A Historian's Brief Guide to New Museum Studies

unfolding of historiographical narrative; in one form or another, the contrast has inspired the recovery or outright construction of alternative histories for marginalized or excluded groups. Over and against the idea that objects are the passive registers of symbolic meanings or exchange values, some revisionist thinking in anthropology stresses their material specificity as things with inalienable pasts.56 This revisionist enterprise has real-world consequences in the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) in the United States and comparable initiatives in the interests of native people elsewhere, particularly in Canada and Australia. Statutes of this sort have written into law the view that objects are bearers and witnesses of values past and present, not just their signifiers or specimens. Where it is possible to establish legitimate claims, the legislation mandates the restitution to native groups of human remains and material goods "collected" by institutions such as ethnographic or local history museums. Predictably enough, enforcement has met institutional resistance in the name of public interest, scholarship, and science. Between extremes, however, many creative accommodations have emerged: exchanges and loans of objects between museums and tribal groups; exhibitions and workshops bringing together museum professionals and "community curators"; the revival or adaptive reuse of techniques and traditions. Critics argue that the results are forced, inauthentic, and evasive, but this line of criticism tends to attribute a purity to cultural objects that the chipped glaze, the torn thread, or the worn surface insistently belie. 57 It is quite possible to imagine some future version of this Brief Guide suggesting that museum studies had turned-or returned-from the primacy of discourse to the priority of object. IF THE "UNIVERSAL SURVEY" was the highest ideal of the great public museums, partiality, in all senses of the word, is a major theme and preoccupation of the 56 For a survey of "the museum-memory nexus [as] one of the richest sites for inquiry into the production of cultural and personal knowledge," see Susan A. Crane, "Introduction," in Crane, ed., Museums and Memory, 1-13; Gaynor Kavanaugh, Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum (London and New York, 2000) is a practice-oriented study by an experienced museum professional. Working with concepts from linguistics and cognitive studies, Diana Drake Wilson, "Realizing Memory, Transforming History: Eum/American/Indians," in Crane, ed., Museums and Memory, 115-36, constructs a theoretical rationale for a "materials memory" that has "referential immediacy and effects ... as truthful and socially, culturally, psychologically, and physically consequential for subjectivity and experience." Quotation on 34. Cf., however, the provocative historiographical essay that brings out the equivocations in the collective memory literature by Kerwin Lee Klein, "On the Emergence of Memory in Historical Discourse," Representations, no. 69 (Winter 2000): 127-43. On "inalienable possessions," see Fred R. Myers, "Introduction," in Myers, ed., The Empire o/Things (Santa Fe, N.Mex., and Oxford, 2001), 12-15, referring particularly to the work of anthropologist Annette Weiner. 57 A very large bibliography ranges from local studies to reflections on cross-cultural encounters in museums as staging grounds of memory, identity formation, and identity politics; two excellent examples of each kind are, respectively, Michael Ross and Reg Crowshoe, "Shadows and Sacred Geography: First Nations History-Making from an Alberta Perspective," in Gaynor Kavanaugh, ed., Making Histories in Museums (London and New York, 1996), 240-56; and the work of James Clifford, esp., the essay chapters in Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1997), chap. 5, "Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections," 107-145; chap. 7, "Museums as Contact Zones," 188-219. For the debates surrounding Native American repatriation issues, see Devon A. Mihesuah, ed., Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? (Lincoln, Neb., 2000); Jed Riffe has produced and directed an excellent documentary film on the subject, Who Owns the Past? AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005 A Historian's Brief Guide 85 newer museum studies. Exhibiting Cultures, a collection of papers from a landmark conference held at the Smithsonian Institution and published in 1991, opened with the editors' essay on museums and cultural difference. In this introduction, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine discuss a 1987 exhibition of Hispanic art at the Museum of Arts, Houston, where "the exhibition strategy reflect[ ed] good current thinking about the nature of pluralism." Somewhere between forbearance and frustration they conclude that "no matter how the exhibition was organized, it would have been disputed" because "the subject matter inevitably was open to multiple responses ... [m ]useums attempting to act responsibly in complex, multicultural environments are bound to find themselves enmeshed in controversy."58 Nearly ten years later, the Smithsonian produced a volume of articles on recent exhibitions to coincide with its one-hundred-fiftieth anniversary. The title this time was Exhibiting Dilemmas, hardly a cue for celebration; the articles, all by Smithsonian curators, are mostly about beleaguered choices. "Museum wars" had become a kind of Western Front of the "culture wars" with no end in sight beyond a whole genre of case studies and casebooks on the latest battles.59 Since the exhibit is a professional unit of reckoning, museum workers are at home with this genre.60 The Smithsonian curators' dilemmas turn out to be mostly on-the-job issues, however much intensified by rising and often conflicting expectations from administrators, patrons, and publics. Their dilemmas are grounded in specific cases rather like minefields are grounded. So, for example, to obtain the centerpiece of an exhibit at the National Museum of American History featuring the Woolworth's lunch counter of the historic 1960 sit-in in Greensboro, North Carolina, the curators had to negotiate with corporate executives, city government and community groups, an ad hoc African-American association promoting its own museum in the Woolworth's building, a carpenters' union, and not least their Smithsonian colleagues, because exhibition space was limited in the museum's crowded Political History Hall. 61 Another collection of curators' papers, Making Histories in Museums, revolves around British and Commonwealth history museums, from medical and agricultural to minority and childhood museums. The title is a gentle teaser. The authors do not want to argue that history is merely made up. Their aim, according to editor Gaynor Kavanaugh, was "to open museums to braver and better researched histories presented with great imagination and real regard 58 Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, "Museums and Multiculturalism," in Karp and Levine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington, D.C., 1991),5. 59 Amy Henderson and Adrienne Louise Kaeppler, eds., Exhibiting Dilemmas: Issues of Representation at the Smithsonian (Washington, D,C., 1997); Willard L. Boyd, "Museums as Centers of Controversy," in America's Museums, 85-228, is a survey by a distinguished museum professional, lawyer, and academic administrator, 60 Marlene Chambers, "Critiquing Exhibition Criticism," Museum News (September/October 1999): 31-74, notes the long-standing popularity of sessions at annual meetings of museum associations that are devoted to critiquing exhibitions; she offers a clever taxonomy: "Yankee Trader criticism, with its authoritarian, didactic emphasis on putting across a message; Houdini criticism, which focuses on escaping the culturally conditioned paradigms that shape our messages and their meanings; LEGO criticism, which views meaning making as a shared social process." Quotation on 31. 61 William Yeingst and Lonnie B. Bunch, "Curating the Recent Past: The Woolworth Lunch Counter, Greensboro, North Carolina," in Henderson and Kaeppler, eds" Exhibiting Dilemmas, 143-55; an eight-foot section of the counter was eventually (and provisionally) installed in a second-floor corridor, outside the main exhibit but in view of the star-spangled banner, and accompanied by photo murals on the civil rights movement. AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW FEBRUARY 2005