Visitors or Community? Collaborative Museology and the Role of Education and Outreach in Ethnographic Museums Nora Landkammer At a 2015 conference about the future prospects of ethnographic curation, I asked one of the presenters who had spoken extensively about the collaborative process of producing an exhibition in an ethnographic museum with local and international communities what effect this collaborative approach had on the education and outreach program for that exhibition. What does this collaborative approach mean for education? Her answer was that they had conducted different programs for each target group. There didn’t seem to be any obvious connection drawn between the demand for horizontal collaboration in the production of the exhibition and the educational work. In the English speaking context, through the critical engagement with the consequences of the British Empire, as Robin Boast describes it, “[t]here are few museums with anthropological, or even archaeological, collections that would consider an exhibition that did not include some form of consultation”1. Though it can hardly be said that in Germany, Switzerland and Austria there is a comparable degree of postcolonial reflexivity, and many exhibitions continue to represent non-European ‘cultures’ without seeming to acknowledge any issue, the paradigm of collaborative museology in ethnographic museums has gained a great deal of traction in the German speaking context. But consultation and collaboration are also relevant outside the field of museum ethnology. The critique of the homogeneous voice of the institution has also been articulated by advocates of critical museum education. The field of learning and outreach work is also experiencing a shift towards horizontal collaborations and cooperative knowledge production with different audiences 1 | R. Boast, Neocolonial Collaboration, p. 56. 270 Nora Landkammer which are relevant to the museum.2 Education and outreach programs which establish long-term networks and replace a one-sided transfer of knowledge with cooperation – as shown in the essays in this volume – challenge the borders between what is inside and outside the museum, as well as between the traditional activities and responsibilities of curation and education. Still, the practice and debate around collaborative learning and outreach projects have as yet rarely affected ethnographic museums. Conversely, in Germany, Austria and Switzerland there are hardly any contributions regarding education in the discussion around the possibilities of transformation and/or decolonisation of ethnographic museums,3 while at the same time education and teaching that critiques colonialism is happening outside of the museums.4 In this context it seems worthwhile to provide a more precise account of the intersections between education and collaborative museology. For this purpose, I will refer to key texts on the collaborative paradigm in ethnographic museums, which was initially developed through the debates around indigenous rights and demands in North America, Australia and New Zealand, and which has also provided the reference point for the discourse around ethno-museology in the German-speaking world.5 I would like to interrogate these texts, as well as a number of contributions on the topic from the UK, as to the role 2 | Arbeitsgemeinschaft deutscher Kunstvereine (ADKV), Collaboration; Schnittpunkt et al.: educational turn; N. Landkammer, Vermittlung als kollaborative Wissensproduktion; M. Guarino-Huet, O. Desvoignes & microsillons, Autonomy within the Institution. 3 | A current exception to this is shown in S. Endter & C. Rothmund, Irgendwas zu Afrika: Herausforderungen der Vermittlung am Weltkulturen Museum, compiled by the education and outreach team of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt. 4 | Examples include the Weiße Flecken der Erinnerung project, from the Eidelstedt district school and cultural agents for creative schools in Hamburg (see http://www. afrika-hamburg.de/eidelstedt.html, accessed 19.08.2015), projects from Berlin Postkolonial, such as Freedom Roads (see http://www.freedom-roads.de/frrd/willkom. htm, accessed 19.08.2015) or Far, far away? Kolonialrassismus im Unterricht/ Globales Geschichtslernen vor Ort, Berlin Postkolonial/Institut für diskriminierungsfreie Bildung/Entwicklungspolitisches Informationszentrum EPIZ Berlin (see http:// www.berlinpostkolonial.de/cms/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1, accessed 19.08.2015), the theater project Vergessene Biografien, by Judith Raner (see www.vergessene-biografien.de, accessed 19.08.2015) or Kolonialismus: Macht: Gegenwart, Bildungsstätte Anne Frank, Frankfurt (see http://www.bs-anne-frank.de/ workshops/kolonialismus-macht-gegenwart/, accessed 19.08.2015). 5 | R. B. Phillips, Community Collaboration in Exhibitions; L. Chandler, Journey without maps; I. Karp, C. Mullen Kraemer & S. D. Lavine, Museums and communities; L. Kelly & P. Gordon, Developing a Community of Practice; L. Peers & A. Brown, Introduction; J. Clifford, Routes. Visitors or Community? ‘education’ plays in collaborative museology. Through this cross-reading and a survey of contemporary critiques and debates,6 I would like to argue that it is necessary to reflect upon and to jointly critique the various traditions of collaborative projects if collaborative museology is not only to increase the legitimacy of the museums, but is also to lead to a decolonisation 7 and democratisation, as well as more justice regarding the different groups with claims to the museum spaces and the collections.8 So how is the role of education and learning portrayed in the literature about collaborative projects? E DUCATION AND OUTRE ACH FOR GROUPS WHOSE MATERIAL CULTURE IS COLLECTED IN THE MUSEUM An initial meaning of ‘education’ as a part of collaborative practice is of making the collections accessible for the communities with which the museum is collaborating over the long term. In the context of ‘source community collaboration’, Peers and Brown speak of educational materials and activities as one of the possible results of the collaboration: Educational materials designed by community members which utilise museum and archival resources, for instance, have become a means through which people can learn about the diversity of materials available to them and about how the histories related to these resources are relevant today. 9 6 | This text builds upon the work of Bernadette Lynch in (Generally Dissatisfied; Whose Cake is it Anyway?; and with Alberti, Legacies of Prejudice). She also formulates some of the central theses in the article included in this volume (p. 255 ff.). 7 | Decolonisation as a term has been developed since the anticolonial liberation movements and still incites controversy, for instance, between approaches influenced by postcolonial theory and decolonialism. They share a demand for decolonisation, which unlike other emancipatory theories, is based on the notion that the present political, economic and epistemological situation in the global south and north is strongly shaped by colonialism, and that action to counter this colonial continuity is demanded. 8 | Claiming a stake in the museum can take various forms, including claiming ownership of objects in the collection, expertise on the exhibition themes, the status as a tax-payer who co-finances a public institution, the right to self-representation, the right not to be exposed to racist or exoticising displays, or the right to education. 9 | L. Peers & A. Brown, Introduction, p. 6. Another interesting work in this field is the collaboration of education departments with indigenous museums for the elaboration of programs. (J. R. Baird, Landed Wisdoms). 271 272 Nora Landkammer C OLL ABOR ATION AS EDUCATION Ruth Phillips, former director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia (MOA), which is a pioneer of collaborative museology, describes the transformation in ethnographic museums, among other characteristics, as a shift from product to process orientation: the focus is no longer exclusively on the exhibition, but rather, the production of the exhibition is expanded into a project (including a wide range of activities) that allows for research, education and innovation.10 Phillips emphasises the pedagogical aspect of collaborative work: she describes it as a double-sided learning process as it is defined by the theory of critical pedagogy, as a “bilateral version of the radical pedagogy advocated by Paulo Freire”11. Successful collaborative processes provide both the institution and the collaborators with new insights and understanding. Phillips’ perspective is thus advocating for an approach in which the curatorial work of collaborating with communities from which the objects originate is simultaneously education work guided by the model of critical pedagogy.12 However, in this model, which has been so influential in the development of collaborative museology, the educators working at the museum are not presented as stakeholders, as is the case with many texts that address the processes of ‘community consultation’ or on-going collaborative work in ethnographic museums. In the introduction to their much-cited Museums and Source Communities, Peers and Brown also emphasise how collaboration is a process of “learning and unlearning”13. Yet the museum’s education staff only appear in the text as one more category of museum staff who will also come into contact with collaborative projects, alongside employees such as the salesperson in the museum shop. Here one could perhaps speak of a ‘present absence’ of the educational component: on the one hand, the museum is depicted as inherently ‘educational’ and learning is emphasised; on the other hand, education as a function and education staff as a specific stakeholder group are absent in the text. 10 | R. B. Phillips, Community Collaboration in Exhibitions, p. 160 f. 11 | ibid., p. 162. 12 | See Kelly & P. Gordon, Developing a Community of Practice, p. 153; on the museum as ‘educational’ institution, see K. Message, Multiplying Sites of Sovereignty through Community and Constituent Services at the National Museum of the American Indian?; R. Mason, Culture Theory and Museum Studies. 13 | L. Peers & A.Brown, Introduction, p. 8. Visitors or Community? THE ‘ GENER AL PUBLIC ’ AND EDUCATION Education takes on another meaning in relation to a general public: in several texts that address a new conception of the ethnographic museum, ‘education’ seems to be understood as instructive teaching, and is taken to mean the imparting of information and values. Robert Sullivan, who is in charge of public programs at the National Museum of Natural History at the Smithsonian Institution, which also contains an anthropology department, defines museums as “moral educators”,14 which have the responsibility – as traditionally sexist and racist institutions themselves, as Sullivan makes clear – to transform the knowledge, beliefs and feelings of their visitors.15 Amy Lonetree clearly formulates this educational mission in her discussion of community-produced exhibitions at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington D. C. The critique is directed at the legibility of the exhibition in terms of it having an educational function for the nation: Abstraction isn’t a correct choice for a museum hoping to educate a nation with a willed ignorance of its treatment of Indigenous peoples and the policies and practices that led to genocide in the Americas.16 This concept reinstates for the museum precisely that authority of knowledge that has been put into question by the new museology: but this time of marginalised, unspoken knowledge. Tony Bennett has formulated a fundamental critique of the museum’s educational mission, which re-emerges here. He presents this function as part of the museum’s tradition of being an instrument of civilisation: “[Are] museums not still concerned to beam their improving messages of cultural tolerance and diversity into civil society as far as they can reach?”17 The museum as ‘contact zone’ is, in his view, a continuation of its governmental function, but this time for the sake of what he calls an ideology of multiculturalism. Notwithstanding the obvious difference between a hegemonic educational project and the idea of teaching counter-narratives, the point is that there is a dichotomy between the learning processes envisaged with communities, and the education of a seemingly homogeneous public. Schultz argues that the debate in museology is limited to the relations between the museum and the collaborators, and therefore pays too little attention to the participation of the public: 14 | R. Sullivan, Evaluating the Ethics and Consciences of Museums, p. 257. 15 | ibid. 16 | A. Lonetree, Missed Opportunities, p. 640 f. 17 | T. Bennett, Culture, p. 213. 273 274 Nora Landkammer Importantly, in pledging themselves to collaboration museums indicate their on-going commitment to it as a form of social activism, reflecting their belief that its relevance extends beyond those immediately participating in the process. Such a belief, however, implies the need for the visiting public to be a part of the process, a group that is frequently overlooked in discussions of collaboration.18 This unnuanced perspective of the ‘public’, which Schultz also critiques, is most prominent in the contributions from USA/Canada/Australia that work with a clear concept of ‘source communities,’ which in the most radical cases has resulted in an actual shift in the balance of power. The concept of ‘source communities’ can be broadly criticised in that it suggests an instrumental relationship between museums and groups. The community is therefore portrayed as the ‘source’ of the collections. However the double negotiation of mutual learning in collaborative projects on the one hand, and instructive education for the public on the other, becomes particularly problematic when the collaborative approach is applied to the former imperial centres and European migration societies. Collaborative museology is understood in the ‘centres’ both as the cooperation with stakeholders in the countries from which the collections originated, as well as the cooperation with the diaspora in Europe. According to Wayne Modest and Helen Mears, the concept of the source community is linked with a sense of identity fixated on origins, and runs the risk of reinforcing the historical classification of people that is contained in the collections. For Modest and Mears, the model of the ‘source’ replicates simplistic approaches based on what are seen as fixed cultural markers for historically unchanging, visibly ‘different’ homogeneous groups; the kinds of groups curators can find historically ‘described’ by groups of material culture and their documentation in museum collections.19 Therefore, the source community concept does not take into account a contemporary understanding of identity (as composite and influenced by multiple forms of belonging) nor can it describe the diversity of claims people can have in a migra18 | L. Schultz, Collaborative Museology and the Visitor, p. 2. With respect to the emergence of an educational dimension in texts on museology, a series of essays that address the reception of collaborative exhibitions and visitor reactions is of particular interest. See C. Krmpotich & D. Anderson, Collaborative Exhibitions and Visitor Reactions; L. Schultz, Collaborative Museology and the Visitor; K. Message, Multiplying sites of sovereignty through Community and Constituent Services at the National Museum of the American Indian? 19 | W. Modest & H. Mears, Museums, African Collections and Social Justice, p. 300. Visitors or Community? tion society to having a say in an anthropology museum: is the legitimacy of the interests and right to participation only defined by the ‘origin’ of the collection? I would like to shift my focus now to the debate in England, in order to further unpack the question of the collaboration with different communities20 and to illustrate some other relationships between education and collaborative museology in projects implemented by education and outreach departments. C OLL ABOR ATIVE EDUCATIONAL PROJECTS Viv Golding has theorised such an approach to learning in ethnographic museums, based on her practice at the Horniman Museum in London. The collaboration with the Caribbean Women Writers Alliance (CWWA) at the Horniman Museum in the 1990s offers an early example.21 Under the title re-writing the museum and working with both young and established writers, the workshops conducted in this project focused not only the collection’s objects, but also on the institution and on the museum’s existing displays and the racism and exoticism to be observed in them. Thus the group critically engaged in writing with a panel that still showed the ‘races of man’. Golding describes education as work on the ‘museum frontiers’ that makes a re-writing possible: “the museum frontier marks a boundary that is also a space of transformation”.22 Golding speaks of the ‘frontier’ and not of the ‘contact zone’, since for her, the term emphasises the necessity of actively working towards a transformation. Speaking in terms of a frontier makes it clear that there are risks, dangers and fear involved. She therefore re-emphasises the aspects of Pratt’s ‘contact zone’ that are so often omitted in the museum debate.23 Long-term collaboration, according to Golding, leads to many different results, be it school projects (working on poetic texts with students, involving the writers as educators), a publication (Anim-Addo 2004), or the establishment of an annual event commemorating Emancipation Day at the Horniman (in remembrance of the anniversary of the British Slavery Abolition Act). In her description of the project, Golding does build a bridge to the collaborative paradigm in museology, as formulated by Phillips from the work done in Canada, though she also strongly refers to literature from the fields of pedagogy and education. She takes different paths than the ones prescribed by the 20 | ibid.; W. Modest, Co-Curating with Teenagers at the Horniman Museum. 21 | The Caribbean Women Writers Association is an international organisation. For the project at the Horniman Museum, the participants were made up primarily of teachers and lecturers in England who are members of the CWWA. 22 | V. Golding, Learning at the museum frontiers, p. 49. 23 | R. Boast, Neocolonial Collaboration. 275 276 Nora Landkammer concept of source communities: this collaboration engages an organisation of writers, both because of their work, and because of their positioning as Black women and their political project.24 The project emerges from the tradition of museums seeking to address groups whose voices are excluded from the museum’s dominant narrative. The educational and community work advanced in particular by the New Labour government in the UK has contributed to the broader establishment of education and outreach work not only in exhibitions, but also in long-standing cooperation and community involvement projects in museums, as well as an intensive discourse around its theorisation and critical development.25 Modest describes this development in England: At first, many of these initiatives were delivered by peripheral elements [sic] of the museum: by the education and then freshly-formed outreach teams, but increasingly they have moved closer to the core of museum business and used collections in achieving those outcomes. 26 In a text about his role as curator at the Horniman Museum, Anthony Shelton refers to the permeability between the areas of activity: the effects of contingency of these processes, he writes, “today are as likely to be mediated by a museum or exhibitions manager, or an educationalist, as a curator”.27 C OLL ABOR ATIVE PROJECTS BE T WEEN E XHIBITIONS AND EDUCATIONAL WORK – A PLE A FOR JOINT REFLE XIVIT Y In collaborative practice, particularly in Great Britain, two different concepts and practices coincide. Firstly, the idea of building collaborations with the erstwhile ‘objects of research’, which emerged from indigenous demands as well 24 | On the capitalisation of the term ‘Black’ here: “Black (as placed in opposition to the construction of whiteness) does not refer here to biological indicators, but rather to the self-conception of a group of people who, as a response to the denigration of their African heritage within racist power structures which constructs the dichotomy of ‘white’ and ‘black’, derive their consciousness from precisely this context, reinterpreting blackness as positive, and reflecting this through the capitalisation of the word. (Autor_innenkollektiv rassismuskritischer Leitfaden 2015, p. 5). 25 | R. Sandell & E. Nightingale, Museums, equality and social justice; B. Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway?; A. Dewdney, D. Dibosa & V. Walsh, Post Critical Museology; E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Vulture. 26 | W. Modest & H. Mears, Museums, African Collections and Social Justice, p. 296. 27 | A. Shelton, Curating African Worlds, p. 5. Visitors or Community? as the internal critique of curatorial work and is informed by the concept of ‘source communities’; and secondly, the demand for participation and collaboration of groups regarded as excluded by the cultural sector, with the aim of advancing the democratic utilisation of cultural institutions, which is key to the work of learning and community engagement departments. It is important to separate the two discourses, because their respective contexts determine how the collaborators are addressed and invited, and which roles they are assigned in the projects. Although Shelton had already pointed out the permeability of the different roles in this community work 15 years ago, the debate today still reproduces these two discourses and the gaps between them. Wayne Modest writes about the requirement as curator to collaborate with young people, and poses a rhetorical question in his text about one of the most discussed recent collaborative projects at ethnographic museums (The Stories of the World initiative run during the London Olympics): I was especially interested in what yield could be gained by working with a group of people based around age categories as opposed to a source. Were they also a source or even a community?28 This question implies a discourse of collaborative projects, shaped by the connection to people over the history of the collections, which differs from the educational discourse on the involvement of audience groups. In a reflection on the same major project (also discussed by Bernadette Lynch29 in this publication), Morse, Macpherson and Robinson problematise, conversely, that the project layout of Stories of the World remained within a logic of youth participation, not taking sufficiently into account the political questions of ‘source community collaboration’. This led to tensions in producing an exhibition from a collaboration between the museum’s education and outreach team, youth co-curators and people with a historical connection to the origin of the objects: The main tension in the rhetoric here is around the language of youth empowerment and creativity and the use of world cultures collections, without a direct acknowledgement of the politics of working with originating communities, or reference to museum practice in this area. 30 I assume that the confluence of both collaborative approaches – the restructuring of the relationship with source communities from the curatorial discourse, and 28 | W. Modest, Co-Curating with Teenagers at the Horniman Museum, p. 100. 29 | See p. 255 ff. 30 | N. Morse, M. Macpherson & S. Robinson, Developing dialogue in co-produced exhibitions, p. 95. 277 278 Nora Landkammer the collaboration with diverse audiences from the educational discourse – is productive if they mutually interrogate one another, for both traditions involve complex problems. The focus on the collections and on the right to co-determine the institutions that characterises collaborative museology can contribute to a questioning of the often paternalistic understanding of participation in education. The tradition of “social inclusion” and “participation” are the legacy against which collaborative education must still fight to this day. In Stories of the World, Modest describes the educators’ concern that the young participants might become frustrated when confronted with tasks that are too challenging.31 He criticises the assumptions about the interests and behaviour of young people that is so widespread in museums. The danger of paternalism, when the educators think they know in advance how and why the participants should be empowered, is one of the biggest tensions inherent in collaborations which come out of the outreach tradition of including groups in the museum. For the discourse of collaborative education, it is necessary to replace the notion of ‘inviting groups to participate’ with a conception of collaborators as experts in a knowledge not present in the museum, and with a notion of the right to co-determination, as proposed in collaborative museology. Another problematic issue in collaborative education projects is their traditional positioning at the margins of the institution. Golding writes about the aforementioned collaboration with the CWWA: “[the] CWWA collaboration occurs at the margins of the main museum discourse, which left the centre of the museum unchanged”32 . The project participants’ ‘rewriting’ of the museum left intact the exhibitions’ central power of definition, the museum’s self-determination and its structures. Even when efforts exist to engage with the different audiences “from the margins to the core”,33 as Richard Sandell demands, the educational tradition of ‘community engagement’ continues to operate with a structure of centre and periphery, in which the museum integrates the communities into its projects as an ‘outside element’. As Lynch points out, within the centre/periphery structure, the museum remains in its position of power, whereas the different communities are forced into the role of “beneficiaries” who receive individual “pieces of the cake” through different projects, instead of posing the question: “whose cake is it anyway?”34 Decolonisation should concentrate on organisational development and on understanding community engagement as an all-encompassing practice for institutions.35 Thinking 31 | W. Modest, Co-Curating with Teenagers at the Horniman Museum, p. 106. 32 | V. Golding, Learning at the museum frontiers, p. 60. 33 | R. Sandell & E. Nightingale, Museums, equality and social justice. 34 | B. Lynch, Whose Cake is it Anyway?, p. 16 f. 35 | ibid., p. 22 f. Visitors or Community? the participatory aims coming from education together with a collaborative practice that directly affects the collections and the power to define them, and which implies a long-term transformation of the responsibilities for objects (as sometimes occurs in indigenous appropriations of museums), can be generally helpful for the development of ‘community engagement’. Conversely, the attention paid to the process at the expense of the product, and the expertise in ascertaining interests in group settings in education can interrogate the focus on objects that often characterises curatorial collaborative projects. The risk of the museums’ interests regarding the collection objects prevailing over the (diverse, not solely object-focused) interests of the communities, is inherent to the concept of the ‘source community’: the concept of a source is not only related to an understanding of identity which is fixated on origins, as explained above, but rather its definition also ensues from the objects in the collection. This suggests that collaboration is fundamental for the museum’s need to deal with the collection and tends to make the collaborators into ‘informants’ from whom information is obtained in a setting which retains a colonial character. Thus, Fouseki quotes one of the participants of the consultation process: “People at the museum just had a fascination about all the objects they got, ‘oh look at this object’, you know, and not thinking so much about the people who were talking in the museum.”36 The joint scrutiny of both collaborative traditions is necessary – and this is my main point – in order to reflect upon the concept of community. Neither an exclusive understanding of the communities as stakeholder groups with regard to the collection objects (as in the concept of the source community) nor addressing groups from the point of view of actual or imagined exclusion from cultural institutions (which shapes many educational projects) suit the complexity of the rights, potential interests, expertise and demands for having a say in transforming the ethnographic museum, particularly in migration societies. If the transformation of the museum is not intended to be pure “transformism”,37 in that the collaborative projects provide the harmonising evidence of participation, and instead ethnographic museums wish to become spaces of critical research, exhibitions and learning, the museum must enter into the complexity of possible communities – in relation to racism, interests, geography, occupational and social positions. It must engage the many, some36 | K. Fouseki, Community voices, curatorial choices, p. 186 f. The example refers to community consultation in the context of the exhibitions in London in 2007 in commemoration of the Prohibition of Slave Trade of 1807. It does not address projects in ethnological museums, but since it focuses on critically confronting the colonial past and on cooperating with the African and Caribbean diaspora organisations in England, it can be used to illustrate the issue at hand. 37 | N. Sternfeld, Erinnerung als Entledigung. 279 280 Nora Landkammer times overlapping and conflicting, self-defined communities in processes of learning and unlearning, both in collaborative projects and in the daily work of the educators with school classes and other groups of visitors. The Spanish educator and theorist Javier Rodrigo Montero has described this kind of work: “The museum would not be a centralising focal point of culture, not even a catalyst, but rather one more mediator within a network of diverse, different and even antagonising social agents.”38 Then it will perhaps be possible to transform the museum into a political space and into a post-museum, as envisioned by Eilean Hooper Greenhill, “where diverse groups and subgroups, cultures and subcultures may push against and permeate the allegedly unproblematic and homogeneous borders of hegemonial cultural practices”39. 38 | J. R. Montero, Experiencias de mediación crítica y trabajo en red en museos, p. 78. 39 | E. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the interpretation of visual culture, p. 140.