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Abstract
This article explores the context of ethnographic exhibiting, and provides a brief overview of the main impact of critical theory on the interpretation of ethnographic displays. Using a model which separates the poetics from the politics of representation, it explores how curators actively reflect these debates through analysis of an exhibition, Le musée cannibale, the aim of which was to reveal the representational artifice at the core of ethnographic exhibiting. A ‘reading’ is proposed to show how this was achieved while arguing that the success of the exhibition was a reflection of its visual and narrative power, but as importantly its ability to interpolate the audience. The article then considers what other models can be used to reinvigorate the process of exhibiting ethnographic collections. It concludes that museums need to create means by which their audiences can assume a more dynamic role in relation to the encounter at the heart of the exhibition process, namely between people, objects and meanings.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Brian Durrans for providing perceptive comments on an earlier draft; Marc‐Olivier Gonseth for his interpretation, help and assistance on Le musée cannibale; and Susie Freeman, Liz Lee and David Critchley for their interpretation and assistance on Cradle to Grave. I would also like to thank Craig Westwood for editorial help on an earlier draft.
Notes
[1] Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, 22.
[2] See Friedmann, ‘Museums, the State and Global Transformation’.
[3] This is culture defined broadly rather than anthropologically. See Greenberg et al., Thinking about Exhibitions.
[4] Ibid.; Karp and Levine, Exhibiting Cultures; Karp and Levine, Museums and Communities.
[5] For some key texts see: Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture; Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Stocking, Observers Observed; Stocking, Objects and Others, as well as references from note 4.
[6] Appadurai, ‘Introduction’, 16.
[7] Since Asad's Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, the political context framing the anthropological project has become a key consideration in the analysis of ethnographic texts.
[8] Appadurai, ‘Putting Hierarchy in its Place’, 36.
[9] Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett, ‘Object of Ethnography’, 388.
[10] See, for example, Coombes, Reinventing Africa.
[11] Lidchi, ‘The Poetics and Politics of Representing Other Cultures’.
[12] See White, ‘The Fictions of Factual Representation’; Barthes, ‘Myth Today’; and Clifford, ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, respectively.
[13] Friedmann, ‘Museums, the State and Global Transformation’, 253.
[14] Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’ and Coombes, Reinventing Africa.
[15] See, for instance, Kirshenblatt‐Gimblett, ‘Object of Ethnography’.
[16] Barthes, ‘My Today’, 140.
[17] Ibid., 133, 36–142.
[18] Shelton, ‘Museums in an Age of Cultural Hybridity’, 222.
[19] This interpretation of Said's Orientalism is both drawn from Clifford ‘On Orientalism’ and Mitchell ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order’.
[20] Both Said, Culture and Imperialism, and Barenboim and Said, Parallels and Paradoxes, explore questions of resistance and intervention.
[21] Kreps, Liberating Culture, 10.
[22] Bhabha, ‘Culture's In‐between’, 54.
[23] See, for example, Davis, Ecomuseums, 24–44, for a brief exploration of this, and from a different perspective Simpson, Making Representations.
[24] Bonne, ‘Le musée, la machine et le monde’, 30. Bonne talks about the museum as an engine which infinitely absorbs all that it finds and converts it to meaning: a cannibalistic machine.
[25] The reading given here draws on MEN's literature and review: Musée d'ethnographie Neuchâtel, Le musée cannibale (catalogue); Gonseth et al., Le musée cannibale; Ciarcia, ‘Le gôut de la croyance’.
[26] Denotation is the first‐order meaning, based on the descriptive relationship, connotation, the second‐order meaning based on the associative relationship—it guides the way in which objects are understood. See Barthes, ‘Myth Today’.
[27] See interview with designer, ‘Cannibales, cannibeaux’, Swissinfo., 10 March 2002.
[28] Ciarcia, ‘Le gôut de la croyance’, for instance, analyses it in terms of fetishism.
[29] P. Doyen, ‘Le musée cannibale’, Le Monde, 19 August 2002.
[30] Bowlby, Carried Away, 103.
[31] See Durrans, ‘The Future of the Other’; Clifford, ‘Paradise’.
[32] Stephen Greenberg, the museum designer, identifies four ‘theatrical’ modes in exhibition design: convention, rough or vulgar, holy and immediate and vital. He derives this distinction from the theatre director Peter Brooks. See Pes, ‘Our Man in Egypt’, 30.
[33] See Butler, Contested Representations, for a full set of references.
[34] Riegel, ‘Into the Heart of Irony’.
[35] Duncan, Civilising Rituals, 17.
[36] Merriman, Beyond the Glass Case, 61.
[37] Indeed, writing on Into the Heart of Africa has suggested that it mis‐communicated; for a recent synthesis see Butler, Contested Representations.
[38] Gonseth et al., Le musée cannibale, 9–10.
[39] Riegel, ‘Into the Heart of Irony’, 97–98.
[40] Ciarcia, ‘Le gôut de la croyance’, 177–78.
[41] Mack, ‘“Exhibiting Cultures” Revisited’, 198.
[42] Marcus, ‘Problems in the Reception of Ethnography and the Challenge of a New Pedagogy’.
[43] Ibid., 190.
[44] See Kaplan, Museums and the Making of Ourselves.
[45] Demos/Resource, Towards a Strategy for Workforce Development.
[46] The installation was accompanied by a brochure which stated that this showed that the Ann Frank House wished to be more than a historical museum.
[47] A pamphlet has been made available now which explains the piece: British Museum, Cradle to Grave in the Wellcome Trust Gallery.
[48] Daniel Barenboim, in Barenboim and Said, Parallels and Paradoxes, 13.
[49] Said, Culture and Imperialism, 278.
[50] Bhabha, ‘Culture's In‐between’, 60