Decolonising the museum? (original) (raw)
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Decolonising the museum? Dilemmas, possibilities, alternatives
Culture Unbound, 2021
As institutions that arose during the European age of imperial expansion to glorify and display the achievements of empire, museums have historically been deeply implicated in the colonial enterprise. However if we understand coloniality not as a residue of the age of imperialism, but rather an ongoing structural feature of global dynamics, the challenge faced by museums in decolonising their practice must be viewed as ongoing. This is the case not just in former centres of empire, but in settler-colonial nations such as Australia, where "the colonisers did not go home" (Moreton-Robinson 2015: 10). As a white, Western institution, a number of arguably intrinsic features of the museum represent a significant challenge to decolonisation, including the traditional museum practices and values evinced by the universal museum. Using a number of case studies, this paper considers the extent to which mainstream museums in Australia, Britain and Europe have been able to change their practices to become more consultative and inclusive of Black and Indigenous peoples. Not only this, it discusses approaches that extend beyond a politics of inclusion to ask whether museums have been prepared to hand over representational power, by giving control of exhibitions to Black and Indigenous communities. Given the challenges posed by traditional museum values and practices, such as the strong preference of the universal museum to maintain intact collections, this paper asks whether community museums and cultural centres located within Indigenous communities may represent viable alternative models. The role of the Uluru Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre in Australia's Northern Territory is considered in this light, including whether Traditional Custodians are able to exert control over visitor interpretation offered by this jointly managed centre to ensure that contentious aspects of Australian history are included within the interpretation.
Recent museological scholarship emphasises visitor participation and democratic access to cultural heritage as key to securing the ongoing relevance and future sustainability of museums. But do legacies of colonialist collecting practices and hierarchical conventions of representation in museums afford the possibility of genuine cultural democracy? This paper explores this question via detailed analysis of the Encounters exhibition, developed by the National Museum of Australia in partnership with the British Museum and promoted as an unprecedented partnership between the institutions and Indigenous Australian communities. Drawing on an extensive and emerging literature on museums, community engagement, participation and democracy, in tandem with analysis of public critiques and Indigenous responses to the exhibition, the paper suggests that the extent of Indigenous agency within the collaboration fell short of the articulated goals of the project. It concludes that the concept of maximal participation and release of agency to communities of interest may be difficult to achieve within existing museum frameworks.
To be or not to be colonial: Museums facing their exhibitions
redalyc.uaemex.mx
This article first gives an insight at what the idea of museum meant before the modern era, to set the global, historical and political context in which modern museums emerged. It then analyzes the conditions that paved the way for institutional change as the weakening of the national setting has allowed other layers of histories -local, regional, community, indigenous, minority- to be expressed. Finally, it explains why handling colonial heritage in contemporary exhibitions -through the historical contextualization of the collections on display- is of paramount importance to museums small and big, and look at the extent to which they succeed in adapting to change, through various examples taken from Europe and Australia.
Can Museums Help Sustain Indigenous Identity?Reflections from Melanesia
Visual Anthropology, 2004
Can indigenous museums serve any useful purpose outside the traditional Western imperial setting? The southwest Pacific is used to test the case. A number of approaches are considered: indigenous curation; indigenous motivation; indigenous audiences; and indigenous concepts relating to methods and character of collecting and display. Cultural centers seem particularly appropriate institutions to display art and ceremonial objects and to insert new cultural and political dimensions into the venues. However, there are also a number of problems associated with such display in terms of copyright and the right to see. Curators throughout the Pacific have to negotiate these issues in the displays that they mount. But, it is argued, the results can sustain new forms of sociation and cultural exchange. THE CONCEPT OF AN INDIGENOUS MUSEUM In 1908, Richard Thurnwald settled in Buin, an island to the north of Bougainville, and here, as Marion Melk-Koch documents, ''after considerable effort, he started his own open-air museum consisting of models of houses from different parts of the colony, furnished with true indigenous items. People from the remote areas of Buin flocked to see them and according to a caption of a photograph, they paid an entrance fee in natural products'' [2000: 59-60]. Through this device Thurnwald was exporting the newly emergent European concept of an open-air museum devoted to local and often threatened indigenous culture. This model thrives today in most of the cultural centers across the Pacific. This vignette in the history of European incursion into the Western Pacific raises a host of questions about the status of museums in the region, which I will seek to explore in this article. First, one might ask, what was going on? Whose interests were being served and on what terms? Second, does this example suggest a model for museums and museum visiting? Third, are there specific circumstances that either enhance or threaten the transfer of the concept of museum to this region and
Reassessing the curatorial treatment of Indigenous cultural material in Western museums
The history of collections and acquisition of cultural materials is fundamental to the issue of the heretofore-accepted prerogative of Western museums to collect, display, and preserve non- Western objects. It is a history that reflects the Marxist theory of commodity fetishism in Western capitalist society in which the value of an object is determined by the social relations that constitute the context of production, and imbue the object with an accepted, abstract and intrinsic economic value. Such a phenomenon underpins an established ‘capitalist system of objects’ through which value is generated and objects are fetishized. Within the Western museological context, value encompasses that which is not only commercially lucrative, but which has a certain degree of aesthetic and/or scientific value. As such, exotic cultural artifacts, particularly those of distant origin - temporally or geographically- are deemed particularly interesting and unique, and have, historically, been highly prized by collectors and curators. Against the background of European colonialism, this Western value system, coupled with the notion of commodity fetishism, constitutes the milieu within which the object-oriented fields of anthropology and art converge and are elevated into the realms of high culture, where they occupy the role of arbiter in the cultural exchange that results from the collection and display of non-Western cultural materials in European museums. The issues inherent in such practices, which find their genesis in the colonial age and early ethnographical study, raise important questions that reflect a postcolonial sensibility. Such questions examine the reasons behind the long accepted circumstance in which non-Western objects are stored and displayed in European museums, and ask what moral and political measures can be taken to ensure culturally sensitive and responsible museological practices, as well as questions regarding the appropriate value of scientific analysis and public display when dealing with highly sensitive cultural material and human remains. I will be exploring these issues in relation to the custodial, museological, and ethnographic practices of westernised Australian museums in the treatment of Indigenous art and culture, and the ramifications of such practices on the identity and social and cultural integrity of Indigenous Australians in a postcolonial context.
Decentring the Museum. Contemporary Art Institutions and Colonial Legacies, 2023
Nina Möntmann’s timely book extends the decolonisation debate to the institutions of contemporary art. In a thoughtfully articulated text, illustrated with pertinent examples of best practice, she argues that to play a crucial role within increasingly diverse societies museums and galleries of contemporary art have a responsibility to ‘decentre’ their institutions, removing from their collections, exhibition policies and infrastructures a deeply embedded Euro-centric cultural focus with roots in the history of colonialism. In this, she argues, they can learn from the example both of anthropological museums, which are engaged in debates about the colonial histories of their collections, about trauma and repair, and of small-scale art spaces, which have the flexibility to initiate different kinds of conversation and collective knowledge production in collaboration with Indigenous or local diasporic communities from the Global South. For the first time, this book identifies the influence that anthropological museums and small art spaces can exert on museums of contemporary art to initiate a process of decentring.
Museums and memory as agents of social change
The International Journal of the Humanities, 2007
Museums meet their charters in diverse ways in a multicultural society such as Australia. We view museums as places of learning that intend to engage and fascinate their audiences. Increasingly museums engage in processes of brokerage through which source communities become active participants in curation activities. These processes are not necessarily transparent. Focusing on the aspirations of the Lamalama people of Cape York Peninsula, Australia, we consider how museums can now contribute to the Aboriginal communities whose cultural heritage materials they hold. We draw on specific collections, particularly the photographic images in the Donald Thomson Collection, to describe how community wishes have been accommodated in a research project that uses multidisciplinary methods, including video-recording, to further develop curatorial processes that explore the potential of museums as venues for social change.
Museum Hegemony, Postcolonial Collections and the Scars of the Colonial Process
Academia Letters, 2021
Museums have been considering their colonial histories and questions of how to shed oppressive legacies rooted in the structures and collections of most major institutions. This essay examines museum hegemony through a social justice lens by incorporating the writings of political theorist Frantz Fanon. Incorporating historic museum case studies provides evidence as to a lack of progress in the field, yet Fanon's theories regarding violence and decolonizing offer a metaphoric path to guide inclusive museums of the future. Attitudinal shifts in society over the last few decades have increasingly concentrated on glaring inequities, compelling museums to consider legacies rooted in colonialism through the lens of social justice-oriented and anti-racist educational programming and exhibitions. This paper examines how engaging in decolonizing work enables museums to incorporate multiple narratives challenging prevailing hegemonic historical accounts, thereby recognizing diverse voices while providing museums with a renewed sense of purpose. Pervasive colonial structures, firmly established within wealth, social and health inequities, have inflicted spiritual and psychological damage on the psyche of the colonized, and these scars are embodied in the culture of settler institutions. With the provenance of many major collections constituting treasures sourced from imperial European aristocracy (Reilly 2018, 23), the time has come for museums to present the counter-hegemonic voices that will deconstruct historic imperialist and elitist canons. In Wretched of the Earth, political theorist Frantz Fanon (1963, 51) argues that truth is key to dismantling the colonialist regime. Given that a narrow version of the truth has been historically relayed through colonial narratives, attaining authenticity requires the understanding
An Incomplete Glossary of Change to Activate Decolonising and Indigenising Practices in Museum
Museum International, 2023
In this article, drawing on my perspective as a settler of white Euro-Welsh/English/Irish ancestry, I discuss words and concepts that are crucial to decolonising and Indigenising museums, with a particular focus on the lands now known as Canada. Museums, heritage spaces and other memory institutions are only beginning to grapple with decolonising and Indigenising approaches that place unacknowledged and unstated colonial norms under scrutiny (despite calls for such actions from Indigenous scholars, curators and activists for many decades if not centuries). The decades of genocide attempts documented in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Report and Calls to Action (2015) amplified the need for this work. Conversations around what ‘Reconciliation’ means for non-Indigenous people are slowly gaining momentum as museums, and the wider GLAM sector, look at how to implement decolonising and Indigenising actions in meaningful ways. I discuss Nerida Blair’s concept of Lilyology and la paperson’s institutional internalisation of scyborgism as part of my discussion of how museums and museum professionals can undertake actions for decolonising and Indigenising their practices and collections.