MUSEUM, FIELD, COLONY

Abstract

This paper proposes a set of theoretical and methodological coordinates for examining the role of museums in relation to the development of colonial forms of governmentality associated with the fieldwork phase in anthropology. It draws on assemblage theory to show how our understanding of the different ways in which museums act on the social is increased when their operations are considered in relation to the different assemblages in which they are inscribed. It draws on Foucauldian theory to distinguish how museums act on the social via the public or in the form of milieus. These perspectives are complemented by Latour's account of the circulation of reference between fieldwork site and laboratory to account for the flows between museum, field and colony associated with colonial forms of governmentality. These arguments are illustrated by considering the development of the Musée de l'Homme in the 1930s in relation to the development of new forms of French colonial administration governed by the political rationality of colonial humanism.

Keywords:

• assemblage
• field
• reference
• milieu
• colonial humanism
• governmentality

Notes

1. I am most grateful to two anonymous reviewers for the time and care they took in commenting on the first version of this paper which, whatever its remaining shortcomings, has benefitted considerably from their advice.

2. Although Rivière disconnected the ATP from the forms of administration to which the MH was subject via the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle, the two museums occupied different sections of the palais de Chaillot until 1969 when the ATP moved to its own premises in the bois de Boulogne. The ATP is now closed: it shut its doors in September 2006, with its connected ‘laboratory’, the Centre d'ethnologie francaise, following suit a few months later, its place ceded to the forthcoming Musée des Civilisations de l'Europe et de la Méditerranée. The MH is also now a shadow of its former self. Stripped of its ethnographic collections which have been relocated across the river in the Musée de quai Branly where, in being brought together with objects from other collections, they now form part of a museum whose organizing principles are primarily aesthetic, its focus is limited to prehistory and the physical aspects of human diversity (see L'Estoile 2007; Dias 2006, 2008a, b; Price 2007).

3. There are, however, extended discussions of these questions in Segalen (2001); Segalen (2005), Weber (2000), and, most fully, Sherman (2004). Sherman notes the significance of the MH's fieldwork practices for the ATP which also placed great stress on the significance of its own laboratory. He also emphasizes the similarities between the MH's organization of the metropolitan/colony relation with the ATP's organization of the Paris/region relation as parallel centre/periphery constructs in the discourses of Greater France, both drawing on elements of salvage ethnography. Sherman does not, though, consider the significance of these parallels in regard to the similar governmental rationalities that applied to France's regions and its colonies in this period. Peer's (1998) discussion of the ‘modernizing regionalism’ of the former and Wilder's discussion of the similar tensions characterizing colonial humanism's contradictory imperative to both preserve Indigenous cultures and modernize them suggest there is fertile ground to be explored here.

4. It is worth noting that this work involves applying Deleuzian and Foucauldian categories in relation to practices that neither Deleuze nor Foucault dealt with in any detail. Foucault's neglect of colonialism has been extensively discussed by Stoler (2002) among others, and while Deleuze and Guattari's categories have been applied to account for the colonial capture of Indigenous populations by, for example, Patton (2000), their account of nomadism is notorious for its ignorance of contemporary debates concerning the distinct temporalities of Indigenous cultures.

5. See, however, Marcus and Saka (2006) for some useful bearings on this topic.

6. I draw, in the following discussion, mainly on Blanckaert (1988), Fabre (1997), Sherman (2004) and Siebeud (2007).

7. See ‘Un rapport signe par Paul Rivet sur une demande de subvention à l'outillage national qui presente un projet de restructuration de Musée’, 21 April 1934, Archives of the MH, 2 AM 1 G3b: Musée d'Ethnographie: notes et raports, activité (1934).

8. See ‘Notes relating to the activities of the Museum of Ethnography in the French colonial domain’, Archives of the MH, 2 AM 1 G3b: Musée d'Ethnographie: notes et raports, activité (1934).

9. These were preceded by the Dakar–Djibouti expedition organised by the MET in 1931–1933. However, the surrealist aspirations of this expedition were at odds with the more scientific orientations of its successors (Clifford 1988, pp. 143–144).

10. For an early and formative summary of these principles, see the document prepared by Anatole Lewitsky ‘Quelques consideration sur l'exposition des objects ethnographiques’, Archives of the MH, 2AM 1 G3d, Notes and Reports, 1935–7.

11. The MH was partly funded by the ministries responsible for France's colonial and overseas territories, and its opening was fanfared by colonial troops.

12. Conklin (2008), pp. 257–258) notes that it was a requirement that every institution operating under the jurisdiction of the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle – which, like the MET before it, was true of the MH – should have its own laboratory and research collection.

13. This was not, though, a matter of the Institute becoming directly involved in colonial policy; it's ethos was rather that of a place where pure knowledge would be produced and then disseminated to assist colonial administration via administrative and scientific networks in both France and its colonies (see Conklin 2002a).

14. Wilder develops this aspect of his discussion as a criticism of Conklin's attribution of the failures of French colonialism in this period to a mismatch between the universalism of French republican traditions and the difficulties of putting these into practical effect (Conklin 1997). For Wilder, colonial humanism's contradictory effects arose from its inherently contradictory constitution.