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Victoria Cain

Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Edited by Ivan

Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Toms Ybarra-Frausto. With
Gustavo Buntinx and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press, 2006. 632 pages. $99.95 (cloth). $27.95 (paper).
The Temple and the Forum: The American Museum and Cultural Authority.
By Les Harrison. Tuscaloosa: Alabama University Press, 2007. 272 pages.
$42.50 (cloth).
People in the United States trust museums, implicitly granting them tremendous authority to guide us through unfamiliar places and eras, to tell us the
truth about our world and ourselves. In May 2001, a survey sponsored by the
American Association of Museums revealed that at least 80 percent of every
demographic group measured believed museums were a more trustworthy
source of objective information than books or television.1 In the late 1980s,
as museum studies programs proliferated and the culture wars burned through
campuses and Congress, scholars began to investigate how and why museums
wielded this cultural power. By the early 1990s, an academic master narrative
of museum history had emerged: museums derived their authority from the
consolidated liberal state, which employed them to inculcate an uneducated
public with self-serving ideologies and to reinforce existing social and political hegemonies. At the same time, Australian cultural critic Tony Bennett
developed a more sophisticated version of this theory: an exhibitionary
complexhis term for the constellation of expositions, department stores,
and museums in nineteenth-century Europe and North Americaprovided
public spaces and modes of classification that helped the masses become a
voluntary, self-regulating citizenry.2
In the last several years, these overarching storylines have fractured. Museum
studies scholars have become more determinedly historical, trading broad
theoretical categories for the disarray of contingency and context, and have

2008 The American Studies Association



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opened up a new range of questions in the process. Interest in recent history

has also cracked open the field; more than three-quarters of todays active
museums were established after 1945, and they havent consolidated knowledge, power, or objects as firmly as their predecessors did.3 Museum studies
scholars now find themselves studying institutions and cultural economies
that destabilize categories they once took for grantedspecimen, public,
even museum. While scholars are still tracing the process by which museums
convince diverse publics to grant them authority, for this second generation
of museum scholarship, the keyword is not hegemony but negotiation.
The books reviewed here exemplify this shift in the historiography. Both use
Bennetts more nuanced rendering of museum authority as a starting point,
but refine his concept to account for national, disciplinary, and temporal
contingencies. In contrastand perhaps in reactionto the fields early literature, the books under review express comparatively optimistic perspectives
on museums potential to encourage genuine public debate and intellectual
exchange. Despite the radical differences of their topics, these authors all cast
museums as laboratories, universities, or community centers, rather than prisons, hospitals, and asylums. Museum Frictions, an edited anthology, provides
a series of case studies that illustrates how the complexities of globalization
affect the earlier narrative, while Les Harrisons The Temple and the Forum
focuses on public perceptions of nascent museums in the antebellum United
States. Both succeed in changing the frame, if not the terms, of the study of
museums and their authority, and map out exciting new directions for the
fields literature.
The issue of museums authority lies at the heart of Museum Frictions: Public
Cultures/Global Transformations, an anthology edited by, among others, Ivan
Karp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, and Toms Ybarra-Frausto. Written over
six years of meetings on four continents, featuring seven editors and eighteen
authors, the anthology is, as one would expect, a grab bag. Its too uneven
and too bulky to be a cover-to-cover read, but a few of the essaysthose by
Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Martin Hall, Leslie Witz, Ingrid Muan, and
David Bunnare real standouts. Museum Frictions follows two other wellknown anthologies edited by Emory-based anthropologists Karp and Kratz,
Exhibiting Cultures (1991) and Museums and Communities (1992). All three
explore museums roles in rapidly changing pluralistic societies, but the essays
in Museum Frictions address the challenges posed by a globalized era, when
the defining elements of museums and the publics they represent are in flux.
While it doesnt break the same kind of new ground its predecessors did,

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Museum Frictions will provide scholars with a sound overview of how globalization has affected museums. The anthology stops just short of providing a
coherent theory of museum authority in a globalized age, and those seeking
a story to replace the old narrative of social control may find this frustrating.
But perhaps, in a world defined by cosmopolitan flexibility, this breakdown
of unified theories and clear-cut definitions is precisely the point.
As its editors note, international travel and trade are not new phenomena;
indeed they made modern museum collections possible. But the greater ease
with which people, goods, knowledge, and capital have flowed since the 1990s
has neither democratized cultural authority, as globalizations champions promised, nor homogenized all culture, as its foes warned. As Karp and Kratz point
out in their introduction, globalization has instead shored up existing cultural
influence at the expense of already voiceless communities, reinforcing differences between the metropole and the periphery. Isolated communities have
also become more intensely local through choice, a decision that can enhance
their appeal to tourists but can also result in destructive self-consciousness.
As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett observes in the introduction to the books
first section and later in her own essay, attempts to preserve local practices and
authority, or living heritage, can make once-vibrant traditions more fiscally
valuable, less culturally meaningfuland inauthentic as heritage.
Of course, the return to local sources of cultural authoritytraditional
objects, practices, and community valuescan also conflict with cosmopolitan
expectations. In Musings from Phnom Penh, Ingrid Muan explains how
the National Museum is a site of conflict about the treatment of displayed
objectsshould the museum cater to Cambodian traditions, in order to help
rebuild a shattered nation, or to Western expectations, in order to enhance
the tourist experience on which the nation so depends?
In the postcolonial, post-cold war world, markets have driven museum
building as much as nationalism has, as both residents and governments of
developing nations rely increasingly on tourism to replace the cash that empire
or cold war powers once funneled to them. Even those museums that embrace
outright the task of nation building must decide if serving local citizens or
focusing on foreign nationals will create the prosperity integral to peace and
nation building. Leslie Witzs Transforming Museums on Post-Apartheid
Tourist Routes investigates whether South Africas project of historical revision and reconciliation can be compatible with its crucial tourist economies.
Though older colonialist museums are reforming themselves to create a
usable past for the nations newly broadened citizenship, tourists generally



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head to Africa to see a once-colonial society, or at least its most marketable

tropes: European luxury surrounded by pristine wilderness, picturesque natives who are silent except when performing or hunting, and, more recently,
triumphant portrayals of the anti-apartheid struggle. Should exhibitions of
the South African Museum follow the demands of the state or the demands of
the market, which are also central to the states success? From which public
and which system of powershould it derive its authority? Essays like these
offer American studies scholars some useful comparative perspectives, though
the anthologys case studies are largely limited to wealthy Western countries
and former colonies with firmly established museum traditions. Essays about
globalizations effects on museums in what used to be called second-world
nationsChina, Russia, Middle Eastern stateswould have made valuable
additions.
Among the challenges the anthologys many authors face is how to define
museums in an era when looming pillars and a respectful hush are no longer
typical. Such diverse institutions claim the moniker of museum today that it
feels nearly impossible to determine what they have in common other than a
tendency to organize and display objects for an educational purpose. Even that
definition is under fireas early as 1973, when the AAM attempted to define
museums this way, science centers, childrens museums, and other museums
without collections all opposed this characterization as too restrictive.4 Over
the last thirty-five years, this diversity has only increased, and the editors of
Museum Frictions take this into account, defining the museum as a portable
social technology, a set of museological practices: effectively, a combination
of curatorial knowledge, display practices intended to inform or inspire, and
the visual or experiential consumption of exhibits by a public (4). By loosing the term museum from both physical locations and collections, Karp and
Kratz encompass the vast array of institutions that now bear the name of
museum and encourage scholars to apply the concepts developed in the field
of museum studies to sites that look nothing like the Louvre. In this way,
contributors such as Martin Hall, David Bunn, Cuauhtmoc Camarena, and
Teresa Morales embrace Bennetts commitment to placing museum display
within the construct of the exhibitionary complex, but update his theory in
order to apply it to sites as diverse as theme parks, game preserves, and community museums under repressive regimes.
Les Harrisons thoughtful book, The Temple and the Forum: The American
Museum and Cultural Authority in Hawthorne, Melville, Stowe, and Whitman,
takes a similarly broad stance on what qualifies as a museum. Like so many

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other authors of this new generation of museum scholars, Harrison has moved
outside the traditional temporal boundaries of museum studies, taking on
an underdeveloped period of American museum historiography. He applies
Bennetts exhibitionary complex to display sites ranging from quarterdecks to
patent offices. His argument will delight cultural historians of the antebellum
United States by establishing that museum exhibition, and perhaps even a
version of the exhibitionary complex, existed decades before its Gilded Age
incarnation.
Harrison uses the museum to explore how antebellum society was preoccupied with the expansion and contraction of cultural authority. He uses the
term forum to describe the chaotic market culture of Barnums American
Museum and its counterparts. These sites of display invited discussion and
disagreement, and forced objects, ideas, and people to jostle for attention. Such
democratic forums posed a powerful challenge to the disciplinary potential of
sober, well-organized temples of exhibitionsites of display nicely captured
by Charles Willson Peales famous portrait of his own museum. Unlike his
scholarly precursors, however, Harrison doesnt describe the museum-as-temple
as a place for elites to exercise their conspiratorial power, nor does he cast the
museum-as-forum as a site of absolute freedom and self-expression by unruly
mobs. As he points out, no museum, temple, or forum could anticipate or
contain the full range of audience interpretations. American museumsand,
by proxy, nineteenth-century American cultureembodied both the regulatory power of the state and the alternatively liberatory and oppressive energies
of the marketplace (xviii).
The authors featured in Harrisons study interpret this cultural paradox in
very different ways. Nathaniel Hawthorne, for instance, chronicles the increasing inadequacy of high cultures temples in a society newly fascinated by the
What-Is-It and other displays of entertaining humbug. Rather than venturing outside to the chaos of the marketplace, Hawthornes fiction mournfully
guides readers past American artifacts housed in buildings that groan under
the failed cultural authority of strict British rule and stricter Puritan values
(69). Melville also wrestles with the failure of cultural authority, but where
Hawthorne explores the temples ruins, Melville wanders, bewildered, through
its replacement. According to Harrison, Melvilles works, ranging from comic
sketches in Yankee Doodle to the magisterial Moby-Dick, all contend with the
tension between authoritative and illegitimate representations . . . between the
authentic and the anecdotal (93). His fictional travel narratives, including
Omoo, White-Jacket, Moby-Dick, and Pierre, frequently feature descriptions of



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museums that borrow heavily from Barnums own display practices, but the
language Melville uses indicates his own discomfort with these practices.
By the time he turns to Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harrison has demonstrated
that the freewheeling forum escaped the restraints of the temple in American
culture. He argues that Stowe considered Uncle Toms Cabin an exhibit of
slavery, a taxonomic collection of types intended to incite protest against the
Fugitive Slave Law. But the museums that adapted Stowes work for stage plays
manhandled her specimens. On their stages, her once obvious moral lessons
became ambiguous, even contradictory. This evolution of her story, notes Harrison, symbolizes the very nature of the foruma place where visitors regularly
found a way to counter the authority of the objects presented there.
His examination of museums as performance spaces is a real contribution to
the cultural history of the era. Museums of the period not only trained visitors
for the performance of citizenship, but also housed literal performancesplays,
storytelling, lecturesthat forced Americans to discuss what citizenship meant.
So much of the literature on museums has been devoted to the transformation
of objects that few scholars have considered museums critical role as a place
for performance. Harrison makes it clear that such performances have a long
and controversial history.
Harrison concludes his book by explaining how the newly available cultural forms of the modern, institutional museum replaced the antebellum
temples and forums of display, allowing once-fluid cultural authority to ossify into hierarchy (xxiv). (Whether or not visitors ultimately accepted this
revised form of the museum is, disappointingly but justifiably, beyond the
scope of his book.) He uses Walt Whitman to do so, and notes that Whitmans populist quotations from the chaotic forum of antebellum American
give way to more sober praise for cultural consolidation as a means of healing
wounds inflicted by the Civil War. In Harrisons view, the solid categorization
of Specimen Days ultimately replaces the exhortative description of Leaves of
Grass, signaling an end to the wild bucking of nineteenth-century cultural
authority. By the Gilded Age, Harrison suggests, museums, novels, and other
cultural forms in the United States had come to possess the disciplinary potential described by Bennett, and had come under siege from the museums
described in Museum Frictions.
Harrisons decision to analyze contemporary posters and editorial cartoons
is an example of interdisciplinarity at its best, and his brilliant exegesis of the
eras popular visual culture further establishes the eras preoccupations with
the shape of cultural authority. When it came to textual analysis, however, I

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wondered why he limited his book to the work of these four canonical authors. Did more popular writers also share the preoccupations of Hawthorne,
Melville, Stowe, and Whitman? It would have been fascinating to know how
African Americans, immigrants, and women other than Stowe, so aware of
the treacherous nature of cultural authority and social performance, described
museum-like spaces in their writing. Harrisons book is an excellent contribution to both American studies and museum studies, but as in the case of
Museum Frictions, it would have been even stronger had he added a chapter
or two exploring more unexpected (and more representative) perspectives.

The very multiplicity and transformative flexibility that make the museum
such a difficult subject to analyze are also what help them survive in a rapidly
changing world. By confronting this multiplicity rather than ignoring it,
these books successfully complicate our understanding of museums cultural
authority. Their authors illuminate how disparate audiences, past and present,
can make the exercise of that authority ever more difficult. As a result, both
books under review reconstruct museum experience, rather than dwell on the
intentions of specific curators or nebulous powers.
Yet they are at the beginning of a reassessment of how contemporary
scholars can gain insight into past players in the museum worlddiverse
audiences and employees of museums. In an effort to pry open the black box
of visitor response, Samuel Alberti, Tony Bennett, and other well-known
museum scholars have begun to approach the history of audience experience
in museums, and the authors in the books under review confidently take on
this challenge.5
Intriguingly, this leads them both closer to and further from the recent
historical turn in museum studies. Neither book is a history, but both books
illustrate how widespread a historical approach to museums has become, for
the authors use rigorous historical methods to uncover evidence, assert arguments, and allow readers to bask in the kind of vivid detail associated with the
best social history and anthropology. Both draw on sources that historians of
museums have traditionally overlooked: literature, visual culture, evenin the
case of David Bunns essay on the history of South Africas Kruger National
Parkthe natural landscape. Ultimately, both books make clear that social
control is not the inevitable endpoint of museum development. In cultural
eras in which the whims and worries of capitalism have replaced other ideolo-



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gies, purposes, and organizing principles, museums authority lies primarily

in museumgoers and markets, as well as (and sometimes rather than) the state
or objects or display methods.
The historical relationship between museums and markets yields rich insights in these two books. Museum Frictions examination of global tourisms
economic impact on the museums of developing nations is an excellent step in
that direction. For his part, Harrison confronts the impact that decentralized,
private financial support has had upon U.S. museums, an issue that museum
studies scholars have routinely overlooked. Yet other scholars also need to
mine these questions. How have past and present trends toward privatization
affected museums and complicated the economics of globalization? How do
state-funded museums fare these days in comparison to museums that dont
receive government funding, especially in places where funding through NGOs
or multinational corporations enables them to stay afloat? How do funding
models ultimately affect museums credibility, and how do they vary from nation to nation? How do for-profit international touring blockbusterssuch as
the King Tutankhamen exhibit or BODY WORLDSwield cultural authority
among visitors as opposed to those at local scholarly institutions? How will art
museums function in the next several years, in an era of repatriationan era
that some have described as post-collection? To answer these and other crucial
questions, scholars need to address the complexities of museum economics.
These two books also help set the stage for a more transnational perspective
on museums pasts and presents. The field could use still more scholarship
comparing the evolution of Western museums with the emergence of museums in nations without a strong history of Western cultural influence. As is
typical of most museum scholarship, all of the authors reviewed stick to local
case studies, and rarely venture beyond a single institution or a particular nation. But it would be interesting to know whether the trajectory of museum
development traced by Harrison applies to other nations with emerging
marketplaces, fledgling democracy, and populist politics. Was the process of
cultural negotiation he describes a particularly American phenomenon, as his
book seems to suggest, or did it also occur in England and Europeor, more
recently, in developing nations? Objects of art and science, ideas about politics
and economics, philosophies on education and aestheticsthe bread-andbutter subjects of museum scholarshiphave been subjects of international
discussion for centuries. Museum scholars would benefit from more research
on the international traffic in ideas and collections between museums and
their supporters; these networks have been too long ignored. There seems to

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be some movement in that direction, such as Andrew McClellans The Art

Museum: From Boulee to Bilbao (2008) and Lynn Nyharts forthcoming book
on the transatlantic development of natural history museums.
Finally, as both books observe, the relationship between the visitor and
the exhibit remains at the heart of the museum experience, regardless of how
profoundly visitors, exhibits, or museums have changed. As traditional concepts of objects are redefined, however, this relationship is under profound
pressure. Yet the power of the object seems to persist in museum studiesand
in museums themselves. Few museum scholars have tackled the question of
why objects possess a different power than images. Many of the authors in
Museum Frictions make vague reference to Benjamins ideas about aura and
authenticity, but few engage in a head-on examination of the evolving relationship between museums and objects. More theory on the power of the
object could significantly affect scholarship on museums, past and present:
scholars working on museums should read the essays in Bill Browns Things
and Lorraine Dastons Things That Talk, or at least peruse their footnotes.6 It
might also help us to understand where exactly museums cultural authority
liesthe collection, the institution, the method of display, the object, or
any of a hundred places related to the museumand whether, and if, that
authority will be maintained in the future.

2SXIW
1. Trust and Education, Americans Perceptions of Museums: Key Findings of the Lake, Snell, Perry
February 2001 Survey (American Association of Museums, 2001), http://www.aam-us.org/getinvolved/advocate/matresources.cfm.
2. Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum (London: Routledge, 1995), 73.
3. Stephen E. Weil, Making Museums Matter (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002),
31.
4. American Association of Museums, Museum Accreditation: Professional Standards (Washington, DC:
1973), 89.
5. Though Andrew McClellans recent anthology on Art and Its Publics focuses on more contemporary
issues, several of its essays also wrestle with questions of reception and visitor response. Samuel J. M.
M. Alberti, The Museum Affect: Visiting Collections of Anatomy and Natural History in Science
in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, ed. Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007); Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution,
Museums, Colonialism (London: Routledge, 2004); Andrew McClellan, Art and Its Publics: Museum
Studies at the Millennium (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2003).
6. Bill Brown, ed., Things (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2004); Lorraine Daston, Things
That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004).