Reassembling the Collection
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Reassembling Ethnographic Museum Collections
Rodney Harrison
This volume addresses fundamental questions about the nature, value,
and efficacy of museum collections in a postcolonial world and the agency
of indigenous people in their production. The book’s primary focus lies
with those objects that, by way of their specific histories, have been defined
as “ethnographic”; however, the question of the contexts in which things
are defined as “art” as opposed to “artifact” (e.g., Clifford 1988, 1997; Danto
1988; Putnam 1991; Marcus and Myers 1995; Gell 1998; Thomas 1999b;
Myers 2001) also constitutes a key concern. The book is most appropriately
situated within the context of various postcolonial critiques of the role of
museums and museum collections in the politics of indigenous representation (e.g., Clifford 1988, 1995; O’Hanlon 1993; Greenfield 1996; Lidchi
1997; Barringer and Flynn 1998; Russell 2001; Karp and Lavine 1991;
Fforde, Hubert, and Turnbull 2002; Kramer 2006; Cuno 2008; Lonetree
and Cobb 2008; Sleeper-Smith 2009) and as a reaction to the perception
that indigenous people had little or no agency in the processes that were
responsible for the genesis of ethnographic museum collections (largely
a phenomenon of the exercising of asymmetrical colonial power relations
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). Although we see this
book as a product of that literature and its accompanying themes, what
sets it apart from much of the current literature is that it makes a significant attempt to move beyond the concerns of the politics of representation,
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which have tended to dominate critical museum studies (Macdonald 2011),
to consider the affective qualities of things alongside their representational
role in the museum. Similarly, in considering the complex material and
social interactions of things, people, and institutions that constitute ethnographic collections, we attempt to move beyond the observation that indigenous people and ethnographic objects had (and continue to have) agency,
to consider how concepts of agency and indigeneity need to be reconfigured
in the light of their study within the context of the museum. In doing so, the
volume develops a series of new concepts and considers their application to
historical and contemporary engagements between ethnographic museums
and the various individuals and communities who were and are involved in
their production. These themes have profound implications not only for
understanding the ongoing processes that have formed museum collections
in the past and present but also for developing new and innovative curatorial practices in the future. Key concepts include the idea of museums
as meshworks and as material and social assemblages; the ways in which
the application of an archaeological sensibility might inform approaches to
understanding the past and present relationships between people, “things,”
and institutions in relation to museums; and the curatorial responsibility
that arises from a reconsideration of the nature of museum “objects.”
Although the book develops novel concepts and approaches, this is not
entirely new ground. Several important books and journal articles have
trod parts of this path before us (e.g., Stocking 1985; Thomas 1991, 1994;
Phillips and Steiner 1999; Myers 2001; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Edwards,
Gosden, and Phillips 2006; Gosden, Larson, and Petch 2007; Larson,
Petch, and Zeitlyn 2007; Sleeper-Smith 2009; Byrne et al. 2011). Indeed,
after years of neglect, objects in general and museum objects in particular
have come to the foreground of anthropological, archaeological, and sociological analyses, as part of what some have termed a broad “material-cultural turn” in the social sciences and humanities (cf. Hicks 2010; Joyce and
Bennett 2010; Olsen 2010). The title, Reassembling the Collection, not only
suggests that we aim to consider ways in which museum collections might
be reconceptualized and reworked in a postcolonial present and future
but also invokes the title of Bruno Latour’s influential Reassembling the
Social (2005). Latour is perhaps the most well-known of a series of scholars
involved in the development of actor-network theory (ANT), and science
and technology studies more generally, who have done a great deal to
foreground the network metaphor in the study of social relationships and
to promote an interest in the involvement of nonhumans (or things) in
social networks. This work has generated much comment across the social
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sciences and humanities, particularly with regard to the contention that
objects might be said to have “agency” and to act in ways that could be
considered to be broadly “person-like” (e.g., Hicks 2010; Olsen 2010). We
note a parallel set of interests here in the revisionary attribution of agency
both to indigenous people and to indigenous objects in museum collections.
Although the chapters have been more or less influenced by debates that
arise from these parallel areas of research, the intention of this book is
to move this area of research forward by developing a more sophisticated
approach to agency and the fields of material and social relations that constitute the contemporary museum and its histories. Much of the work on
indigenous agency in colonial contexts has relied on the concept of the
“contact zone” (after Pratt 1992; Clifford 1997) in exploring the interactions of indigenous people and others. A key aim of this book is to move
beyond what could be interpreted as an asymmetrical and broadly neocolonial engagement with this concept (Bennett 1998; Dibley 2005; Boast
2011) to develop new models for understanding the networks of social and
material interactions that center on the space of the museum collection.
Perhaps equally important, the book is also a product of what we discuss
as the “curatorial responsibility,” which arises out of a nexus of interests.
For researchers, this curatorial responsibility results from engagements
with particular individuals and groups, most especially, indigenous people,
around museum objects and collections. At a broader level, it also arises
from the “weight” of things in museums. In making reference to the weight
of things, we mean not only the physical bulk of collections, which occupy
vast storage facilities behind the scenes of museums around the world, but
also their political and affective weight. The “affective” weight of things in
museums refers to the charismatic (Wingfield 2010) or enchanting (Gell
1998; Harrison 2006) qualities of objects, their ability to engage the senses
(Edwards, Gosden, and Phillips 2006:12), and their ability to act in ways
that are both integral to and generative of human behavior or even in ways
that are person-like, in conjunction with or independently of people (e.g.,
Harvey 2005; Jones and Cloke 2008; Olsen 2010; Basu 2011). Things also
have a political weight, in the sense that they come to symbolize or stand in
for various imperial and colonial processes, which underlie their presence
in museum collections. In addition to reminding us of imperial and colonial histories, things speak to the contemporary political and ethical issues
of the ownership of culture and its products. It has perhaps become passé
to speak of the enthusiasm for objects that has driven many to a career
in museum curatorship, archaeology (e.g., Shanks 1992; Webmoor 2012),
object-centered anthropology (e.g., Miller 2010), or sociology. However, the
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genuine ideology of care that often underlies the practice of curatorship
shares many characteristics with indigenous notions of the custodial obligations that arise from and in relation to things (e.g., Haber 2009; Kreps
2003, 2011). This book aims to explore these synergies and their ability to
generate new conceptions of care and curation as genuine forms of respect
and concern in the contemporary museum and beyond.
I N DIGENOUS AGENC Y
In putting together the proposal for the advanced seminar, the cochairs asked contributors specifically to consider the issue of indigenous
agency in relation to the formation of museum collections. In reflecting
on this aim for the seminar, it is important to explore why we saw indigenous agency as worthy of special consideration. I have already noted that
this book is perhaps best situated as emerging from, and forming a partial
response to, scholarship on the politics of indigenous representation within
the museum (e.g., Karp and Lavine 1991; Simpson 1996), itself a product
of an indigenous critique of the role of anthropological and archaeological
forms of expertise and knowledge production in processes of colonial governmentality and the subjectification of indigenous people (e.g., Deloria
1969; Tuhiwai Smith 2006[1999]; Nakata 2007; Hoerig 2010). As seminar
organizers, our interest in indigenous agency emerged from what we saw
as a lack of recognition of the many ways in which indigenous people had
been active in shaping museum collections in the past and their ongoing
role in doing so in the present (Byrne et al. 2011, 2011a; see also Jacknis
2002; Hoerig 2010; McCarthy 2011). For many of the participants, this
interest emerged as a result of direct involvement in developing collaborative research around museums and material culture with particular groups
of indigenous people and from an emerging sense that a consideration
of “museum as method” (cf. Thomas 2010; see also Moutu 2007) might
reveal new ways of reading objects and collections “along [and perhaps
even across] the archival grain” (after Stoler 2009; see also Bell 2010a).
Although the authors in this volume are interested in indigenous agency
in different ways, all attempt to show how indigenous agency is connected
with other forms of agency, drawing on a definition of indigeneity that is
performed and emergent. Thinking about indigenous agency in this way
raises questions of how it is manifested by, interpreted by, mediated by,
distributed by, and entangled with museum collections.
Two of the key questions this raises for the contributors—a mixed
group of mostly non-indigenous scholars—are, “Who are we to speak of
and for indigenous agency?” and “What can we contribute to this issue?”
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I have already noted the ways in which postcolonial literatures raise questions of indigenous agency and, in particular, the ways in which forms of
governmental practice grounded in archaeological and anthropological
expertise have denied indigenous agency in the production of museum collections. Given that these are, broadly speaking, the disciplinary areas from
which each of the authors writes, we believe that the questions that have
been raised by the assertion of indigenous agency require us to look into
the histories of our disciplines and examine these concerns and to bring
from that process insights that can reformulate questions of indigenous
agency in relation to our disciplinary practices and to curatorial practices
within the museum (see Nakata 2007; Hoerig 2010; Kreps 2011). Clearly, in
light of the historical roles that each of the disciplines represented by the
contributors has played in attempts to subjugate indigenous people, there
is a need not only to be humble and listen to the points of view of indigenous people themselves, but also to speak from within our disciplines and
respond to issues raised by external political contexts, to bring them back
to look at questions of indigenous agency, and, in the process, to reformulate the questions and nature of our disciplines and their relationship to
governmental processes in the museum.
Many of the contributions to this volume bring what might be called an
“archaeological sensibility” (see Shanks 1992) to a contemporary version
of the “hidden from history” problematic (or “history from below”; e.g.,
Samuel 1996) in their attempts to explore how indigenous people have contributed to the shape of museum collections. This is one of the reasons that
the authors insist on the need to uncouple intentionality from concepts of
agency. Many of the forms of agency explored in these chapters reveal the
ways in which indigenous agency in the past was not necessarily formulated
or enacted with direct reference to the question of museum politics but
nonetheless had an important impact on the formation of museum collections and on the representation, conceptualization, and governance of
indigenous people. We do not want to downplay the difference between
unintended influences and the points at which indigenous agency asserts
itself explicitly as a political project in relation to the museum. Instead, we
seek to raise this as an important historical question. At what point does
indigenous agency become a matter of specific intentionality in relation
to the museum? Under what circumstances can we speak of indigenous
agency occurring, and in relation to what?
Clearly, when indigenous agency takes the form of an explicit intentionality with regard to the museum, this has implications in terms of
how a whole range of other agencies begin to interact, and the issue of the
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histories of categories of indigeneity is invoked. Significant contemporary
indigenous networks deal with the extension of indigeneity as a concept
and with the championing of indigenous concerns, for example, through
global indigenous peoples movements. Nonetheless, we need to be careful
about romanticizing indigenous agency or reading contemporary forms of
agency backward into the past. This would simply serve to undermine the
importance of the political project of the contemporary indigenous critique of museums in the same way as denying forms of indigenous agency
in relation to the formation of museum collections would.
The project of seeking indigenous agency clearly raises a series of other
questions, which the chapters in the volume address in different ways. What
are the obligations that arise from the politicization of the relationship
between indigenous people and museums? How do different methodologies allow us to explore agency? Can “things” be “indigenous”? Key to
understanding these questions in relation to museum collections are processes of categorization, classification, ordering, and governance of things
and people. One of the most important of these relates to the categorization and definition of “indigeneity” itself.
INDIGENEIT Y
To speak of “indigenous agency” raises the question of the definition
and history of the concept of indigeneity, which itself is closely bound up
with the history of museum collections. The rise of ethnographic collecting in museums in Western Europe, Great Britain, North America, and
their colonies was closely associated with the projects of colonialism (e.g.,
Thomas 1991; Griffiths 1996; McCarthy 2007; MacKenzie 2010), imperialism (e.g., Coombes 1994; Barringer and Flynn 1998; Henare 2005), and
the development of the professional field of anthropology (e.g., Hinsley
1981a, 1981b; Stocking 1985, 1991; Jenkins 1994; Conn 1998; Wolfe 1999;
Jacknis 2002; Sherman 2004, 2011; Kuklick 1991, 2011; Shelton 2000, 2011).
Although, historically, objects collected from indigenous people by Western
travelers were perhaps acquired merely as curios or as a way of marking the
achievements of voyages to exotic locations (Thomas 1991:141; Abt 2011),
during the nineteenth century, museums came to form the spaces in which
subsequent understandings of indigeneity (by way of discourses of “primitiveness” and “savageness”) were defined, drawing on ethnographic collections that were perceived as the materializations of Otherness (e.g., Fabian
1983; Stocking 1985; Ames 1992; Pearce 1995:308ff.; Russell 2001; Bennett
2004). These ethnographic collections were defined as such not by where
and from whom they had been collected, but by the ways in which they
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were detached and exhibited as fragments of other cultures (KirshenblattGimblett 1991). In this way, both things and their modes of exhibition and
display became central to the definition of indigenous people. This process
had far-reaching implications for developing normative notions of culture
that could be employed within regimes of social management (Bennett
1995, 2004, 2005). Museums thus had a function in providing an ordered
model of culture that reinforced evolutionary notions of social and technological progress.
It is customary to speak today of the category of “indigenous people”
in relation to ethnographic museums, but when we begin to explore it as
a category for analysis, its shallow history becomes immediately apparent.
Indeed, the term “indigenous” has come into common use only since the
mid-1970s through the prominence of globalized indigenous rights movements and the work of the United Nations and associated groups that have
championed the shared experiences of marginalized peoples (Sanders
1989; Kuper 2003; Kirsch 2001; Feldman 2002; Niezen 2003; Merlan 2008).
Rowse (2008) has shown how the category of “indigenous people” was first
used in the 1920 Covenant of the League of Nations and subsequently
found definition through the work of the United Nations’ International
Labour Organization (ILO) in the 1930s in relation to the potential of
“native” labor and the idea that responsibility for the welfare of Aboriginal
peoples should be removed from the nation-state and entrusted to an international body. As such, the term “indigenous” became a synonym for a sort
of problematized difference that required careful management through
international intervention. With the emergence of international indigenous rights movements in the mid-1970s, Rowse (2008) argues, indigeneity
in the major settler colonial nation-states (Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
and the United States) has been defined through an ambivalence toward
national labor markets, which has contributed to the ongoing maintenance
of difference between indigenes and settlers and the emergence of what
might be perceived as a new “indigenous modernity.” Key to the definition
of indigeneity has been the delineation of a series of threats and forms
of vulnerability that are perceived to be a direct function of indigeneity
with regard to the common good of post–World War II development, especially in relation to international organizations such as the World Bank.
Ironically, given the emphasis on the local within discourses of indigeneity, “indigenousness” has largely come to be defined through the work of
various international conventions, in particular, the ILO’s Indigenous and
Tribal Populations Convention (1957) and its revision, the Indigenous and
Tribal Peoples Convention (1989).
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Merlan (2008) notes two broad ways in which indigeneity is defined
in contemporary use. The first is “relational,” in which indigenous people
are defined in opposition to another category, for example, “settler colonists” or “the state.” The second she terms “criterial,” citing Martinez Cobo
(1986:5, par. 379) for the United Nations, who defines indigenous communities, peoples, and nations as “those which have a historical continuity with
preinvasion and precolonial societies that developed on their territories,
consider themselves as distinct from other sectors of societies now prevailing in those territories…and are determined to preserve and transmit to
future generations their ancestral territories, and their ethnic identity, as
the basis of their continued existence as peoples” (Merlan 2008:305). The
globalization of the term has tended to obscure the local variability of the
self-definitions of indigenous peoples and communities; indeed, Béteille
(1998; see also Kuper 2003) notes the ways in which the term “indigenous”
has come to stand in for old anthropological notions of “tribal” or “primitive” people. In this way, the term “indigenous” has inherited the discursive
baggage associated with the categories of primitiveness and savagery by way
of their development through specific modes of exhibition and display in
ethnographic museum collections. Nonetheless, there are important differences between contemporary understandings of indigeneity, “complexly
understood as subjectivities, knowledge and practices of the earliest human
inhabitants of a particular place and including legal and racial identities”
(Delugan 2010), and the older anthropological notions of “tribal” people,
which were created in museums. An important subject for discussion is thus
the ways in which and the extent to which the contemporary museum is
involved in the production of these new notions of indigeneity.
Indigeneity, drawing on the discourses of ethnographic museums, is
defined as having a specific relationship with time and place: indigenous
people are perceived to be both spatially bounded and relegated to the past
(Byrne 1996). And while we do not deny the importance of the ethical and
political issues raised by indigenous rights movements, nor the real need
to acknowledge the impact of colonialism on first peoples, we are cautious
about the ways in which old stereotypes of indigenous peoples as primitive,
marginalized Others continue to be employed within the space of the contemporary museum (Prasad 2003; Dias 2008). Clearly, indigeneity cannot
be taken as a given, and it is important to explore how it is constructed as a
subject and category within the museum. Similarly, diasporic forms of indigeneity need to be recognized and placed in relation to narratives of continuity, and the relationship of indigenous people to other minorities and
majorities needs exploration in relation to processes of transnationalism
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and globalization. This raises questions about the circumstances under
which indigeneity emerged as a category and its relationship to notions
of time, situatedness, place, and the politics of representation. Indigeneity
needs to be perceived as a status that is subject to various modes of adjudication and different forms of authority, as a discourse of rights, as well as
values. In this sense, despite its emphasis on the connection between culture and race (Kuper 2003), indigeneity must be perceived as contextual.
Chapters in this collection address this problematic implicitly or explicitly
in a number of different ways.
In thinking about indigeneity in relation to museum collections, the
contributors are influenced by Clifford’s (2001, 2004; see also 1997) discussion of indigeneity as performed and emergent (see also Merlan 2008),
drawing on Stuart Hall’s (1986) articulation theory. This acknowledges
both the important work done by indigenous activists and scholars to demonstrate their sustained experiences of cultural continuity, survival, and
resistance (e.g., Deloria 1969; de la Cadena and Starn 2007; Hoerig 2010)
and a definition of indigeneity that is innovative, emergent, and mobile.
Putting aside an organismic model of culture for an articulated one, the
arrival and departure of traditions and practices are perceived not as
aspects of cultural decline, but as necessary moments of uncoupling and
rearticulation. Articulation theory recognizes that cultures and cultural
forms can and must be “made, unmade and remade” (Clifford 2001:479).
Thus, the transformation of one aspect of culture, for example, language,
does not cause the “death” of the “culture-as-organism” but instead is seen
as a moment of reassembling or remaking. This means that the question of
authenticity is removed and cultural “invention” is rearticulated as cultural
persistence and continuity.
C A T E G O R I E S O F VA L U E , G O V E R N A N C E , A N D T H E
CL A SSI F IC AT ION OF PEOPL E A N D T H I NGS
Central to the museum are processes of assembling, categorizing,
comparing, classifying, ordering, and reassembling (e.g., Stewart 1993;
Baudrillard 1994; Elsner and Cardinal 1994; Pearce 1995; Bennett 1995,
2004; Byrne et al. 2011b), processes that relate to modern scientific practices more generally (e.g., Latour 1993; Law 1994; Bowker 2005; Hopwood,
Schaffer, and Secord 2010; Schlanger 2010). All of these processes involve
judgments of value and putting “things” in place. We might think here of Mary
Douglas’s (2010[1966]) work on dirt; dirt is taboo because it represents “matter out of place.” In the same way, museum collections have implicit within
them particular sets of values, which are reproduced through particular
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systems of authority and expertise that seek to purify ethnographic objects
as things simultaneously “in” and “out of” place. These categories of value
help create the institutional spaces into which things can be slotted in the
museum.
Although debates between indigenous peoples (and their supporters)
and museums have often been perceived to center on repatriation and
issues of ownership, it is possible to argue that these debates have more
often been about the need to fundamentally reform curatorial practice
in relation to things held in museum collections (e.g., Isaac 2009; Hoerig
2010). A major part of the indigenous analysis of museum practice has
involved a critique of the categorization, management, and storage of
things in ways that are not only foreign to indigenous ontologies but also
potentially offensive or even dangerous (e.g., Henry 2004; Lonetree 2006;
Sully 2007). Recently, museums have begun to acknowledge indigenous
categories and curatorial practices as forms of expertise equal to those of
museum curators (e.g., Herle 2002; Peers and Brown 2003; Chaat Smith
2008; Chavez Lamar 2008; Singer 2008). This is part of a broader process
of the reorganization of contemporary museums in relation to the goal of
widening access and engagement (e.g., Macdonald and Silverstone 1990;
Karp and Lavine 1991; Message 2006; Macdonald 2011), a process that has
in turn occurred alongside the “postmodern restructuring” (cf. Prior 2011)
of museums as part of the development of new entrepreneurial cityscapes
(Hetherington 2008; Frey and Meier 2011). In many instances, indigenous
viewpoints about objects have been given their own space in museum
catalogs and databases (e.g., Sleeper-Smith 2009). However, although
this is obviously an important step in acknowledging indigenous forms of
knowledge practices and expertise and emphasizes the museum itself as a
space for reconciliation and social change (e.g., Kelly and Gordon 2002;
Mpumlwana et al. 2002; Allen and Hamby 2011), this does not necessarily
reform the system. The original categories and underlying values on which
they rest often remain in place. Consequently, it does not lead to a real
sharing of authority (Hoerig 2010; Boast 2011), only to a reorganization
of existing categories to accommodate differing perspectives. This process
can in turn often be redeployed within the context of contemporary museums in the production of difference (Hetherington 2002; Bennett 2006,
2011a; Dias 1998, 2008; Sherman 2008).
The incorporation of indigenous categories within the museum has
emerged as part of a project of reforming the categories on which it was
established as an institution, but the authors in this volume argue that we
need to go further in drawing attention to the very nature of the categories
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themselves and the forms of authority on which they draw (and which they
subsequently reproduce). Part of this process involves acknowledgment
that classification and ordering can only ever be partially realized (cf.
Law 1994) and, indeed, that any attempt to categorize will always produce
anomalies (Douglas 2010[1966]). Revealing the process of categorization
to be partial and incomplete undermines the universalizing mission of the
museum (Bennett 1995) and draws attention to the ways in which the categories it employs are not “natural,” but actively formed out of particular
systems of value. Such a project contains the potential for a radical reconceptualization of things in museum collections and their relationship with
people. For example, what would happen if we were to consider things in
museums as “kin” (see Hays-Gilpin and Lomatewama, chapter 10, this volume), who might be displaced or “in diaspora” (Basu 2011)? How would
this transform curatorial practices and modes of ordering and classification within the museum and in heritage practice more generally (see also
Harrison and Rose 2010; Harrison 2012)?
Indigenous people have been articulating this point of view for some
time (e.g., Viveiros de Castro 2004; Rose 2004; Harvey 2005; Haber 2009),
but the “ontological turn” (cf. Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007; Alberti
and Bray 2009) in the social sciences and humanities has begun to trouble the strict impermeability of the categories of persons and things and
has helped make possible such a radical new way of conceiving of museum
objects. Adopting a perspective that acknowledges a broad ontology of “connectivity” (Rose and Robin 2004; Barad 2007; Rose 2011) between humans,
objects, plants, animals, and the world in which they reside has radical
implications for museum and heritage practices (see Harrison 2012).
Contributors to this volume remain open to the ways in which contemporary indigenous agency may provide the basis for revising the underlying
philosophy of curatorial practice, which could bring about the reform of
museum categories and museums as institutions. This observation brings
us to the next point about the curatorial responsibilities that arise from the
weight of things.
CU R ATOR I A L R E SPONSI BI L I T Y
One of the important themes that links many of the chapters in this
book is a transformed notion of curatorial responsibility to things in
museum collections. We suggest that this curatorial responsibility arises
from two different (but closely linked) sources. The first is the obligations that arise from collaborations between researchers and indigenous
and other minority community groups. Museums have recently adopted a
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broader sense of accountability and an expanded conception of their publics, and many of the contributors to this volume approach their work as
museum professionals, archaeologists, and anthropologists as collaborative,
community-based research. Indeed, since the 1990s, collaborations between
museums and “source communities” have taken an increasingly central place
in exhibition development. Such collaborations are transformative not only
in terms of the results of the outputs of collaboratively designed museum
displays but also in terms of the practices of individuals as academics and
museum professionals (e.g., Young and Goulet 1998). However, as Schultz
(2011) argues, in many cases, the public is not aware of or even misunderstands the nature of these collaborations. Nonetheless, this way of working
not only generates creative friction, which is potentially generative of new
forms of knowledge, but also has the potential to transform the values of
researchers and their attitudes toward the objects with which they work. One
way in which it does this is by introducing new ontological models for conceptualizing the relationship between persons and things, which require a
sharing of curatorial expertise and authority (Boast 2011:67, after Clifford
1997:210; see also Hoerig 2010; Colwell-Chanthaphonh 2010). Knowles
(chapter 9, this volume), for example, addresses this issue directly in relation to her collaborations on the reconstruction of Te Tu\hono, the Ma\ori
waka in the National Museum of Scotland.
The second source of transformation of the notion of curatorial responsibility is linked to the obligations that stem from the historical, physical,
and political “weight” of objects. The chapters in this volume arise from a
particular intellectual milieu in which it is increasingly accepted that things
are not inert but play an active role in social relations. If we accept a model
of objects as agents, having “charisma” (Wingfield 2010) or even potentially
being “kin,” this implies certain responsibilities to the things themselves,
which may be separate from our obligations to the individuals and groups
(indigenous or otherwise) outside the museum who relate to these things
in some way (e.g., as descent communities). If objects can behave in ways
that are person-like, should they also be treated as persons? Although not
all chapters address this question directly, all are conscious of the sense in
which museum practice is being transformed by the project of looking for
indigenous agency in relation to ethnographic collections and by new ways
of conceptualizing museum collections. Over the course of the advanced
seminar, the contributors developed a series of ideas that are central to this
process of reconceptualizing museum collections in relation to indigenous
agency. In the remaining part of this chapter, I outline the theoretical basis
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for this new model of museums as heterogeneous assemblages of persons
and things.
SPE A K ING OF “THINGS”: OBJECTS A ND THE
DIST R I BU T E D NAT U R E OF AGENC Y
It is conventional in museum literatures to speak of “objects,” with all of
the connotations of inanimacy, inertness, and disengagement from social
relations that are carried by the term. Here, we speak instead of “things,”1
“actors,” “nonhumans,” even “kin.” We do so purposefully, not only to connect our work with a broad body of literature in anthropology, sociology,
philosophy, material culture studies, and religious studies that is rethinking the relationship between human and nonhuman worlds (e.g., Viveiros
de Castro 2004; Latour 2004a; Harvey 2005; Serres 2008; see discussion
in Olsen 2010) but also to draw attention to the ways in which speaking of
objects invokes an underlying idealist philosophy that places emphasis on
the separation of matter and mind. To such a way of thinking, objects are
defined by the absence of mind or spirit and, by extension, by their inability to embody agency and to act as agents in social relations, interactions
that are perceived to be solely the preserve of humans (see Harrison and
Rose 2010; Rose 1996, 2004, 2008, 2011; Haber 2009; and Harrison 2012
regarding the indigenous ontological challenge to this position). While the
editors and contributors to this volume do not hold a unified materialist
position in this regard, all seek to trouble this notion in various ways and
to emphasize the agency and affective qualities of things in museums and
collections.
The idea that “things” have agency, although increasingly discussed
across the social sciences and humanities, perhaps still carries with it a sense
of surprise. What do we mean when we say that things can have agency? To
answer this question requires a consideration of the nature of agency itself.
It is now becoming customary to consider agency not as an individual act
of will, but as something that is distributed across collectives. Importantly,
these collectives (or “assemblages”; see further discussion below) are
defined as composed of both humans and nonhumans and as such are
seen to include plants, animals, the environment, and the material world.
Although different disciplines and authors draw on different versions of
this notion—the “distributed action and cognition” approach of Hutchins
(1995); Gell’s (1998) and Strathern’s (1988) “distributed agency” in anthropological studies of art; the distributed agency that arises from the actornetwork framework of ANT (e.g., Latour 2005); the assemblage theory of
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Deleuze and Guattari, which sees social life as composed of “semiotic flows,
material flows and social flows simultaneously” (2004[1987]:25)—all share
a radically transformed notion of social collectives and the ways in which
agency is manifested within them. Fundamental to this new notion of “the
social” is the dissolution of familiar, modernist dualisms such as “nature”
and “culture,” “human” and “nonhuman,” “social” and “natural” (Latour
1993, 2004a; Law 1994), which are based on an idealist separation of matter and mind. Agency is thus contingent upon and emergent within social
collectives, involving both human and nonhuman actors and taking many
different forms (see also Joyce and Bennett 2010:4).
Callon (2005:3–5) has provided a summary of these arguments insofar
as they relate to the question of agency. He notes that action is a collective property that “naturally overflows” and that, to be recognized as such,
agency has to be framed in particular ways. For this reason, agencies are
“multiple and diverse” and, depending on how they are framed, can be perceived to be collective or individual, adaptive or reflexive, interested or disinterested. These agencies are distributed among collectives that include
humans, their bodies, the technologies they employ, and the natural world
that surrounds them. These collectives are arranged in specific ways, and
agency is made or remade through the assembling or reassembling of these
collectives. Despite employing a “flat” notion of the social (Latour 2005) in
which all parts of the collective are potentially involved in the distribution
and redistribution of agency, asymmetries between agencies may be considerable; certain arrangements of collectives may be capable of deploying
particular forms of agency strategically, and others may have less capacity
for free will. Importantly, this allows us to simultaneously level out the priority usually given to humans as actors so that we perceive things and other
nonhuman actors as equal players with humans. It also acknowledges the
significant inequalities in the implementation of power that usually accompanied the colonial and imperial contexts that were central to the historical development of museum collections (e.g., Bennett 1995, 2004, 2009,
2010; O’Hanlon and Welsch 2000; Thomas 1994; Griffiths 1996; Gosden
and Knowles 2001; Coombes 2006; MacKenzie 2010). In relation to this
point, it is perhaps helpful to think of “handicaps” to account for “relations of domination-exclusion between agencies, and to interpret behaviors of resistance or recalcitrance” (Callon 2005:4–5). In the same way that
individuals can behave in ways that are not always strategic and that might
betray mixed allegiances to different, even opposing, interests, so different agencies can be perceived to mix and merge with one another in ways
that are not unidirectional or always adaptive. In this book, the authors
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often use the term “relations” in preference to “social relations” to emphasize these mixed social/material collectives and the ways in which agency is
expressed and distributed across them.
One of the important implications of requalifying or rethinking agency
in this way is that it allows the notion of agency to be differentiated from
that of “intentionality.” Agency shifts from being defined solely in terms of
intended action to being seen more simply as an ability to make a difference, or
to effect change, in a field of relations (Latour 2005:52–53). By privileging
only politically intended action as agency, scholars have overlooked the significant role that indigenous people played in the past in determining the
nature of ethnographic museum collections (Byrne et al. 2011a). It is possible to argue that at least some indigenous people in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries may have been employing politically intended
action in the selection of particular items for trade and sale with what we as
academic researchers would perceive to be a more contemporary sense of
the issues surrounding the politics of representation in a global art-culture
market (e.g., Harrison 2006). Redefining agency in this way, however, allows
us to take account of the many forms of action and interaction that involved
asymmetrical colonial power relationships but that nonetheless had an
enormous impact on the shape of museum collections (e.g., Torrence 1993,
2000; Gosden and Knowles 2001; Torrence and Clarke 2011; Bell, chapter
5, Torrence and Clarke, chapter 7, and Wingfield, chapter 3, this volume).
By stretching the notion of agency beyond that of an explicit political intentionality, we do not deny the importance of intentionality but seek to give
dignity and significance to the ways in which indigenous people played
active roles in the construction of contemporary museum collections, the
traces of which can be read in the evidence of processes of gifting, withholding, buying, trading, and selling (Byrne et al. 2011a). We also see unintended consequences as being equally important as intended ones. Given that
many contemporary museums contain the traces of hundreds of years of
collecting, bargaining, trading, stealing, buying, assembling, exhibiting,
and educating with ethnographic objects, we believe that the ways in which
forms of action in the past have a recursive and at times unintentional
influence in the present should also be an important subject of analysis in
relation to museum collections. Indeed, the historical changes in emphasis on the volitional agency of indigenous actors are partly explained by
the shift from earlier forms of colonial rule to the inclusion of indigenous
people in liberal forms of rule, which must produce indigenous agency as a
condition for their operation, a point made by Bennett in his contribution
(chapter 2) to this volume.
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A PPROAC H E S TO ( R E )A S SE M BL I NG : T H E
A RCH A EOLOGIC A L SENSIBIL IT Y
One of the features that links the chapters in this book is that they take
a thing-focused approach to exploring the set of relations that surround
museums and their collections. Despite the range of disciplinary perspectives in the volume, including sociology, anthropology, and archaeology,
we identify this thing-focused approach as drawing on a broadly archaeological sensibility. This term is not used in opposition, for example, to an
“anthropological sensibility,” but to draw attention to the particular inflections of a thing-focused analytical approach to understanding the field of
relations in which museums, things, people, and places are caught up and
distributed, as well as the ways in which elements from within this field are
deployed in practices of governance and the distribution of power. In doing
so, we draw on a series of linked metaphors from archaeology, which help
to draw attention to the methods involved in taking such an approach, as
well as to the forms of information it could be used to illicit (see Shanks
1992, 2012; Shanks and Witmore 2010 for a discussion of the “archaeological imagination”). We propose that this archaeological sensibility leads to a
taphonomic approach to the study of museums and archives, which involves
the study of the museum as an archaeological site and an exploration of
the processes that led to the formation of the museum collection as an
archaeological assemblage (see also Ouzman 2006; Torrence and Clarke
2011). Although this version of an archaeological taphonomy is (explicitly)
not primarily concerned with discourse, as a method or approach it shares
similarities with Foucault’s The Archaeology of Knowledge (2002[1972]) in the
sense in which it allows us to focus on difference and what Deleuze calls
“the theory-practice of multiplicities,” (2006[1988]:14), a key concern of
postcolonial studies in general and postcolonial museum studies in particular (e.g., Sherman 2008; McLean 2008; Lydon and Rizvi 2010). Central
to understanding the concept of the archaeological sensibility is the notion
of the “assemblage.”
A SSE M BL AGE S
The authors draw on two distinct notions of the term “assemblage”
(see also Harrison 2011b). The first, an archaeological conception, refers
to a group of artifacts found in association with one another. For example, in the popular archaeology textbook The Human Past, Chris Scarre
(2005:721) defines the term “assemblage” as “a group of artifacts occurring
together at a particular time and place, representing the sum of human
activities in that respect.” Implicit in an archaeological use of the term is
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the idea of the assemblage as a contemporary construction; that is, the
assemblage is created as part of the engagement of an archaeologist’s contemporary classificatory gaze with a series of material remains from the
past. It arises out of the relationship between past and present and between
a contemporary external observer and a set of activities carried out by particular people and particular things in the past (e.g., Shanks 1992; Shanks
and McGuire 1996). The formation of an archaeological assemblage is
perceived to be the result of both natural and cultural processes, and the
study of these archaeological site formation processes is known as “taphonomy.” Michael Schiffer (1972, 1976) described the taphonomic processes
by which a group of things becomes an archaeological assemblage by way of
cultural (“C-transforms”) and natural (“N-transforms”) transformations.
He referred to this as the movement from the systemic context (the original set of relationships between human behaviors and material things)
to the archaeological context (the archaeological assemblage studied by
the archaeologist). C-transforms include a range of cultural processes
such as intentional or nonintentional discard, recycling, or reuse, whereas
N-transforms include processes such as biological and chemical weathering
and decay. In this model, the rapid burial of artifacts and stable biological
and physical processes create more favorable conditions for the reconstruction of past human behavior than do long periods of exposure to cultural
and natural transformation processes. We suggest that thinking of the
museum as an archaeological field site and considering the taphonomic
processes by which the museum collection was assembled raise significant
possibilities for new understandings of the processes involved in the formation and maintenance of museum collections.
Archaeologists have not tended to perceive museum collections as
assemblages because the collections do not appear in conventional archaeological contexts (the classic context being a buried archaeological deposit)
and represent a heterogeneous jumble of things that have come together
in complicated ways that are difficult to understand. Indeed, museum collections are often perceived as the very antithesis of archaeological assemblages—out of context, shuffled together in convoluted and confusing
ways, and with much accompanying dissolution of “authentic” contextual
archaeological information. However, this does not mean that museum collections cannot be studied as field sites (cf. Ouzman 2006; Gosden, Larson,
and Petch 2007; Allen and Hamby 2011) and archaeological assemblages in
their own right. Indeed, by foregrounding the taphonomic processes that
have led objects from their original context of production and use to their
residence within museum collections and by thinking about the relationships
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between these heterogeneous things, important questions are raised about
the nature of museums and their histories, as well as the diverse agencies
embodied in their collections. Doing so immediately shifts our perception
of what is often presented within the museum as an entirely “natural” coexistence of objects from different times and places to ask, “How did all of
these things make their way into this place?” and “What does it mean for
them to be assembled together in such a way?” These are important first
steps in “unpacking” the museum collection (Byrne et al. 2011a) so that
we can begin to think about it critically. Indeed, we would argue that to
conceptualize anything as an assemblage poses questions regarding its composition, structure, and function. We might extend this metaphor of the
assemblage to distinguish between the assemblages that reside in museum
storerooms, which are like subsurface archaeological assemblages, and
those on display, which we might usefully compare to “surface assemblages”
(see also Harrison 2011b). Assemblages in museum storerooms have different forms of visibility; they are more or less accessible to museum staff,
but access by the public is controlled and mediated by museum staff as the
“experts” (see Byrne, chapter 8, this volume). But we need to be careful of
extending this metaphor too far—objects on display are as much a product
of historical site formation processes as they are of careful curation and
exhibition by museum personnel. This way of approaching museum collections draws on an archaeological sensibility, which involves the literal
or metaphorical disassembly (or excavation) of an archaeological site and
then its subsequent reassembly (for example, in post-excavation analysis)
to understand its structure. Another aspect of this archaeological sensibility involves an awareness of the way in which a number of different
people with different skills work at trying to reassemble meaning at the
post-excavation stage of an archaeological investigation. As well as drawing
objects together, a process of assembling and reassembling can draw people
together in novel ways.
The second notion of the assemblage relies on Manuel de Landa’s
(2006a; see also J. Bennett 2010) articulation of Deleuze and Guattari’s
assemblage theory. Deleuze and Guattari (e.g., 2004[1987]) used the term
“assemblage” to refer to a series of heterogeneous groupings in which the
grouping itself could be distinguished as a whole from the sum of its parts.
Importantly, such groupings are mixed, and social or cultural groupings
are not distinguished from natural ones (or vice versa). Assemblage theory exists as an alternative to the metaphor of society as a living organism, which dominated social theory throughout the twentieth century. In
perceiving social structures as assemblages as opposed to organisms, De
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Landa (2006a:11) indicates that the properties of such natural/cultural
groupings are not the result of the functions of the components themselves
but instead are the product of the exercising of their capacities: they are
not an inevitable outcome of the function of their components (i.e., they
are not logically necessary), but a product of their particular histories and
their relationships with other parts of the assemblage (i.e., they are contingently obligatory). Unlike organisms, assemblages are not governed by a
central “nervous system,” or head. In this way, agency is distributed across
and through the assemblage, as well as within it.
Far from simply being a semantic point, De Landa (2006a) shows how
replacing the organismic metaphor with that of an assemblage has a series
of implications for the way we study relationships in the past and present.
In the first instance, thinking of assemblages as heterogeneous groupings
of humans and nonhumans has the effect of flattening the hierarchy of
relationships that exists within idealist philosophies, which separate matter
and mind. This progresses an aim of the authors of this volume: to address
the ways in which things and people are involved in complex, interconnected webs of relationships across time and space. Second, the notion of
the assemblage connects with other key theoretical influences on this volume. In Reassembling the Social, Latour argues that “the social” should not
be considered a separate domain, but “the product of a very peculiar movement of re-association and reassembling” (2005:7). In this way, focusing on
the assemblage helps us to concentrate on the formation and reformation
of social processes across time and space.
Jane Bennett’s (2010)discussion of assemblage theory also draws out
another key issue we pursue in this volume. In thinking of museums as
heterogeneous sociotechnical and biopolitical assemblages, unlike the
organismic metaphor, we are able to identify both relationships of functional flow and more volatile relationships of friction and conflict (Bennett
2010:23). Perceiving social groupings as organisms tends to emphasize the
relationships that lead to the functioning of the whole. Such a model has
the potential to produce narratives of indigenous/non-indigenous contact
as inevitable, in which the catastrophic clashes that often arose as a result
of radically asymmetrical structures of power and unequal forms of authority are muted. The notion of an assemblage allows for relationships that are
not necessarily directed toward the functioning of the whole but that might
indeed cause a network to stall or even cease functioning. We discuss this
concept of friction and its importance in understanding indigenous agency
in relation to the museum in more detail below. But for now, it is important to emphasize the ways in which agency is distributed throughout the
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assemblage, which functions as a “federation” of actants in which all material and nonmaterial things are participants (J. Bennett 2010). Indeed,
Latour speaks of a “parliament of things” (1993:144–145) to describe such
collectives.
Where archaeologists have tended to focus on material things to help
understand the behavior of people in the past, by defining assemblages as
federations or collectives of things and people, we suggest that the archaeological sensibility of disassembling and reassembling provides innovative
ways of approaching the study of museum collections. Indeed, we suggest
that archaeological approaches to the study of human behavior might be
conceived as being somewhat like what one sees when looking at a picture
of a Rubin vase (see figure 1.1). By focusing on the vase, one overlooks
the faces in the background. But thinking of the image as an assemblage
enables one to see both the vase and the faces, both the material and the
behavioral, or, in our case, the whole federation of human and nonhuman
actors. Disassembling and reassembling this collective involves the excavation and study of both the vase and the faces, both the object and the
people. In this way, the thing-focused approach to the study of museum
collections outlined by the contributors involves a particular, archaeological
sensibility.
N E T WOR K S , M E SH WOR K S , A N D SU R FAC E S
In Unpacking the Collection (Byrne et al. 2011a; see also Gosden, Larson,
and Petch 2007; Larson, Petch, and Zeitlyn 2007), it was suggested that
museums need to be conceptualized simultaneously as material and social
assemblages:
By saying this, we mean that museums, the people who staff and
run them, the objects and the various individuals and processes
which led to them being there, those who visit them and those
who encounter the objects within them in various media, are all
part of complex networks of agency. This agency does not cease
with the acquisition of objects from their creator communities,
but is ongoing in the material processes of curation and display,
and the social processes of visiting, researching, learning and
“knowing” things (after Gosden, Larson, and Petch 2007; see
also Bennett 2010) which arise from them. (Byrne et al. 2011a:4)
In the study of these heterogeneous groupings of people, institutions, and
things, the “network” metaphor became a key concept for understanding the fields of relations in which museums are entangled, drawing on
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Figure 1.1
The optical illusion known as the Rubin vase. Public domain image created by John Smithson at
the Wikipedia project.
actor-network theory (see also Bennett 2009, 2010). I want to pause here
to consider arguments put forth by Ingold in defense of a metaphor of
“meshwork” (2007a, 2007b, 2008b) in preference to that of the network to
describe the relationships between people and things. Ingold (2007a:80)
notes that the network metaphor tends to be used to describe a complex
of interconnected points rather than a set of interwoven lines. Instead of
the lines in a network simply representing movements or entities that “connect the dots,” Ingold urges us to consider meshworks as the “lines along
which life is lived” and the entanglement of lines, rather than the connecting of points, as the phenomenon by which the mesh is constituted
(Ingold 2007a:81). Thus, for Ingold, action (or change) is not the result
of agency distributed within a network, but “emerges from the interplay
of forces that are conducted along the lines of a meshwork” (2008b:212).
This directs us to think about not only the connections between people,
things, and institutions but also the medium by which agency is transmitted. In a provocative article in which he places this notion in opposition to
actor-network theory, Ingold appears to suggest that in the interaction of
biological organism and medium (he gives the example of a fish in water or
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a butterfly in air), the medium has no agency: “Air and water are not objects
that act. They are material media in which living things are immersed, and
are experienced by way of their currents, forces and pressure gradients.…
For things to interact, they must be immersed in a kind of force-field set
up by the currents of the media that surround them.… Our concept of
agency must make allowance for the real complexity of living organisms as
opposed to inert matter” (Ingold 2008b:212–213).
Ingold goes on to stress the importance of skilled practice in defining
agency, along with a consideration of the qualities of materials themselves
(Ingold 2007b; see also Knappett 2007). What is appealing about Ingold’s
model is the way it forces us to pay attention to the particular qualities
of the media through which agency is transmitted—its emphasis on the
mediation of agency and the particular qualities of material things. Less
helpful for us is its apparent denial of the agency of nonbiological entities.
However, he expands on this point to suggest that the animacy of things
be understood not in terms of the classical definition that has dominated
anthropology since Tylor (1920[1871]; see further discussion in Harvey
2005) as the inhabiting of inert matter by spirit, but in terms of the “generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist.… Things are in life rather than…life [existing]…in things.
Things are alive and active not because they are possessed of spirit…but
because the substances which they comprise continue to be swept up in circulations of surrounding media that alternatively portent their dissolution
or—characteristically with animate beings—ensure their regeneration”
(Ingold 2007b:12).
Although the authors in this volume do not share a single position on
this issue, we note the usefulness of both the meshwork and network metaphors in directing our attention to the relationships between people, things,
and institutions with reference to museum collections. In this introduction,
I prefer the term “meshwork,” primarily because it seems consistent with
Deleuze and Guattari’s typologies and De Landa’s work (e.g., De Landa
1997, 1998, 2006b; note that these sources are not cited explicitly by Ingold
in the works discussed above) and focuses our attention on the mediation
of agency and the qualities of the media by which it is transmitted. But we
do not wish to lose the radical symmetry of actor-network theory and the
way it encourages us to consider the involvement of what might otherwise
be defined as inert substances in the transmission of agency throughout
the meshwork. Both network and meshwork are useful concepts in relation
to the study of ethnographic collections, and contributors employ either or
both concepts.
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Figure 1.2
A piece of paper twisted to form a Möbius strip. Photograph by Rodney Harrison.
Indeed, over the course of the advanced seminar, while working
through the ideas of networks and meshworks and other ways of conceptualizing the complex field of relations in which museums are bound up, we
began to think of the Möbius strip as a metaphor for thinking about this
field of relations in a constructive way (see figure 1.2). The Möbius strip
is a surface with a single side and only one boundary—a shape that is not
mathematically orientable but gives the illusion of containing two sides.
We started to use the strip as a way of conceptualizing diagrammatically
the entangled relationships of various categories that are constructed discursively as opposites within the context of the museum—“indigenous” and
“non-indigenous,” “people” and “things,” “colony” and “metropole,” “primitive” and “civilized”—and the ways in which they are actually integrally
connected with one another. Although the Möbius strip gives the illusion of
these categories as opposites, they are constructed and arise out of a single
flat plane, which in our model we interpret as a single field of relations.
While we might “see” a single plane, by moving the strip we are able to draw
different aspects of the field of relations into view. As in the metaphor of
assembling and reassembling, the Möbius strip provides a model in which
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Figure 1.3
A schematic diagram representing the field of relations surrounding the museum, including sites of
mediation (oval labels) and various processes and relations that arise from them (rectangular
labels). Different perspectives or disciplinary points of entry are shown as “cuts” across the meshwork (unbounded labels). Drawing by Rodney Harrison.
different aspects of the field of relations can be viewed in different ways by
viewing the field from different angles and at different scales of analysis.
One of the important aspects of this volume is that, unlike many anthropological studies of museum material culture, the authors do not seek to
distinguish between indigenous producers and non-indigenous consumers
but instead consider both as part of a meshwork, which in turn allows them
to focus on the whole range of social and material relations that surround
museum collections.
The field of relations can be further expressed as a series of points
of analytical attention on a schematic circuit, which can be cut in different ways (figure 1.3). These “cuts” represent different points of entry into
various sites of mediation of social and material relations. Several of the
key nodes in the meshwork have been included in the diagram, delineating field, museum, object, collection, and the public as important nodes
and administration, typology/seriation, curation, exhibition, and ideology/
identity construction as important social processes that emerge from them.
But returning to Ingold’s point about meshworks forces us to consider the
various ways in which these different relations are mediated and the qualities of the things that mediate them. The different qualities of these media
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in turn dictate different approaches to their study, or different disciplinary
sensibilities, denoted in the diagram as governmental, curatorial, archaeological, exhibitionary, and ethnographic perspectives. These perspectives
represent different ways of looking at, or cutting into, the meshwork to
understand the processes at play within it. We have identified the archaeological sensibility as the key perspective for this book, which takes a thingfocused approach to understanding the field of relations surrounding the
museum meshwork, but each of the chapters inflects the archaeological
sensibility differently and each cuts into the network differently. The locations and fields of practice associated with the museum meshwork are characterized by different forms of relational dynamics and represent sites of
mediation of different forms of agency. These locations and fields of practice have different relationships with one another, and all pose questions of
indigenous agency in quite different ways.
F R ICT ION, F LOWS, A N D M USEU M A SSE M BL AGE S
When considering the various points of entry into sites of mediation
within the museum meshwork, it is important to reflect on governmental
processes—listing, collecting, structuring, organizing—and the forms of
authority associated with each. Similarly, it is important to consider the
impact of these processes on practices and structures of indigenous governance. In this regard, museums and the museological disciplines (archaeology, anthropology, conservation sciences, and natural sciences) should,
themselves, be seen as governmental assemblages and mechanisms for
assembling and reassembling forms of power and authority (e.g., Bennett
2009, 2010; Ruppert 2009). Institutions are caught up in administrative
processes and forms of assembling that are directed at controlling the
conduct of people and things, directing our attention toward processes of
management and organization. However, the authority that is attributed
to museum collections, their modes of collection and presentation, and
the forms of knowledge they are used to produce suggest that museums
should also be considered governmental assemblages in the way in which
they function toward the distribution and control of structures of authority and power. At any of the points in the meshwork, if we make reference
to processes of assembling and reassembling, we also speak of forms of
expertise and knowledge. Within the museum, as part of its exhibitionary
complex (cf. Bennett 1995), these have traditionally been archaeological
and anthropological forms of knowledge and expertise. So a key concern
becomes exploring how different forms of knowledge and expertise
have been involved in the process of assembling and how each has been
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employed in relation to processes of governance, particularly the governance of indigenous and local forms of knowledge (cf. Scott 1998).
It is also possible to apply the perspective of assemblage to the ways
in which different governmental apparatuses themselves assemble—collections, things, people, ideas, techniques, technologies—in programs of governance that are aimed at regulating forms of behavior and conduct (cf.
Foucault 2007, 2011; see also Rabinow 1989, 2003; Scott 1995; Pels 1997;
Steinmetz 2007). They might address themselves, for example, by way of the
exhibitionary complex (Bennett 1995), to the conduct of citizens or through
the connection of museums and processes of colonial governance (Bennett
2009, 2010) with indigenous people (who may or may not be addressed as
citizens, depending on the individuals, communities, time periods, and
nation-states under consideration). Equally important, these governmental processes, by way of schema of classification and organization within the
museum, address themselves to the governance of things, in terms of both
their definition and the attribution of agency to them in relation to the possible relationships that might exist between them and humans.
I have already suggested that an important aim of this collection is to
look critically at the notion of the “contact zone” in describing the field
of relations surrounding museums and to consider whether it remains an
appropriate metaphor for describing the relationships between indigenous
and non-indigenous people in the light of the network or meshwork model
of relations. Mary Louise Pratt (1992) introduced the notion of the contact
zone to overcome the Euro American imperialist, expansionist perspective
of the term “frontier zone.” She used the term to describe
the space of colonial encounters, the space in which peoples
geographically and historically separate come into contact
with each other and establish ongoing relations.… [The term]
invoke[s] the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographic and historical disjunctures, and
whose trajectories now intersect. By using the term “contact”
[she] aim[ed] to foreground the interactive, improvisational
dimensions of colonial encounters…[to emphasize] copresence,
interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often
within radically asymmetrical relations of power. (Pratt 1992:6)
The idea of museums as contact zones was popularized by Clifford
(1997:188ff.), who used the term to emphasize the ways in which museums
are best understood as locally negotiated responses to what are portrayed
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as dominant, universalizing, hierarchical notions of culture. He suggested
that seeing them as such might have the effect of transforming and breaking down these dominant modes, which structure the governmental role of
museums. While the authors in this book do not necessarily disagree with
this point of view (but see responses by Bennett 1998; Dibley 2005; Boast
2011), this notion of the contact zone might appear to imply that the globalized, transnational flows of things, people, values, and information (cf.
Appadurai 1996) are somehow frictionless. We know that the contact histories involved in the production and maintenance of such globalized flows
have often involved violent conflicts and have occurred as the result of vastly
unequal power relationships. In our accounts of the field of relations that
surround the museum, we feel it is necessary to take note of not only globalized flows but also the sense in which moments of assembling and reassembling within the museum network also often produce friction and conflict
(cf. Kratz and Karp 2006). We are mindful here of Anna Tsing’s (2005)
work on friction and the ethnography of global connection. Tsing argues
that friction might be an outcome of the interactions of people and things
in a globalized world but is also a creative force in the co-production of
culture, which occurs across interactions of difference. The idea of friction
acknowledges the fundamentally awkward, unequal, contingent nature of
cross-cultural interactions and the relationships between the local and the
global. She notes that all forces of globalization are driven by a modernist
striving for universals, and it is in this way that her work connects directly
with the idea of the museum, a universalizing, modernist institution par
excellence (Bennett 1995; Harrison, chapter 4, this volume). The idea of
the contact zone could be interpreted as a space in which contact and crosscultural flow are unimpeded. Tsing (2005) shows how conflict and friction
are not simply about slowing down social and material flows but are generative of new relations and are necessary to keeping both global and local
flows in motion.
These ideas connect with the authors’ shared conception of the
museum meshwork in several productive ways. In the first place, the metaphor of friction seems to better describe the messy, sticky engagements
that characterize the historical exercising of agency (indigenous and otherwise) and the contemporary processes of cross-cultural contact and collaboration within museum meshworks.
It is important to learn about the collaborations through which
knowledge is made and maintained.… Through the friction of
such collaborations, global conservation projects—like other
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forms of travelling knowledge—gain their shape. [But] collaboration is not a simple sharing of information. There is no
reason to assume that collaborators share common goals.…
Overlapping but discrepant forms of cosmopolitanism may
inform contributors, allowing them to converse—but across difference.… Globally circulating knowledge creates new gaps even
as it grows through the frictions of encounter. (Tsing 2005:13)
Second, the idea of friction emerges from a consideration of the properties of the parts of the meshwork by which agency is mediated. This assumes
that the rate and effect of the flow of information, material, and ideas will
not be equal but will depend on the media by which the flow is transmitted.
In turning our attention to the connections between people, things, corporations, places, institutions, and techniques of government, we also need to
be mindful of the qualities of the “stuff” that connects them and the ways
in which flow and friction themselves are creative and generative, leading
to processes of reassembling within the museum meshwork.
ORGA N I Z AT ION OF T H E BOOK
While all of the contributions to this volume address a broad, overlapping set of themes relating to ethnographic museum collections and indigenous agency, the chapters have been organized into three parts to reflect
their emphases on one or more important sets of questions raised in this
introduction.
The chapters in part I, “Museum Networks and the Distribution of
Agency,” are concerned primarily with the nature of museums and ethnographic collections as assemblages and the ways in which agency can be
traced in relation to the processes of their formation and ongoing maintenance. Tony Bennett (chapter 2) draws on Latour’s discussion of museums
as centers of (and for) the collection and calculation of “immutable and
combinable mobiles” (1987:227) and, as Bennett puts it, “objects and texts
that, no matter how old they are or how far distant from the sites at which
they were collected, are ‘conveniently at hand and combinable at will’”
and the ways in which the processes of assembling them within the late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century museum led to the distribution of
“new forms of agency across the relations between museum and field, metropolis and colony, colonizer and colonized, scientist and subjects, and collector
and collected.” This is a point also developed by Harrison (chapter 4) in his
comparison of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century anthropological museum collections and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century
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lists of intangible heritage. Importantly, he discusses the ways in which
both forms of collection are linked by the desire to assemble and govern
cultures “at risk.” A consideration of the processes involved in the assembling and reassembling of collections and the significance of the spaces
“in between” the museum and the field informs Chris Wingfield’s (chapter
3) reflection on the London Missionary Society “museum,” a mobile collection that circulated in the mid- to late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries between London and various sites of missionary activity, with
objects intended to serve both anthropological and proselytizing functions.
Importantly, he highlights the process of dispersal and the movement of
ethnographic objects between the field and multiple centers of missionary
activity (themselves alternative sites of collection and calculation) as being
as significant as field collecting itself, significantly deepening our understanding of the formation processes of museum collections.
Part II, “Indigenous Strategies and Museum Collections,” focuses more
specifically on the ways in which indigenous agency might be traced in relation to the formation of historic museum collections. Joshua A. Bell (chapter 5) explores the intersecting agencies of Papuans and field collectors
during the 1928 US Department of Agriculture Sugarcane Expedition to
New Guinea. In a sensitive and nuanced exploration of the various objects
and records that were collected, he demonstrates how the expedition created distinct artifacts and networks, the narratives about which fed into
and helped sustain colonial imaginaries of New Guinea as timeless and
primitive, while simultaneously exploring the ways in which colonial science, exploration, and authority were made to articulate with indigenous
New Guinean worldviews, interests, and cosmopolitics. Tracing the agency
of an individual person through the contributions she made to a particular collection, Gwyneira Isaac (chapter 6) explores the objects and records
relating to the Zuni lhamana We’wha’ in the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, DC, produced during We’wha’s six-month visit to DC in
1886 with the anthropological couple Colonel James and Matilda Coxe
Stevenson. Isaac shows how the structure of museum catalogs serves to dissolve the identities of individual indigenous collaborators such as We’wha
through its emphasis on the classification of artifacts by tribal and geographical grouping. Nonetheless, Isaac’s chapter demonstrates how the
identities of individuals and the details of the objects they produced might
be retraced and the objects reunited with the identities of their makers.
Robin Torrence and Anne Clarke (chapter 7) are similarly concerned with
discovering traces of indigenous agency in museum collections, primarily in relation to processes of anthropological field collection, through a
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focus on the structure of museum collections themselves. Modeling their
study on archaeological approaches to assemblage analysis and treating
the museum explicitly as an archaeological field site, the authors attempt
to identify strategies adopted by indigenous source communities to create, sustain, or avoid social interaction with European field collectors, and
they consider how these strategies might have altered indigenous people’s
notions of themselves and others in a globalizing, colonial world.
The chapters in the third and final part of the book, “Objects, Agency,
and the Curatorial Responsibility,” focus principally on contemporary relationships between indigenous people and museums and the curatorial
responsibilities that arise from a serious consideration of indigenous ontologies in relation to the agency of things. Sarah Byrne (chapter 8) recounts
how new collaborative practices that emerged during the British Museum’s
Melanesia Project suggested new logics for the organization and storage of
Melanesian artifacts within the museum, reflecting on the ways in which
the application of an archaeological sensibility to the museum storeroom
and a conceptualization of museum collections as assemblages could potentially open up new ways of thinking about the formation and location of
ethnographic collections and the processes of collaboration they undergo.
By drawing attention to the museum storeroom as the primary context in
which ethnographic objects are found and by positing ways of exploring it
as an archaeological site that has been created and structured in very particular ways, she suggests that curators have a responsibility to facilitate new
collaborative strategies for working with source communities that acknowledge the agency of things. In a comment on Byrne’s chapter, Evelyn Tetehu,
one of the Solomon Islander women involved in the Melanesia Project at
the British Museum, reiterates how an artifact’s social function can significantly influence the ways in which it should be managed, and she discusses
the ongoing social implications of engaging indigenous communities in
such collaborations. This theme is discussed further by Chantal Knowles
(chapter 9), who shows how ambiguous objects that are not able to be categorized using conventional museum categories can help trouble those categories. She draws attention to such categories as an invention of museum
practice and also points out the ways in which museum objects are far more
commonly the result of mixed agencies and makers than might generally
be assumed. The collaborative reconstruction of the Ma\ori waka taua in
the National Museums Scotland draws into question a range of museological practices through the discussion of a shared practice, which drew on
Ma o
\ ri approaches to conservation informed by a tradition of continual use,
repair, and renewal. Finally, the implications of adopting Hopi ontologies
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for reshaping contemporary curatorial practices are explored by Kelley
Hays-Gilpin and Ramson Lomatewama (chapter 10). In embracing a view
of artifacts as animate and as having reciprocal relationships with humans
(and one another) in terms of their life force, personhood, emotions, kin,
life cycle, and function—which derives from Hopi cosmology but which can
be seen as shared by other indigenous groups throughout the world—they
suggest that museums might shift their emphasis to living people and the
reciprocal relationships between museum staff and representatives from
source communities, the relationships between artifacts and individuals,
and the relations of artifacts with one another. This would have positive benefits not only for source communities but also for the recognition and reignition of the relationships that animate the things in museum collections.
CONCLUSION
I will conclude with some thoughts about how the ideas developed in
this book might inform everyday museum practices. While it is well known
that museums employ anthropologists, archaeologists, and non-indigenous
curators alongside indigenous curators and consultants, in practice, a range
of individuals work behind the scenes, such as exhibit designers, marketing
managers, educational outreach staff, and cafeteria workers, who are perhaps far less likely to engage directly with the sorts of theoretical concepts
developed in a book like this one. However, the themes developed here
can and should articulate directly with the everyday practices of museum
workers and goers and not just with those of museum curators or professorial staff, in that we call for a fundamental reorganization and sharing of
authority between source communities, museum staff, and members of the
museums’ various publics, as well as museum objects and exhibits. It is not
only the curator or consultant or source community member who interacts
with the objects in collections and determines the ways in which they are
managed and displayed, but a whole range of museum staff, visitors, and
other agents within the museum meshwork. All might be encouraged to
view their interactions with objects as more dialogical (cf. Harrison 2012),
to consider objects as possible agents and interlocutors in their own right,
and to establish practices that treat objects more democratically. Similarly,
all museum staff and visitors might be encouraged to consider their own
obligations, which arise as a result of an acknowledgment of this shift in
modes of authority within the museum. As Schultz (2011) has argued, it is
important to involve the public—as much as source communities—in collaborations if the new shared modes of authority within the museum are to
be communicated.
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In the introduction to the edited volume Evocative Objects: Things We
Think With, Sherry Turkle (2007:4) urges us to reconsider Claude LéviStrauss’s (1966) suggestion that we explore bricolage, the creative combination and recombination of a particular series of things, as a spur to
new knowledge. The processes of reassembling the museum collection
described by the authors in this volume owe much to the creative potential
that Lévi-Strauss identified as a latent property of assemblages of people
and things. These chapters go some way toward shifting the dominant orientation of critical museum studies away from issues of difference and representation and toward a more nuanced engagement with a broader range
of concerns, including the exercising of authority and agency, the forms
in which they manifest, and the materials and relations by which they are
mediated within ethnographic museum collections, understood broadly
as sociotechnical and biopolitical assemblages. Although the book focuses
particularly on indigenous agency and the forms in which it has emerged
in relation to the museum, its themes have broad relevance for museum
and material culture studies more generally, drawing on an archaeological
sensibility to argue the need for greater sensitivity to the affective qualities
of things and the relationships in which humans and objects are bound
up throughout the world. Similarly, the theoretical and methodological
issues discussed here go beyond museums to raise questions relevant to
the applied disciplines of archaeology, anthropology, and material culture
studies more generally. Certainly, the fundamental implication of many
of these chapters is that increased respect for material things follows from
acknowledgment not only that the makers were “real people” but also that
the objects themselves have been (and continue to be) involved in significant historical and contemporary relationships with a variety of other
human and nonhuman actors. Museums are already adopting special practices for material thought to have important “sacred” or “spiritual” significance, and the chapters suggest that these practices, which acknowledge
the dialogue between humans and things, might gainfully be extended to
other museum objects more generally.
An important, growing literature parallel to the one explored here
considers the relationship between science museums and climate change
(e.g., Cameron 2010, 2011a, 2011b), for example, and is similarly beginning to emphasize the responsibilities and obligations that arise from a
consideration of heritage as something produced in the dialogical relationships between human and nonhuman actors, who work together to curate
the past in the present to collectively build a common world (Dibley 2011;
see also Harrison and Rose 2010; Harrison 2012; and Meskell 2010:854 in
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relation to heritage more generally). Museum collections not only are
spaces of display but also provide objects to think with, through, and in
relation to—objects that continue to exercise their own forms of agency in
a complex mesh of relations with those who have made, traded, received,
collected, curated, worked with, and viewed them in the past and do so
in the present. Recognizing these various forms of agency has profound
implications for curatorial practices, implying not only an active engagement of people and things but also a curatorial responsibility that arises
from the material, historical, and political weight of museum objects.
Acknowledging this curatorial responsibility has the potential to transform
our relationships with museums and their varied communities of interest
in the twenty-first century.
Acknowledgments
This introduction summarizes the themes that arose from the advanced seminar
“Reassembling the Collection: Indigenous Agency and Ethnographic Collections,” hosted by the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. The advanced seminar ran 26–30
September 2010 and was co-organized by Sarah Byrne, Anne Clarke, Rodney Harrison,
and Robin Torrence. In writing this introduction, I have drawn on the ideas and concepts that were collectively developed among the participants in the seminar, borrowing
liberally from the discussions. For that reason, this introduction should be read as a
direct product of the collaboration among advanced seminar participants, albeit one
that has been filtered through a particular authorial lens. I thank all of the participants
for sharing their ideas so freely and for allowing me to put them together in this way. In
particular, I thank Tony Bennett, Sarah Byrne, Anne Clarke, Robin Torrence, and two
anonymous reviewers for their specific comments on this introductory chapter, which
were helpful in revising it for final publication.
Note
1. Gosden (2004) makes a similar distinction between “objects” and “things.”
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