Universalism and the new museology: impacts on the ethics of authority and ownership

Abstract

The emergence of the new museum studies in the late twentieth century forged a rearticulation of museum ethics with respect to the prerogative of diverse stakeholders to claim authority and ownership of museum objects. Stemming in part from indigenous claims to collections, the incipient representational critique accepted (if critically) the ethical foundations of repatriation and shared authority. The recent Declaration of the Importance and Value of the Universal Museum, augmented by philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah's discussions of cosmopolitanism, substantively contradicts this ethic by creating a divide between the universal and the local in the ownership of cultural property and the definition of knowledge. These ambiguities engender conflicting reactions in an author sympathetic to indigenous repatriation claims, but invested in museums as didactic and preservative sites. True to the claims of the universal museum, local claims to material culture do problematize the idea of the museum, but the ethical commitments to the representation of non-Western communities inherent to the new museum studies require it. This paper examines the intellectual foundations of this contradiction and the resulting impact upon the ethical collection and display of museum objects.

Keywords:

• repatriation
• universal museum
• cosmopolitanism
• new museum studies
• museums
• social responsibility

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Janet Marstine, Alex Bauer and Chelsea Haines for their helpful and insightful comments and suggestions. I am also indebted to the many trenchant and useful comments provided by the anonymous referees who reviewed this paper for publication.

Notes

1. Author's note: Network for Mississippian Heritage Conference, Memphis, TN, USA, March 2006.

2. The literature that represents the new museum studies is far too broad to list here. Beyond the citations below, the core of the new museum studies can be found in the footnotes and bibliography of Macdonald (2006) and Marstine (2005).

3. These museum studies principally located museums – the organizational idea and the institution – in the West. Both Hooper-Greenhill (1992) and Bennett (2006) articulate their critical analysis of museums as being uniquely situated in (modern) time and (European) space. While there are many examples of non-European collecting structures, our critical understanding of what a museum is and how it formed are strictly Western in nature (Simpson 1996, Witcomb 2003). Bennett even asks if because of the specific locations of museums as reflecting the ordering impulses of the enlightenment, expressing the evolutionary justifications for colonialism and racism, and acting as discourse within the public sphere (which Habermas located specifically in the early nineteenth century), can non-Western peoples use museums in the same exhibitionary, discourse-creating way as the West?

4. http://www.icom.museum/pdf/E_news2004/p4_2004-1.pdf

5. Certainly, human communities throughout time have been interconnected dynamic entities, and to consider them only in unchanging and unaffected local and national terms resembles the worst sort of synchronism that views communities as unchanging normative objects to be studied. See a further discussion in Bauer, Lindsay and Urice (2007, 53) and Bator (1982, 31–2)

6. In an era when Wikipedia and other collaborative projects severely challenge the authority and meaning of actual encyclopaedias, it seems bizarre that these museums would appeal to an ‘encyclopaedic authority’ as justification for comprehensive collections.

7. There is a strong literature considering the role of museums in the creation of support of nations. An introduction may be found in Boswell and Evans (1999) and Barkan and Bush (2002).

8. For an evenhanded approach addressing the strengths and weakness of both sides of this discussion, see Bauer (2008).

9. Special thanks to one of the anonymous reviewers for making this important point.

10. There has been much objection to the use of the term ‘human remains’ in indigenous studies and cultural heritage literature. This clinical, professional term seems, in the view of many, to obscure and disassociate the fact that the remains are human bodies – the remains of ancestors taken from their graves. While the author uses the term here, he does so because it has become the standard nomenclature within professional and legal discourse, and not to mask an acknowledgment that these remains were people whose progeny live today.

11. The uncertainty here lies not in the gap in the historic record that early archaeologists felt deemed all prehistoric objects culturally unidentifiable, but with genuine uncertainty about contemporary Native American connections to the site. The centuries-long occupation of Chucalissa was varied with somewhat different housing, burial and material culture morphologies emerging during the period 1000–1650 CE. The site lies in sight of the Mississippi River, which is often considered a border, but it is clearly not an impassible one. Finally, the early histories of the region demonstrate tremendous change and fluidity stemming from the shattering effect of European contact. Besides the Quapaw tribe, the Chickasaw Nation (with whom I have worked closely), and possibly some others, could have equally credible claims to cultural affiliation with Chucalissa.

12. In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, James Clifford (1997) advocates and describes the process through which these discussions operate in so-called contact zones. Clifford's role among anthropologists in negotiating the intersection of indigenous and western epistemologies cannot be overstated and could be especially helpful as museums pursue a way forward.