CAG on museums: The Future of Ethnographic Museums in Oxford reflections

View of Radcliffe Camera from inside of the Bodleian

One of the key questions of the Future of Ethnographic Museums Conference circulated around how museums created at the height of the ‘museum age’ could be reconfigured to engage with new audiences and respond to changes in a globalized twenty-first century world. The conference was very academic and included curators, researchers, and museum professionals and therefore the discussions were driven by individuals with definite gravitas and influence in the museum world. There were many interesting points brought up in a rather philosophical reflection on the ‘future’ of ethnographic museums, spoken about particularly in terms of what is presently going on at museums around the world.

Garden view outside Lady Margaret Hall/Lady Marmalade Hall

The conference started off with the anthropology star James Clifford (!), who began proceedings with the keynote lecture. Clifford’s talk generally spoke about ethnographic museums in a fraught relationship with cultural communities in the era of globalization, using the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) at UBC Vancouver as an example. MOA has come under fire by many cultures of the area who have taken up arguments over not wanting to be associated with museum because of the word anthropology. The word itself has been too connected to colonialist intentions and an antiquated view of cultures. Clifford also mentioned how the word ethnology, which was used to characterize collecting and the comparison of cultures has become completely defunct.

James Clifford!

There were other very interesting points made in the conference and very thought provoking talks, but I will summarize just a few of the things that have really stuck with me.

Sharon Macdonald spoke about the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and the intention to move the ethnographic collections to Museum Island, which Clifford also used as a point of comparison the previous night. Macdonald’s paper compared different approaches to citizenship, nationality, and issues of multiculturalism that have threatened museums through various political agendas. Both she and later Wayne Modest talked about museums shying away from difficult histories and some countries wanting to steer away from telling colonial histories at all, which prompted the attempt to close down the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. These trends outline a difficult phase for memory connected to ethnographic collections, or as Modest suggested, an active ignorance- referring to Ann Stoler’s concept of cultural aphasia as “the ‘inability to recognize things in the world and assign proper names to them’, especially in matters relating to the colonial past in Western societies”. Also very interesting in the discussion of these presentations, was the point that it is often difficult even for museum professionals to articulate to politicians and those adverse to ethnographic collections, what exactly the importance of collections are and why you can’t disregard even their more difficult national stories.

Hay in the Wolfson Nature Reserve

Another really interesting point was brought about by Clare Harris’s talk on the digitally distributed museum and issues of using The Tibet Album, and community reactions to the release of photographs onto the internet. The project has created a digital archive of British photography in Tibet from 1920-1950. The question of who uses these images and issues of freely circulated information on the internet is an interesting point. I’ve long wondered myself if historic photographs, or significant cultural objects are appropriate for release onto the internet. I think in terms of ethnographic material there will always be specific communities within a group or perhaps even individuals who do not want images of their ancestors or ancestral objects visible for the world to see on the internet. What kind of digital forums could encompass the concept of digital repatriation (although a difficult concept in my opinion), but maintain the knowledge that communities might want to keep restricted to themselves and made available only to them? If using the internet for digital exhibitions, social media to spread information, and online databases as the repository of museum metadata has been a major part of twentieth century museum practice, is there a step beyond for how museums can communicate to particular communities digitally in the twenty-first century?

I also took some time to reminisce about my university days and get around Oxford, so the photos are from some of those moments.