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SIEF Keynote, Marseilles, April 28, 2004. To appear in the conference proceedings, 2005.
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From Ethnology to Heritage: The Role of the Museum
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, there was a close fit between
ethnology as a knowledge formation, collections, and museums, whether museums of
natural history, museums of ethnology or Völkerkunde or Volkskunde or les arts et
traditions populaires. The museum was the home for these fields, indeed for any field
whose research produces and requires collections, including archaeology, biology, and
geology, among others. During the twentieth century and especially after World War II,
the situation changed, as the knowledge formations, in our case ethnology, moved into
the university, leaving their collections behind. Museum became custodians of the
collections of outmoded scientific disciplines. In reinventing themselves, museums have
become agents of “heritage.”
My remarks are organized around the following themes:
• Heritage is metacultural
• Tangible and intangible heritage
• Repudiation as an enabling condition
• Ethnology’s heritage
• Museum’s heritage
Heritage is metacultural
I define heritage as a mode of cultural production that has recourse to the past and
produces something new. Heritage as a mode of cultural production adds value to the
outmoded by making it into an exhibition of itself. Central to my argument is the notion
that heritage is created through metacultural operations that extend museological values
and methods (collection, documentation, preservation, presentation, evaluation, and
interpretation) to living persons, their knowledge, practices, artifacts, social worlds, and
life spaces. Heritage professionals use concepts, standards, and regulations to bring
cultural phenomena and practitioners into the heritage sphere, where they become
metacultural artifacts, whether “Living National Treasures” or “Masterpieces of the Oral
and Intangible Heritage of Humanity.” At the same time, the performers, ritual
specialists, and artisans whose “cultural assets” become heritage through this process
experience a new relationship to those assets, a metacultural relationship to what was
once just habitus. Habitus refers here to the taken for granted, while heritage refers to the
self-conscious selection of valued objects and practices. The power of heritage is
precisely that it is curated, which is why heritage is more easily harmonized with human
rights and democratic values than is culture. UNESCO stipulates that only those aspects
of culture that are compatible with such values can be considered for world heritage
designation.
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Unlike things, animals, and plants, people are not only objects of cultural preservation but
also subjects. They are not only cultural carriers and transmitters (the terms are
unfortunate, as is masterpiece), but also agents in the heritage enterprise itself. What the
heritage protocols do not generally account for is a conscious, reflexive subject.
UNESCO’s declaration and conventions on intangible heritage speak of collective
creation. Performers are carriers, transmitters, and bearers of traditions, terms which
connote a passive medium, conduit, or vessel, without volition, intention, or subjectivity.
Living archive or library are common metaphors. Such terms do not assert a person’s
right to what they do, but rather their role in keeping the culture going (for others).
According to this model, people come and go, but culture persists, as one generation
passes it along to the next. But, all heritage interventions—like the globalizing pressures
they are trying to counteract—change the relationship of people to what they do. They
change how people understand their culture and themselves. They change the
fundamental conditions for cultural production and reproduction. Needless to say, change
is intrinsic to culture, and measures intended to preserve, conserve, safeguard, and sustain
particular cultural practices are caught between freezing the practice and addressing the
inherently processual nature of culture.
Heritage interventions attempt to slow the rate of change. The Onion, a humor newspaper
in the United States with a national readership, published a satirical article entitled “U.S.
Dept. of Retro Warns: ‘We May Be Running Out of Past.’”1 The article quotes U.S.
Retro Secretary Anson Williams: “If current levels of U.S. retro consumption are allowed
to continue unchecked, we may run entirely out of past by as soon as 2005” and “We are
talking about a potentially devastating crisis situation in which our society will express
nostalgia for events which have yet to occur.” In support of these predictions, the article
explains that “The National Retro Clock currently stands at 1990, an alarming 74 percent
closer to the present than ten years ago, when it stood at 1969.” As the retro clock speeds
up, life becomes heritage almost before it has a chance to be lived and heritage fills the
life space.
The asynchrony of historical, heritage, and habitus clocks (and in particular the
differential temporalities of things, persons, and events) produces a paradox, namely, the
possession of heritage as a mark of modernity, which is the very condition of possibility
for the world heritage enterprise. The contemporaneous becomes—or rather, is at one and
the same time--contemporary, to invoke the distinction made by Johannes Fabian in Time
and the Other.2 The dilemma for projects to safeguard intangible heritage, which requires
human actors to commit themselves to embodying the knowledge, so designated and to
maintaining embodied practices, is how to reconcile the valorization of customary
practices with a program of personal and social transformation. The result is a
transvaluation that “preserves” custom without preserving the “custom-bound” self.
Indeed, heritage becomes a resource in the project of fashioning the self.3
Tangible and Intangible Heritage
Museums, while repositories of tangible heritage in the form of artifact collections, have
always had to address the intangible aspects of culture—indigenous knowledge, belief
systems, techniques of the body, performance. And, as those creating world heritage
policy now realize, particularly within UNESCO, the division between tangible, natural,
and intangible heritage is arbitrary, though not without its history and logic. Nonetheless
to designate embodied knowledge and practices “intangible” is to define them by what
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they are not (they are not tangible) and to maintain the primacy of tangibility as an
organizing concept in heritage theory and practice. That said, those dealing with natural
heritage increasingly argue that most of the sites on the world natural heritage list are
what they are by virtue of human interaction with the environment. Similarly, tangible
heritage, without intangible heritage, is a mere husk or inert matter, objects that are not
yet things.4 As for intangible heritage, it is not only embodied, but also inseparable from
persons and their material and social worlds. “Africa loses a library when an old man
dies," a quotation from Hampaté Bâ, appears on the opening page for the UNESCO’s
Intangible Heritage page.5 While affirming the person, the library metaphor confuses
archive and repertoire, a distinction that is particularly important to an understanding of
intangible heritage as embodied knowledge and practice. In contrast with the tangible
heritage protected in the museum, intangible heritage consists of cultural manifestations
(knowledge, skills, performance) that are inextricably linked to persons. It is not
possible—or it is not as easy—to treat such manifestations as proxies for persons, even
with recording technologies that can separate performances from performers and consign
the repertoire to the archive.
According to Diana Taylor, the repertoire is always embodied and is always manifested
in performance, in action, in doing.6 The repertoire is passed on through performance.
This is different from recording and preserving documentation of the repertoire in the
archive. The repertoire is about embodied knowledge and the social relations for its
creation, enactment, transmission, and reproduction. It follows, according to UNESCO,
that intangible heritage is particularly vulnerable precisely because it is intangible,
although the historical record does not necessarily bear this out. Though the situation
today is of a different order, Australian aborigines maintained their “intangible heritage”
for over 30,000 years without the help of cultural policy and the monumental Bahmian
Buddhas were reduced to dust in an instant.
While the categories of tangible and intangible heritage distinguish things from events
(and from knowledge, skills, and values), even things are events. First, as existential
philosopher Stanley Eveling has remarked, “A thing is a slow event.” This is a perceptual
issue. The perception of change is a function of the relationship between the actual rate of
change and “the windows of our awareness.”7 Things are events, not inert or deteriorating
substance, in other senses as well. A thing can be an “affecting presence,” in the words of
Robert Plant Armstrong.8
Moreover, many things are renewable or replaceable under specified conditions. Every
twenty years, the wooden sanctuaries at Ise Jingu, a sacred shrine in Japan, are rebuilt.
The process takes about eight years, and the shrine has been rebuilt sixty-one times since
the first rebuilding in 690. Known as "shikinen sengu," this tradition involves not only
construction, but also ceremony and transmission of specialized knowledge: “The
carpentry work is carried out by about one hundred men, the majority of whom are local
carpenters who set aside their usual work for a privileged period of two to four years. No
nails are used in the entire structure. Although the plans exist for every structure, the
master carpenters must remember and pass on to apprentices their expert knowledge of
how to put together the complex joints, using ancient and unfamiliar tools.”9 This shrine
represents “2000 Years of History, Yet Never Gets Older than 20.” Ise Jingu is a slow
event.
As the Ise Jingu shrine demonstrates, intangibility and evanescence, which are, after all,
conditions of all experience, should not be confused with disappearance or extinction.
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This is a case of misplaced concreteness or literal thinking. Conversations are intangible
and evanescent, but that does not make the phenomenon of conversation vulnerable to
disappearance. This is true of much that is considered intangible heritage, namely
performances of all kinds. On the contrary, it could be said that because they cannot be
collected, in the way that objects can be collected, because they cannot be preserved, in
the way that a house can be preserved, meals and stories and songs have to be done—
they have to be performed—over and over again. Indeed, the willed ephemerality of
things—the destruction of the Ise Jingu shrine, for example, and commitment to
rebuilding it every twenty years—intensifies the need to maintain the embodied
knowledge, the practices, which are required for making it in the first place. Ephemerality
gives to things their processual and eventful character, while evanescence is the enabling
condition for performing over and over again, which is itself the enabling condition for
the maintenance, transmission, and reproduction of embodied knowledge. The principle:
use it or lose it.
Finally, the possession of heritage—as opposed the way of life that heritage safeguards—
is an instrument of modernization and mark of modernity. “To have no museums in
today’s circumstances is to admit that one is below the minimum level of civilization
required of a modern state.”1 Indeed, museums are one instrument for the “safeguarding”
of heritage, as understood by UNESCO. Safeguarding, it should be noted, requires
specialized skills that are different from the practices that are to be safeguarded. There is
a difference between doing the practice and doing something about it, between
performing a song and recording it. Safeguarding efforts produce heritage workers, who
may or may not also be heritage practitioners.
While persistence in old life ways may not be economically viable and may well be
inconsistent with economic development and with national ideologies, the valorization of
those lifeways as heritage (and the integration of heritage into economies of cultural
tourism) is economically viable, consistent with economic development theory, and can
be brought into line with national ideologies of cultural uniqueness and modernity.
Fundamental to this process is the heritage economy as a modern economy. For this and
other reasons, heritage may well be preferred to the pre-heritage culture that it is
intended to safeguard. Such is the case at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawai’i, a
Mormon operation where, since 1963, students at Brigham Young University-Hawaii
“keep alive and share their island heritage with visitors while working their way through
school.”10
Repudiation as an Enabling Condition
Such cases point to the troubled history of museums and heritage as agents of
deculturation, as the final resting place for evidence of the success of missionizing and
colonizing efforts, among others, that preserve (in the museum) what was wiped out (in
the community). Today’s museums and heritage interventions may attempt to reverse
course, but there is no way back, only a metacultural way forward.
The operations just described are the enabling conditions for the field of ethnology and
for the museums dedicated to this science. This is a story of alienation, detachment, and
repudiation thanks to the civilizing, colonizing, missionizing, reformation, and
revolutionary projects that produce cultural outtakes in the form of dispositions and
practices whose very outmodedness has made them safe for handling, studying, and
display. We have here what Steven Mullaney calls the rehearsal of culture, by which he
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means the foreclosure of what is collected and displayed. This is the enabling condition
for ethnology, its collections, and their display. The enabling condition is willed
disappearance through a process of removal, followed by the display of what has been
made to disappear, as a foreclosure of it.
This is a first step in an ongoing process of devaluation and revaluation, a process that
alters the world by purging it of objects associated with pagan religions, primitive
peoples, Catholicism, and subsistence lifestyles, in the name of salvation, civilization,
Protestantism, and economic development, as in the case of the Congo, as described by
Lotten Gustafsson in her paper at this conference on the 12,000 Congo objects collected
by the Swedish Missionary Society for the Swedish National Museum of Natural Science
at the turn of the century. There, as in the Torres Straits and elsewhere, missionaries had
the islanders pile their sacred objects in a heap and set them on fire, after reserving some
of them for museums in Europe. Removal of objects was one step in the process of
stripping subject peoples of their culture in order to convert them, modernize them, or
otherwise transform them in a grand rite of separation. Ethnology, as the handmaiden of
colonialism, was governed not only by intellectual concerns internal to the discipline, but
also by the practical concerns of better administering by studying those who were to be
governed.
The success of these efforts produced a kind of crisis for ethnology to the degree that it
created a disappearing subject, decimated both demographically and culturally. Imminent
disappearance, an ever advancing eleventh hour, energized salvage anthropology and a
revaluation of that which was sufficiently endangered to be safe for appreciation. Salvage
anthropologists, particularly those who studied Native Americans, rushed to salvage what
remained, that is, to record and collect, this time in the spirit of preserving in the museum
and the archive, what was disappearing in the world. Disappearance was and continues
to be an enabling condition.
Ethnology’s Heritage
Heritage, it could be said, is the opposite of ethnology. Heritage is predicated on a
different set of claims. But, ethnology is deeply implicated in the production of heritage,
first, for the historical reasons outlined above—its role in making culture disappear and
then salvaging what remains—and, second, because of ethnology’s own complicated
relationship to its own past.
There is a double move here, two alienations. The first alienation occurs when ethnology
makes culture disappear in the world and reappear, as ethnology, in the museum. The
second alienation occurs when ethnology repudiates its own history, particularly as a
museum field and in the museum itself.
Shame—and its other face—moral indignation are enabling conditions to the degree that
they create a relationship, a strong affective and moral relationship, to that which has
become a marker of ethnology’s spoiled identity. In remaking itself, ethnology had to
remake its relationship to its own past as well as to the present of the people they had
studied.
Shifts in ethnology as a discipline—less interest in the tangible (material culture), more
interest in the intangible and the theoretical—brought about a disarticulation of what was
once a tight integration of knowledge formation, collection, and museum. These shifts
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also produced a peculiar asynchrony, as ethnology shifted from the museum to the
university, forged ahead with its theories, enlarged its field of inquiry to include
contemporary society, and, in a postcolonial era, faced its problematic past, while
museums because the custodians of the collections and displays of an outmoded
ethnology—that is, museums of ethnology became museums of ethnology’s own
“heritage.” The devaluation of the scientific value of ethnographic collections—as
ethnology moves on to other concerns—prepares the way for their revaluation as
heritage, in a double sense: the heritage of those from whom those objects were taken and
the heritage of ethnology itself.
Consider the so-called Bushman Diorama, the most popular exhibit at the South Africa
Museum in Capetown. This diorama has auratic power in its own right, which is precisely
what makes it so dangerous. Not only are real artifacts embedded in the recreated
environment, but also the figures were created using life casts made from living
Bushman, as they were called, or Khoisan, as they prefer to be known. The diorama has
become an artifact in its own right, which makes the museum doubly responsible for it,
that is, for making it in the first place and for taking responsibility for what it says about
museum practice. Every attempt to deal with this problematic display and ones like it
elsewhere in the gallery—whether to cover it up, explain and apologize for it, add
warning labels—foregrounds the museum itself, its operations, history, and, in retrospect,
its mistakes. Such reflexive moves make the museum, its practices and its mediations,
visible. They effect a shift from an informing museology (the exhibit as a neutral vehicle
for the transmission of information) to a performing museology (the museum itself is on
display).11 “The diorama is now closed,” the sign reads, but not gone. It is there, but it
cannot be seen—except on postcards still for sale in the museum gift shop. With this
performative gesture, the South African Museum publicly confronts the ideological
burden of its own history. Tour guides have protested and threatened to not bring tourists
to this museum until such time as the Bushman Diorama reopens.
Museum’s heritage
Post-World War II developments, really from the 1960s, arising from powerful social
movements—the civil rights, free speech, anti-war, women’s, and student movements;
the dissolution of colonial empires and new postcolonial nations; immigration from the
postcolonial periphery to the imperial center; and developments in the 1990s (fall of the
Berlin wall, collapse of the former USSR, end of Apartheid, emerging national
consciousness of postcolonial settler societies such as Australia and New Zealand and
creation of new national museums), the ever larger European Union (and the question of
European identity under such new geopolitical and demographic conditions), rise of
religious fundamentalisms (Christian, Jewish, and Islamic), and now the “war on terror.”
These developments have altered the nature of citizenship and given rise to policies of
multiculturalism--and in New Zealand a policy of biculturalism, which recognizes the
rights flowing from the treaty signed in 1840 (?) between the Crown and the people of the
land, namely, the Maori. An example of how museums responded to the policy of
biculturalism is the Goldie exhibition.12 Goldie, New Zealand’s old master (or Norman
Rockwell, depending on your perspective), was a very popular painter of Maori subjects
during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. During the latter part of the
twentieth century, pakeha (non-indigenous) New Zealanders became ashamed of Goldie
and what they had come to see as his sentimental and stereotypical paintings of the Maori
as noble savage on the brink of disappearance. He actually titled one of the paintings,
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“The Last of a Dying Breed.” During the 1990s, curators discovered that Maori,
particularly those who identified their ancestors in the paintings, did not view them as
shameful, but rather as taonga, as sacred treasures--indeed, as their ancestors. The
decision was taken to exhibit the Goldie paintings, but in a way that reflected the value
they have for Maori today. The paintings were grouped by iwi or tribe. Antagonistic
tribes were not hung near each other. The wall labels identified the sitter by name and
tribe, not by the title that Goldie had given the painting, though the gallery guide did
include Goldie’s title. The audio guide provided a detailed biography of the sitter, starting
with his whakapapa, or genealogy, followed by his travels and achievements, including in
some cases a trip to England, a meeting with the Queen, success in establishing a printing
press, and the like. Maori related to the sitters were in the galleries to talk with visitors.
Photographs of contemporary Maori life were exhibited outside the painting gallery when
the exhibition traveled to the Museum of Sydney. Maori protocol was followed with
respect to handling and treatment of the paintings.
A second example of how museums responded to the biculturalism policy was to take
ethnology to task for the way that it had structured the old national museum, which
consisted of a National Art Gallery featuring European-style paintings and sculpture and
a natural history museum for plants, animals, Maori, and other peoples of the Pacific.
This arrangement had become untenable not only on political but also on scientific
grounds.
In New Zealand, as elsewhere, the early history of ethnology and of museums was
defined by a close fit between the scientific project, the collection, and the museum. The
scientific project was the museum’s raison d’être. The museum sponsored research
expeditions, developed collections, and based research on them. Permanent exhibitions of
permanent collections were first and foremost exhibitions of the discipline of ethnology
itself. As I have discussed elsewhere, museums exhibited “ethnographic objects,” that
were “objects of ethnography” in the sense that these objects were what they were by
virtue of the conceptual categories and practices of ethnographers.13 What, however was
to be done, when ethnology left the museum for the university? What was to be done
with old collections, modes of displays, and the museums that continued to house them?
Should these institutions be preserved as museums of themselves? As ethnology’s
heritage? Or, should the museum reinvent itself? In the case of New Zealand, the decision
was taken to dismantle the institution, reorganize the collections, and integrate the
collections in exhibitions. First and foremost, however, it was necessary to redefine the
mission of the national museum. The result is the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa
Tongarewa, known as Te Papa. This museum has repudiated its history as a museum.
Instead, it has envisioned itself within the history of New Zealand’s participation in
world’s fairs, from the very first one in 1851 until Seville. An expo style building and
expositionary approach to exhibition make this museum immensely popular, consistent
with its promise to attract people who never go to museums and to make a good faith
effort to earn income to support at least part of the institution’s operating costs.
I have tried to argue here for a notion of heritage as a mode of cultural production that
creates something new. Above all, heritage as a mode of cultural production produces a
new relationship—a metacultural relationship—to that which becomes heritage.
Moreover, heritage is one of the ways that museums, particularly ethnology museums,
reinvent themselves and redefine their relationship to their stakeholders. Rather than
museums continuing to be a showcase for ethnology, they are increasingly treating their
collections as the heritage—someone’s heritage of the communities from which the
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objects come or of the visitors to the museum. Consistent with this approach, Te Papa’s
motto is “Our home” and the museum markets itself as a place for “finding ourselves.”14
I have also argued that repudiation has historically been an enabling condition for the
production of ethnology, the collections it generates, and the museums that house them.
A second round of repudiation puts ethnology and museums into a problematic
relationship with their respective pasts and opens up new possibilities for them to engage
with their own histories and their own heritage, as well as with their responsibility to
those whose heritage they have helped to produce.
1 “U.S. Dept. of Reto Warns: ‘We May Be Running out of Past’,” The Onion 32, 14 (2000),
http://www.theonion.com/onion3214/usretro.html.
2 Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983).
3 See Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991).
4 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, Mass:
Harvard University Press, 1993).
5 Intangible Heritage, UNESCO,
http://mirror-us.unesco.org/culture/heritage/intangible/html_eng/index_en.shtml.
6 See Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the
Americas (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
7 Doron Swade, “Virtual Objects: Threat or Salvation? Museums of Modern Science,” eds. Svante
Lindqvist, Marika Hedin, and Ulf Larsson, Nobel Symposium, 112 (Canton, MA: Science History
Publications/USA, 2000), 139-47.
8 Robert Plant Armstrong, The Powers of Presence: Consciousness, Myth, and Affecting Presence
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), and Robert Plant Armstrong, The
Affecting Presence: an Essay in Humanistic Anthropology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1971).
9 Japan Atlas, Architecture, Jingu Shrine in Ise,
http://www.jinjapan.org/atlas/architecture/arc14.html.
10 From the website of the Polynesian Cultural Center, http://www.polynesia.com/aloha/history/.
See also, Andrew Ross, "Cultural Preservation in the Polynesia of the Latter Day Saints," in The
Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (London, New York: Verso, 1994), 21-
98.
11 Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations Through Proverbial
Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990)
12 Roger Blackyey, Goldie (Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery and David Bateman, 1997).
13 See Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, “Objects of Ethnography,” Exhibiting Cultures: The
Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, eds. Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 17-78.
14 Paul Williams, "Te Papa: New Zealand's Identity Complex," New Zealand Journal of Art
History 24, 1 (2003): 11-24.