Other Types of Display
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This is probably the most common form of ethnographic display in the world today. A particular culture or country is selected and objects, and often contextualising information, are displayed in one case or have a special exhibition devoted to them. Sometimes the display is more limited still and shows one particular type of object from one culture or country. Recent examples of such displays in this country include:
Extract from 'Exhibiting in Practice', in M. O'Hanlon's Paradise
(p78 on)
[Field collecting and exhibiting] take place in a given context and that context (particularly fieldwork situation on the one hand, specific museum on the other) inevitably influences the image of a culture which an exhibition portrays.
There has, in fact, been a flood of such reflexive writing on museums and exhibitions since Clifford (1988:229) argued that 'it is important to resist the tendency of collections to be self-sufficient, to suppress their own historical, economic and political process of production ... Ideally the history of its own collection and display should be a visual aspect of any exhibition'. To date, however, these discussions have tended to focus more exclusively upon theoretical issues - on, for example, the nature and politics of representation - than upon the mechanics of production of specific exhibitions which, like the Wahgi bolyim house, tend to be prepared out of sight and revealed only when the process which went into the making of them have been concealed. ...
The dearth of such information is highlighted by the way that ethnographic exhibitions are sometimes reviewed. Let me take as a minor example one aspect of the review of an exhibition, held in fact at the Museum of Mankind in 1987, which included material on the religious practices of Bolivian mining communities. I take this example because it illustrates the more widespread failure of museums to convey, and of reviewers to visualise, the context in which exhibitions actually happen. Criticising the exhibition's use of a glass case format for most of the objects on display, the reviewer (Platt, 1987: 13 - 14) remarks:
What a missed opportunity! We could have entered a cavernous tunnel, stumbling on tracks driving into the darkness .. and then - incredulously - of a wicked-looking goblin amidst the block carvings before arriving at the seated effigies ... An exhibition plunged in near-darkness, carefully lit, and with adjoining 'windows' on specific topics ... Visitors could even have been offered miners' helmets and lamps on entry ...
The assumption here is that an exhibition should be like a film-set reconstructing as vividly as possible the artefacts' original context ... it is not necessarily lack of vision so much as mundane contextual factors of cost and practicality which case such opportunities to be 'missed'. Both the gallery in question and the exhibition budget were a fraction of the size necessary for so elaborate a treatment. Such factors - along with issues of safety and security ... exert an unseen influence on the form taken by exhibitions. ...
... [V]isiting any exhibition does potentially raise questions at two distinct levels. On the one hand, it may pose questions about the individual objects included in it; on the other, about the exhibition as an entity in its own right: why are some objects included but not others: why are they grouped in this way, and not that; why is one subject tackled but another ignored? ...
Artefacts added to the museum's collection - whether they come directly from the field or elsewhere - channelled through processes of fumigation, registration, labelling, conservation, photography and storage. ... Van Beek (1990), indeed, has questioned the popular metaphor which portrays museums as mausoleums, and their storage areas as 'object cemeteries', symptomatic of an arid, peculiarly Western approach to objects. He argues (1990:33), rather, that the period any objects spends in storage is not a neutral passage of time but becomes instead a 'distinct attribute of the object itself'. ...
Equally, if this cycle of storage and use in a sense creates objective time (as the intervals between exhibition), so the process of museum conservation offers to arrest time. I was struck, for example, by the questions which the museum's conservation staff asked as they worked on the Wahgi artefacts. One of the shields had been stored in a smoky house roof, only partially protected by a plastic wrapping: should the accumulated grime be removed from the shield's outer surface? The question raised the issue of what it is that an artefact is valued as embodying. Is it the shield as a perfect example of its kind, a kind of snapshot in time, taken grime-free at the outset of its career? Or do we seek, rather, to preserve the evidence of the shield's biography through time, even when (as with the grime) the evidence also begins to obscure something of the artefact's original purpose?
... it is worth reviewing the reasons for mounting an exhibition on this subject [Paradise - on Wahgi material culture] in the first place. First it presented an opportunity to exhibit the Wahgi material that was in the process of being acquired for the museum - further tangible results of the Trustees' emphasis on adding to the museum's holdings through making documented field collections rather than relying on auction-house purchases.
The second point in favour of a Wahgi exhibition was the almost complete absence elsewhere in the world of exhibitions focusing on the New Guinea Highlands. From one point of view this absence is odd. Since their 'discovery' in the 1930s, the peoples of the New Guinea Highlands have been among the most intensively studied on the globe, and data from the area has been at the forefront of anthropological debates in the past thirty years. At another level, however, the dearth of exhibitions undoubtedly reflects most museums' orientation to artefacts which are more permanent and 'collectable' than is much New Guinea Highlands material culture. ...
A further merit of such an exhibition was the opportunity it provided to the museum's educational programme to question the stereotype (reflected in many of the enquiries which ethnography museums receive) that countries such as Papua New Guinea remain largely untouched by the contemporary industrialised world. Living Arctic, an earlier Museum of Mankind exhibition, had sought to undermine the same stereotype for the indigenous peoples of northern Canada, and visitors regularly recorded their surprise in the 'comments' book kept in the exhibition at how 'up-to-date' 'they' were. There is, though, a particular need to do this in relation to Papua New Guinea, whose popular image in the West tends to be exclusively that of the last refuge of exotic practices ... The inclusion in the exhibition of a full range of manufactured goods used by the Wahgi should challenge this admittedly evergreen stereotype. Accompanying photographs and text will make the equally important complementary point that the incorporation of Western goods does not determine how they are used and is not the simple index of acculturation it is sometimes taken to be.
... It was in this context that, in the late 1980s, I proposed a large exhibition on the Wahgi to go into one of the three double [temporary exhibitions] galleries. ... Large exhibitions of this kind are not cheap to produce professionally. Precise costs depend upon the degree of elaboration of the exhibition but often run to several hundred pounds per square metre of exhibition space. Museums are also highly labour-intensive institutions in which staff salaries absorb the major proportion of their running costs. In common with many other publicly-funded bodies over the course of the 1980s, financial provision for museums has not kept pace with staff costs (Wilson, 1989:95). Increasingly, elaborate exhibitions of the kind I had proposed require supplementary sponsorship.
... In the period since initially conceiving the exhibition the use of naively naturalistic reconstructions has, in fact, increasingly come to be questioned. Reconstructions were introduced into many ethnographic museums from the late 1960s as a more imaginative and less alienating alternative to displaying artefacts in glass cases: the Museum of Mankind, as it happens, was a pioneer in this respect. However, innovations in their turn inevitably become the starting point for fresh departures. While reconstructed environments and mannequins remain popular with many, to others they have come to seem doubly inauthentic. Not only are they not 'the real thing', but in so dramatically supplying artefacts with their 'original' context they tend to exclude the other contexts in which the artefacts have figured, including their present one as museum objects (Durrans 1988:162). This limitation to reconstruction as a technique brings to mind Baxandall's (1991:41) comment that 'exhibitors cannot represent cultures': all they can do, he suggests, is to set up a non-misleading and stimulating arena in which the maker of artefacts, the exhibitor's intentions and the visitor all come together. Such a perspective does not exclude the use of reconstructions. It simply suggests that their use should be undercut by some acknowledgement of their artificial status ...
... one further defining limit should be mentioned at the outset. This is simply the stock of artefacts available for inclusion in the exhibition. The Wahgi field collection numbers some 900 items in total. It is particularly strong in netbags, shields and shell ornaments ... Though financial constraints did not allow this deficiency to be made good through museum loans from abroad, it have been able to draw upon an extensive photographic collection to illustrate their use. ...
The most appropriate category of artefact to display directly after trade-store and beer is a selection of the shields discussed in the previous chapter. ... As with beer, it will be necessary to avoid reinforcing stereotypes of 'tribal warriors' 'naturally' prone to fighting. In addition to including the point ... that shield use today partly reflects an attempt to prevent warfare from escalating, this section should include examples of the long bamboo poles on which thousands of pounds worth of Papuan New Guinean currency are arrayed for handing over in battle compensation payments. The accompanying text and large photographs will cover successful peace-making ceremonies ...