On the Anthropology of Museums

by

Elizabeth Bishop

American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt

Copyright © 2000 by Elizabeth Bishop, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. Copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the editors are notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.

Review of:

Boswell, David and Evans, Jessica Representing the Nation: A Reader/ Histories, Heritage, and Museums . London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

1. Ostensibly a textbook for students in masters' in museum studies programs, this volume packs some powerful contemporary theory inside an ostensibly professionally oriented wrapper. Representing the Nation: A Reader, an edited collection, groups twenty-one articles into four parts to tell how cultural hegemony became institutionalized in museums. Be forewarned: this is some exciting stuff in a plain wrapper.

2. David Boswell and Jessica Evans prepared this volume for use in the Open University Masters in Social Sciences program. Others may very well find it useful in supplements to modern history courses, political science courses, and courses in the anthropology of museums. As a museum studies textbook, the reader provides alternate paths into the profession. Some of the most compelling points of entry resonate against political culture, writ large.

3. An undergraduate history seminar could use this reader to draw students quickly beyond mere knowledge and appreciation of the past. This edited volume's varied critical perspectives propel undergraduate students beyond reverence for the past and mastery of its material artifacts. Undergraduate students could find Raphael Samuel's article on "Resurrectionism" the beginning of an aware and critical engagement with the institutions that define and reify national experiences.

4. Two of the books' four sections, "Museums as classificatory systems and their prehistories," and "Museums and cultural management," place museum management firmly in the construction of knowledge, as well as the construction of cultural identity. The other two sections, "Culture, community, and the nation," and "Representing the past as heritage and its consumption," develop the implicit and explicit messages embedded in nineteenth century galleries, museums, and exhibitions.

5. Carol Duncan's article on Paris' Louvre and London's National Gallery develops the book's central theme around the role of European state formation in the foundation of metropolitan museums, and the transfer of connoisseurship to the ascribed needs of public audiences. Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge's contribution on India introduce the exhibition's role in cultural imperialism. Just as Duncan approaches museums as "monuments to the new bourgeois state as it was emerging in the age of democratic revolutions" (p. 304), Appadurai and Breckenridge identify museums as tied up with transnational ideologies of development, citizenship, and cosmopolitanism (p. 405).

6. For particularly ambitious and outgoing museum studies graduate students, this reader serves as a basis for apprehending Douglas Crimp's approach to Michel Foucault, as Tony Bennett's article "The Exhibitionary Complex" introduces. Advanced students may use the reader as a bridge to Crimp's On the Museum's Ruins, with its suggestions that a transformation of the organization of knowledge occurs with the formation of new institutions of power. Their further consideration might encompass Foucault's analysis in the Archeology of Knowledge, which chooses to pass over engaging with the speaking subject who exercises sovereign freedom in order to engage with implicit, invisible forms of authority.

7. This said, this reader provides a welcome supplement to mid-level political science courses, where students' ideas frequently drown in a sea of jargon. Representing the Nation's readings would grant students the ability to assign subjectivity and agency in the construction of national identity. For advanced undergraduate students of political science, the volume pairs nicely with John Hutchinson and Anthony Smith's widely used edited volume Nationalism, the empirical approach of the one supporting the theoretical approaches contained in the other. Hutchinson's assertions about the role of cultural nationalism can draw on Representing the Nation's examples of specific museums in specific national formation efforts.

8. Finally, this volume would prove useful in upper level undergraduate and introductory level graduate programs in the anthropology of public material culture. Robert Rydell's article on the Chicago World's Columbian Exhibition places the nineteenth-century anthropological mission in the context of institutional funding and the ethnological knowledge of the collected object as a means toward self-knowledge. Current institutions of higher education are in a position to develop such critical perspectives among their students. The Council for Museum Anthropology reports 34 institutions having a museum training course or program appropriate for anthropology students (http://www.nmnh.si.edu/cma/survey.html) any of which may consider adopting this edited volume as a seminar text for first year graduate students.

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