Museums and communities -The politics of public culture

7 Consequently the distinction between “serious” and “popular” culture that we in Europe and North America tend to make is not particularly relevant for Indian [r]

MUSEUMS AND COMMUNITIES

The Politics of Public Culture

Christine Mullen Kreamer,

and Steven D Lavine

MUSEUMS AND

Edited by

ivan Karp,

Christine Mullen Kreamer,

and Steven D Lavine

The Politics

of Public Culture

Smithsonian Institution Press Washington and London

COMMUNITIES

C op yrig ht © 1992 by Sm ithsonian Institution

Portions of chapter 3 first appeared, in different form, as “The Multicultural Paradigm," reprinted from High Performance magazine, 1641 18th Street, Santa Monica, CA 9 0 4 0 4 , vol 12, no 3, Fall 1989, and “Acculturation vs Frontieriza- tion,” Visions 3 , no 4 (1 98 9 ), and are reproduced herewith permission

Chapter 1 1 copyright © 1 9 9 2 by the Chinatown History Museum

Chapter 17 copyright © 1 9 9 2 by Fath Davis Ruffins

All other rights reserved

Designed by Linda McKnight

Edited by Susan Warga

Production editing by Rebecca Browning

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Museums and communities : the politics of public culture / edited by Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer, and Steven D Lavine

p cm

Includes bibliographical references

ISBN 1- 56098-164-4 (cloth).— ISBN 1 - 5 6 0 9 8 - 189-x (paper)

1 Museums— Planning— Congresses 2 Public relations— Museums— Con­gresses 3 Museum techniques— Congresses I Karp, Ivan II Kreamer, Chris­tine Mullen III Lavine, Steven, 1 9 4 7 -

A M 5 M 9 2 8 1992

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

Manufactured in the United States of America

5 4 3 2 1

96 95 94 93 92

col he paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Mate­rials Z 3 9 4 8 - 1 9 8 4

For permission to reproduce individual illustrations appearing in this book, please correspond directly with the owners of the works, as listed in the captions The Smithsonian Institution Press does not retain reproduction rights for these illustra­tions or maintain a file of addresses for photo sources

On the cover and title page: Exterior view of the Grand Hall of the Canadian Museum of Civilization, depicting the melting glaciers at the end of the Ice Age Photo by Stephen Alsford, courtesy o f the Canadian Museum of Civilization

P A R T I :

Contents

Introduction: Museums and Communities: T h e

C H A P T E R 4: Festivals and the Creation of

Public Culture: Whose

Chang e and Challenge: Museums

Ec o m us e um Project 3 2 7

N A N C Y J F U L L E R

P A R T 3: D e f i n i n g C o m m u n i t i e s T h r o u g h E x h i b i t i n g a n d

C o l l e c t i n g 3 6 7

C H R I S T I N E M U L L E N K R E A M E R

C H A P T E R 13: T h e Rites o f the Tribe: American

J A C K K U G E L M A S S

C H A P T E R 14: A Distorted M ir r o r : T h e

Exhibition o f the H erb er t Ward

M A R Y J O A R N O L D I

C H A P T E R 1 5 : A li7 and M aka 'ainana: T h e

Representation o f H a w ai ia ns in Museums at H o m e and

C H A P T E R 17: Mytho s, Mem ory , and History:

African American Preservation Efforts, 1 8 2 0 - 1 9 9 0 5 0 6

FATH DAVI S R U F F I N S

C o nt r ib u to r s 6 1 2

sented at a conference entitled M u ­seums and Communities, held at the International Center o f the Smithsonian Institution 2 1 - 2 3 March 1990 Muse ums and C o m m u ­nities was the second o f two conferences on the presentation and interpretation o f cultural diversity in museums Proceedings o f the first conference appear in Ivan Karp and Steven D Lavine, eds., E x ­

ington, D C : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1 9 9 1 ) Both conferences were sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and, at the Smithso­nian, by the International Directorate, the Offices o f the Assistant Secretaries for Museu ms and Research, and the National Museum of Natural History and its Department o f Anthropology

At the Rockefeller Foundation, Alberta Arthurs, director for arts and humanities, encouraged this project from its inception; Ellen Buchwalter, Rose Marie M in o r e , Carol Bowen, and Tomas Ybarra- Frausto provided patient logistical assistance and advice throughout

At the Smithsonian Institution, Ro be r t M c C Adams, Francine Berkowitz, David Challinor, Za hav a Doering, Tom Freudenheim, Elaine Heu man n Gurian, Christine Helms, Robe rt H o ff m a nn , Jo h n Reinhart, and Ros s Simons supported the project We are grateful to Robe rt M c C Adams for delivering the opening remarks at the confer­

ix

X A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S

ence We thank Cheryl LaBerge, director of the Office o f Conference Services, Karen H a n s o n , and Sheri Price for their support throughout the event Robe rt Leopold watched over the conference and coordi- nated the preparation o f the manuscript

T h r o u g h o u t this project we have benefited from the advice o f scholars and museum professionals, many of whom participated in planning sessions as well as in the conference In addition to the authors themselves, these include M a r ia Acosta-Colon, Donal d Cos- entino, Z a h a v a Doering, Michael Fischer, Hilde Hein, M a r y J a n e Hewitt, Corinne Kratz, Hillel Levine, J o a n n e Malatesta Davidoff, Roger M a n d le , Steve Prystupa, Dor an Ross, Betsy Q u ic k , An thony Seeger, Allen Sekula, J i m Sims, Kathy Dwyer Southern, Ro w e na Stew­art, and Michael Watts

R e b e c c a Br owning, of the Smithsonian Institution Press, guided the preparation o f this bo ok , and Susan Warga, more co-editor than copy editor, graciously edited the individual contributions, critiqued drafts o f the introductions, and tried to keep us intellectually honest.Ivan Karp wishes to thank the present and past directors o f the Natio nal M use um o f Natural History, Frank Talbot and R o b e r t

H o f f m a n n , and the present and past chairs o f the Depa rtme nt of Anthropology, Donald Ortner and Adrienne Kaeppler, for enabling this project to go forward He would also like to thank Cory Krat z for

c o m m e n t in g on each and every draft o f the two introductions he wrote and no t sparing him her criticism

Christine Mullen Kreamer would like to thank her colleagues at the August 1 9 8 9 Salzburg seminar on Museums and C o m m u ni ty for their insights and support for this project In addition, she would like

to th an k her husband, Ross G Kreamer, for his unflagging enthusiasm

in this and all other endeavors

Steven D Lavine gratefully acknowledges Judy M c G in n is o f the California Institute o f the Arts for her careful attention to this project

in the midst o f myriad other responsibilities; Alberta Arthurs for her example and encouragement to think through the realistic possibilities

of institutional change; and above all his w7ife, Ja ne t Sternburg, who too k time from her o w n writing and film activities to stimulate, share, and help refine his thinking on this subject, as on so many others

Introduction:

Museums and Communities: The Politics

of Public Culture

I V A N K A R P

In 1988 and 1 9 9 0 the Rockefeller F o u n ­

dation and the Smithsonian Institution convened two conferences charged with examining how museums exhibit cul­

tures and relate to the multiple communities in which they are situ- ated T his volume is composed o f papers from the second conference

In the first conference, published as E xhibiting Cultures: T he Poetics

sity is collected, exhibited, and managed Ex amples ranged from c o s ­

mopolitan art museums through world’s fairs and folklife festivals

T he essays were often cross-cultural, discussing topics such as the

assumptions that organize Japanese exhibiting and the decolonization

o f the museum system in a “new nation,” Z im b a b w e M a n y o f the

papers were concerned with exhibition contents and their associated

politics In the introduction we described exhibitions as political

arenas in which definitions of identity and culture are asserted and

contested

T h e discussion o f the poetics and politics o f museum display

illustrated how the selection o f knowledge and the presentation o f

ideas and images are enacted within a power system T h e sources o f

power are derived from the capacity o f cultural institutions to classify

and define peoples and societies This is the power to represent: to

reproduce structures o f belief and experience through which cultural

2 I V A N K A R P

po we r does not wor k in the same way for all types o f museums Art museums privilege visual experience, while museums o f cultural his­tory and natural history produce exhibitions with more narrative co n­tent, and festivals claim to embody experience T he se differences are

an integral part o f the poetics of exhibiting cultures, which was e x a m ­ined in the first volume T h e papers related differences in how exhib i­tions co m m un ic a te their messages to the political subtexts o f the e x ­hibiting process

Differences amon g museums are not without their political impli­cations Communities attempting to gain access to museums connect

to different types of museums in distinct ways Some African Ameri­can artists, for example, are suspicious o f attempts to deconstruct the aesthetic canon T h e y want a place in art museums, not a world in which art museums no longer assert claims of excellence.2 Natural- history and ethnographic museums present different problems Afri­can Am erican activists rightly argue that while these museums have not excluded them, they have denigrated African achievements Here the co m m un it y demand is not for a place in an accepted scheme, but for revision o f the scheme itself.3

equally political questions of how museums relate to the changing

co nfi gurations o f communities that surround them, ranging from the

ne ig hb o rh o od to the nation-state, from groups defined in ethnic and racial terms to social classes Only one section of that b o o k , co ntain­ing essays about the exhibition Hispanic Art in the United States:

T h ir ty C o nt e m po r ar y Painters and Sculptors, confronted the question

o f relations between museums and communities as a maj or dimension

o f the politics o f cultural institutions.4 T h e essays in that section

e xa m in ed the issues that arise when a mainstream institution wishes to

ex hibit the art o f a minority community T h e debate over this exhibi­tion raised fundamental questions about who controls the exhibition and collection processes, what happens when works o f art from o ut­side ma instream traditions are assimilated to the cano n o f dominant

c o m m u ni ti e s, and, finally, whose interests the multicultural activities

o f centrally placed museums actually serve

N o n e o f these questions was highlighted in the first conference

T h e debates showed us, however, that the original title for our second

co nf e re nc e, Museums and T heir Communities, rested on the false assumption that the politics of museums and communities had easy solutions We wanted to hold a conference on the changing ways

Museums and Communities 3

museums manage relations with communities, but the act o f posses­sion inserted in our original title unconsciously reproduced the acquis­itive relationship we challenged in the first volume’s section on His ­panic Art in the United States

T h e discussions and interventions from the floor at both co nfe r­ences taught us that while exhibitions and collections were contested, they were not nearly so contested as relationships amon g diverse m u ­seums and diverse communities Furthermore, the contests that swirl around exhibitions and collections have increasingly beco me contests over relations between museums and communities Inspect recent is­sues o f any maj or museum journal, such as M useum N ew s. Its c o n ­tents include such hot issues as the repatriation o f Native American materials, the proper relationship between artists and e xhi bi tor s, and the sometimes conflicting responsibilities o f boards of trustees to the public and to the mission and mandate o f the institution T h is is the stuff out of which current museum debates are fashioned.5

T he se debates take their coloration not from the specific activities

o f muse ums— “collecting, preserving, studying, interpreting, and e x ­hibiting ’6— but from the way in which these activities relate to the other institutions and communities that comprise the social order

Wh en people enter museums they do not leave their cultures and identities in the co a tr o o m N o r do they respond passively to museum displays 1 hey interpret museum exhibitions through their prior e x p e ­riences and through the culturally learned beliefs, values, and percep­tual skills that they gain through membership in multiple c o m m u ­nities W h a t Stephen Weil says of the United Slates is true for the world: “While American museums may be exem pt from ta x es , they are in no way exempt from history.”7

Every society can be seen as a constantly changing mosa ic o f multiple communities and organizations Individual identities and e x ­periences never derive entirely from single segments o f society— from merely one o f the communities out o f which the complex and c h a n g ­ing social order is made An individual can in the space o f a short time move from emphasizing the part o f his or her identity that come s from membership in an ethnic community to highlighting his or her partici­pation in a formal organization such as a professional society and then

b ack to being an ethnic-community member again We experience these identities not as all-encompassing entities but through specific social events: encounters and social settings where identities are made relevant by the people participating in them Com mun ities are often thought of as things and given thinglike names such as “the Irish,” “the

4 I V A N K A R P

blacks,” “the Jews,” “the WASPs.” But they are actually experienced as encounters in which cultures, identities, and skills are acquired and used T h e se settings can involve communal groups as small and inti­mate as the nuclear family or as large and institutional as the conven­tion o f a professional society People form their primary attachments and learn to be members o f society in these settings, which can be referred to collectively as the institutions of civil society.

M u se u m s and communities mak e up only a portion of civil soci­ety, the co m pl ex o f social entities in which we act out our lives and through which we fashion our identity Civil society is a perennial topic in the social sciences and political theory Periodically a “crisis in civil society” emerges in discourse and thinking about society, gener­ally in periods o f social upheaval T h e best recent discussions o f civil society have been inspired by the way Antonio Gramsci defines the functional differences between civil society and political society For

G ra m sci the institutions of political society exercise coercion and c o n ­trol, while civil society creates hegemony through the production of cultural and moral systems that legitimate the existing social order

F ro m this point o f view, the cultural parallel to coercion and control is heg emo nic relations If Gramsci were writing in the 1 9 9 0 s , I believe that he would think o f civil society both as a site for the production of hegemony, that is, as an intellectual and moral co m m itm en t to the way a society is ordered and governed, and as a site for contesting assertions a bo ut who has the right to rule and to define the different identities in society This is how museums are perceived in this vol­ume: as places for defining who people are and how they should act and as places for challenging those definitions

T h e key point here is that the institutions o f civil society can be thought a bo ut separately from the agencies of government specifically charged with social control, such as the police and the courts Taking the police as an example, one would say that when police act in their capacity as officers o f the law, investigating crime, maintaining order, and so o n, they are acting as part o f political society Wh e n the police form a professional association, they are acting as members o f civil society, concerned with promoting the identities and interests o f police officers W hil e some museums in the United States may be part of

lo cal, state, or national governments, they are not part o f political society; they remain agents o f civil society

Civil society includes such diverse forms o f organization as fami­lies, voluntary associations, ethnic groups and associations, educa­

Museums and Communities 5

tional organizations, and professional societies These are the social apparatuses responsible for providing the arenas and co nt ex ts in which people define, debate, and contest their identities and produce and reproduce their living circumstances, their beliefs and values, and ultimately their social order.8

E c o n o m i c activities, social life, and cultural affairs are all c o n ­structed within civil society T h e movements o f persons from one identity and/or institution to ano th er connect these forms o f organiza­tion and their practices Institutional identities often overlap O u r talk continually makes connections a mo ng the institutions o f civil society Some on e comes not just from a family but from an “old English family or an O r t h o d o x Jewish family.'’ A person is not simply a lawyer but a “Harvard lawyer” or a “feminist lawyer.” Art can be called “mainstream,” “black,” “Chinese,” “modernist,” or “p r i m i t i v e ”

T h e last characterization, for ex amp le, suggests (among other things) that the artist making the object lacks formal training in an institution

of civil society known as an art school or academy.9

Sociologists, anthropologists, and observers o f society from the time o f Alexis de Tocqueville, Karl M a r x , and M a x Weber to the present have argued that the strength and resilience o f a social order resides in the capacity o f civil society to aid in shaping the direction o f change Civil society is the crucible in which citizenship is forged As integral parts o f civil society, museums often justify their existence on the grounds that they play a m a j o r role in expressing, understanding, developing, and preserving the objects, values, and knowledge that civil society values and on which it depends Arguments a bo ut the social significance o f museums assert that museums can provide ser­vices that other institutions can no t As repositories o f knowledge, value, and taste, museums educate, refine, or produce social c o m m i t ­ments beyond those that can be produced in ordinary educational and civic institutions For example, museums are sometimes held up as the antidote to the failure o f families to engage in moral ed ucation— or so the argument goes Underlying this line o f thinking is the assertion that museums play a unique role in civil society.10

Th ere is another side to civil society It is not merely the benign agent o f social reproduction and education Its institutions can either support or resist definitions imposed by the more coercive organs o f the state Furthermore, elements o f civil society need not fit amiably with one another Class, ethnic, and racial conflict can be as c h a r a c ­teristic o f civil society as harmonious social reproduction C o m m u ­

6 I V A N K A R P

nities are as often thought o f as being separate and unequal as they are tolerated and respected in civil society Henry Ford, for example, set

up the Ford English School in D ea rb o rn , Michigan,

and compelled his foreign employees to attend it before and after

w o r k t wo days a wee k T h e first thing [they] learned in the Ford

s chool was how to say, “I am a good American.” Later the students acted o ut a p a n t o m i m e which admirably symbolized the spirit o f the enterprise In this p e r f o rm a nc e a great melting pot (labeled as such)

o ccupied the middle o f the stage A long column o f immigrant stu­dents descended into the pot from backs tage, clad in outlandish garb and flaunting signs procl aiming their fatherlands Simultaneously

f rom either side o f the pot another stream o f men emerged, each prosperously dressed in identical suits o f clothes and each carrying a little American f l a g 11

T h is is surely an image o f civil society that asserts the value of some

co mm uni tie s over others and strives to define the direction o f cultural change M o r e than a mosaic of communities and institutions, civil society is a stage, an arena in which values are asserted and attempts at legitimation made and contested

If civil society is a stage, then it has a script that the actors follow

or at least use as a basis for improvising their performances 1 his script contains the social ideas o f a society, the set o f beliefs, assump­tions, and feelings in terms o f which people judge one another and which they sometimes use to guide their actions Social ideas often set

up hierarchies of moral values in which communities and institutions are interpreted Social ideas embody notions people have about their differences and similarities, and these are organized in terms o f which

is good and which bad , which superior and which inferior As signifi­cant elements in civil society, museums articulate social ideas They define relations with communities whether they intend to or not f he processes o f makin g meaning and o f negotiating and debating iden­tity— localized in institutions such as museums— provide the unwrit­ten, ever-changing constitution of civil society T h e social ideas o f civil society are articulated and experienced through striving for consensus and struggling against the imposition o f identity Museums are one o f

a nu mbe r o f settings for these conflicting but simultaneously operating processes, which m a k e social ideas understandable, but not always legitimate

T h e very nature o f museums as repositories for knowledge and

o bje cts o f value and visual interest makes them key institutions in the

Museums and Communities 7

production o f social ideas in many nations M us e um collections and activities are intimately tied to ideas about art, science, taste, and heritage Hence they are bound up with assertions a b o u t wha t is central or peripheral, valued or useless, kno wn or to be discovered, essential to identity or marginal T h e history o f debates a b o u t identity and the mosaic o f communities that could or should constitute civil society is the central issue to which the presentations and discussions

in the Museums and Communities conference returned C on ference participants considered how museums could a c c o m m o d a t e multiple communities in their programs and why this process is critical to the production o f a civil society that acc o m m od at e s diversity

T h e essays in this volume are divided into three parts Part 1, “On Civil Society and Social Identity,” inquires into ho w people make and experience identity in civil society and how identity is manifested in forms o f public culture ranging from museums in India to festivals in Minne sot a T h e essays argue that the making o f identity and its m an i­festations are really just two ways o f lo oking at one process T h e present moment in North American and Eu ro p ea n mus eum s, which is characterized by experiments with mus eum -co m mu nit y relations, is described in part 2 , “Audience, Ow ne rs hip , and Authority: Designing Relations Between Museums and C o m m u n i t i e s ” T h i s mo me nt emerges out o f a specific historical co nt ex t in the United States and,

we suspect, elsewhere Part 3 o f this volume, “Defining Co m m u ni ti es

Th ro ug h Exhibiting and Collecting,” shows that the interrogation o f cultural diversity is not a new concern for museums, and that the process o f asserting and questioning can be seen most clearly by l o o k ­ing at the multiple ways the same objects are made to stand for differ­ent identities; for example, at different places and at different times the same object can be a piece o f art, a sign o f a culture’s place in an evolutionary hierarchy, a sign o f heritage, or a m a rk o f oppression

T h e essays examine how identity is asserted in ex hi bi tio ns , how such assertions change over time and are affected by specific relations among museums and communities, and finally ho w the audience itself can assert its own identity as part of its experience o f exhibitions

M o s t o f the essays in the volume concern cases from the United States U.S museum history shares many features in c o m m o n with that o f other industrialized nations But what happens over the long term in Europe is often compressed in the United States As a result, the historical changes and circumstances that have produced the cur­rent concern about the relationship between museums and c o m m u ­

Harris also demonstrates the degree to which the perceptions of museums have changed along with the institutions themselves In the

1 9 5 0 s , Harris tells us, cultural historians wrote histories o f museums that were “self-confident and optimistic.” “Almost any institution that managed to survive was admired, a tribute to sacrificing founders bent on co mb in ing the democratic genius with obvious needs for en­lightenment, recreation, standardization, or reform.” 13 T h e trium- phalist history they told was a story of American modernization, a narrative o f how cultural institutions helped to create the new forms

o f persons needed in industrial society

C urr en t writing on museums takes a mor e critical appr oa ch Left- wing points o f view hold that cultural institutions such as museums can be perceived as instruments of the elite that are used to assert class-based claims to interpret and control “high” culture At the same time, attempts to democratize them and open them up have been critiqued from the right because these processes are thought to pro­mote values that degrade the great works contained in m u s e u m s 14

O n e factor that helped museums resist change has been what Harris describes as “a professional reluctance to see how museums were linked functionally with other units concerned with market share.” T h i s attitude operated primarily at the ideological level o f self­definition, as Harris has shown elsewhere.15 Actually, museums have always look ed over their shoulders, albeit reluctantly, and been influ­enced by competing institutions o f public culture, ranging from the

w o rl d’s fair to the department store and, more recently, the theme park While this is not a line of influence that Harris traces, one could also add that museums have had their own influences on more c o m ­mercial ventures: witness the way in which “total resort hotels” have been designed to attract clients by mimicking the cultural authority of the m u s e u m 16

Interestingly enough, the degradation argument, now perceived

as a critique from the radical right outside o f museums, was an

atti-Museums and Communities 9

rude that flourished inside museums before World War I Harris de­scribes this earlier time as a period o f “authoritarian condes ce nsio n” in museums, when upper classes presumed to speak for others T hi s was

a period in which museum authorities “acknowledged the values o f popularity, but not its priority.”

In the 19 2 0 s and 1 9 3 0 s museums became more interested in diverse audiences and sought to design environments better able to educate them N o one raised questions about how collections were made, ab out how they reinforced elite taste and standards, or about the claims to knowledge embodied by the curator or asserted through the authority o f the exhibition Harris refers to this time as the period

o f “authoritarian experimentalism ” 17

Increasing concern over commercial and financial considerations had produced by the 1 9 6 0 s another phase of museum history, which occured primarily in art museums T his was a period in which m u ­seums underwent a vast exp an si on , using market surveys to help them capture as large a share o f the public’s attention (and money) as possi­ble Harris sees museums as “absorbed by issues o f reputation and promo tio n and [as a result] making some better a cc o m m o d a ti o n to multicultural constituencies” that in general are poorly represented in museum staffs, collections, and exhibitions I would add that the blockbuster art exhibition, which draws as large a public as possible into the museum (but usually for only that one time) is also c h a r a c ­teristic o f w'hat Harris aptly terms “an age o f populist deference,” his third phase o f museum history As art museums go, so goes the m u ­

seum world Few major museums of any genre— natural history, cul

tural history, or science and technology— feel able to survive without public attention

T h e impetus for museums to change their attitudes has often been

e co n o m ic , with members o f the museum community arguing that their survival was at stake T h e means of change have been social; m a j o r redefinitions of the audience were undertaken, and museums increas­ingly asserted that they were essential components o f the social order American art museums often justified their existence in the nineteenth century on the grounds that they exposed the urban working classes to objects that embodied “civilized” values T h e result, museums claimed, was to make better citizens out o f working men and

w o m e n 18

But the claims museums make inevitably put them in a vulnerable position Museums assert that they can compensate for the failures o f other cultural institutions, such as schools, to perform the w o r k o f

10 I V A N K A R P

social reproduction These assertions define the museum as one o f the central institutions o f civil society; they also make museums answer- able for how well they educate and represent the citizens w ho com po se society In other words, the very roles that museums desire to play in civil society leave them open to accusations that they are responsible for features of the social order such as pervasive discrimination and injustice As definitions of inclusion and exclusion become more nego­tiable, museums are asked to explain their history o f exclusion, and to fashion inclusive ways of going about their w o rk

This brings us to what Harris identifies as the current phase of museum history He points out that “deference was one thing, power another.” N ow , he argues, we live in an age o f “existential scrutiny, one in which the institution stands in an unprecedented and often troublesome relationship to its previous sense o f mission.” For Harris this is a period in which cultural deconstruction dominates the m u ­seum playing field, as elsewhere “T h r o u g h o u t our entire culture the canons o f taste and the assumptions o f scholarship have been chal­lenged and challenged from within T h e r e is no reason to believe that museums can be immune from this any more than universities, li­braries, or medical schools.” 19

Perhaps Harris seems to me t o o confident about the end o f m u ­seum history and too sure about how the contests will conclude History does not necessarily proceed in a straight line N o r are all claims to authority necessarily bad Fu rt he rm o re , the challenges to authority made on behalf o f communities can be surprising, even disturbing, and come at museums from unexpected directions T h e secretary of the Smithsonian Institution was recently “startled,” according to the newspapers, when he was asked while giving testi­mony to the Senate to justify the N ati on al M u s e u m o f American Art’s revisionist exhibition T h e West as A m er ic a, which treated portraits

of frontier experience as ideological tr a c t s 20 In this instance an estab­lishment attempt to set the historical record straight (as that museum saw it) was challenged by elected representatives o f the American citizenry

An acute moral dilemma is raised by the acknowledgement that museums have responsibilities to comm uni ties W h a t happens when one community makes a request that will inevitably oppress another community? W h o actually speaks for a community? Are all demands equally valid? If not, what procedure should be set in place to adjudi­cate among th em ?21

T h e Smithsonian experience provides just a single instance of

Museums and Communities I I

what is be coming a m a j o r issue for museums: how to manage the increasingly political relations between museums and communities Repatriation is yet another case where communities are taking an intense interest in how museums conduct their affairs N o r is this just

a domestic issue in the United States Museums with collections de­rived from overseas will soon have to justify their retention of the collections and their exhibition of them Natural-history museums may be no more exempt than art museums Biological type specimens are usually found in museums in the capital cities o f wealthy, indus­trialized countries Yet they are equally valuable to the scientific and museum communities o f the states or countries in which they were acquired

Harris is more than correct to assert that the relations between museums and audiences have also taken on more overtly political overtones, and that these relations take the form o f questioning the claims to truth and beauty made by museums and their staff T h e new relationship is not simply one in which museums make assertions and members o f the audience challenge them Claims to authority are countered by parallel claims made by different museum constituen­cies A good example involves the fall 1 9 9 0 meeting o f the Smithso­nian Institution Council, during which they considered problems of cultural diversity On the very day that the council was meeting in the

N ational Muse um of Natural History, tours o f the mu se um’s exhibi­tions were being conducted by antievolutionist religious groups, who were enacting in the ex hibit halls of the museum a diversity different from the kind the council was considering in another wing o f the same

building But the claim to possess authoritative knowledge was no less apparent

Political contests have the peculiar tendency of overflowing the boundaries that are designed to contain them It is one thing for museums to try to broaden their audiences, and another for the public

to claim the museum T h e museum world tends to think o f art mu­seums as the site of controversy, but museums such as the National Museum o f Natural History have had their moments as well The claims made on the museum by different publics are instructive Reli­gious groups resist the assertions o f science in the natural-history halls, while racial and minority groups resist the assertions about culture made in the anthropology halls

T h e Smithsonian Institution has its apparatus for generating in­clusion: it conducts audience surveys and has an outreach program, and the education departments o f its museums schedule many c o m m u ­

12 I V A N K A R P

nity events In spite of these efforts, different segments of the public

de mand more Presently they claim the right to assert their c o m m u ­nities’ point o f view in the essential activities o f the museums Stephen Weil is right: museums are not exempt from history, and the c o m m u ­nities that have been eliminated from museums or denigrated by them now insist that museums rectify their errors— errors that can be viewed in out-of-date exhibit halls

T h i s is a historic m o m e nt , not a unique one It is a time in which audiences are claiming their rights as diverse communities T h e cur­rent period o f “existential scrutiny” described by Neil Harris is as much a response of the museumgoing public to changing museum practice as museum practice has been a response to policy changes within museums T h e nature of what museums do, and their claims to

a particular status in civil society, only create the possibility for the situation they now' co nfront Changes in civil and political society outside museums often provide the actual impetus for community requests and demands to museums It can n ot be accidental that in the United States communities are asking museums to ac co m m od a te themselves to cultural diversity at the same time as the courts are reducing the scope o f affirmative action programs Changes in politi­cal society are channeling the battle for equal opportunity into the cultural sphere o f civil society

Suddenly, communities that have not previously been thought

a bo ut as communities have sprung uninvited into museum delibera­tions N at io na l museums may have to answer even to communities in other nations These newly emergent communities raise questions that museums often do not have the experience to answer M any o f the essays in this volume ask the fundamental questions o f how museum experience becomes a community issue, and how museums a c c o m m o ­date co mmunities T h e museum experience is supposed to be intensely private and personally transforming Communities are the setting in which the skills for appreciating museums are acquired, but m u s e um s’ audiences belong to many communities, often simultaneously Part o f the politics o f museum-community relations involves the politics o f asserting and legitimating claims to identity People speak on beh alf o f collectivities about an experience that they also think o f as essentially private and individual

T h e best way to think about the changing relations between m u ­seums and communities is to think about how the au dien ce, a passive entity, be co me s the com m un ity, an active agent T his is a process in which self-appointed or delegated representatives o f a co m m un it y

Museums and Communities I 3

contest a museum’s perspective by articulating a community point o f view T h is is not so new a phenomenon T h o m a s C r o w ’s important study Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-C entury Pans describes how the early salons became scenes o f contestation, where different actors fought over who was to represent the public At the same time

as contemporaries described the audience as being composed o f indi­vidual fragments, the audience also was assigned unitary opinions and

a single will C ro w sees this paradox as part of a political contest:

We can arrive at empirical knowledge concerning the salon

au dien ce because an audience is by definition an additive p h e n o m e ­non [that is, it can be counted] But what transforms an audience into a public, that is, a commonality with a legitimate role to play in justifying artistic practice and setting value on the products o f that practice? T h e public is a representation o f the significant totality [of the audience] by and for someone A public appears, with a shape and a will, via the various claims made to represent it; and when sufficient members o f an audience c ome to believe in one or anot her

o f these representations, the public can become an important art- historical act or 22

A community can be one form of what C ro w here calls a “public,” a

“c o m m on al ity ” for which someone presumes to speak M a n y o f the essays in this volume describe contests between communities and m u ­seums over who is to speak on behalf of and to the commonality Speaking for and speaking to are often comb ine d, since the right to speak often depends on the creation o f community consciousness and

a sense o f identity and mission This is the only w;ay in which a public can become an actor

Some of the most telling accounts in this volume describe claims

to the right to speak on behalf o f a community J a c k Kugelmass’s penetrating account in part 3 of American Jewish tours to former Nazi concentration camps in Poland shows that there are m a jo r differences between individual visits and organized tours T h e tours are c o n ­trolled by people who serve as guides and interpreters In this guise they act out the political meanings of the visit to the cam ps, interpret the past and contemporary Poland to the tourists, and attempt to fashion a consistent sense o f identity and opinion in their clients T he y seek to be the representatives of a public as much as the critics o f the salon did in the eighteenth-century context described by C r o w

T h i s involves a process of paring down multiple voices and c o m ­plex identities into relatively clear identities and messages It often

14 I V A N K A R P

involves challenges to accepted and sanctioned interpretations and wisdom, and often impassioned claims, counterclaims, and denials about who has the right to articulate a point o f view Vera Z o l b e r g ’s account in part 1 o f “contentious c o m m un it ie s” o f artists and m u ­seums, for example, describes the disputes between museums and artists about how to interpret the art displayed in museums

N o paper describes this political process better than Fath Davis Ruffins’s history in part 3 o f African American preservation efforts She tells a complex story o f resistance to hegemonic interpretations of African American life, the desire to tell an insider’s story, competing claims over who has the right to represent African American expe ri­ence, and finally, the development o f a professional cadre of inter­preters among curators and museum professionals W h a t Ruffins de­scribes is a movement from outsider status vis-a-vis the museum to insider status within museums It has had the consequence o f putting former outsiders in the position o f resisting the claims o f other m e m ­bers o f African American communities to speak on behalf o f “the community.” T h e political contests over who has the right to speak for whom are an inevitable result o f the emergence o f new communities that make claims on museums T his is h o w publics are created

T h e acknowledgement by museums o f the existence o f publics entails the idea that these entities should be asked about their own opinions and interests and about the effects o f exhibitions on their sense o f who they are Inevitably we will discover that audiences have multiple opinions and multiple identities As a result, the audience becomes not a single comm ona li ty but many commonalities, called communities Fhe process C r o w describes for eighteenth-century Paris has its parallels with Harris’s history o f museums in twentieth-century America On one side are the museums, w ho query their audience about its beliefs, opinions, and desires; on the other side is the ch a n g ­ing mosaic o f communities, which seek to influence and control how' museums act, what they ex am in e, wha t they represent, and how they represent it

T his political process takes place in civil society For c o m m u ­nities, the struggle over identity is vital to their existence: they often feel that they live or die to the degree that they are accorded or denied social space Rut museums are learning that members of communities are active agents T h e y can resist museum definitions o f space and even redefine spaces in subversive w a y s 23 Because museums are drawn into the process o f according or denying identity to c o m m u ­nities, they become embroiled in c o m m u n i ti e s’ struggles for public

Museums and Communities I 5

recognition T h e intensity o f these debates in museums are directly related to their prominence in civil society As privileged agents of civil society, museums have a fundamental obligation to take sides in the struggle over identity (and indeed cannot avoid it) In fact, this strug­gle is essential to the life o f civil society T h e essays in this volume recognize the situation o f museums and seek to interpret and explain the role o f museums in civil society at the same time as they also seek

to describe how museums are currently experimenting with models for living in civil society

N O T E S

1 See Ivan Karp and Steven D Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics

an d Politics o f M useum D isplay (Washington, D C : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1 9 9 1 )

2 Patricia Failing, “Black Artists Today: A Case o f Excl usion, ” A R T news,

Mar 1 9 8 9 , 1 2 4 - 3 1

3 T h i s issue has recently crystallized around literature on the Egyptian roots

o f African and Western civilizations For a summary o f the current positions

on this debate, see J oy ce Mercer, “Nile Valley Scholars Bring New Light and Cont roversy to African Studies,” Issues in H igher E ducation 7 , no 2 6 ( 1 9 9 1 ) ,

1, 1 2 - 1 6

4 See the following essays in Karp and Lavine, Exhibiting Cultures: Carol

D u n c a n , “Art Mus eums and the Ritual o f Citizenship” ; J a n e Livingston and

J o h n Beardsley, “T h e Poetics and Politics o f Hispanic Art: A Ne w Perspec­tive” ; and Tomas Y b a r r a - F r a u s t o , “T h e C h i ca n o M o v e m e n t / T h e Movement

o f C h i ca n o Art.”

5 Museum professionals reading this passage may experience deja vu. We have indeed been here before In 1971 Stephen Weil delivered an address to the annual meeting o f the Western Museums Association in which he de­scribed “the multiple crises in our museums.” He examined three crises, in­volving money, power, and identity T h e fiscal crisis is obvious and perennial Crises o f power crystallized in struggles a mon g trustees, staff, artists, and communities Crises o f identity had to do not only with the future shape of the museum and its role as a definer o f culture, but with the museum as an arena

in which “forces contend to determine museum identity.” Reflecting on his analyses in 1 9 8 3 , Weil saw himself as having been t oo caught up in current debate and t oo “millenarian.” In 1 9 9 2 it is possible that he would think that the 1 9 7 0 s have c om e around onc e again, for it now appears that his 1971 address needs little revision today See Stephen E Weil, Beauty an d the Beast:

On M useum s, A rt, the Law , an d the M arket (Washington, D C : Smithsonian Institution Press, 1 9 8 3 )

16 I V A N K A R P

6 T h i s list o f museum goals is taken from Jo s ep h Veatch N o bl e, “Museum

M a n i fe st o ,” M useum N ew s 4 8 , no 8 ( 1 9 7 0 ) , 1 6 - 2 0 It is cited in Weil, Beauty

an d the B east, 7 1

7 See Weil, Beauty an d the Beast, 3

8 See Ant onio Gr am sc i , Selections fr o m the Prison N o te b o o k s o f A ntonio

G ram sci, ed and trans Quinton Hoare and Geoffr ey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1 9 7 1 ) For an excellent discussion o f how different a ut ho rs ’ use o f the concept o f civil society compares to G r a m s c i ’s

f ormul at io n, see N orber to Bobbi o, “Gramsci and the Conception o f Civil Society,” in Chantal Mouff e, ed., G ram sci an d M arxist T heory (London: Rout ledge and Kegan Paul, 1 97 1)

9 See Ivan K ar p, “High and Low Revisited,” A m erican Art 5 , no 3 ( 1 9 9 1 ) ,

2 - 7 , where I describe how producers o f “low” art tend to be divided into two categories: the popular, savvy artist versus the naive, unconscious amateur

T h i s is a way o f distinguishing between c omme rcial art and so-called folk or primitive art It creates a false opposition between trained artists and s pon ta ­neous artists T h e result is that so-called folk and primitive artists are pre­sented as if they had not painstakingly acquired their skills or as if they had no predecessors

10 See the fall 1 9 9 0 issue o f N ew Perspectives Quarterly, “T h e Stupidifica- tion o f America, ” in which conservatives, liberals, and radicals debate the causes o f the declining standards o f American educat ion Th is is just the sort

o f debat e in which museums increasingly insert themselves, and in terms o f which they justify their existence This line o f reasoning has unexpected c o n ­sequences M u s eu m professionals are uncertain whether museums should be repositories o f objects or conduits o f information T h e very cl aims that m u ­seums increasingly make open them up to this sort o f debate

11 J o h n H i g h a m , Strangers in the Land (New York: Atheneum, 1 9 7 3 ) , 2 4 4 ,

2 4 7 - 4 8

1 2 Neil Harri s, “Polling for Opinion,” M useum N ew s, S e pt / Oc t 1 9 9 0 , 4 6 -

5 3

13 Ibid , 9 7

14 F or left-wing critiques, see, for example, C a ro l Duncan and Alan Wallach,

“T h e Universal Survey Museum, ” Art History 3 , no 4 ( 1 9 8 0 ) , 4 4 8 - 6 9 , and

La wr enc e Lavi ne, H ig h b ro w /L o w b ro w : The E m ergen ce o f Cultural H ier­ archy in A m erica (Cambridge, M a ss : Harvard University Press, 1 98 8 ) For the critical right-wing position, see the arts writing found in such neoconser- vative journal s as The N ew Criterion.

1 5 Neil Ha rri s, Cultural Excursions: M arketing A ppetites an d Cultural Tastes in M odern A m erica (Chicago: University o f C hi ca go Press, 1 990 )

16 Ivan K a r p and Cori nne Kratz, “T h e Fate o f T i p p o o ’s Ti ge r: A Critical

A cc o u n t o f Et hno gra phi c Display” (Los Angeles: Getty Center for the History

o f Art and the Humanit ies, 1 9 91 )

Museums and Communities I 7

17 Ha rr is , “Polling for O pi ni on ”

18 See Lavine, H ig h b r o w /L o w b r o w for a spirited account o f h o w elites appropriated culture from the lower classes in nineteenth-century America Stephen Weil points out that although the Met ropol it an Mus eum o f Art was started to make reproductions o f European and classical art available to Ne w York’s wor king class, it was closed on Sunday “out o f deference for the reli­gious sensibilities o f members o f its board” (Weil, Beauty an d the Beast, 4)

19 Har ri s , “Polling for O pi ni on ”

20 “ V i ew o f West Raises Hack les in Congress” read the headline in the

Philadelphia Inquirer ( 1 6 J u n e 1 9 9 1 )

21 T h e s e are not hypothetical questions Each o f them is raised by the current debate over the repatriation o f Native American materials T h er e are cases in which t wo competing tribal groups have claimed the same objects T h e r e are instances in which requests have been made in the name o f religious sensi­bilities to exclude people from access to collections on the grounds o f gender All o f these raise painful moral dilemmas and also produce situations that could conceivably engender resistance to lawful and morally correct requests from Native American communit ies Civil society is never wholly co he re nt , and responsible persons are often forced to take difficult stands

22 T h o m a s C r o w , Painting an d Public Life in Eighteenth-C entury Paris ( New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 9 8 5 ) , 5

2 3 T h e best account o f “everyday forms o f resistance” is J a m e s S cot t,

W eapons o j the Weak: E veryday Form s o f Peasant Resistance ( N e w Haven: Yale University Press, 198 5)

P A R T I

On Civil Society and Social Identity

I V A N K A R P

broad perspective on museum- community relations T h e essays

in this section examine how iden­tity is manifested and experienced in public culture, which includes settings such as museums and fairs T h e examples include commercial

nity festivals in M in ne s ot a , and art museums in New York City Peo­ple co me to these events and places to be edified, educated, and

entertained, but these settings are also sites for the play o f identity Art, history, and ethnography displays, even natural-history exhib i­tions, are all involved in defining the identities o f communities— or in denying them identity Every one o f these museum events and places are part of public culture, which can be shown to take on a large part

o f the responsibility o f defining civil society.1

Public culture provides some relatively formal settings for defini­tions and experiences o f identities, but public culture is only one fo­rum in which people experience who they are There are others

Identities are made and experienced in settings that differ from the so­cial spaces o f public culture in multiple ways These other settings can include the intimacy o f the family or the sacred quality of religious

19

20 V A N K A R P

worship N o matter where or when identities are defined, they are ac­ted out in ways that often contradict official definitions o f a social group’s identity T h e way people perform their social roles shows more about how they feel about their identity th a n does the content of the roles themselves And the way people pe rform their roles and e x ­press their individual feelings demonstrates that more than one iden­tity enters into their actions People know themselves to have more identities than they are allowed in a single setting, and these identities often overlap and even contradict one another

T h e essays in part 1 discuss four aspects o f the process o f identity formation as these emerge in mu se um -co m m u ni ty relations: (1) iden­tities arc defined by the content and form o f public-culture events such as exhibitions and performances; (2) identities are subjectively experienced by people participating in public culture, often in ways conditioned by their other identities and experiences; (3) expressions

o f identities can contain multiple and co nt ra dic tor y assertions— that

is, there can be more than one message in a single expression or per­formance o f identity— and the same is true for the experience of iden­tities; and (4) identities are rarely, if ever, pure and uncontaminated by other identities, because they are usually fabricated from a mix o f elements

T h e re are many types o f identities othe r than community identi­ties, but this is a b o o k devoted to museums and communities N o n e ­theless, community identities ca n n o t be discussed without first

considering identity in general and the relationship between c o m m u ­nity identities and personal identities in particular Even museum set­tings relate personal and community identities: consider T h o m a s

C r o w ’s analysis o f how “the public” ca me t o be defined in eighteenth- century Paris (discussed in the introduction to this volume) As C r o w argues, the experience o f visiting an exhibition and judging its m a te ­rials is often intensely personal But museum professionals or cultural activists who try to explain and acc o u nt for the ways audiences e x p e ­rience and respond to exhibitions usually invoke collective entities:

“She’s L a t in o ”; “H e ’s middle-class” ; “T h e y ’re children.” We believe that communities exist within us in some way, and that their values a f ­fect our perceptions and structure our ow n persona! values Hence, the individual experience o f viewing a muse um exhibition is also o r g a ­nized by memberships in (that is, identification with) communities

T his belief results at least in part from the ways personal identi­ties and community identities interact Personal identities are co m pl ex

Civil Society and Social Identity 2 1

entities that are fashioned from comm unity identities as well as other identities and experiences Similarly, community identities emerge out

o f personal identities T he re cannot be a community if there are no in­dividuals who think o f themselves as members o f it W h a t Benedict Anderson says about nations, that they are im agined communities, is true o f all co m m un it ie s 2 In order for communities to exist in time and space, they must be imagined and represented by individuals as significant co mponents o f their identities

Identities are not easily known or clearly experienced phenom­ena Personhood, M ey e r Fortes observes, poses problems that indi­viduals have to solve.3 T he se include formulating answers to the questions of how we k n o w ourselves to be the persons we are sup­posed to be and how we display our personhood These are questions frequently asked in the literature on personhood in anthropology and philosophy They arise out of the distinction that is comm onl y made between the person (the socially defined aspect of the self) and the in­dividual (the uniquely experienced side o f the self) T h u s personhood

is a Janus-faced phe nome non Individuals strive to be persons, at­tempting to fulfill ex pe ctations they have co me to hold o f what it is to play a role or be a m e m b e r of a community Ideals are often invoked

in this process, and museums are clearly places where representations

o f such ideals are displayed T he se ideals comm uni cate messages

a bo ut how persons should be defined; they set up models for behavior

or display modes o f being that are to be avoided

In many cultural displays, ideals about the person are often as­serted tacitly, derived from implicit contrasts between the viewers and makers o f exhibitions, on the one hand, and the persons and cultures displayed in the e xhi bitions, on the other.4 We might call this the ideo­logical aspect o f identity making However, people think o f them­selves as being more than the sum total o f their social roles and

personhood They also define themselves in terms of “those particular contingencies which m ak e each o f us T rather than a copy or replica

o f somebody else.” 5 T h i s is the subjective aspect of identity T he per­son and the individual are always simultaneously cooperating and at war with each other T h e re is a parallel here with museum displays, which are one o f the sites in which identities are made: here museums and communities simultaneously cooperate and do battle

All o f this (and more) enters into that element o f m us eum -co m­munity relations that revolves around the play o f identity Muse- umgoers usually co m e to exhibitions with expectations about what

22 I V A N K A R P

they will find in museums; often they are disappointed at not finding their expectations realized or infuriated at seeing w hat they had hoped would be omitted

Ex hibition makers have parallel problems The y too have identi­ties; these include their professional standing and co m m itm en ts they have to serve the community Exh ibitio ns portray their m a k e r s’ sense

o f how the world is defined T h is sense is not unrelated to the role museums play as archives o f knowledge and objects Responsible m u ­seum personnel identify with the professional and curatorial obliga­tions associated with this museum role, and seek to portray the social world in terms that ho n o r their sense of purpose and identity Yet they are also members o f com m uni tie s, and bring to their world personal and communal histories that often relate to and interact with the his­tories o f the communities that compose the constituency o f their m u ­seums This co mplex situation creates a postmodern problem for museums First, they must fashion exhibitions that can present multi­ple perspectives on the world T h e n they must ensure that those per­spectives respect but also are critical o f not only museums’ o wn

worldview but also the woridview o f the people whose lives, culture, knowledge, and objects they are exhibiting T h is will require e xh ib i­tions that encompass all aspects o f cultural experience, both the typi­cal (a culture or c o m m u n i ty ’s ideas o f what it is to be a person, to be a

m e m b er o f that culture or community) and the unique (what it is to be

an individual in that culture or community and have experiences that are different from a no th er ’s ) 6

T h e essays collected in this section all address these central issues

o f identity formation So me focus 0 11 personhood and identity, some

o n exhibitions, and some on both Appadurai and Breckenridge’s es­say shows how colonial displays in Indian museums are interpreted by postcolonial Indian audiences in ways that go far beyond the images presented in the exhibitions themselves While colonial messages and postcolonial interpretations engage and contradict each other, the multiplicity o f identities that are asserted and experienced in museum exhibitions are affected by a set o f interpretive processes that derive less from museums themselves than from other aspects o f public cul­ture in India today

Appadurai and Breckenridge argue that public culture is c h a n g ­ing rapidly in India It is becomin g a site for the production o f a n a ­tional culture that is particularly important for a society in which the other institutions o f civil society, such as schools, are often in direct

Civil Society and Social Identity 23

competition with the state Aspects of public culture in postcolonial India such as television, films, advertising, commercial expositions, and tourism developed not sequentially but simultaneously, and in a world in which physical distance is rarely any longer a barrier to inter­action among different ethnic and national groups As a result, an aesthetic o f viewing has emerged that is at once transnational and In­dian Appadurai and Breckenridge argue that the Indian public ap­plies this aesthetic, rather than different sets o f interpretive skills, to these different forms o f public c ulture 7 Consequently the distinction between “serious” and “popular” culture that we in Europe and North America tend to make is not particularly relevant for Indian audi­ences’ experience o f museum ex hi bi tio ns 8 In a sense Appadurai and Breckenridge’s vision o f the Indian public is George M a c D o n a l d ’s nightmare vision o f the North American future— one in which the public can no t distinguish between the educational messages created

by exhibition makers and the trivializations of culture perpetrated by the popular media in the name o f commercialization (see his essay in part 2) Yet there are differences, for Appadurai and Breckenridge be­lieve that what is im portant in India is the very way in which the var­ious forms o f public culture affect one another and the way they combine local, national, and transnational elements T h e result of these conflicting and contradictory identities and histories is a truly hybrid cultural form ati on But the existence of this hybrid should not

be shocking, for all cultural formations are hybrid Appadurai and Breckenridge’s achievement is to show the historical contexts and pat­terns o f mixing that make Indian public culture what it is today

Ed mu nd Barry G a it h e r ’s essay also examines the multiple nature

o f identities in museums His is a passionate plea to acknowledge the role museums can play in the reconstruction o f civil society But he as­serts that we must also acknowledge the complex nature o f peoples’ identities and, by implication, the histories of their communities G a i ­ther rejects simple distinctions between assimilation and separatism; for exa mp le, people have the capacity to be both African American and American at the same time T h e problem is not how people

choose identities, but the checkered history o f how those identities have been manifested in civil society and exhibited in museums

Ja m es Baldwin elegantly describes how African Americans have subjectively experienced the public denial of their identity (which G a i­ther calls “silences” ) in a way that illuminates the suspicion many Afri­can Americans and other minority peoples feel toward museums:

24 I V A N K A R P

It is a very grave matter to be forced to imitate a people for whom

you k n o w — which is the price o f your performance and survival—

you do not exist It is hard to imitate a people whose exist ence ap­

pears, mainly, to be made tolerable by their bottomless gratitude

t hat they are not, thank heaven, y ou 9

T h e silences do more than simply deny African American existence In exhib it io ns that celebrate cultural achievement, the very fact that the achievements o f people o f color are ignored introduces implicit mes­sages abo ut their worth A hierarchy o f cultures is erected, in which those worth examining are separated from those that deserve to be ig­nored Racial imagery and ethnocentrism can be co mmunicated by

w ha t is not exhibited as well as by what is Large, historically impor­tan t mus eum s, such as the universal survey art museums, now have to face the consequences o f their history o f silence Co mmu nities are o f ­ten no longer content to remain passive recipients o f museum activ­ities At the very least they demand to be included in the celebration o f cultural achievements

Hierarchical assertions o f cultural differences tell a story that has

a disturbing history with contemporary ramifications for all m u ­

seums, even those that do not have older exhibit halls badly needing revision African American and other ethnic museums have had to e n­gage in tasks that involve more than simply filling in the silences of

o th er museums’ exhibitions and educational activities As Fath Davis

R u ff in s’s essay in part 3 on African American preservation activities

de mo nst ra tes , these museums have been involved in c o m b a t in g racist imagery and in reconstructing self-identities and knowledge about heritage and achievements that have become attenuated in many c o m ­munities Gait her supports J o h n Kina rd’s call for the museum to act

as an agent o f redemption in society (see Ruffins’s essay) But Gaither believes that not only minority communities will be redeemed by m i­nority museums T h e challenges minority museums present to larger,

mo re well established museums will inevitably result in those mu­seums changing the stories they tell and reaching out to wider audi­ences T h e y will not only fill in the silences about m a jo r segments o f Amer ica n civil society and world cultures; they will also cor rec t the messages they deliver Let us hope so A m aj or reason for Gait her’s

op timism is that he believes minority museums will create a new cadre

o f museumgoers wh o will demand more from the older museums As the comp os ition o f museums’ constituencies changes, so will the n a ­ture o f museums’ participation in civil society Gaither’s hopes also

Civil Society and Social Identity 25

rest upon his belief in the capacity o f people to make the effort to identify with what they see in museums— if they are given the chance

to do so and if the exhibition provides support and encouragement This identification will be only the beginning; curiosity and a desire for knowledge will follow, and museums are the natural entities for satisfying these desires, thus producing more knowledgeable citizens.Gait he r advocates a positive role for museums in society He e n ­visions museums as crucibles for forging citizens who see themselves

as part o f civil society, as important members o f a valid social order Museums have the responsibility to compensate for the failure of other institutions, such as schools, to show members of minority groups their stake in society Museums can play this role because they are spaces for the play o f identities, and the multiple nature o f those identities can be made part of museums’ exhibitions and programs.For Gaither, museums that serve communities with multiple identi­ties, such as African American museums, are now important locations for innovative practices that will show the way for mainstream mu ­seums to e xpa nd their constituencies and reform their exhibiting and educational programs

Guille rmo Gomez -Pen a defines identities in a way that goes be­yond thinking a bo ut them as multiple and complex Assertions about identity may attempt analytically to disentangle and separate out

co mponents o f a particular co mm uni ty’s identity and try to show how people shift from one identity to another, but this interpretation ig­nores the perspective from the margins T h e making of identities is as intrinsically “syncretic, diverse, and complex as the fractured realities

we are trying to define." Gomez-Pena writes from the border, that is, from the point of view o f people who continuously melt do wn,

merge, and am al ga m ate seemingly incommensurate senses o f identity and points o f view He calls for the acknowledgement of a new

“world topography,” which implies a way o f seeing that acknowledges that the margins are actually the center, that the center is continually shifting, and that it is the task o f the artist to bring out the hybrid and dynamic nature o f these fractured realities

Go me z- Pen a appears to be taking a postmodern position— to be arguing that the goal o f the artist should be not to reproduce the d o m ­inant aesthetic but to resist it, and to celebrate the particular stories through which people make spaces in a world that seems determined

to organize everything for t h e m 10 Yet Gomez-Pena denies any affinity with postmodernism: “Postmodernism is a crumbled conceptual ar­chitecture, and we are tired o f walking amon g someone else’s ruins.”

26 I V A N K A R P

He desires to replace postmodernist critique with “experimental tech­niques and practices to intervene directly in the w o r l d ” T h is is a political position that recognizes that today ’s margin may be to m o r ­

r o w ’s center, and that to be at the center is to reproduce the structure

o f hegemony His are subtle but penetrating observations Gome z- Pena acknowledges that power is always a danger and can be fought only with politics All hegemonic assertions, which are embedded in definitions o f the canon and criteria o f taste, must be fought with

“creative appropriation, expro priation , and subversion o f dominant cultural forms.”

Assertions o f cultural centrality are also assertions o f hegemony for Gomez-Pena T h e claim that any artist is centered in his or her cul­ture, often made about Latino and African American artists, is a hege­monic claim that seeks to prevent the search for new content and for

an art that is against “monoculturalism.” Such claims implicitly define

a canon against which other w orks o f art or forms o f culture will be judged T h e result is that the hierarchical structure o f evaluations set

up by dominant cultures is reproduced in minority and subordinate cultures Gomez-Pena counsels resistance “To step outside one’s cul­ture equals to walk outside o f the law,” he says, “but it also means to maintain one’s dignity outside the law.” T hi s is an ideal, not a possi­bility W h a t Gomez-Pena envisions is a stance that does not blindly accept the world as being defined by the tenets o f any single culture Such dominating practices have no place on the border

For museums, this implies that exhibitions that claim to present true and authentic pictures o f peoples and their cultures— that a t­tempt to define what is essentially African or American or English or

M e x i c a n — are hegemonic practices that reproduce the values and privileges o f the center G om ez -P ena denies all claims to the privileged possession o f any experience, whether it be ethnic, racial, or artistic.Gomez-Pena counters G a it h e r’s call for reconstruction with a de­mand for perpetual deconstruction He is leery o f the way in which claims to cultural authenticity (that is, being a source for the correct cultural traditions) can also be strategies o f oppression W h a t should museums do, for example, with the assertion that Native American religious traditions require that w o m e n not be allowed to touch tribal objects in museums? T his has already happened If museums have no right to assert a dominant perspective vis-a-vis minorities, what rights

do they have to assert any perspective about anyone? Gomez-Peria’s answer, with which I agree, is that neither museums nor communities should have special interpretive privileges Rather, they must be m u t u ­ally responsible Museum practices should be reviewed continually

Civil Society and Social Identity 27

and judged in terms o f multiple perspectives Just as museums have the obligation to examine the consequences o f their own exhibiting and educational practices, so communities have the responsibility to see that exhibitions abo ut themselves are more than celebratory

All types o f museums have responsibilities to communities These matters are not just the special preserve of cultural-history or ethnic and minority museums Art and science museums have the same

obligations as the others Science museums, for example, usually de­fine themselves as possessing privileged access to verifiable truths But science is as partial a perspective on the world as any other Like any other body o f knowledge, it can be used in a hegemonic f a s h io n 11 Even the seemingly innocent and uncriticizable demand that natural- history museums play a maj or role in advocating environmental c o n ­cerns should be critically evaluated, for far too often in the history o f the environmental movement, unconfirmed facts and the selection o f issues that are mostly white and middle-class concerns get presented

as the ou tc o m e o f “scientific research.” This is yet another situation in which Western points o f view assume a falsely universal significance Sadly, these points o f view can become the justification for doing a great deal o f harm to the rural poor and the native peoples o f the

T hi r d World For ex amp le, a recent exhibition on the highland gorilla and its status as an endangered species, which toured the m aj or natu- ral-history museums o f the United States, uncritically reproduced some o f the mo st offensive racial stereotypes about the sexuality of Africans Yet not a single public protest was made by any responsible scientific institution, nor was there any mention o f the racial imagery and attitudes in the reviews o f the e x h ib it io n 12 If museum profession­als take up G o m e z - P e n a ’s challenge, the cultural assumptions they will have to co nf ro nt critically include their o wn T h e y too will have

to walk outside their cultures and the law, with dignity

G o m e z- P en a ’s essay raises questions about multiple perspectives, the hybrid nature o f expression, and politics that are addressed in more detail in the remaining two essays in this section Robert Lav- enda and Vera Z o lb e rg both consider a number o f issues directly re­lated to how identities are defined in exhibitions and how these

definitions are experienced by the different parties in the exhibiting process T he se issues include how perspectives define different voices, even when people have more than one perspective and claim more than one voice at the same time; the ambivalence that is present in communities about the role o f the museum or festival as a certifier o f culture; and questions o f control as a primary political issue This last issue is one that museums and communities must continuously man-

28 I V A N K A R P

age and renegotiate, and it is a central co nc er n of parts 2 and 3 o f this

b o o k Part 2 contains case studies of exhibitions that allow power to

be shared by museums and communities, and part 3 uses a historical perspective to look at exhibiting co ntexts as sites for contestation be­tween museum and community or even community and community

R o b e r t Lavenda’s essay, “Festivals and the Creation o f Public Culture: W h o s e Voice(s)?” questions cherished assumptions held by the general public and the museum co mm uni ty ab out the nature of

co mm uni ties Lavenda examines comm uni ty festivals in M inn es ota , a state where the local festival is a flourishing enterprise Festivals are generally held to be special events in which everyday cares and social differences are put aside and people interact as part o f the larger c o m ­munity to which they b e lo n g 13 Yet the communities that Lavenda e x ­amines are like all communities in the world: they are internally

divided and made up o f segments that have overlapping but some­times different interests

Lavenda describes festivals from many types o f communities in

M i n n e s o t a , from the smallest rural town to the large urban celebra­tions o f St Paul His account shows that these festivals have a major shared problem that must be managed anew each and every year

W hil e the festivals assert that they are the expression of a unified, in­clusive community, they actually must find ways to deny or mask

co m m u n i ty diversity and patterns of exclusion T h e forms o f diversity that these community festivals manage vary according to the type o f

c o m m u n i ty ; for ex ample, rural towns are divided between farmers and merch an ts, the older, established mem bers o f the community and the unemployed or underemployed you ng , and sometimes between male and female Th ou gh small-town festivals explicitly undertake the p ro m o ti o n o f a communitywide identity, in practice they often re­inforce social divisions By contrast, St Paul’s long-established and nationally famous urban festival is a successful co mb in ati on o f cele­bra ti on o f bourgeois achievement and ritualized mockery o f social pretensions In Lave nda ’s description o f the St Paul W inter C arnival’s events we can see a familiar phe no men on : the assertion o f a co m m o n

co m m u n i ty o f high and low that is achieved by the denial o f social claims T h i s is an element missing in the formal organization o f the sma ll-to wn festivals It may be that in small towns social relations are

to o intimate and face-to-face for the co mm uni ty even to imagine its differences in festivals But even there multiple voices are manifested and different points o f view expressed at the same time as their ex is­tence is denied

Civil Society and Social identity 29

In St Paul issues o f gender and class intrude on the organization

o f festival performances Vulcans, the an on y mo u s pranksters who mock the pretensions o f the festival’s royal co urt, also act out a carni- valized denial of bourgeois standards o f sexuality But their playful a c ­costing o f women is no longer acceptable in a society in which

violence against wo me n has be co m e a public issue T h e wives o f the princes o f the royal court are now included in the public ceremonies

as well, but Lavenda shows that the liberal assertions of gender c o m ­plementarity serve only to emphasize the actual gender inequality Wives make brief appearances that only demonstrate their irrelevance

to the celebration o f individual male achievement that is at the heart

o f the festival's public ceremonies

Class differences and conflict intervene in all the festivals Lav­enda discusses, but in the St Paul case the class-based control o f the festival extends far beyond the control in the other M in ne so ta festi­vals described in the essay T h e urban nature o f the St Paul milieu e n ­ables the organizers to have far less contact with lower-class audiences than is possible in small towns The St Paul elite do not need to keep their own activities secret, and the vast expenditures required for their participation provide an effective barrier against lower-class groups penetrating their events

But this creates a problem After all, the St Paul Wint er Carnival

is a com m un ity festival H o w is community participation maintained

at the same time that segments o f the community are excluded? T h is has become a gender issue as well as a class issue As St Paul becomes more diverse, it may be co m e a racial and ethnic issue as well Lavenda examines how this pro blem is managed in all the M in ne so ta festivals

by describing h o w voices are defined and experienced

T h e voices Lavenda discusses have both official and unofficial sides T h e festivals are defined by official voices, but even those voices can express dou bt, as in the halfhearted attempts to give wives a sig­nificant role In St Paul the institutionalized mockery of the Vulcans provides an official setting for unofficial attitudes to be voiced; here,

t o o , doubt and uncertainty creep in about how different segments o f the community have been defined and treated

Sometimes people do begin to voice the ways in which their sub­jective experiences can co nt rad ict dominant voices or official defini­tions o f cultures T h is is now happening in some o f the festivals

Lavenda mentions and in some museums People know how they are defined and often find means o f resisting definitions T h e result is that voices and definitions be co m e multiple and contradictory, but not ar­

30 I V A N K A R P

bitrary In some co ntex ts people’s responses are as hybrid as Gomez- Peria’s co nce pt o f the border as a site for the production of culture would suggest In other contexts conflict becomes an overt problem in relations between communities and cultural institutions

O v e r t conflict between museums and a specific type o f c o m m u ­nity, namely artists, is the theme o f Vera Z o lb e r g ’s essay Z o lb e r g de­scribes relations between museums and a set o f individuals, artists, who only occasionally come together to form a community Wh en they do, however, they often perceive themselves as being in opp osi­tion to the art museums whose jo b it is to exhibit them Art museums also have co m pl ex senses of their mission and identity Jus t as artists aspire to recognition and reputation, so do art museums T h e r e are few directors o f art museums who do not define their legacy as a dis­tinguished collection One ma jo r issue for artists and museums is the degree to which an art museum should define itself as an agent for the local artistic community T h e more cosmopolitan the art mu se um , the more involved it becomes in the history o f modern and cont empo rary art, which is usually represented as a history o f artistic production in Paris and N e w York

Z o l b e r g ’s essay describes how artists in other maj or cities, includ­ing Washington and Chicago, have reacted against the history o f art

as it has been defined by critics and museums They also seek to resist the silences in terms o f which they are defined It may be that artists’ most im portant experience in the process o f defining themselves as a

co m m un it y is their interest in asserting their local existence in the art world

Z o l b e r g observes that “artists tend not to form durable c o m m u ­nities.” W h e n they do so it is usually because they have a temporary sense o f shared identity as a group that is resisting a definition o f art and defining new modes o f expression Z o lb e r g cites the dadaist tradi­tion o f flouting bourgeois conventions as a significant theme in c o n ­temp ora ry arts and observes that this pits many artists against art muse ums , which have patrons who possess bourgeois taste and often assert bourgeois moral standards

Ev en more important, however, is the tendency o f many c o n t e m ­porary artists to subvert the categories o f high and low cultural e x ­pression on which museums rely to construct an artistic ca n o n T his conflict ca n be observed in the reactions to the Museum o f M o d e r n

Ar t’s massive but ambivalent attempt to exhibit the high and low dis­tinction in modern art (the 1 9 9 0 exhibition High and Low : M o d e r n Art and Popular Culture) M O M A was attacked from both the artis-

Civil Society and Social Identity 3 I

tic right and left; on the one hand, it was condemned for aban do nin g its role as guardian o f aesthetic standards, and on the other it was condemned for castrating the best and most outrageous in popular arts in its e xhi bi tio n T h e cura tor s’ nervousness was manifested in the opening pages o f the catalogue, which made multiple references to the religious quality o f high a r t 14

Zo lb e rg argues that museums do not like to deal with artists as a community, but attempt to interact with them as individuals T h is is a classic response to community demands on cultural institutions Insti­tutions assert that these issues can be dealt with only on a case-by-case basis Hence they deny the legitimacy o f claims made by people who act as spokespersons for communities I am not making a judgment here; I am describing a strategy As this essay pointed out earlier, claims to speak on behalf of a comm unity can also involve denying the interests o f segments o f that community But the insistence that the issues are individual and not the co m m u n i ty ’s also denies the claimed interests o f the community T h e cases discussed in this volume are p o ­litical contests; hence it should not be surprising that the means of conducting business is political

A m a j o r co ntribut ion of Z o l b e r g ’s essay is to show how asser­tions or denials o f identities in muse um -comm un ity relations are p o ­litical processes M us e um s are certifiers o f taste and definers o f

cultures As such, they are intimately involved in the task o f defining identities and setting up schemes that classify and relate cultural iden­tities T h e way that museums are inserted in civil society and their power to produce cultural values make them an integral part o f the processes by which cultures are placed into hierarchies that define them as superior or inferior to one another

Th is need not be the fate o f museums T h e y are also repositories

o f knowledge and o b je ct s; some do represent the range o f human cre­ativity Even though the collections museums ma ke are not c o m p r e ­hensive ( h o w could they be?), they can strive to contain and exhibit the range o f human co mm unitie s, capacities, and artistic achieve­ment T h i s task involves not just seeking out objects and cultural m a ­terials that are representative or stylistically central It also involves engaging in dialogue with people who stand apart from their c o m m u ­nities or w h o form different communities, and it involves seeking out objects and knowledge that can be used to deny essentializing asser­tions o f identity M o s t o f all, however, the tasks of museums involve questioning their own claims ab out identity and engaging in serious and systematic dialogue with other points o f view