‘Back Room’ Pedagogies in University Museums in Britain

Abstract

The stage-like “exhibitionary space,” which members of the public visit, has received more scholarly scrutiny than the pedagogical and curatorial activities that take place in the back rooms of museums. This essay draws attention to the behind-the-scenes places in university museums as a pedagogic site where students learn through the close examination of artefacts. It addresses the social context of learning through the study of incomplete objects, which may involve handling them. This process of using artefacts to engage with different groups of people (collectors, curators, teaching staff and students) contributes to the physical and intellectual development of academic disciplines. It enhances the museum's institutional mission and survival as an incorporated body that is embedded in a greater whole, the university itself. The Ashmolean Museum, in the University of Oxford, and the Balfourian and Sibbaldian Museums, in the University of Edinburgh, were founded in the seventeenth century. But whereas the Ashmolean survived as an institution, the first Edinburgh collections did not. These historical antecedents serve as a backdrop to a discussion of how one particular example, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CUMAA), trains new generations of learners to evaluate empirical evidence and by working with different communities of users—students and the wider public—it ensures its survival.

Notes

Notes

1. The term artefact refers here to objects made by human skill, but can on occasion also refer to “found” objects. The accessioning of this latter category and the study accorded to them in museums impart an artefact-like quality. Most of the examples explored in this essay are of a size that can be held in the hand.

2. Colin Dexter, The Jewel That Was Ours (London: Pan, 1992), 47.

3. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 26.

4. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1971).

5. David Anderson, A Common Wealth: Museums in the Learning Age (United Kingdom Stationery Office: A Report to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, 1999), 8–10.

6. K. Hill, Culture and Class in English Public Museums, 1850–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate), 65 and 105.

7. Exceptions for university museums in Britain are provided by Marcia Lord, “Editorial,” Museum International 52.2 (2000): 3; Melanie Kelly, ed., Managing University Museums: Education and Skills (Paris: OECD, 2001); and University Museums Group, University Museums in the United Kingdom (2004). For literature relevant to Japan and Australia, see Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World: Uses of Museum Collections (Amsterdam: Elsevier, Butterman, Heinemann, 2005), 23 note 6.

8. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, ed., The Educational Role of the Museum, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1999).

9. Tony Bennett, “That Those Who Run May Read,” in Hooper-Greenhill, The Educational Role of the Museum, 252.

10. Keene, Fragments of the World, 17.

11. University Museums UK Group, University Museums in the United Kingdom (2004), iii.

12. University Museums UK Group, University Museums in the United Kingdom (2004), iii.

13. Marcia Lord, “Editorial,” Museum International 52.3 (2000): 3.

14. William Ryan Chapman, “Arranging Ethnology: A. H. L. F. Pitt Rivers and the Typological Tradition,” in Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture, ed. George W. Stocking Jr (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 15–48; Frances Larson, “Anthropological Landscaping: General Pitt Rivers, the Ashmolean, the University Museum and the Shaping of an Oxford Discipline,” Journal of the History of Collections 20.1 (2008): 85–100.

15. Richard Handler, “An Anthropological Definition of the Museum and Its Purpose,” Museum Anthropology 17.1 (1993): 33–36.

16. Handler, “An Anthropological Definition of the Museum,” 35.

17. An example considered below is provided by the sculpture of Livia's head which is owned by the Ashmolean Museum.

18. James Doesner, “University Archaeology: A Thing of the Past?” British Archaeology (May-June 2010): 18–25.

19. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey (London: Penguin, 1970), 152, 242.

20. Macdonald Critchley, “Tactile Thought, with Special Reference to the Blind,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine 46 (1952): 27–30.

21. For a discussion of interviews with blind people and their use of touch in handling museum artefacts, see Fiona Candlin, “Don’t Touch! Hands Off! Art, Blindness and the Conservation of Expertise,” Body & Society 10.1 (2004): 71–90.

22. Critchley, “Tactile Thought,” 30, 28, 30.

23. Fiona Candlin, “Don’t Touch! Hands Off!” 85.

24. Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993), 26.

25. Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (London, Allen Lane, 2008), 152.

26. Donald Preziosi, “Brain of the Earth's Body: Museums and the Framing of Modernity,” in The Rhetoric of the Frame: Essays on the Boundaries of the Artwork, ed. Paul Duro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 96–110. Reprinted in Bettina Messias Carbonell, ed., Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 79.

27. Rupert Bruce-Mitford, The Sutton Hoo Ship-Burial Vol 2: Arms, Armour and Regalia (London: British Museum Publications, 1978), 536–64. The buckle has three large burnished bosses in a triangular arrangement rather than inset with rubies as in the novel. Had the fictitious buckle been from the Early Medieval period, it would more likely have been set with garnets.

28. Arthur MacGregor, The Ashmolean Museum: A Brief History of the Museum and Its Collections (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2001), 39.

29. David A. Hinton, A Catalogue of the Anglo-Saxon Ornamental Metalwork 700–1100 in the Department of Antiquities, Ashmolean Museum (Oxford, 1974), 29–48; David A. Hinton, The Alfred Jewel and Other Late Anglo-Saxon Decorated Metalwork (Oxford: Ashmolean Museum, 2008), 12; Simon Keynes “The Discovery and First Publication of the Alfred Jewel,” The Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society for 1992 136 (1993): 1–8.

30. Hinton, The Alfred Jewel, 12.

31. Hinton, The Alfred Jewel, 28.

32. Hinton, The Alfred Jewel, 27. According to Hinton, it was W. J. H. Clifford, Bishop of Bath and Wells, who in 1877 identified the function of an aestel by noting that the words festuca (“rod”) and indicatorium had been inserted in a thirteenth-century hand above the term aestel in the preface to the Regula Pastoralis.

33. The ring entered the collection of the Cabinet des Médailles in Paris but in 1831 it was stolen as well as most of the other items studied by Chifflet; Edward James, The Franks (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 61. A wax impression taken before the theft forms part of the collections in the Ashmolean Museum (accession number AN2009.9.B).

34. Peter Burke, “Images as Evidence in Seventeenth-Century Europe,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64.2 (2003): 286, 288.

35. As drawn, the “closed” aspect of the artefact casts a P-shaped shadow that throws the object into relief. Recent commentators consider the mystery object to have been a crossbow brooch, which is a Roman type with a characteristic cross bar decorated with knobs; the profile of the complete brooch forms a letter ‘P’, like a crossbow. See James, The Franks, 61. However, the artist who drew the items from Childeric's grave depicted an object with two detachable parts: a long pointer which was housed in the main shaft (convex on one side and flat on the other), and a short pointer which the user drew out from one of the knobs at the end of the cross bar. The hand using the object is shown with the artefact resting on the bow of the ‘P’ and the flat side of the shaft downwards and the convex face resting under the index finger. James commented that the presence of a seal ring implied letter writing, a Roman rather than a Frankish custom. The presence of a pointer for reading documents would be in keeping in such a context if, indeed, the artefacts came from the same grave. Since these items are now missing (see note 33), there is some uncertainty regarding their interpretation.

36. Burke, “Images as Evidence,” 273.

37. Maev Kennedy, “Caesar's Wife Statue Made Whole Again,” The Guardian, http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2004/jul/13/artsandhumanities.arts?INTCMP=SRCH, 13 July 2004 (accessed 9 January 2011).

38. Emilio Marin, “Livie à Narona,” Comptes-rendus des séances de l’année – Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres 147e année, N.2 (2003): 957–74.

39. Marin, “Livie à Narona,” 964.

40. Marin, “Livie à Narona,” 965.

41. Marin, “Livie à Narona,” 964 note 18.

42. Handler, “An Anthropological Definition of the Museum,” 33.

43. The institutional status of who is allowed to touch artefacts in national museums is considered by Candlin, “Don’t Touch! Hands Off!” 77–81.

44. Constance Classen and David Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artefacts,” in Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture, ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth B. Phillips (Oxford: Berg, 2006), 199–22, and esp. 207.

45. Fiona Candlin, “Museums, Modernity and the Class Politics of Touching Objects,” in Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling, ed. Helen J. Chatterjee (Oxford: Berg, 2008), 18.

46. Nowadays, some museums do make less vulnerable artefacts available to visitors, especially children, to provide opportunities for handling.

47. Candlin, “Museums, Modernity and the Class Politics of Touching Objects,” 17.

48. University Museums UK Group, University Museums in the United Kingdom (2004), 5.

49. For an example of a student project in the three-dimensional digital recording of ethnographic artefacts and an enquiry into the extent to which digital images were understood by the students to retain the sensory attributes of the original artefacts, see Graeme Were, “Out of Touch? Digital Technologies, Ethnographic Objects and Sensory Orders,” in Chaterjee, Touch in Museums: Policy and Practice in Object Handling, 121–34.

50. Marcia Lord, “Editorial,” Museum International 52.2 (2000): 3.

51. Mary Bouquet, “Introduction: Academic Anthropology and the Museum. Back to the Future,” in Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future, ed. Mary Bouquet (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 2.

52. Roger L. Emerson, “Sir Robbert Sibbald, Kt, The Royal Society of Scotland and the Origins of the Scottish Enlightenment,” Annals of Science 45.1 (1988): 41–72.

53. Sir Robbert Sibbald, The Memoirs of Sir Robert Sibbald (1641–1722), ed. Francis Paget Hett (London, 1932), 64–65, cited by Emerson, “Sir Robbert Sibbald, Kt,” 44 note 12.

54. Emerson, “Sir Robbert Sibbald, Kt,” 55.

55. Emerson, “Sir Robbert Sibbald, Kt,” 64.

56. Burke, “Images as Evidence,” 276, 277.

57. MacGregor, Ashmolean Museum, 12.

58. Philipp Blom, To Have and to Hold: An Intimate History of Collectors and Collecting (Woodstock, NY: The Overlook Press, 2004), 57; Mea Allan, The Tradescants, Their Plants, Gardens and Museum, 1570–1662 (London: Michel Joseph, 1964), 192.

59. Blom, To Have and to Hold, 57–59; MacGregor, Ashmolean Museum, 16–18.

60. Cited by MacGregor, Ashmolean Museum, 16.

61. Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums (Farnham: Ashgate: 2006), 26. Apparently the university made an expenditure of £4540 to establish the new venture; Mordechai Feingold, “The Mathematical Sciences and the New Philosophy,” in Seventeenth-Century Oxford: The History of Oxford University, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), vol. 4, 435–38.

62. MacGregor, Ashmolean Museum, 20–23.

63. Cited by MacGregor, Ashmolean Museum, 24.

64. MacGregor, Ashmolean Museum, 10.

65. Ashmolean Museum, The Tradescant Collection Catalogue: “Powhatan's Mantle”, http://www.ashmolean.org/ash/amulets/tradescant/tradescant07-13.html, 2002 (accessed 9 January 2011).

66. David Watkin, The Life and Work of C. R. Cockerell (London: Zwemmer, 1974).

67. Cambridge University Reporter 27 May 1884, cited by V. Ebin and D. A. Swallow in“The Proper Study of Mankind …” – Great Anthropological Collections in Cambridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 1984), 4.

68. Nélia Dias, “‘Does Anthropology Need Museums?’ Teaching Ethnographic Museology in Portugal Thirty Years Later,” in Bouquet, Academic Anthropology and the Museum, 92–104.

69. Warwick Bray, “Obituary: Geoffrey Hext Sutherland Bushnell, 1903–1978,” American Antiquity 45.4 (1980): 787–90.

70. Although Jacquetta Hawkes was sometimes a panel member, the programme seems from a twenty-first-century point of view to have been based on a show of male expertise, therefore the male pronoun is used here.

71. University Museums Group, University Museums in the United Kingdom (2004), 24–25.

72. HM Government, The Coalition: Our Programme for Government (London: Cabinet Office, 2010), 31–32.

73. Fiona Candlin, “Don’t Touch! Hands Off! Art, Blindness and the Conservation of Expertise,” 71–90.

74. For a discussion of touch as an early stage prior to the use of vision in the gaining of knowledge in the work of the art historians Riegl, Berenson, and Panofsy, see Fiona Candlin, “The Dubious Inheritance of Touch: Art History and Museum Access,” Journal of Visual Culture 5.2 (2006), 137–54.

75. Benoît Godin, “Writing Performative History: The New New Atlantis?” Social Studies of Science 28.3 (1998): 465–83.

76. Godin, “Writing Performative History,” 466.