University Museums in Scotland - Conference 2011
UNIVERSITIES AND MUSEUMS: NEW RULES OF ENGAGEMENT?
'Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time' - why anthropology needs museums
Peter Bjerregaard, Postdoc, PhD
University of Oslo
peter.bjerregaard@khm.uio.no
Click here to view the accompanying Powerpoint
Introduction: universities and museums
In his much-famed article from 1969, William Sturtevant asked the question whether anthropology needs museums (Sturtevant 1969). The question was justified from Sturtevant's own account of the history of the relation between anthropology and museums up through the 20th century. While, in many cases, the museum had been the cradle of modern anthropology, operating as a laboratory where objects collected from all over the world were analysed and compared contributing that time's major theoretical orientations of cultural evolution and diffusion, the museum of the late 1960s didn't seem to add much to the contemporary university discipline.
The history is well known. Early into the 20th century, anthropology and the museum departed, iconized by Franz Boas showdown with the American Museum of Natural History (Jackniss 1985). The discipline was finding its grounding in the fieldwork rather than in object collections and apparently this gap only grew deeper up throughout the century.
If Sturtevant's article thus recaptured about a century of changing relations between academia and university, it also foreshadowed a period of uprising and experimentation within ethnographic museum that has lasted more or less since then. The rejection of colonial collections in the naturalistic exhibitions of the 1970s and later on the emergence of the debate on representation has certainly asked the question of who actually needs the museum several times. In retrospect we may say that it seems as if source communities, politicians, citizens, the experience economy, UNESCO, indigenous populations and multiple other parties need the museum.
It seems more questionable though, whether anthropology needs museums, or if anthropology - as Jonathan Hass (1996) has suggested - should rather unite with the wizards of Disney or Pixar for creating a voice for anthropology.
This paper will answer Sturtevant's troubling question with a sound and clear 'Yes' - anthropology does need museums as Sturtevant did himself by the way. Anthropology does need museums and maybe now more than ever. But as Sturtevant ends up, we also need a model of the museum that would give life to research through the museum as a research organization (Sturtevant 1969: 646-7).
We do not need museums to legitimate the discipline or induce our authority onto the public. While the museum obviously offers a public face to the discipline that it is worth to consider how to make most use of, that is not even the point I want to make today.
We need museums, because they may make up a much-needed 'parasite', a field between the old field and 'home', a place where our biases and tacit knowledge is continuously challenged. In other words, the museum may be re-established as a laboratory, where we trace the central questions of humanity in a collaboration that includes not only different disciplines and indigenous popuplations but also audiences, art and whomever we may think of including.
I will present my argument through a project that has recently been started at Aarhus University, Denmark and Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. First I will present the background for this project; then I will describe the project and our plans in some detail, and finally, I will try to make clear why an approach like the one we propose is not simply a way of challenging the museum institution, but also a way of challenging our ideas of science and the role it should play.
Envisioning a new museum at Moesgård
The project I wish to speak about today - 'Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time' - was conceived in a process of institutional change at Moesgård Museum in Denmark. The museum is to open in a new state of the art museum building in 2014 which has caused not simply the need for developing new exhibitions, but more than that a reconsidering of the role of the museum as such, and its relation to research in particular. While Moesgård is primarily a museum of archaeology, its main attractions being the war sacrifices from Illerup and the bog man from Grauballe, the need for change was probably more acute in the smaller department of ethnography.
The Ethnographic Collections at Moesgård were established in 1947 and as such these collections have a particular story being based, primarily in postwar collections. After initially being tied with archaeology in a theoretical grounding of German 'Kulturgeschichte', this tie was cut as the museum moved from town to the present premises at the old manor house of Moesgård. While originally (i.e. since 1957) only taught as a course for archaeologists, ethnography had become an independent discipline at University of Aarhus in 1964, included in an institutional collaboration with Archaeology and placed at the Aarhus Museum (which was to become Moesgård Museum). By 1970, as the museum moved to Moesgård, ethnography split with the common theoretical grounding in Kulturgeschichte for a more up-to-date orientation towards social anthropology (Bohanan and Barth) and, later on Marxism. The split did not just count for the relation between ethnography and archaeology but, in fact, also for the relation between the academic discipline and museum practice. Thus, artefacts vanished from the radar screen of the academic orientation. So, while objects and exhibitions might serve as a platform for engaging the public in the acute matters studied by ethnographers, there was no idea for how to apply museums and objects for this cause.
This may be illustrated by an exhibition on Afghanistan presented at the museum in 1976. While the first part of the exhibition presented an Afghan bazaar in the kind of naturalistic presentation known from the Tropenmuseum, the second part sought to 'deliver the message', through complex tables and models on issues of land ownership, division of the labor force, exploitation etc. Unsurprisingly, the last part of the exhibition turned out not to work according to the intentions. On the other hand the naturalistic type of display was to become the trademark for the museum's ethnographic exhibitions for decades.
So when Rane Willerslev was appointed as director of the Ethnographic Collections in 2008 with the primary task of preparing the ethnographic exhibits to be presented at the new museum, it was clear that a major thing had to happen. Not only had the kind of exhibits the department had grown accustomed to making become obsolete in their exhibition grammar, but the fact was also that they rejected any kind of theoretical impact being based in a blunt reconstruction of the world. In this sense, these exhibitions did not carry any other legitimation than an actuality they were always deemed to be lagging behind anyway.
In contrast Rane Willerslev came to the museum as what Sturtevant talks about as 'a square peg', almost totally without background knowledge from the museum, but, instead, with a major interest in cutting-edge theoretical anthropology. So it was more of less from this background, we started to rethink not only the work at the Ethnographic Collections, but the role of the museum more generally. In practice, what we did was to shape a forum for intensive, intellectual debates, in the shape of what was called 'Magic circles'. The idea behind this forum was that rather than working individually, we needed to create a forum, including staff both from the museum and the university department, in which common ideas might develop. Thus the task for the presenters at Magic circles was not to present finished, closed off papers, but rather to open up for intellectual and practical problems that the rest of the forum would be asked to suggest possible new roads for. This opened in fact up for an open debate and common interest between the university department and the museum department for the first time in many, many years.
The crux of these debates came out, finally, in the shape of a research proposal, which we were happy to receive funding for from the Danish Council for Independent Research in December 2010.
So now, I will turn to describe the central aspects of 'Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time'.
'Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time'
Very briefly we may state that two overarching ideas came out of the Magic circles to define DMT.
First of all, we wanted to break with the conventional idea of science as based on correspondences to matters of fact and work, instead, towards a notion of science that legitimated its work through its ability to actually have an impact on the world. The people taking part in the magic circles all worked in different areas of anthropology - museums, ethnographic filmmaking, organizations, innovation as well as more traditional regionally based genres of anthropology - but one common issue that came out of the discussions was the need to transgress the tendency always to look backwards, documenting what had already been seen. Rather, we saw a need, both among ourselves and the people we worked with, to create means of communication that would actually shape the world through material as well as conceptual forms. This should not be understood as a return to the ideologically based Marxist anthropology that had reigned at the university department throughout the 1970s and 80s (although the iron fist often occurred in our debates). Rather, we wanted to play with other ways of presenting the world as for instance the montage, the metaphor etc. that evoked something that could not simply be seen or documented but would have an effect in the environment they appeared.
These ideas merged with the second overarching idea that came out of the magic circles, a wish to actually implement ideas from recent anthropological theories in our work with exhibitions. As elsewhere the museum lagged at least 30 years behind the university department in terms of theoretical development and imagination. But the strong focus on materiality that had occurred since the mid-90s (Gell 1998; Henare et.al. 2007; Miller 2005) offered a platform for re-engaging the museum as a center for theoretical innovation. The core of materiality studies have been to place objects as active parts of social relations (Gell 1998; Miller 2005) that do no simply reflect mental ideas or worldviews, but actually shape them. Thus, for instance, the authors of 'Thinking Through Things' argues in the introduction that if we really want to look at the world materially we will have to accept that materials are not only capable of materializing concepts, they have the ability to be concepts in material form:
"Rather than accepting that meanings are fundamentally separate from their material manifestations [...] the aim is to explore the consequences of an apparently counter-intuitive possibility: that things might be treated as sui generis meanings" (Henare et. al, 2007: 3)
Such thinking opens up for an approach to museum work through which research is not just explained through text, but need to find non-textual ways of communication. This also implies, that research has to deal with its own imaginations rather than certified knowledge.
The theoretical idea
While, for this occasion it is the methodology rather than the subject matter of DMT that is of most importance, I will just briefly mention the theoretical idea behind the project. The project is based on the hypothesis that our relations to the materiality of death is basic to an understanding of what we may term 'human time'. Thus, to cut it very short, while time and death, in philosophy and natural sciences, are abstract and essential terms, death is always present to human beings as the horizon of time, which we need to establish a relation to. And the way we may establish such a relation is through the materiality - decay, permanence, manipulability - of the body and the material environments we operate in. This is the basic hypothesis that binds together a number of individual anthropological and archaeological research projects ranging from gradual death in New Guinea, ancestor relations and burials in post-civil war Uganda, death cult in Egyptian bronze age and blood sacrifice in Siberia to the accumulation and eventual dispersal of personal objects in contemporary Denmark.
While this theme was obviously developed out from the previous work and research interests of the researchers, the selection of such a large and existential theme for the project also hinged upon the larger vision for the museum. The idea is that rather than teaching audiences about some theme or region of the world, they might not have an interest in from the outset, the museum should invite audiences for an exploration of a common enigma. Death and time is not only interesting to us as researchers, but a common problem we all have to struggle with and do so more or less consciously. And, furthermore, the question is so immense, that even if we as researchers may qualify the question from the different regions, ages and themes we have been working with, we are ultimately no more able to give an answer to the questions we raise than is the audience. Therefore, we want, eventually, to venture into a common tracing of this enigma with audiences, and hopefully, as I will return to in a little while, be able to take audiences' reflections and reactions in as the outset for new research questions or new ways of framing our research questions. The museum will, thus be turned into a machine for knowledge-in-the-making rather than a space for communicating established knowledge.
Experimental methodology - social theory as practice
What is more important here, though, is the way DMT wants to make use of the museum as an anchor point for research. For this purpose the entire project is turned into a design process, which we have comprised in a model. So, within the common question of how human time is established through creating a relationship to death a number of individual research projects are carried out (5 projects sponsored by the funding, 8 projects that have already received funding but are attached to the project, and finally, relevant projects from Oslo will be included in the project).
While researchers will meet in usual academic settings in the shape of conferences and more informal forums, we will also include a number of design experiments where we will challenge our concepts through object installations. These design experiments will take part in smaller units, where researchers that somehow share a common theme - sacrifice, decay, permanence, disjunction/conjunction with the dead - will meet, bringing objects from their respective field. While the plans are not perfectly clear as yet, we will probably also decide for at particular installation technique (or several) that we want to play with for each experiment. This could for instance be light and shadows, but we have also talked about working with chocolate in an experiment on decay or on the devouring of the dead.
While the actual activities of each experiment still have to be settled the aim is clear enough. We want to bring in another sensate element to research in order to challenge and question the concepts we are working from. Just like we argue for the field, that some concepts are material, so we may use the museum to create forms that actually assemble experiences and ideas better than we could in the traditional academic text.
But the experiments have one or two further purposes. By working through installations we want to transgress the framework of individual projects and develop more general, overarching concepts related to our search for 'human time'. Rather than just bringing together a number of individual projects under a common heading we want these projects to interact and produce more general observations - as what we search for are basically universal understandings, crossing time and space.
Now the design experiments may in themselves help us towards this, but by letting the different projects reflect on each other, they also ask new questions to each other. We want make use of these questions through a series of interventions.
Intervention
Intervention has often been imposed as a problematic inherent in social sciences, which differentiates social science from 'true' natural science. Thus social scientists have spent considerable energy on trying to diminish the impact of their presence in the field. But what if we turn things around a bit and claim that presence and intervention is, in fact, a quality of anthropological fieldwork?
In the studies we want to work with in DMT we specifically focus on engagements with the material environments. That means that our object of study will often be practices and ideas that are tacit and can not necessarily be explained in language. Still, the worlds that guide such practices are not necessarily simply observable, since they always imply impossibilities that do not necessarily surface in practice, but is nonetheless implied in it.
Therefore, interventions may be used as a tool to tease out the tacit knowledge that guides practice by staging counterintuitive or deliberately 'wrong' situations. While the interventions we want to stage will be based upon the design experiments, one imagined intervention could ask questions between Ugandan and Danish child burials. In recent years, Danish child burials have become more and more elaborated. Children's graves are lavished with toys, teddy bears etc., and often relatives will post photos of their lost children on social sites on the Internet. In Uganda, in contrast, dead children are done away with in quite casual ways whereas deceased elders are buried with much ceremony. From this we may ask whether these two approaches to burials reflect two more general conceptions of time - one bemoaning the life and relations that have been accumulated through the deceased old person, one bemoaning the potential lost with the dead child.
Could we then, in close collaboration with informants, create a situation that suggests the opposite - that children could be buried under much ceremony in Uganda, and more casually in Denmark. The point of doing this would be to tease out the tacit knowledge that is implicit in but not necessarily observable in daily practice. And, I should point out, this is not a question of manipulating our informants behind their back. Such interventions could only be developed through a close collaboration with informants on the means through which such interventions could be staged.
So, if we return to the model, the intervention is a way to let the inside of the museum reach out and have new effects in the world outside of the museum, informing fieldwork through the experiments carried out within the museum.
This process will be reiterated later on in design experiments cum exhibitions that include museum audiences. As mentioned before, we want to turn exhibitions from 'mirrors of the world', ultimately reflecting established knowledge, into stages for knowledge-in-the making. Therefore we will use design experiments and exhibitions to interact with audiences, letting the reflections and reactions modify the installations - either immediately through letting audiences physically change the installation, or through a process of reflection where audiences' responses are worked in to installations. And, eventually, such interactions will add to the museum machine by proposing new questions that will be taken into the field.
Thus, the museum machine reaches full circle as a space where we challenge our own concepts through the concepts suggested by informants, audiences and other interactors. The aim is not simply to reflect these concepts but to create assemblages of a higher order. This is, as I see it, a vision for an engagement between museum and university research that does not simply apply the museum as a space for the public communication often required in research applications, but actively puts the museum in use as a machinery that offers research tools that can neither be obtained in the field nor in the armchair.
Literature
Bouquet, Mary. 2001a. 'Streetwise in Museumland', Folk, Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society vol. 43: 77-102.
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Haas, Jonathan. 1996. 'Power, Objects, and a Voice for Anthropology.' Current Anthropology, 37(Supplement):1-22.
Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. 2007. 'Introduction: thinking through things'. In Thinking Through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically, ed. Henare, Holbraad and Wastell, pp. 1-31. London and New York: Routledge.
Jacknis, Ira. 1985. 'Franz Boas and Exhibits: On the Limitations of the Museum Method of Anthropology'. In Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. Stocking, pp. 75-111. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press
Mack, John. 2001. '"Exhibiting Cultures" Revisited: Translation and Representation', Folk, Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society vol. 43: 195-210.
Miller, Daniel. 2005. 'Materiality: An Introduction'. In Materiality, ed. Miller, pp. 1-50. Durham: Duke University Press.
O'Hanlon, Michael. 2004. 'Introduction'. In Hunting the Gatherers: Ethnographic Collectors, Agents and Agency in Melanesia, 1870s- 1930s, ed. O'Hanlon and Welsch, pp. 1-34. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books.
- 2001. 'The Field of Collecting: Back to the Future', Folk, Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society vol. 43: 211-220.
Sturtevant, William. 1969. 'Does anthropology need museums?', Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 82: 619-650.
