167 and tourism, 165 Hermann, Carl, 187 hermeneutics, 66, 67 Herzfeld, Michael, 149, 152 Hetherington, Kevin, 16, 142 historiographies, 97 Hooper-Greenhill, E., 32 Hootz, R., 201, 204 Hormann, Anne, 202

House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany, 201, 203 Huxley, Thomas, 57 I identification, 166, 172 within distance, 176 identities, 169, 171 illusion of the absolute, 104 imaginative reasoning, 7, 39–40, 44, 47 Industrial revolution, 46 indigenous environmentalists, 156 Infocities, 29 information revolution, 37, 46, 47 insignias of power, 101 in-situ diet (zoo), 123 institutional authority, 186, 196 International African Association, 100 invention of tradition, 100 Iset-Iri-Heset, 64 J Jacobsen, D. 182, 199, 204 Jacques and Storms, 7 James, W., 211 Jameson, F., 89 Jenkins, R., 225n.1 Jennsen, J., 199, 204 Jewsiewicki, Bogumil, 9 John, J., 201, 204, 205, 206 K Kabre, 164 Kandinsky, Vladimir, 190 Karp, I., 19, 172, 174 Katriel, T., 172, 176 Khnum Nakt, 62 Kilburn, T., 40, 41, 42, 43, 44 King Albert I, 77 King Leopold II, 10, 86 Klee, Paul, 190, 196 Klinggraff, F., 199, 204 Knapp, G., 201, 202, 204 Knowledge, see science Korrek, N., 185, 205 Kugelmass, J., 225n.5 Kunstkammer, 39, 47 Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, 189, 199–203, 205–206 Kurtz, L., 211

236 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 237

Index

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

L labels, 108, 110 LaGamma, Alisa, 13 Landgericht Erfurt, 200, 205 landscape, 15 Latour, Bruno, 3, 16 Lavine, S., 172, 174 Legambiente, 148 Lerner, A., 217 Lévy, Pierre, 8 lieu de mémoire, 99, 197 life-stories, 97 lighting, 183, 188–89, 197 liminal, 198 liminality, 8 Linde, Irene van der, 134 literacy, 164, 167, 176, 178 local history, 189 London Missionary Society (LMS), 166 Loos, K., 185, 205 looting art, 110 Luntumbue, Toma Muteba, 4, 17, 90 M Macdonald, Sharon, 4, 6, 12, 20, 22, 23, 142, 199, 214, 218 magic, 6, 21, 44, 46, 48 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2–3, 20, 67 Malraux, A., 214 Man and Biosphere Project, 148 Manchester, 30, 33, 35, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46 Manchester (exhibit) 52, 64 Manchester Museum, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, 69n. 10, 70n.13 Manchester University, 59 Marihuana Museum, 69n.1 Martin, D., 210 Masterpieces collection, 98 Masterpieces of Congolese art, 98, 99, 104 Matton, Arsène, 79, 80–83, 86, 87 Mattuer, Wolfgang, 199 Maurer, M.E. and A.F. Roberts, 3, 11 McClintock, A., 86 McKenna, J., 88 meaning making-process (zoo), 120, 128 memorabilia, 108 memory, 166–67, 171 Merleau-Ponty, M., 79 Mieras, Mark, 122

Mikisi power objects, 96 mission house, 162–63 missionaries, 163, 165–67, 169, 173–74, 176–77 missionary, 164–66, 172, 176 Missionary church, 162 modernity, 164–65, 167–69, 177–79 monumental time, 149–52 Moore, Sally and Myerhoff, Barbara, 143 moufflon, 144 Morris, Wendy, 2, 80, 83, 87 multiculturalism, 172, 217 celebratory, 78 Multi-Purpose Hall, 184–85, 190, 196–97 Munch, Edvard, 187–88, 195, 202 Murray, Margaret, Dr, 55, 59, 60 museum authority, 76 collective ritual, 14 culture, 5 effect, 142, 156, 216 enchantment, 17, 20 exhibits, 166, 169 experience, 155, 172 guides, 170, 172, 174–75 magic, 21–23 performance, 169, 171–72, 174 as ritual process, 2 as ritual site, 2, 4, 20, 21 science, 29, 30, 31 space, 186, 196 strategies, 76 story, 170, 172, 174 tour, 170, 172 visiting as ritual experience, 19, 20 Museum for History, 183 Museum of African and Oceanic Art, Paris, 69n.9 Museum of Holocaust, 69n.1 Museum of Man, San Diego, 55, 69n.7, n.8 Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester (MSIM) 5, 29, 30, 32, 35, 39, 42 Museum of Sex, 69n.1 museumisation of the landscape, 152, 156 N Nandi, Denis, 163 Nakambale, 161–78

237 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 238

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

Index Nakambale Museum, 6, 16, 163, 165–66, 168–72, 174, 178, 179n.3, n.4, n.5 Namibia, 161–68, 174–75, 179 narrative, 31, 40, 44–48, 178, 164, 168–72, 174, 186–87, 189–90, 194, 196–98 nation building, 16, 163–68, 186 National monument, 162–63 National Monuments Council, 162 National Museum, 174 National Museum of Cracow, 2 National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, 53, 69n.3, n.4, n.5 National trophies, 98–99 natural magic, 142, 156 Nazi party rally grounds 219–24 Nazi politics, 191 Nekh Ankh, 62 Neoclassical building, 103 Nerlich, Klaus, 199 Netherlands, the, 119, 122, 132, 135 Neubert, Willi, 193–94, 202 new religious movements 209–13, 217 New Walk Museum, Leicester, 53, 58, 69n.6 Nieuwe Prinsengracht, 122 Nkisi, see Mikisi Nora, Pierre, 197, 205 North-Central Namibia, 162, 164–67, 174, 179n.3 Norwegian Ethnographic Museum, 11 Nuremberg, 6, 219–23 O Official/Un-official: The Art of the GDR, 183, 191 Ogan, B. 225n.3 Olson, Ellena, 199 Olukonda, 161, 169, 172–76, 178, 179n.2, n.6, 180n.10 Omaruru, 175 Ondangwa, 161, 176 Ondonga, 172–73 Orgosolo, 142, 147–57 Oshakati, 162, 176 Oshindonga, 175–76 Oshiwambo,163–68, 176–77, 179n.1 Outjo, 175

Owambo, 161–68, 172–76, 178, 179n.1, n.5, n.6 Owamboland, 166–7, 175–76, 179n.6 P paganism, 164 painting, 188–89, 193, 200, 201 Palace of the Republic, 197 Palast der Republik, 193 Palumbo, Berardino, 142 panoplies, 101–102, 108 Parkin, D, 101 parks, 142–46 participants, 190 passage, 185, 197, 201, 204, 206 pathologisation of human remains, 61, 62 of dead bodies, 61, 63 peaceable-kingdom, 136, 137 Peers, L., 77 performance, 12, 161, 162, 168–69, 170–74, 78, 179n.4 performative, 167, 170, 174, 179n.8 permanent exhibit, 188 Petropoulos, Jonathan, 202, 205 Pettigrew, Thomas, 59 photographs, 190–91, 193, 199, 201, 201 archival, 110 photological apparatus, 76 Piot, Charles, 164 Plantage Middenlaan, 122 Poland, 209, 225n.5 Porter, G., 32 porterage routes, 108 Porto, Nuno, 12, 199 postcolonial, 168, 179n.4 power-objects, 96–99 Preiss, Achim, 183, 191, 194, 200, 202, 205 presentation aesthetic, 76 typological, 76 presentational strategies, 169 Preston, Douglas J., 51 Price, Sally, 111 Prior, N., 217 profanation, 220–21 professional ethnographers, 96 Prösler, Martin, 11, 16 public, the 217–18 public memorials, 103

238 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 239

Index

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

R Rautenen, Martti, 161–66, 172–73, 176 religion/museum analogy, 6 resonance and wonder, 156 Rhenisch Missionary Society (RMS), 166 Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, see The National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden Ringrose, M., 217 Rise and Fall of the Modern, 6, 17, 182, 185–95, 199 ritual, 40, 46, 47, 182, 184–86, 196–97, 199, 201, 202, 204 bodies, 144, 153 of citizenship, 182, 184, 196–97, 204 of environmentalism, 143–44 site/space (zoo), 120, 130, 134, 139 Ritzer, G., 225n.1 Roberts, Allan, 97, 100–101, 105 Robinson, A., 41 Rogoff, Irit, 201, 205 Rohlfs, Christian, 187, 201 Röschenthaler, Ute., 99, 103 Roth, Silke, 199 Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, 5, 10, 75, 95, 214 Russia, 166–67 S sacra, 186 Sahlins, M., 167, 169, 179n.7, n.8 Salmon, Pierre, 113 Salzmann, M., 201, 205 Samuel, Charles, 79, 87, 88 Sardinia, 141–57 Sardinian Forestry Service, 148 Sardinian Regional Forest Ranger and Environmental Protection Corps, 148, 157n. Saunders, Barbara, 4, 5, 10, 11, 26, 80, 96, 103, 214, 217, 218 Saxony Art Fund, 183 Schalken, W., 179n.6 Schama, S., 15 Scheidig, W., 187, 205 Schierz, Kai Uwe, 199, 204 Schiller, Friedrich von, 184, 201 Schley, J., 201, 205 science, 30, 31, 38, 44, 46, 47, 48

scientific authority (over the landscape), 144–46 scientific expertise, 30 scientised aesthetism, 111 secular rituals, 3, 143 secularisation thesis, 210, 211 self, 212, 215 senses, 76 Seurat, George, 187, 195 Shelton, Anthony, 96, 100, 214 Sherman and Rogoff, 5 showcases, 98, 102, 104, 106, 109 Signac, Paul, 187 Silva, N., 4, 6, 13, 14, 22, 216 sites, 184 Sitte, Willi, 193–94, 202 slide projection, 110, 111 Smart, B., 225n.1 social time, 149–52 Socialist Realism, 194 Solberg, 20 source communities, 77 South Africa, 77, 163, 180n.9 South African National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds (SANCCOB), 127 South West Africa Peoples’ Organization (SWAPO), 167 spoliation, 101 Stadler, S., 202, 206 statement art, 100 Sumatra, 125 suspension of disbelief, 110 Swakopmund, 173, 175 synecdoche, 99, 107 T Tabwa political art, 100 Tabwa wood carving, 96, 98–99 Tambiah, S., 30 Tannert, C., 183, 206 Tassi, Franco, 143 Taylor, C., 215 technology of enchantment, 20 temporary exhibit, 188 Tervuren, 96 Thanisaeb, Werner, 174 the suppressing death, 63 Thomas, Louis-Vincent, 70n.12

239 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook

11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 240

Index Thuringia, 185, 190, 201 Thuringian, 182, 194 title of the exhibition, 190, 195, 199–202 Tootill, G.C., 41 tour, guided, 120, 125, 127–31, 133–35 tourism, 162, 164–66, 168–69, 173, 178, 179n.6 cultural, 165, 169, 178 and heritage industry, 162 tourists, 162, 164–65, 168–70, 172, 176, 178 tradition, 162 and apartheid, 167 Owambo, 163–65 transparency, 31, 37, 39 Truth, truth, truths, 212, 213, 215, 218–19 Turner, V., 8, 17, 46, 185–86, 201, 206 Tuzin, Donald, 2, 22, 23

Copyright © 2004. Berghahn Books, Incorporated. All rights reserved.

U Ulbricht, J.H., 201, 204, 205, 206 universal exhibitions, 31, see also Great Exhibition University of Manchester, 35, 42 V Vaessen, J., 19 van Gennep, Arnold, 8, 185, 201, 206 Van Gogh Museum, 12, 69n.1 Van Kets, 83 Vanhee, Hein, 113 Vent, Hans, 193–94, 202 Vergilius, 54 violence, 220 vision, 75 visiting publics, 48 visitors, 182–86, 194–98, 200, 202–203, 215, 222–23 ideal, 186 as initiated, 14 visual perception, 77

W Walsh, K., 217 war trophies, 98, 101, 102, 103, 108 Ward, Herbert, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87 Wastiau, Boris, 4, 6, 10–13, 19, 90, 214, 218 Weber, M., 20, 225n.1 Weimar, 182–85, 187–97, 199–206 Weimar Art Collection, 183, 187, 196 Weimar Republic, 184, 201 Weimar School of Painters, 187 Weiss, W., 225n.3 Wennekes, Wim, 122 Werbner, R.P., 179n.6 Wershoven, H., 183, 200, 206 Wieczorkiewicz, 4, 76, 214, 216, 217 wilderness, 144, 155 Williams, F., 40, 41, 42 Wilson, B., 211 Wirth, H., 185, 206 Wolbert, B., 4, 6, 13, 17, 18, 20, 206, 214, 218 Wolf, C., 185, 206 works of art, 98 WWF, 145, 148 Y Young, J., 86, 88, 225n.5 Z Zelnhefer, S., 225n.3 Zivilcourage, 198 zoo, 119–20, 122–25, 127–32 experience, 133–35 philosophy, 123 Zühlke, D., 201, 205

240 Science, Magic and Religion : The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic, Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2004. ProQuest Ebook