11.10.18 What is decolonization Are museums dialogical or polyvocal? Can the museum be decolonized - what would that look like? How did we get here: · British Museum - neoclassical, colonial enlightenment edifice - it grew with colonial power. Symbol of enlightenment, cosmopolitanism, also of plunder, colonisation . Why was museum building in the colonies such a part of the colonial enterprise? · Kaeppler 1994 - 'One might consider museums to be the epitome of the colonial institution' . Carol Duncan 1991 - 'museums are important, even necessary, fixtures of the well- furnished state' · Idea of European Museum begins in Egypt/ Roman worlds o The Mousein, or Library of Alexandria - 3rd Century BC o Early collections of Renaissance Italy = wonder chambers/ cabinets of curiosities- i.e Ferrante Imperato's museum, Naples 1599 & Musei Wormiani Historia, Copenhagen 1588-1654 Efforts to classify the natural and artificial world · Understand how everything fits together in a paradigm of understanding the mind of god/ creation stories. . Francis Bacon points out that collecting and displaying were tied to status o Typologies = Museo Cospiano 1606-1686, Bologna . Fundamentally it is not simply the buildings, collections, staff, it's the structure of knowledge. How collections are ordered, how visitors are segmented, the way things are divided and classified. · Creating and exhibiting the order of things. Creating the order, then making it visible . The museum like the shopping mall/department store/prison, are all technologies of control/governmentality. o E.g Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon 1800s Millbank Prison Bennet (drawing on Foucault) saw these structure of urban space/public sphere/museums was about having not only all the works of man and nature on display, but also the people walking around viewable. · What viewing means - Millbank Prison (Bentham's design) is now the Tate Museum. - Trudgill reading. o Museum, prison, public space as agents of social control . 'Middle Eastern visitors found Europeans a curious people, who had an uncontainable eagerness to stand and stare' . Pitt Rivers and MAA opened in 1880s - what is intended to be made visible in these spaces, who is doing the looking
· Colonialism was not just about collection - it was also about re-arrangement, re- presentation and re-distribution o It was a process of systematic fragmentation that can still be seen today - Decolonizing Methodologies Linda Tuhiwai Smith 1999 o Fragmentation is not postmodernism - it is a consequence of imperialism o How do we work against that? · What are the implications of fragmentation on decolonization today? · 'Who Are We' - reflections on the anthropological 'We' - in decolonizing and recognising voice, we need to understand who the 'we' is that we are fighting in decolonization Coombes: Museums establishing ideas of racial superiority As tools of the imperialist states - a way of selling imperialism to the British public Creating a natural order to justify this How individuals reproduce institutions Museums were political - but now are wary of being political Museums are neutral/passive, but in doing so