Re-placing objects: Historical practices for the second museum age

Canadian Historical Review

Volumn 86, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 83-110

  Phillips, Ruth B ^a  

^a CARLETON UNIVERSITY   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 46449110690     PISSN: 00083755     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/CHR/86.1.83     Document Type: Review

References (84)

1. Mark Fisher, 'Objections to the Object,' Times Literary Supplement, 22 March 2002, 14
2. Chris Gosden and Chantal Knowles, Collecting Colonialism: Material Culture and Colonial Change (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 4-5
3. William Sturtevant, 'Does anthropology need museums?' Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington 82 (1969): 619-50
4. For important discussions on the role of public museum exhibitions in producing citizens for the nation-state see Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York: Routledge, 1995)
5. Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995)
6. and, for a related Foucaultian reading of the historical development of the museum, Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (New York: Routledge, 1992)
7. See also the essays in 'Part Four: Museums and Cultural Management,' in Representing the Nation: A Reader, Histories, Heritage and Museums, ed. David Boswell and Jessica Evans, (New York: Routledge, 1999)
8. For example, in 1968 Ontario's Royal Ontario Museum Act made the museum administratively and financially independent of the University of Toronto, although the two institutions have remained linked through continuing cross-appointments of curators (especially in the sciences) and board members. Typically, according to Lovat Dickson's history of the ROM, the major reason was financial flexibility at a time of expansion. See Lovat Dickson, The Museum Makers: The Story of the Royal Ontario Museum (Toronto: Royal Ontario Museum, 1986), 142-5. A similar set of circumstances surround the McCord Museum of Canadian History's separation from McGill in the 1980s, when the museum went through a major rebuilding project. Its collections continue to be owned by the university, but the institution is now governed independently. A third example is the separation of the Museum of Indian Archaeology from the University of Western Ontario, which also retains research links to the university, though independently governed. (For a history, see www.uwo.ca/museum/lmahistory.html.)
9. Important late twentieth-century theorizations include Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986)
10. Marcus Banks and Howard Morphy, ed., Rethinking Visual Anthropology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1997)
11. James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1988)
12. Annie E. Coombes, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994)
13. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998)
14. Michael Ann Holly and Keith Moxey, eds., Art History, Aesthetics, Visual Studies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)
15. Nicholas Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 1999)
16. George W. Stocking, Jr., ed., Objects and Others: Essays on Museums and Material Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985)
17. Nicholas Thomas, Entangled Objects: Exchange, Material Culture, and Colonialism in the Pacific (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1991)
18. Christopher Tilley, Material Culture and Text: The Art of Ambiguity (London: Routledge, 1991)
19. On new directions in museums see, for example, Michael M. Ames, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1992)
20. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture (New York: Routledge, 2000)
21. and Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown, eds., Museums and Source Communities (New York: Routledge, 2003)
22. For a parallel lag between academic theory and practice and museological practice in art history see Charles W. Haxthausen, ed., The Two Art Histories: The Museum and the University (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002)
23. Barbara Kirshenblatt Gimblet, 'Objects of Ethnography,' in Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991), 386-443
24. On the 'object lesson' and the more general conceptualization of material objects in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century museum research and display in the United States and Britain, see Franz Boas, 'Some Principles of Museum Administration,' Science, 14 June 1907
25. Simon J. Bronner, 'Object Lessons: The Work of Ethnological Museums and Collections,' in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880-1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: W.W. Norton, 1989)
26. Curtis Hinsley, Savages and Scientists: The Smithsonian Institution and the Development of American Anthropology, 1846-1910 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981)
27. and George W. Stocking, ed., Objects and Others. The development of Canadian museum practices around objects is closely related to these histories. See Barbara Lawson, Collected Curios: Missionary Tales from the South Seas (Montreal and Kingston: McGill Queen's University Press, 1994)
28. Edward Sapir, 'An Anthropological Survey of Canada,' Science, 8 Dec. 1911, 789-93
29. Susan Sheets-Pyenson, Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums during the Late Nineteenth Century (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1988)
30. and Morris Zaslow, Reading the Rocks: The Story of the Geological Survey of Canada, 1842-1972 (Toronto: Macmillan Co., and Ottawa: Department of Energy, Mines, and Resources, 1975)
31. A useful introduction to the debates is Julia Harrison, 'Completing a Circle: The Spirit Sings,' in Anthropology, Public Policy and Native Peoples in Canada, ed. Noel Dyck and James B. Waldram (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1993), 334-58
32. For an excellent case study, see Shelley Ruth Butler, Contested Representations: Into the Heart of Africa (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1999)
33. See Turning the Page: Forging New Partnerships Between Museums and First Peoples, Task Force Report on Museums and First Peoples (Ottawa: Canadian Museums Association, 1992)
34. and Trudy Nicks, 'Partnerships in Developing Cultural Resources: Lessons from the Task Force on Museums and First Peoples,' Culture 12, no. 1 (1992): 87-94
35. Although the Museum of Modern Art's 1984 controversial exhibition Primitivism and 20th-century Art: Affinities of the Tribal and the Modern is usually identified as the starting point for critiques of appropriation, Canada had begun to work through similar debates almost twenty years earlier during the planning for Expo 67. As I have argued elsewhere, the political struggles within the Department of Indian Affairs that resulted in the building of a separate Indians of Canada Pavilion not only foreshadowed later conflicts, but also produced a radically innovative exhibition, the first major show to be controlled by Aboriginal people and to tell history from a First Nations perspective. See my 'Show times: De-celebrating the Canadian nation, Decolonising the Canadian Museum, 1967-92,' in Making History Memorable: Past and Present in Settler Colonialism, ed. Annie E. Coombes (Manchester: Manchester University Press, forthcoming)
36. Richard White, 'Using the Past: History and Native American Studies,' in Studying Native America: Problems and Prospects, ed. Russell Thornton (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998), 224
37. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)
38. Daniel K. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001)
39. I have discussed this souvenir genre in more detail in chapter 4 of Trading Identities: The Souvenir in Native North American Art from the Northeast, 1700-1900 (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1998), 103-54
40. See also Ruth B. Phillips and Dale Indiens, 'A Casket of Curiosities: Eighteenth-Century Objects from Northeastern North America in the Farquharson Collection,' Journal of the History of Collecting 6, no. 1 (1994): 21-33
41. The exhibition, Across Borders: Beadwork in Iroquois Life, was organized by the McCord Museum of Canadian History in collaboration with the Castellani Art Gallery of Niagara University. My co-curators were Kanatakta, Kate Koperski, Moira McCaffrey, Trudy Nicks, Sandra Olsen, and Jolene Rickard
42. On authenticity see Shelley Errington, The Death of Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998)
43. On the connections between notions of hybridity and racial theory, see Robert J.C. Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Culture, Theory, and Race (New York: Routledge, 1995)
44. William H. Guthman, Drums A'beating, Trumpets Sounding: Artistically Carved Powder Horns in the Provincial Manner, 1746-1781 (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1993), 26
45. For a discussion of the taxonomy of museums see my 'How Museums Marginalize: Naming Domains of Inclusion and Exclusion,' Cambridge Review 114, no. 2320 (1994): 6-10
46. For the notion of the 'contact zone,' see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7
47. Pratt borrows the notion of 'transculturaltion' from the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, trans. Harriet de Onis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 102-3
48. The powder horn is dated 1758 and is in the United Services Museum, Edinburgh (unnumbered)
49. Museum of Anthropology curators Rosa Ho, Bill McLennan, and Karen Duffek organized the event on 29 August 1998 with the participation of Robin Wright from the University of Washington's Burke Museum and Martha Black from the Royal British Columbia Museum
50. See Janet Catherine Berlo, Plains Indian Drawings, 1865-1935: Pages from a Visual History (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1996)
51. Bill McLennan and Karen Duffek, The Transforming Image: Painted Arts of the Northwest Coast First Nations (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2000)
52. and Robin K. Wright, Northern Haida Master Carvers (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001)
53. On the application of art historical methods to Native North American art, see Janet Catherine Berlo, Introduction, The Early Years of Native American Art History: The Politics of Scholarship and Collecting, ed. Janet Catherine Berlo (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992)
54. Joan Vastokas, 'Native Art as Art History: Meaning and Time from Unwritten Sources,' Journal of Canadian Studies 21, no. 4 (1986/7): 7-36
55. and my 'What is 'Huron Art'?: Native American Art and the New Art History,' Canadian Journal of Native Studies 9, no. 2 (1989): 167-511
56. On connoisseurship as a way of knowing, see Carlo Ginsburg, 'Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,' in his Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)
57. On Morellian connoisseurship method in art history, see Edgar Wind, 'Critique of Connoisseurship,' in his Art and Anarchy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963)
58. and Richard Wollheim, 'Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship,' in his On Art and the Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974)
59. The classic formulation of iconological study is Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939)
60. See also Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984)
61. The installation was part of All Roads Are Good, which opened in 1991 at the museum's Custom's House venue in New York City. See National Museum of the American Indian, All Roads Are Good: Native Voices on Life and Art (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994)
62. See Cassidy Rose Ellis and Susan Roy, "The Hastings Mill Museum: Curious Narratives of Journey and Settlement in Early Twentieth-Century Vancouver' (paper delivered to the Qualicum Conference, February 2001)
63. and Cassidy Rose Ellis, 'Preserving the "Glory of the Past": The Native Daughters of British Columbia and the Construction of Pioneer History in the Hastings Mill Museum' (master's thesis, University of British Columbia, 2002)
64. According to an article in Scientific American in 1859 there were twenty-five sewing-machine manufacturers selling 1500 machines a week and a total of 100,000 in use. See Grace Rogers Cooper, The Sewing Machine: Its Invention and Development (Washington, DC, Smithsonian Institution Press, 1976), 158
65. The Piano, directed and written by Jane Campion (Miramax, 1993)
66. James Clifford, 'Four Northwest Coast Museums: Travel Reflections,' in Exhibiting Cultures, ed. Karp and Lavine, 212-54
67. See Tina Loo, 'Dan Cranmer's Potlatch: Law, Coercion, Symbol, and Rhetoric in British Columbia, 1884-1951,' Canadian Historical Review 123, no. 2 (1992): 125-65
68. Donna McAlear, 'Repatriation and Cultural Politics: Australian and Canadian Museum Responses to First Peoples' Challenges for Cultural Property Ownership' (PhD. diss., Griffith University, Australia, 1999), 107-15
69. and Gloria Cranmer Webster, 'The Potlatch Collection Repatriation,' University of British Columbia Law Review 14 (1995), 137-41
70. and 'From Colonization to Repatriation,' in Indigena: Contemporary Native Perspectives, ed. Gerald McMaster and Lee-Ann Martin (Vancouver: Douglas and McIntyre, 1992), 25-39
71. The label of the Chilkat blanket acknowledges its non-Native donor, Vancouver art collector Lorne Balshine, who returned it to Alert Bay because he felt that 'it belonged in its right place with the rightful owners.'
72. In 1988, for example, during the Preserving Our Heritage conference held at Carleton University that led to the establishment of the national Task Force on Museums and First Nations, Aboriginal representatives held up for special praise the British Museum's Living Arctic exhibit, which featured tableaus of contemporary Inuit life, complete with televisions and computers. See The Living Arctic: Hunters of the Canadian North, Report and Catalogue (London: Trustees of the British Museum and Indigenous Survival International [Canada], 1989)
73. Kopytoff, 'The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,' in The Social Life of Things, ed. Appadurai, 64-91
74. Laurier Turgeon, 'The Tale of the Kettle: Odyssey of an Intercultural Object,' Ethnohistory 44, no. 1 (1997): 3
75. Gosden and Knowles, Collecting Colonialism, 22
76. See Gloria Cranmer Webster, "The Contemporary Potlatch,' in Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch, ed. Aldona Jonaitis (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 236
77. See Miriam Clavir, Preserving What Is Valued: Museums, First Nations, and Conservation (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2001)
78. See Audrey Hawthorn, A Labour of Love: The Making of the Museum of Anthropology, UBC: The First Three Decades (Vancouver: UBC Museum of Anthropology, 1993), 137-41
79. 'The Civilization of Difference' (fourth annual LaFontaine-Baldwin lecture, Halifax, 7 March 2003), http://www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/ lafontaine_lectures/2003/ (accessed 25 Nov. 2004)
80. The CFI grant was 17.1 million dollars, representing 40 per cent of the cost to be matched by a further 40 per cent from the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund and 20 per cent from UBC
81. The Cultural Resources Centre of the Smithsonian Institution's Native-run National Museum of the American Indian provides an important and pioneering model that is one of the inspirations for MoA's plans
82. For a provocative discussion of the discourse of the treaty table and the role of material objects in these discussions, see Andrea Laforet, 'Narratives of the Treaty Table: Cultural Property and the Negotiation of Tradition,' in Questions of Tradition, ed. Mark Salber Phillips and Gordon Shochet (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004)
83. On the issue of academic freedom and community collaboration, see Michael M. Ames, 'How To Decorate a House: The Renegotiation of Cultural Representations at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology,' Museum Anthropology 22, no. 3 (1999): 41-51
84. and Deborah Doxtator, 'Inclusive and Exclusive Perceptions of Difference: Native and Euro-Based Concepts of Time, History and Change,' in Decentring the Renaissance: Canada and Europe in Multidisciplinary Perspective, 1500-1700, ed. Germaine Warkentin and Carolyn Podruchny (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001), 33-47