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Moving Beyond the Museum's Walls Alaka Wali Museums are about collecting, defining and displaying heritage. Although in recent years, science centers, children’s discovery zones and other destination sites have proliferated, museums that house collections of objects still predominate the institutional landscape. Since the early 1990s, as part of the on-going critique of anthropological practice, these collections- based museums have come under intense scrutiny both from scholars in museum studies fields and activists who contest the very existence of museums and their modes of shaping the interpretation of heritage. Although this critique has been well documented, relatively little has been written about the on-going changes in museum practice that the critique has generated.
Representation
Since the late 1980s, there have also been numerous exhibits, such as the Burke Museum’s Pacific Voices exhibit, that have privileged “first voice” interpretations, giving people from a particular heritage the opportunity to interpret that heritage as they see fit. Even art museums, although they have hardly been subject to the same degree of criticism as natural history or anthropology museums, have mounted displays based on consultation with indigenous artists. This has only been true though for exhibits of “non-Western” artists—typically African or indigenous Americans. Art historians have yet to consult about the heritage of Western art in making displays. History museums have also been very innovative. The Lower East Side Tenement Museum of New York City, which opened in 1994, has restored the apartments of dwellers of a historic tenement on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, but uses the heritage of these people to connect visitors and New York City residents to contemporary concerns of affordable housing, single parenthood and living conditions in present-day tenements. The opening in 2004 of the long-awaited National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) represents one culmination of the national and global trend toward a more open museum practice. The NMAI, under founding director Richard West Jr, a Cheyenne peace chief, is forthright in its embrace of first-voice interpretation of objects and heritage. The opening ceremonies in September 2004 brought together over 20,000 people from indigenous America—from Patagonia to the Arctic—in a stunning manifestation of the museum’s credo: “We are still here.” In Detroit, the Museum of African-American History, similarly, presents an African-American centered perspective on interpretation of the rich and diverse heritage of Africans in the North American Diaspora. The New Zealand Museum Te Papa Tongarewa incorporates bicultural principals into every aspect, from governance and administration to exhibition and public programming. In fact, throughout the postcolonial world, museums are now being used to reinterpret heritage, ancestry and national culture. In urban America, “ethnic” or single-heritage-based museums, cultural centers and historical societies persist or are created, even as the ethnic communities themselves are evermore geographically dispersed. Chicago has over 100 such institutions, and new ones are formed every year. Last year, for example, the Cambodian Association of Illinois opened a new museum and the first US memorial to the killing fields. Of course, this trend itself is now subject to critique for its slide into essentialism and neglect of mixed constructions of identity. Repatriation The Field Museum, in anticipation of NAGPRA, adopted its own repatriation policy and took advantage of grants from the National Park Service to invite representatives from different native groups to study the collections in preparation for making their requests for repatriation. The Field Museum’s anthropology department also removed most sacred objects from display and covered up many sacred objects in storage. Only people from the affiliated groups or people given permission by the group are allowed to view these objects. Members of the group, if they so desire, can treat the objects in ways that are ceremonially appropriate. Constraints Ironically, the very existence of collections is a constraint because they are static forms. Making them come alive, revealing their complexities as transmitters of multiple heritages and poly-vocalizing them requires a major commitment of time and resources. Yet, since the late 1990s, museums, along with other cultural institutions, have experienced economic difficulties and as a result have pulled back from taking on risky projects and opted for “safer,” supposedly “blockbuster” style exhibits to boost attendance. Use of objects in exhibits has been gradually diminishing to achieve a more “experiential” ambiance.
For those of us working in museums, this has meant thinking harder about how to meet our responsibilities toward the people whose heritage we hold and toward the diverse publics who are our constituents. What to do? Actively Engaging the Public We have also formed a partnership with 22 ethnic or place-based museums, cultural centers and historical societies to offer a program that uses cross-cultural comparison to deepen understanding of patterns of similarity and difference. This Cultural Connections Program has also provided a space where these institutions—which are highly varied in size, capacity and mission—can explore mutual interests, understand the basis for their differences, forge alliances and begin to affect Chicago’s cultural landscape and future heritage. Since 2000, CCUC has also worked very closely with the Office of Environmental Conservation Programs at the Field Museum to incorporate programs of community-based conservation. Protected areas for wildlife conservation in tropical forest areas of Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador have already been implemented. While CCUC has had only limited access to representing these efforts through exhibits or programs within the museum, we are increasingly turning to web-based media for disseminating the stories and experiences of people struggling to maintain vibrantly different senses of self and to create and re-create relationships between their pasts and their futures. By choosing to move beyond the museum’s walls, we are attempting to come to terms with the heritage of our museum. Dilemmas abound but we hope that in this small experimental space, creative strategies for building new practices can continue to flourish. Alaka Wali is the John Nuveen Curator in Anthropology and director of the Center for Cultural Understanding and Change at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.
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