The article reproduced below is a critique of the exhibition 'Bolivian Worlds', held at the British Museum, Museum of Mankind in 1987. The article first appeared as an article in Anthropology Today, 3 (4) pp 13 - 16.
The author is Research Fellow at the Institute of Latin American Studies (University of London), and is at present working with the ESRC/CNRS-funded Franco-British research project (1985-1987) on 'State control and social response in the Andes, 16th-20th centuries'.
What exactly is the purpose of museums?, I asked myself again as I left the gloriously-named Museum of Mankind last Thursday. I remembered how the National Ethnographic Museum in La Paz had set up exhibitions in which Bolivian Indian groups address their compatriots with the exclusive 'we', while elsewhere the indigenous past is treated as a common fund of regional or national identity. Again, the recent CADW celebrations at Caerleon's Legionary Fortress in South Wales had shown the Welsh telling the British about 'our Roman past': here one tacit aim at least was the uphill task of educating the English. But the exhibitions I had glimpsed in London (partially excepting The Hidden Peoples of the Amazon, clearly the best-funded) had left me painfully aware of cultural distance, of the disconnected facets of that human crystal which the metropolis holds in its Invisible Hand, rather than of any real universe of human communicative possibilities. The impression was not corrected by Eduardo Paolozzi's bricolage-games in the Lost Magic Kingdoms exhibition, amidst claims that 'it was from Paris that I learned everything about treating 'primitive art' seriously' (note the claim of 'seriousness', in spite of Malcolm McLeod's disclaimer in A.T. June 1987). Here the aim appears to be the appropriation of mysterious meaning-fragments from afar for new aesthetic purposes defined in the metropolis.
Several bits of Mankind are currently on offer at Burlington Gardens for 'serious' consideration by the metropolitan palate. They include the real-life construction of an Indonesian ricebarn, Nigerian Faces of the Dead, and the Arab World; but it was the funding of Bolivian Worlds by Lufthansa, and of Madagascar, Island of the Ancestors by Air Madagascar (both airlines clearly interested in boosting their tourist bookings to each country), that reminded me of the uncomfortable continuum between ethnography and the travel-brochure ... Could I persuade myself that these artefacts were in fact to be perceived as 'ambassadors' of their peoples to the English capital of Britain?
The main 'ambassadors' at the Bolivian Worlds exhibition certainly enjoy well-established credentials in Bolivian literature and ethnography. They evoke the depths of the San Josa tin-mines at Oruro ('Oruro, Folkloric Capital of Bolivia', as the tourist posters say): the Andean 'Devil of the Mineshaft' (his painted phallus here decorously covered for the British Public) and his temptress consort, a weaving sculpted over her naked shoulders and breasts. In an accompanying text (indigenously headed 'The Culture of Poverty'), the Devil is identified as supay (a generic name for devilish beings in Bolivia), and his mate is left anonymous except for a confusing reference to the Virgin of the Adit ... Both are seated stonily, side by side, in an inset grotto, each with a pair of encrusted horns reaching to the enclosing roof. They occupy the centre of the viewer's semicircular tour, and they gave me a thrill, though the space allotted to them is small - just a diabolic roadshrine, staring out enigmatically into the spotlights.
Most of the exhibition is in traditional 'glass-case' style, interspersed with photos and lengthy passages of small print. What a missed opportunity! We could have entered a cavernous tunnel, stumbling on tracks driving into the darkness, caught a glimpse of ore-laden trucks, a cage and a mineshaft, of the barretero at the rockface, and then - incredulously - of a wicked-looking goblin amidst the block-cavings before arriving at the seated effigies ... An exhibition plunged in near-darkness, carefully lit, and with adjoining 'windows' on specific topics and collateral activities in Oruro city and the countryside outside, drawing the spectator in instead of holding him at arm's length ... Visitors could even have been offered miners' helmets and lamps on entry, as at Big Pit Mining Museum, Blaenavon! - though there, of course, the miners have the advantage of a real coalmine (now producing memories, more marketable today than coal) as their museum/mausoleum. Surely something better could have been devised at Burlington Gardens, even though funding for Bolivian World is obviously lower - in spite of Lufthansa - than it is for the Amazonian rainforest (whose opening atmospherics had me wanting to escape straight back to the Garden of Eden).
The exhibition is cramped and lacks clear thematic direction; but it is overpowering for the visual richness and suggestive fascination of the Andean artefacts, packed into their glass cases like tubers in an overflowing market-place. Sometimes this impression is ethnographically correct - the wealth of (unidentified) substances in the empirical medicine store, for example; but many other objects are also badly glossed, and some are treated almost as curiosities (an Aymara staff of authority - where from? how is it used? what does it mean?; a 'brass bell on a wooden braid' - presumably a lead-llama's cencerro?; scallop shells and a starfish 'for restoring a frightened soul to its body' - should not the connection between death and the Western ocean have been made explicit in this landlocked country/ etc.) Was the idea to make up for the lack of any strong setting or coherent exposition by piling up as much as possible of the mute material accumulated by the museum's buyers (often of fine intrinsic quality, as with the Carnival masks or the painted wooden effigies)? - to provide an exotic backdrop to the 'ambassadorial couple', rather than articulating them expressively within their world? Or are the articulations supposed to be supplied by the viewer? Either way, the attempt verges on collapsing into a brilliant travel-poster, for the clustered objects tend to sit and stare back at one: they rarely 'speak'.
The expository chaos is general. Some items closely related to the devilish couple are tucked away with barely a clue to help us. I think, for example, of the little pachatata cross embedded in a pyramid: pachatata, 'earthfather', is another name for the Devil, just as his mate may be called pachamama; and the Calvary Cross has phallic connotations, which accounts for its association with pachatata ... All this relates to the complex problem of the Christianization process, which must recur constantly to the mind of any viewer - in vain, for none of it is explained. Again, an early text-reference to St James as the lightning-patron of healers and diviners is left in the air until right at the end, where a fine devoción (illustrated in A.T. June 1987) may, with luck, twang a semi-conscious cord in the viewer - but then why should it, when no clear relation has been established between the Saint's shamanic functions and the rule of the mining devils? More probably this vital Saint shall appear to the uninformed spectator as just another mute 'extra' in the pageant.
At the outset, one theme appears which could have helped articulate a better exhibition. On a panel, flanked (for some reason) by a colour photograph of the Sajama and Payanchata volcanic groups on the Western rim of the Altiplano, we read a Bolivian miner's words: 'Just to earn something [the miner] faces death, he becomes joined with his own destiny' - a splendid phrase which is unfortunately lost within a longer quotation, and is not picked up again. Then we zoom straight into six small stills of Oruro, mining capital of the Oruro Department (not 'State' as the blurb says, the Federal model has yet to be adopted in Bolivia). Some of these - the empirical medicine store, the devil-dancer from Oruro's Carnival, the Virgin of the Adit - suggest thematic threads which reappear in one or other of the glass cases, though never in relation to an easily perceivable whole; but the ore-crusher (quimbalete) does not prefigure any interest in the technical side of tin-production, much less in the actual experience of mining-work, beyond the brief (and over-selective) glimpse in the grotto.
This lack of interest in the productive process (apart from an informative sequence on the construction of a Carnival mask) probably explains the most stunning absence in the presentation. History is an essential tool for understanding the way in which pre-Colombian and Christian elements jostle together in highland Bolivia, recording themselves quickly to express shifting patterns of power; yet here, not only is the conventional 'historical introduction' reduced to a panel of eclectic small print just before we get into the exhibition proper, but all reference to the shattering effect on Bolivian mining-life of the 1985 collapse of world tin-prices is quite simply omitted. By 1987 the 32,000 workers of the nationalized mining company (COMIBOL), which includes the San Josa mine, have been reduced to 7,000. As a social and political force the miners and their way of life have been gravely weakened. The capital-flows which made possible these subterranean 'work-temples' (a deeper historical vision would have related them to their labyrinthine predecessor at Chavim) have been cut off. Yet the unwary visitor to Burlington Gardens will leave serenely oblivious of all this, coming down gently from the high-wire exaltation of these Bolivian 'Magic Worlds' via the soothing safety-net of a Virgin from a London bazaar (with superimposed artwork, we are disarmingly informed, by one Michael Paraie ...).
Why? If Hidden Peoples of the Amazon has been accused of politico-economic insensitivity, in spite of much space dedicated to the impact of deforestation and ecological crisis on Amazonian culture (see Malcolm McLeod's comments in A.T. June 1987), what words can do justice to this incredible silence in Bolivian Worlds on the latest havoc wrought by Western market anarchy (and Third World export-dependency models) among Bolivian miners? The omission is scandalous - and it put an end to my last attempts at sustaining any 'ambassadorial' illusion about what was happening. Apart from anything else, when the mines close their devils receive no more offerings. No, this exhibition contains many beautiful things (including an important myth-variant at its heart on the origins of the battle between the Devil and the Virgin), and will no doubt provide another 'Lost Magic World' for London-based artists to exercise their creative imaginations on for years to come; but it is, on any 'serious' analysis, underfunded, confused, and politically irresponsible. The importance of the Southern Andes within the 'deep identity' of the South American continent, and their vital contribution to the development of American and world civilization as a whole, makes one hope for a major Andean exhibition at the Museum (with a sense of time-depth, and ideas drawn from the protagonists themselves) to overshadow the memory of this touristic trip.