museums as relational entities: the politics and poetics of heritage
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Museums as Relational Entities: ThePolitics and Poetics of HeritageJOSHUA A. BELLPublished online: 02 Mar 2012.
To cite this article: JOSHUA A. BELL (2012) Museums as Relational Entities: The Politics and Poetics ofHeritage, Reviews in Anthropology, 41:1, 70-92
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Museums as Relational Entities: ThePolitics and Poetics of Heritage
JOSHUA A. BELL
Bodinger de Uriarte, John. 2007. Casino and Museum: Representing MashantucketPequot Identity. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.
Carpenter, Edmund. 2005. Two Essays: Chief & Greed. North Andover: PersimmonPress.
Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Chip, Stephen E. Nash, and Steven R. Holen. 2010.Crossroads of Culture: Anthropology Collections at the Denver Museum of Nature &
Science. Boulder: University of Colorado.
Price, Sally. 2007. Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly.Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Silverman, Helaine, ed. 2006. Archaeological Site Museums in Latin America.Gainsville: University Press of Florida.
Over the last 40 years museums have become important sites tounderstand the politics and poetics of heritage management,display, and knowledge production. The books under consider-ation here all help demonstrate how museums as relationalentities—containing dynamic relations between persons andthings, as well as generating them—are emergent processes. Eachwork helps demonstrate why museums in their many guisesremain critical terrains for the negotiation of identity, history,and culture in the push for more collaborative accounts of ourworld and the circulation and display of things.
KEYWORDS collaboration, heritage, museums, social relations
This article not subject to US copyright law.Address correspondence to Joshua A. Bell, Department of Anthropology, NHB 112,
National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, P.O. Box 37012, Washington,DC 20013-7012, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
Reviews in Anthropology, 41:70–92, 2012ISSN: 0093-8157 print=1556-3014 onlineDOI: 10.1080/00938157.2012.651072
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To study a museum is to study an endless, endlessly shifting, assortmentof people and things.
(Gosden et al. 2007:5–6.)
Since their inception, museums have been important, albeit too often elite,sites for the ordering and reordering of knowledge through the display ofan array of things, be they cultural artifacts or natural specimens (Foucault1994). Institutionalizations of the myriad ways in which people articulatetheir identities, and senses of time and place through the manipulation ofmaterial things, museums—which have proliferated in the 21st century—are particular tools for assembling and understanding the world. As such,museums need to be understood as participating in a wider spectrum ofhuman efforts of display, curation, and engagement with things throughwhich relationships are materialized and negotiated over time (Lemonnier1993; Kreps 2003; Renfrew et al. 2004). Repositioning museums within thiswider array of cultural activities helps de-center how museums in their mostclassic sense compile divergent spaces and times into linear teleological nar-ratives that often privilege particular ways of being in the world (Ames 1992;Bennett 1995).
While important work in the critique of these practices, hierarchies, andmodes of representation continues and remains needed, the wider shifttoward a more reflexive museology and the disciplinary reconsiderationsof the material world’s imbrication in the social has helped to criticallyhistoricize museums within larger arcs of modernity, and contextualized theirplace within wider spheres of the poetics and politics of representation,identity, and knowledge formation (Clifford 1988; Jones 1993; Karp andLavine 1991; Karp et al. 2006). These disciplinary transformations have beeninformed, and pushed, by political shifts in the status of indigenous com-munities both within settler colonial societies of Australia, Canada, NewZealand, and the United States, as well as re-evaluations of history in thepost-colonial contexts of the Global South (Henare 2005; DeJong andRowlands 2007; Sully 2007; Stanley 2008; Phillips 2012).
While the work of decolonization of museums and academia is ongoing(Smith 1999), the new tribal museums and cultural centers that have emergedalongside new research protocols have created opportunities for collabor-ation, and have demanded the rethinking of heritage management, display,and the politics of representation, and thus identity, as articulated in andaround museums (Peers and Brown 2003; Clifford 2004; Fienup-Riordan2005; Crowell et al. 2010). Usefully repositioned as ‘‘contact zones’’ (Clifford1997:191–192 following Pratt 1992) museums and their objects (Peers andBrown 2003:4–6) are now understood to be important sites of articulationwhere intercultural dialogues emerge. As the books reviewed here collec-tively demonstrate, while this is an ongoing and often messy dialogic pro-cess, the new theoretical and methodological understandings of how
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museums work and interface with wider social, political, and economicrealms provide an important opportunity through which to create mutualintercultural understanding and respect, as well as local empowerment. Assuch, museums, and issues around intangible and tangible heritage, havereturned to the fore of anthropology and the discipline’s rethinking of itselfand the intersections of identity, history, place, and knowledge.
Before turning to the books discussed here, it is important to articulatesome issues that are implicit in these collected works but are not explicitlyarticulated. Doing so helps tease out some under-realized but importanttheoretical implications of working with and in museums, and provides someguiding analytical themes. All of the reviewed books deal with issues relatedto what I will refer to as heritage—that is, the nexus of relations materializedin particular objects, buildings, and landscapes, as well as verbal or perfor-mative traditions. I use the term heritage throughout this essay because ofthe ways it allows for the combination of otherwise too often analyticallyseparated realms of culture and nature, as well as tangible and intangibleentities that more often than not are combined in indigenous ontologies(Latour 1993; Bell and Geismar 2009). Far from a static phenomenon,however bracketed off from the flow of social life by UNESCO regulationsand=or museums (Meskell 2009), heritage is continually performed (Dening1996). As Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998:149) argues, heritage is ‘‘a mode of cul-tural production in the present that has a recourse to the past.’’ As each ofthese books demonstrates, the circumstances of heritage’s formulation,display, preservation and care cannot be divorced from the wider political,economic, and social contexts it inhabits.
Following this, I advocate understanding museums as processes andemergent institutions that are formed by the dynamic interactions of peoplewith the objects. The recent rethinking of materiality and the nature ofagency (Gell 1998; Miller 2005; Byrne et al. 2011) informs this understanding,which is most clearly articulated by Gosden, Larson, and Petch (2007) in theirassessment of the University of Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum. Adding newperspectives into discussions dominated by questions of representationand politics about museums, in thinking about agency and objects, onecan begin to examine what it is that objects do in the world, how they workas social actors, and their influence. Through this expanded understanding ofmuseums, and what a museum’s collections are, Gosden, Larson, and Petchhelp see museums as relational entities, the meanings and work of which arecontextual and temporally bound. As a result, museums and their contentsemerge as incredible sites for investigation, as ethnographic field sites inand of themselves, and as sources to understand the histories of anthro-pology and other disciplines and the positioning of their subjects of study.
The five books reviewed here overlap in their interest in the politics andpoetics of representation and concern for how heritage is materialized inobjects and by institutions. Each provides different points of departure to
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understand the complex array of relations that are museums, and whichinfuse their workings. Politics of ownership and knowledge pervade eachof these books—each is concerned with understanding the interlockingquestions of who has the rights to display and tell histories, let alone stewardmaterials of others’ heritage. Each of these questions points to the need andmessiness of collaboration, both in the management of heritage materials,and their presentation and interpretation.
While none of these books offers groundbreaking theoretical insightsinto these issues, as case studies each offers important glimpses of how theserealities play out in different contexts. In what follows, I have paired books totease out what I see as their dominant themes. This is not to suggest thatthemes discussed under one heading are not found in another, but, rather,it is done to provide some logic to this review. In my conclusion I offer somethoughts on future directions and needs for the study of and in museums andstudies of heritage materials.
POLITICS AND POETICS OF DESIRE (CARPENTER 2005AND PRICE 2007)
. . . for a collector—and I mean a real collector, a collector as he ought tobe—ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have toobjects. Not that they come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.(Benjamin 2007:67)
Edmund Carpenter’s cryptic tale of entrepreneur and collector George Heye(1874–1957), his private Museum of the American Indian (MAI) in New YorkCity, and Sally Price’s tale of the making of the Musee du Quai Branly in Paris,both hinge on desire and the management of difference as understood to bematerialized in objects, and as they play out in institutional settings. The twoaccounts are parallel stories of obsession, divergent ways of understandingand representing others, and the legacies of colonialism, albeit separatedby several decades and taking place in different continents. Each providesinsight into Benjamin’s assertion that collectors live in their collections,through which they extend their desires and imaginaries into the world,infused as they are with power and privilege. Each offers important perspec-tives on the continued legacy of social relations that make, and un-make, col-lections. In relation to this latter point they implicitly dovetail with the moretheoretical arguments of collecting put forth by others in a variety of contexts(Stocking 1985; Thomas 1991; Schildkrout and Keim 1998; O’Hanlon andWelsch 2000). Both accounts also share a crisp and accessible style thatmakes them engaging to read.
Carpenter’s account of the MAI consist of two parts—the first of whichdeals with a short biography of New Yorker Heye, a prodigious and often
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unethical collector of materials from indigenous communities of theAmericas, a collection which became the MAI and now is the SmithsonianNational Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The second part of thebook deals with the politics around the collection and the various deals bywhich Heye’s collection was put together and dispersed. Between each chap-ter are short pieces about objects in the collection that serve to amplify thelarger narrative of objects movement in and out of the MAI and other regimesof value. These sections are meant, through a social lives of things approach(Appadurai 1986), to provide a brief account of
1. what an object was originally intended for by its makers,2. the reason behind its collecting and,3. what happened to the object once it entered Heye’s collection (Carpenter
2005:5).
These vignettes are welcome reminders of the complex intersecting historiesthat the MAI, and indeed all museums contain. While each could have easilybeen expanded, their brevity and tactful selection highlight what is translatedand lost in these circulations.
A 17th century club emerges as being part of the bloody conflict thatengulfed Native communities and European settlers in New England, andwas likely obtained as loot from a raid. A Northwest Coast mask purchasedin 1914 from the English dealer W. O. Oldman reveals how, in 1982, objectswent missing from MAI and, through an elaborate sting, were returned (seeWaterfield and King 2006 for more on Oldman). Another mask, a Tsimshianshaman’s mask, illustrates how objects that were taken out of the MAIorbit, went on to sell for exorbitant prices after being exhibited as part ofa Surrealist show in 1936. The only book among those reviewed here to takeseriously these histories and transforming materialities, Carpenter reminds uswhat, in part, generated the desires that came to grip Heye and other collec-tors as they sought to own aspects of the world. These vignettes also remindus that collections are not only composed of objects, but also, by extension,of people—makers, users, and collectors of the objects that compose acollection (Moutu 2006).
Carpenter writes this account from the privileged position of havingbeen one of the MAI’s board members from 1973–1985, and as someonedeeply engaged in the art world as a pioneering visual anthropologist, eth-nographer of Arctic communities, and curator (Carpenter 1968, 1972, 2011;see also Prins and Bishop 2001–2002). Moreover, at the University of Penn-sylvania (1940–1950), he was a student of Frank Speck, who founded theUniversity’s Anthropology Department, and who for a time served as oneof Heye’s field collectors (Carpenter 2005:64–67). Carpenter’s explicit aimis to expose the ills that beset the collections and the corruption by whichobjects were sold, traded, and stolen. An expose with several names
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redacted, Carpenter’s account gives a quixotic sense of the social relationsand misdeeds that shaped what was Heye’s collection and what is now partof NMAI.
If I have any complaint about the book is that it does not delve deeplyenough at times. Many of the stories feel as if they are only the tips of muchlarger icebergs. Regardless of these veiled allusions, the author does a goodjob of presenting the set of intersecting histories that compose and areengendered by the MAI collections. For a different rendering of Heye, andthe MAI collection, readers would do well to consult the history by Krechand Hail (1999), as well as the critical engagements around the museologyof NMAI by contributors to Loantree and Cobb (2008).
For her part, Price draws on a mixture of sources to write a page-turningaccount of the making of the Musee du Quai Branly (MQB) in Paris. As shenotes, it is a story ‘‘of relationships between men and objects, it’s a story thatturns equally on personal relationships between the men themselves’’ (Price2007:x). Building on her earlier wide-ranging discussion of the circulation ofobjects and value in the creation of primitive art (Price 1989), Price continuesthese examinations but through an incredibly lucid and succinct account ofFrench academic, cultural, and institutional politics that converged in themaking of the MQB.
Opening in June 2006, the museum began as a dream of the formerprime minister and yet to be elected president Jacque Chirac, and materia-lized out of a chance meeting with the art dealer Jacques Kerchache in theRoyal Palm Hotel in Mauritius. At this meeting the two men discovered theirmutual love of non-European art and a pact was made to share this love withthe world. Following contextual chapters about Chirac and Kerchache, Priceelaborates on important aspects of museums’ relation to the State (curatorsare nationally certified), before proceeding to events surrounding the makingof the MQB.
On becoming president in 1995, Chirac established the FreidmannCommission to find ways for the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americasto be displayed in the Louvre. The resulting report pushed for a dedicatedgallery in the Louvre, and a new museum to house and display collectionsin the venerable Musee de l’Homme and the Musee des Arts d’Afrique etd’Oceanie. The report quickly became anathema to those who understoodthe Louvre not to be a universal museum but, rather, one focused on thecelebration of European heritage, as well as to those who saw the scien-tific focus of the Musee de l’Homme being eviscerated in the name ofnon-contextualized aesthetics. Situating this discussion within an expla-nation of France’s cultural politics of assimilation where foreign culturesare appreciated but national culture promoted, Price describes the powerstruggles and rifts between anthropological collaborators—Maurice Godelier,chief among them—who sought to maintain ethnographic contextualizationin the face of efforts to aestheticize the collections.
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As plans for the new museum progressed, Kerchache, at Chirac’sbequest, installed 117 ‘‘masterpieces’’ from the Musee de l’Homme and theMusee des Arts d’Afrique et d’Oceanie in the Pavillon des Sessions at theLouvre in 2000. This now 11-year-old ‘‘temporary’’ exhibit is a tour-de-forceof Kerchache’s aesthetic vision of precisely light sculptures. The exhibit hasbecome an example of the decontextualization and imaginary that exalts theaesthetic over context in museum display. In another set of chapters, Priceilluminates the social relations, both public and murky, that were involvedin new acquisitions for the museum, thereby reminding us of the well-wornpractice of elites shifting and preserving wealth through art, how they spreadtheir renown through donations, and the hierarchy of aesthetics involved inthis movement (Bourdieu 1984).
In the remainder of the book, Price looks at the planning andimplementation of Jean Nouvel’s $300 million project that became theMQB. Wrapped up in his own fantasy about non-Western experiences andart, Nouvel called this museum ‘‘a space marked by the symbols of theforest, the river, and obsessions with death and oblivion’’ (quoted in Price2007:113). This panache is only matched by Stephane Martin, who, whileMQB’s president (he was appointed vice president in 1998), in an interviewtellingly remarked, ‘‘Everything in a museum gets beautiful’’ and referred tothose that value context as ‘‘poor museographers’’ (Kimmelman 2006). Bothcomments reveal underlying tropes of the MQB’s ideology, and its position inthe making of heritage and valuation of non-Western objects.
But the museum’s spectacular displays, in an equally fantastical andoften impractical space, as Price shows, lead to a set of misrepresentations,with labels omitting makers and wrongly attributing objects (2007:140–167). While these issues are an inevitable aspect of a rushed museum open-ing, Price uses these examples, which are drawn from her own observationand the commentary of others, to make a wider case for the ways the spec-tacles of the MQB architecture and displays flatten the complexities of theircollections. In her last chapter, Price asks ‘‘What...becomes of the institutio-nalized presentation of other cultures once imperialist ambitions are officiallydefined as a thing of the past’’ (2007:169). Discussing this question and thenotion of cultural dialogues that take place in museums, and, it is hoped, takeplace in the MQB, Price notes how MQB’s aesthetic vision, despite the goodintentions of curatorial staff, fails to engage communities from whom its col-lections come, and fully engage the museum in the history of colonialism thatfacilitated their acquisition. As a result the MQB remains a contact zone thatawaits full realization and one in which European imaginaries reign supreme.
Readers of Paris Primitive would do well to pair it with Clifford’s analy-sis (2007), as well as Price’s own more recent assessment (2010). Doing sohelps reveal how, as an emergent process, the MQB is constantly changing,and thus how evocative Price’s account is of the institution’s early history. Incharting out the outlines of the museum’s birth, Price has paved the way for
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other studies of the MQB, as well as challenged staff to rethink the museum,and their place within its field of relations.
EMERGENT REALITIES: TRIBAL AND SITE MUSEUMS(BODINGER DE URIARTE 2007 AND SILVERMAN 2006c)
We all make histories endlessly.—Dening 1996:35
If both Carpenter and Price give accounts of museums and collections thatemerged as vanity projects of private (Heye) and public (Chirac) individuals,then John Bodinger de Uriarte and Helaine Silverman give accounts of theemergent realities of museums and heritage materials through their analysisof a tribal museum and archaeological site museums. Both books demon-strate how these institutions are counter-sites to dominant museologicaland disciplinary narratives, and help re-think who has the right to displayheritage, and what this heritage is. Each account is also an illustration ofhow heritage display is part of the wider politics of recognition, and thusidentity formation and reclamation both within the nation-state and in con-trast to it. Indeed, just as art was and largely remains a term of inclusion,the withholding of which excludes societies from the table of civilization(Morphy 2008), so too the presence of a museum enables groups to negotiatevarious claims about and around themselves, their sovereignty and heritage.The institutions that these authors engage are part of the proliferation ofmuseums and heritage management begun over the last 30 years, and theyprovide important spaces for other histories to be curated, displayed, andnegotiated.
Bodinger de Uriarte’s focus is the Mashantucket Peqout Tribal Nation’swork to secure the means of their own representation and heritage throughthe Mashantucket Peqout Museum and Research Center (MPMRC). Com-pleted in 1998, the MPMRC is the largest Native American-owned and -runmuseum facility in the Americas (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:16). In contrastto the site museums elaborated in Silverman’s volume, the MPMRC isself-sufficient due to the revenue stream of the Foxwoods Resort Casino.Begun as a bingo hall in 1986, the casino emerged in the wake of new reg-ulations that allowed gambling on Native American reservations to proliferatethroughout the United States (see Darian-Smith 2003). While the casino is notthe primary focus of the account, it looms large in the account as theenabling platform for the museum. Given this, the book would have ben-efited in contextualizing these transformations and realities of these engage-ments with some personal narratives akin to those found in Cattelino’sethnography of the political and cultural economies of gambling amongthe Seminoles (Cattelino 2008). I mention this absence because, though
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Bodinger de Uriarte is explicitly focused on the politics and aesthetics of rep-resentation and ‘‘history-making practices’’ (Bodinger de Uriarte 2007:18)found in the intersections between the casino and the MPMRC, the book isultimately a distanced discussion of the MPMRC’s politics of representation.As a result one gets only a dim impression of how the site is a process andthe ways the building is inhabited.
Where the casino is a factor in Bodginer de Uriarte’s narrative is how itsinception and creation generated the racial politics that quickly engulfed theMashantucket Peqout Tribal Nation as other casino operators, notablyDonald Trump, felt the pinch of competition. Bodinger de Uriarte does, how-ever, deftly discuss these challenges to the Nation’s authenticity to explorehow and why the museum’s exhibits are the way they are and the work theyset out to accomplish. In the final chapter, he returns to these external chal-lenges to the Mashantucket Peqout Tribal Nation’s authenticity, through adiscussion of the photographic work of David Neel, which documents com-munity members as they wish to be seen. Doing so, Bodinger de Uriartegives a good summation of the various issues involved in the history of pho-tography and Native Americans. But, again, the absence of commentary bymembers of the MPMRC, and=or the Mashantucket Peqout Tribal Nation,throughout the book, is striking, and one is left wondering about the socialrelations that infuse these images, the museum, and the heritage making dis-cussed (Edwards 2001; Pinney and Peterson 2003).
As a result of these omissions, Bodinger de Uriarte’s book is more astudied observer’s understanding than an ethnography of the museum.Reading his account, I kept wishing he had taken a different tack, and donesomething akin to the exemplary study of the Zuni Tribal museum by Isaac(2007). My frustration in Bodinger de Uriarte’s approach, by now obvious,lies in how one only gets distant glimpses of the nexus of relations betweenheritage and communities as articulated at the site, and the various local nar-ratives that enliven them. To be fair, however, Bodinger de Uriarte does situ-ate himself at the beginning of the book as a former photographer, an internat MPMRC in 1997, and later as a grant proposal writer for the MashantucketPeqout Tribal Nations, and then a photographer, writer, and researcher forDesign Division Inc., the museum’s exhibition designers. These experienceswere prefigured by his collaborations as a photographer with the MPMRC.I present this information to help situate Bodinger de Uriarte’s book, whichis clearly focused as a visual exploration of the site’s experiences, and to con-textualize my critique. Bodinger de Uriarte does do a good job of walking thereader through the exhibits and the casino facility, but again, the absences ofpeople in his account is at odds with his attempt to understand represen-tation which emerges from the dialogic engagement between people andthings. Here he would have done well to take cue from Price’s discussionof MQB, which deftly uses secondary sources to fill in gaps not obtainedfrom interviews.
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Bodinger de Uriarte uses his own photographs, and those of theMashantucket Peqout Tribal Nation, to make a visual argument about themuseum and casino, and give a sense of its spectacle as he guides the readerthrough the museum. While some of these images are illuminating, too manyof them are not. Spaces of the museum and casino are depicted, but people,as in the textual description and analysis, are far away, and so are the dis-cussed displays. A more effective tack would have been a series ofimages—close-ups and more general shots—to build up a montage of thesite, and how people engage it (see, e.g., Strassler 2010). These images inter-woven with discussion by community members and MPMRC would haveenriched the book, and helped Bodinger de Uriarte toward a more dialogicunderstanding of representation. While the finite images and the repro-duction quality of the photographs are most likely products of the publisher,I found myself wishing Bodinger de Uriarte had worked to push his visualpresentation more, so that the images became a form of analysis like thatfound in the work of Chris Pinney (2004).
These critiques aside, Bodinger de Uriarte has charted out an interestingaccount of the MPMRC’s displays and how he understands them to helprevise the history and heritage of the Mashantucket Peqout Tribal Nation.He also deftly uses a wide range of theory to reiterate his point throughout.The book is an important document of this emergent tribal museum, and sig-nals the opportunity for more collaborative ethnographies of the heritagework and intersections of capitalism and sovereignty at work within theMashantucket Peqout Tribal Nation.
By contrast, the contributors to Silverman’s volume, Archaeological SiteMuseums in Latin America, present a diverse array of examples of the idea-lized and realized workings of archaeological site museums in which heritagematerials can be displayed and engaged within the mutual curation ofhistory. A nice companion to the wide-ranging heritage issues addressedby Breglia (2006), this book deals more explicitly then Bodinger de Uriarte’saccount, and as a result, though not explicit in all the chapters, it is easier tosee how these site museums are emergent processes.
The volume is divided into six sections, including an introduction andset of commentaries. Due to the breadth of this volume, I only discuss severalof the chapters that are examples of the issues the volume seeks to addressand raises through its diverse case studies. Silverman’s introduction (2006a)sets the stage for this volume, which, through a focus on Latin America,addresses a lacuna in the field of critical museology—an analysis of thearchaeological site museum. As their name implies, these institutions are typi-cally on or adjacent to archaeological sites. Their principle aim is to provideinterpretation to excavations and house materials recovered, and they mayinclude laboratory and storage facilities, as well as an educational program.Site museums are important places for reinterpretation, and a means to attracttourists and thus create local economic opportunities.
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They embody a complex set of imagined and real relations between‘‘perceived pre-Hispanic glory, the usually disadvantaged situation of thelocal and=or descendant communities, and the pressure for development,often in the form of tourism’’ (Silverman 2006a:4). As argued by Silverman,there is great reason to be engaged with and interested in site museums, bothfrom a disciplinary background, and for anyone interested in the poetics andpolitics of heritage. Site museums provide archaeologists with a way toengage local communities’ or stakeholders’ interest in the excavations, anda means to promote proper conservation and heritage management, depositmaterials from excavation, provide training, and understand the dynamics oftourism. In short, site museums allow archaeologists and heritage communi-ties to engage in interpretation of archaeological sites and assist with localdevelopment.
Silverman rightly points out the centrality of site museums in identity con-struction and the politics and costs involved in such an endeavor. In contrast tostate museums, site museums tend to be regional or local in focus. Silvermanreminds us that ‘‘site museums in Latin America are being created and valor-ized as local iterations of...national sentiments, as first lines of defense in theprotection of cultural (archaeological) patrimony, and new promoters ofeconomic development in their immediate regions’’ (2006a:16).
The second section consists of six chapters that deal with the politicsenmeshed in site museums on monumental archaeological sites. Here welearn about Teotihuacan (Manzanilla 2006), San Lorenzo (Cyphers andMorales-Cano 2006), Copan (Mortensen 2006), Kuntur Wasi (Onuki 2006),Pukara (Paredes Eyzaguirre et al. 2006), and Chiripa (Hastorf 2006). Whileall these chapters are engaging, that of Cyphers and Morales-Cano, on thedynamics of heritage in San Lorenzo of the Tenochtitlan Region of Mexico,is particularly so. Asking who and what cultural patrimony is for, they exam-ine the ways Olmec heritage materials—specifically the monumental iconicheads—became tokens in the political struggles between communities andthe Mexican nation tate, as well as sources of income for looters. Despitethe wealth and density of heritage materials, the region remains marginalwithin the larger tourist economy of Mexico, and continues to be impactedby the petroleum industry.
Cyphers and Morales-Cano recount a story of heritage possibilities, howsite museumswith the proper legislative backing could help the region. Other-wise unexplored in this snapshot are the politics of regional looting and theinternational art markets’ encouragement of these practices—a theme thatcould have been explored by all the contributors. Reading this and other chap-ters I could not help but think of the entanglements of Heye and those of thevarious collectors and dealers associated with the Musee du Quai Branly, andwonder what similar relations lie dormant within these sites.
Contributors do, however, give a vivid sense of the impact of these his-tories of collecting, and the need for local site museums to foster community
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engagement. Hastorf (2006) charts the building of a site museum at Chirpa,Bolivia. Her story is a personal one, in which she tracks her entanglement inthe museum’s founding. Her account is revealing of her own long-term com-mitment, which such a project required, aswell as various sets of collaborations(a similar personal account is echoed in other chapters showing, collectively,the contributors’ deep commitment to these places and their communities).
Curiously though, none of the involved Chiripa individuals are named, anomission which, as an anthropologist, I found striking. I raise this because,though the authors in this volume provide interesting case studies of how sitemuseums are begun or managed, none of them provides an account of theirworking that is sensitive to the local dynamics at play beyond mentioningthe broad outlines. Hastorf does mention the dynamics of Tiwanaku residents,who long fought for their own museum and are now being pressured by theChiripa to relinquish their heritage materials for the newly founded Chiripacenter, but these issues could have been expanded. In this and the other essaysin this book, each author points to the need and opportunities for morenuanced ethnographic renderings of these sites.
The third section deals with museums at non-monumental sites and pre-sents case studies, two of which are centered in Coastal Ecuador (Strothert2006; Weinsten 2006) and another in San Jose de Moro, Peru (Castillo Buttersand Holmquist Pachas 2006). As Strothert (2006) reminds us through heraccount of the site museum of the Lovers of Sumpa in Eucador, these institu-tions enable a range of performances by Ecuadorian state and army officialsmilitary hosting of foreign dignitaries, as well as international eco-culturaltourists and students. This diverse constituency reminds one of the differentpolitics that site museums engender and can become party to as contactzones and backdrops for statecraft, as well as sites for education. But devel-oped collaboratively with community members, the Lovers of Sumpa sitemuseum fulfilled certain heritage expectations and needs. However, fissureshave emerged as funding has become a problem. But as Strohert makesclear, foreign academics cannot ultimately be responsible for solving theseinstitutional problems. Rather, these institutions must develop their owngrassroots leadership and funding.
Butters and Holmquist Pachas (2006) present a comprehensive dis-cussion of the modular site museum that they helped developed at San Josede Moro, Peru, and thus importantly address these financial issues. Here theyargue for cost-effective modular sites that help situate diverse places withinan archaeological site, and which help turn heritage into a resource. To thisend, they also advocate for archaeologists assisting in finding developmentoptions for invested communities. Here the balance is between social andeconomic development, which works to invest communities with prideand identification with a site.
Silverman’s chapter about the Historic District of Cuzco (2006b) is thesingle contribution to fourth section, The City as Site Museum. She focuses
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on musification, that is, the transformation of living cities into static entitiesfor touristic enjoyment. Characterizing this trend as a pathology of historiccities, Silverman judiciously blends results of her ethnographic fieldwork,in which she queried people’s understandings of their relation to the Inca,with astute analysis of the work of the Organization of World Heritage Cities(OWHC), a branch of UNESCO, to assess what the realities of heritage mak-ing are for the city and its residents. Here we get a glimpse of the contradic-tions of heritage work—how the bureaucratic push to preserve rubs upagainst the realities of a living city and the needs of its populace. As withsome of the other chapters in this book, Silverman makes compelling argu-ments and her work hints at a richer story that is worth telling in a longerformat. The fifth section—‘‘Museums for the Landscape=The Landscape asMuseum’’—turns to three case studies, the site museum at Agua Blanca,Ecuador (McEwan, Silve, and Hudson 2006), the Sican museum in Peru,and site museums in Peru’s Cotahusai Valley (Jennings 2006). Readers willbe rewarded and learn a great deal through these chapters.
The two concluding commentaries that round out the volume providesome important synthesis for the volume. Coben (2006:251) is right to drawattention to the need to more thoroughly address the ‘‘relationship betweenidentity=empowerment...and sustainable economic development’’ as articu-lated at site museums. For it is only through creating programs that havecommunity support and sustainable community benefits that the viabilityof these site museums can be maintained into the future. Otherwise, archae-ologists run the risk of imposing—more than they perhaps inadvertentlyalready do—particular ways of seeing, understanding, and curating heritage(Kreps 2003). There is an inherent tension between etic interests and emicneeds at site museums, and while most work toward creating a commonground for these issues to be discussed, more collaboration remains to bedone. But as Anne Pyburn (2006:256) notes, contributors in the volume areunited in their understanding that the ‘‘archaeological record [is] a globalresource.’’ Site museums are obligated to create experiences that educatevisitors on various levels—shifting their idealized perceptions of the past,and helping them see the contemporary relevance of heritage materials. Inthe final analysis, participatory archaeology is the future of the sub-discipline,just as wider commitment to collaboration is the future of anthropology(Field and Fox 2007; Field 2008). This book is an important account of thesedevelopments and commitments.
ANTHROPOLOGICAL RETURNS AND MUSEUM FUTURES(COLWELL-CHANTHAPHONH ET AL. 2010)
The most recent of the books discussed, Crossroads of Culture, is a popularrendering of the anthropological collections of the Denver Museum of Nature
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& Science, founded in 1900. The book has clear affinities with the work ofCarpenter and Price, in terms of its broad outline of the museum’s anddepartment’s history. However, for reasons that shall become apparent, Ihave decided to discuss it separately. In the words of the authors, the bookis intended to be ‘‘a tangible version of a behind-the-scenes tour’’(Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al. 2010:2). Reading this I had hoped for anaccount with the intimacy of O’Hanlon’s book Paradise, which recountshis mounting an exhibit at the Museum of Man (O’Hanlon 1993). A simpleillustration of the work in the museum—cataloging, conservation, and mountmaking, which are discussed on page 13—would have been helpful andmade the book more of a ‘‘behind the scenes’’ tour.
Instead, Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Nash, and Holen give a useful shortoverview of the department’s various collections: American Ethnology,American Archaeology, World Archaeology, and World Ethnology. Each isthe subject of a chapter in which they enumerate the scope, history, and den-sity of the collections. Doing so, they situate the Denver Museum within theemergence of Natural History Museums in the United States in the 20th cen-tury, and provide outlines of the various careers of those who formed themuseum and its collections (Conn 2000; Asma 2003; Yanni 2005). Nash(2011) has shown his abilities to produce more theoretically informed anddetailed rendering of disciplinary histories, as has Colwell-Chanthaphonh(2011). I look forward to their subsequent elaborations on the initial outlineof the museum, the department, and its collections.
The bulk of the book consists of 122 plates of selected objects. Themateriality of these pieces is, for the most part, conveyed by the photo-graphs. I am particularly fond of the rawhide cards attributed to Naipero, aTonto Apache, and acquired in 1873. The cards are shown as whole entitiesso that you get a sense of the card’s edges, the thickness of the rawhide, andthus how these cards as objects were handled. Similarly, details of objects, asin plates 45a=b, showing an 18th century Iroquis Confederacy wampum belt,or plate 115a=b, showing a traditional jacket of the Lahu Shi of Thailand, helpconvey the complexity of these objects. Rather than portraying the ‘‘world’sdetritus’’ (2010:2), these photographs portray incredible materializations ofknowledge and ways of being in and with the world, as well as being pro-ducts of colonial histories. The use of this phrase is inappropriate when refer-ring to these ethnographic objects, and betrays the author’s archaeologicalsensibilities. As with more detailed rendering of the museum, I look forwardto the author’s and other scholars’ exploration of the wealth of material pub-lished here.
Where the book sings, and why it helps to signal the future of museumsas relational entities is in the authors’ discussions of the ethics of collection,display, and preservation. While echoes of these issues are found in the otherworks, with the exception of contributors to Silverman (2006c), this book isthe only one reviewed here and written by museum professionals, and, as
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such, it offers important insights into the messy realities and future direc-tions of museum practice. This is not to discount the important chroniclesand deconstructions offered by Carpenter (2005), Price (2007), andBodinger de Uriarte (2007). Such work is critical to keeping the historicityand political realities of museums in view. I raise this point because curatorsand museum professionals need to produce more accounts of their prac-tices, and this is, in part, what Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Nash, and Holen(2010) have done.
Readers familiar with Colwell-Chanthaphonh’s community-oriented andcollaboratively driven scholarship will not be surprised with the directionssignaled here (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson 2008). The inclusionof these collaborations in what could have simply been a catalogue of selec-ted objects is, however, noteworthy, and ultimately works to help raise thisbook above being simply an interesting catalogue. Ruth Montoya Starr, aDine=Apache resident of Denver and long-time museum volunteer, gives apersonal account of the importance of the museum’s engagement withNative Americans in the region through its program to inspire Native youthin the fields of science, as well as the importance of the collections for per-sonal and community empowerment. This all too brief snapshot, along witha commentary by Curator Emerita of Ethnology Joyce Herold, gives a senseof the importance of collaborations that museums are increasingly engagingin, and how the Denver Museum’s anthropology department is committed tosustained dialogues around and through its collections. Captions, such as thatfor Figure 7, which shows a Tlingit elder and head of the Raven House wear-ing repatriated regalia, are tantalizing hints of the work that the department isdoing to fulfill the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act(NAGPRA), as well as forge new relationships with indigenous communitiesthrough collections (see also Figure 8).
While NAGPRA has been an important push for many museums toaddress the legacies of their unsettling involvement in colonialism andindigenous disenfranchisement (see Mihesuah 2000; Nash and Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2010), the book signals how this legislation provides a plat-form for sustained dialogues with communities that can help forge more col-laborative renderings of history and our intersecting histories. This workcontributes to what is an important shift in museum practice (seeFienup-Riordan 2003; Peer and Brown 2003; Crowell et al. 2010). The authorsoutline the Denver Museum’s Collections Synthesis Project and the Indigen-ous Inclusiveness Initiative—both of which are aimed at enhancing the net-work of relations between collections and then ‘‘combin[ing] indigenousvoices with the best scientific research so that cultural treasures can beappreciated from every perspective—aesthetic, historical, scholarly and cul-ture’’ (Colwell-Chanthaphonh et al. 2010: 39). These are both importantinitiatives and are examples of how the department is pushing the DenverMuseum of Nature and Science to be better and more collaborative stewards
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of these collections. These endeavors are what all museums should be under-taking, and speak to the collaborative futures of museums where they shiftfrom being storehouses to being meeting places.
MUSEUMS AS METHOD
In a recent essay, Nicholas Thomas (2010) argues that in addition to the socialrelations and objects that are a museum, we need to see museums as amethod through which knowledge is generated collaboratively. I raise hiscomments in closing because of the way Thomas helps push us to rethinkwhat museums are and should be—whether they be a 110-year-old naturalhistory museum, a tribal museum, a site museum, or a new museums suchas the Musee du Quai Branly—as a means to effect better public advocacyin the discovery and telling of our intersecting histories. Part of realizingmuseums as method begins by understanding how the practices ofmuseums—collecting, classifying, curating, and displaying things—are aninstitutionalization of what humans do in a variety of settings and scales,from our homes (Miller 2001; Miller 2008) to department stores (Carrier1995). Engaging with the world through and with objects in the creation ofself and understanding of others is part of what being human is. Understand-ing and recognizing the relations inherent in museums and the objects theyare stewards of helps to displace the divisions that Western categories ofthought have imposed (Latour 1993). More importantly, this perspectiveenables new understandings rooted in an appreciation of indigenous waysof being to enter museums thereby challenging institutional political andsocial assumptions so that new forms of collaboration can emerge to educatethe wider public and redress colonial legacies.
To realize the museum as method, scholars need to draw on the vari-ous strategies deployed by all the authors reviewed here. We need to writemore nuanced historical and contemporary accounts of the social relationsthat infuse museums, as evidenced in the work of Carpenter and Price.Accounts of the formation of collections and institutions in the past andpresent usefully remind us of how the material is deeply imbricated inthe social, and the ways in which power relations too easily obscure theseconnections. It is only in knowing these relationships that they can be chal-lenged by people inside these museums today and in the future, and beaddressed by communities seeking more equitable relationships withmuseums and the heritage materials within. At the same time, thinkingthrough the practical and legal obligations of disciplines allows for morecollaborative futures in the management of heritage materials at sitemuseums, as evidenced by contributors to Silverman’s volume. This bookhighlights the messy realties of site museums in terms of the economicsand politics of heritage management, but also the ways in which site
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museums can empower communities in international, national, and localpolitical arenas. The collaborative push that emerges from critically engag-ing with the notion that museums are emergent and relational entities alsohelps us consider the material and visual histories that museums in all theirguises continually perform for their publics. Colwell-Chanthaphonh, Nash,and Hollen illustrate these issues in their account of the Denver Museum,pointing out how collaboration is essential to museum practice, whileBodinger de Uriarte, in his discussion of the Mashantucket Peqout Museumand Research Center, demonstrates that control over representation is a criti-cal part of redressing the lingering legacy of colonialism and helps articulatesovereignty.
While none of these works alone is able to keep the relations betweenobjects and subjects, and those between people and things in view com-pletely, collectively they do help shed light on the dynamics that haveinfused museums and their collections historically and which continue tochallenge them in useful ways. All these books also help reveal in their parti-cular ways how museums are relational—being both made up of relationsbetween people, but also between people and things. These relations aregenerative and are the glue that holds museums together, and that makesthem such a fascinating place to generate ideas about the world, but alsoto collaboratively explore the poetics and politics of heritage. Readers willfind in all these books reasons to want to continue their own engagementwith the relations of heritage in and outside museums, and why museumsremain critical sites for the reformulation of identity, histories, and sense ofplace.
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JOSHUA A. BELL (D. Phil 2006, Oxford) is Curator of Globalization at theSmithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Combining ethno-graphic fieldwork with research in museums and archives, his work exam-ines the shifting local and global network among persons, artifacts, andthe environment. His recent articles include ‘‘ Out of the Mouths of Croco-diles: Eliciting Histories with Photographs and String Figures’’ and ‘‘ SugarPlant Hunting by Airplane in NewGuinea: A Cinematic Narrative of ScientificTriumph and Discovery in the ‘Remote Jungles.’’’ He is a leader of the Smith-sonian’s Recovering Voices Initiative, connecting communities to Smithso-nian collections to foster grassroots language and cultural revitalizationefforts.
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