c57e9dfa-9420-4f66-aa5b-4e4959844422

SCIENCE, MAGIC AND RELIGION
New Directions in Anthropology

General Editor: Jacqueline Waldren, Institute of Social Anthropology,
University of Oxford
Volume 1 Coping with Tourists: European Reactions to Mass Tourism
Edited by Jeremy Boissevain
Volume 2 A Sentimental Economy: Commodity and Community in Rural Ireland
Carles Salazar
Volume 3 Insiders and Outsiders: Paradise and Reality in Mallorca
Jacqueline Waldren
Volume 4 The Hegemonic Male: Masculinity in a Portuguese Town
Miguel Vale de Almeida
Volume 5 Communities of Faith: Sectarianism, Identity, and Social Change on a
Danish Island
Andrew S. Buckser
Volume 6 After Socialism: Land Reform and Rural Social Change in Eastern Europe
Edited by Ray Abrahams
Volume 7 Immigrants and Bureaucrats: Ethiopians in an Israeli Absorption Center
Esther Hertzog
Volume 8 A Venetian Island: Environment, History and Change in Burano
Lidia Sciama
Volume 9 Recalling the Belgian Congo: Conversations and Introspection
Marie-Bénédicte Dembour
Volume 10 Mastering Soldiers: Conflict, Emotions, and the Enemy in an Israeli Military Unit
Eyal Ben-Ari
Volume 11 The Great Immigration: Russian Jews in Israel
Dina Siegel
Volume 12 Morals of Legitimacy: Between Agency and System
Edited by Italo Pardo
Volume 13 Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future
Edited by Mary Bouquet
Volume 14 Simulated Dreams: Israeli Youth and Virtual Zionism
Haim Hazan
Volume 15 Defiance and Compliance: Negotiating Gender in Low-Income Cairo
Heba Aziz Morsi El-Kholy
Volume 16 Troubles with Turtles: Cultural Understandings of the Environment on a
Greek Island
Dimitrios Theodossopoulos
Volume 17 Rebordering the Mediterranean: Boundaries and Citizenship in Southern Europe
Liliana Suarez-Navaz
Volume 18 The Bounded Field: Localism and Local Identity in an Italian Alpine Valley
Jaro Stacul
Volume 19 Foundations of National Identity: From Catalonia to Europe
Josep Llobera
Volume 20 Bodies of Evidence: Burial, Memory and the Recovery of Missing Persons in Cyprus
Paul Sant Cassia
Volume 21 Who Owns the Past? The Politics of Time in a ‘Model’ Bulgarian Village
Deema Kaneff
Volume 22 Science, Magic and Religion: The Ritual Process of Museum Magic
Edited by Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto
S CIENCE , M AGIC AND R ELIGION

The Ritual Processes of Museum Magic
Edited by
Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto
Berghahn Books
New York • Oxford
Published in 2005 by
Berghahn Books
www.berghahnbooks.com
©2005, 2006 Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

First paperback edition printed in 2006
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages

for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book
may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or
mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information
storage and retrieval system now know or to be invented,
without wirtten permission of the publisher.
Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Science, magic, and religion : the ritual process of museum magic / editors, Mary Bouquet
and Nuno Porto.
p. cm. -- (New directions in anthropology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-57181-520-1 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-57181-521-X (pbk.: alk. paper)
1. Museum exhibits. 2. Museum theater. 3. Historic sites. 4. Museum techniques. 5.
Rites and ceremonies--Exhibitions. 6. Ritual--Exhibitions. 7. Performing arts--Exhibitions.
8. Cultural property--Protection. I. Bouquet, Mary, 1955- II. Porto, Nuno. III. Series.
AM151.S39 2004
069’.5--dc22
2004046271
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.
ISBN 1-57181-520-1 (hardback)

ISBN 1-57181-521-X (paperback)
C ONTENTS

List of Figures vii

Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion: the Ritual Processes of
Museum Magic
Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto 1
PART I OBJECTS OF SCIENCE? BABY AND THE MUMMIES

1. Memorialising the Future: the Museum of Science and Industry
in Manchester
Penelope Harvey 29
2. Unwrapping Mummies and Telling their Stories: Egyptian
Mummies in Museum Rhetoric
Anna Wieczorkiewicz 51
PART II SITE SPECIFICS: THE CASE OF TERVUREN

3. Congo-Vision
Barbara Saunders 75
4. The Scourge of Chief Kansabala: the Ritual Life of Two
Congolese Masterpieces at the Royal Museum for Central Africa
(1884–2001)
Boris Wastiau 95
PART III ENCOUNTERS, PERFORMANCES AND UNPREDICTABLES

5. Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo, Amsterdam
Natasha Silva 119
v
Contents
6. The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni: Authority,

Authenticity and Ritual in Sardinia
Tracey Heatherington 141
7. The Performance of Heritage in a Reconstructed, Post-Apartheid
Museum in Namibia
Ian Fairweather 161
8. Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar
Barbara Wolbert 182
PART IV DILEMMAS OF ENCHANTMENT

10. Enchantment and its Dilemmas: the Museum as a Ritual Site
Sharon Macdonald 209
Notes on Contributors 229
Index 233
vi
L IST OF F IGURES

1.1 ‘The world’s oldest surviving railway building, the

warehouse at the terminus of the Liverpool to
Manchester railway which opened in 1830’
(photograph by Penelope Harvey) 34
1.2 Railways in 1830 (photograph by Penelope Harvey) 36
1.3 Futures – The Telephone, 1880 (photograph by
Penelope Harvey) 37
1.4 Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill pose in front of the
‘Baby’ for the press on 21 June 1998 (photograph by
Penelope Harvey) 43
1.5 The Baby as exhibit, with the image of Chris Burton
(photograph by Penelope Harvey) 45
3.1 Scheme of the placement of sculptures in the Rotunda,
Africa Museum (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 80
3.2 ‘Belgium grants civilization to the Congo’, A. Matton,
1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 81
3.3 ‘Belgium grants her support to the Congo’, A. Matton,
1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 81
3.4 ‘Slavery’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 82
3.5 ‘Belgium grants prosperity and well-being to the
Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 82
3.6 ‘The Artist’, H. Ward, 1912 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 84
vii
List of Figures
3.7 ‘Chief of the Tribe’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of

Wendy Morris) 84
3.8 ‘The Idolmaker’, H. Ward, 1906 (courtesy of
Wendy Morris) 85
3.9 ‘Making Fire’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of
Wendy Morris) 85
3.10 ‘Vuakusu-batetela protects a woman from an Arab’,
Charles Samuel, 1897 (courtesy of Wendy Morris) 88
4.1 Tabwa cephalomorph carvings, two ‘masterpieces’ of the
Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by
R. Asselberghs, 1994) 97
4.2 and 4.3 The two Tabwa carvings exhibited as trophies in the
middle of panoplies in General Storms’ Ixelles (Brussels)
house (Anonymous photographer (circa 1929)
© Royal Museum for Central Africa) 102
4.4 The two Tabwa artworks in the exhibition TABWA.
The rising of a new moon, Royal Museum for Central
Africa (Anonymous photographer, 1985 or 1986) 104
4.5 Chief Kansabala’s ancestor figures in the exhibition
Hidden Treasures of the Tervuren Museum, Royal Museum
for Central Africa (photograph by J.-M. Vandyck,1995) 106
4.6 Kansabala’s ancestral figures in the display of works of
art collected by military personnel during the colonial
period in the exhibition ExItCongoMuseum. A Century
of Art with/without Papers, Royal Museum for Central
Africa (photograph by Boris Wastiau, 2001) 109
5.1 A Map of Artis Zoo 121
5.2 Eye to eye with a raccoon (photograph by Natasha Silva) 124
5.3 Elephant Bull ‘Murugan’ (photograph by Natasha Silva) 126
5.4 A guided tour (photograph by Natasha Silva) 129
5.5 The Minangkabauan House (photograph by
Natasha Silva) 132
5.6 Visitors watch grey meerkats sunbathing (photograph
by Natasha Silva) 136
viii
List of Figures
6.1 The road to Monte San Giovanni, Orgosolo (photograph

by Tracey Heatherington) 141
6.2 Geological formations at Monte San Giovanni
(photograph, courtesy of Francesco Pili) 145
6.3 Lunch with the Shepherds’: Egidio Manca demonstrates
cheesemaking for Sardinian schoolchildren (photograph
by Tracey Heatherington) 150
6.4 Roundup on the commons (photograph by
Tracey Heatherington) 154
7.1 A plan of the Nakambale Museum showing the route of
the guided tour and highlighting several important
stops on the tour (from a handout given to visitors at
the start of the tour) 170
7.2 Local schoolchildren perform ‘traditional dances’ at the
Nakambale Museum (photograph by Ian Fairweather) 171
7.3 A reconstruction of Nakambale’s study which forms
part of the display entitled ‘Translating the Bible’
(photograph by Ian Fairweather) 175
7.4 Copper anklets, part of a display of ‘Ladies’ Ornaments’
in the section entitled ‘Traditional Personal Belongings’
(photograph by Ian Fairweather) 177
8.1 A view of the courtyard of the castle, which hosts the
Weimar art collection and, in summer 1999, the exhibit
‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph
by B. Wolbert) 187
8.2 A view of the display of Graf Kessler’s portrait by Munch
in the castle. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999
(photograph by B. Wolbert) 188
8.3 An exhibition wall with a painting by Rohlfs, depicting a
Weimar street, and an opening that allows a view of the
paintings from the permanent collection on the wall behind
it. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999
8.4 A view of a part of the Gauforum complex with the
annex building of Multi-Purpose Hall and a banner of the
exhibit’s second part ‘Art to the People – The Collection
Hitler’. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999
ix
List of Figures
8.5 A view of the presentation of Hitler’s art collection on the

first floor of the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of
the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 192
8.6 A view of paintings, a.o. by Schult, from Hitler’s art
collection in the first floor of the Multi-Purpose Hall.
‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph
by B. Wolbert) 192
8.7 A view of the ramp leading to the entrance of the
exhibit’s third part ‘Official/Unofficial: The Art of the
GDR’. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999
8.8 A view of ‘the curve’ with paintings from the Palace of
the Republic in Berlin by Vent, Heisig, Neubert, and Sitte
in the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’
Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert) 194
8.9 A view of ‘the panorama’ with garden chairs and paintings
from GDR collections in the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise
and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by
B. Wolbert) 195
x
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book started to take shape at the end of the last century with the idea
of exploring further Carol Duncan’s seminal theory of the art museum as a
ritual site. When we floated our idea for a workshop on the museum as a
ritual site at the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA)
conference in Crakow in 2002, we were surprised and pleased by the enthu-
siastic response. It was at that stage that we thought of asking Sharon
Macdonald to act as discussant at the workshop and, having graciously
accepted the task, she carried it out with finesse. We would like to thank
Sharon for her great contribution both to the workshop and to this book.
We would also like to thank each and every one of the contributors not
only for their originality, creativity and scholarship in writing the chapters,
but also for their considerable patience and understanding with the time it
has taken us to do our part. We would especially like to mention Anna Wiec-
zorkiewicz’s guided visit to the Crakow Museum and one of the exhibitions
she writes about in her chapter. We are also particularly grateful to our Polish
hosts at the conference in Crakow for reserving for our use the splendid –
galleried – lecture room (where Malinowski used to teach) in which to hold
our workshop, and for their help in many other ways.
Back in Portugal and the Netherlands respectively we would like to thank
our colleagues in Coimbra and Utrecht for providing us with such stimulat-
ing working environments. Students of Ethnographic Museology and Material
Culture in Coimbra engaged in stimulating discussion of the arguments with
which this book is concerned. Anthony Shelton, Sandra Xavier and Susana
Matos Viegas were invaluable discussion partners; while Nélia Dias may be
held accountable for her support. In Utrecht, thanks go to Maarten Prak and
Aafke Komter for their encouragement in launching the Museum Studies
course at University College in 2003. Field trips and discussions with the first
students to follow the course helped to focus the theoretical notion of the
museum as a ritual site by putting it into practice.
xi
Acknowledgements
Finally we would like to thank Marion Berghahn for her enthusiasm for
this book from its inception, as well as to Jackie Waldren for welcoming it
into the New Directions in Anthropology series. Mark Stanton at Berghahn
Books in Oxford made the production process run smoothly and efficiently.
And on the home front, Henk de Haan has been generous with his time and
patience on many occasions as the manuscript passed through various meta-
morphoses. Museums are in fact places that are increasingly used by people
for a variety of quasi-ceremonial occasions. And it was in recalling and reflect-
ing upon such moments that the inspiration for this volume arose.
Coimbra/Wageningen, 13 February 2004
xii
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I NTRODUCTION :
S CIENCE , M AGIC AND R ELIGION :
THE R ITUAL P ROCESSES OF
M USEUM M AGIC
This was a museum of technology, after all. You’re in a museum of technology, I told
myself, an honest place, a little dull perhaps, but the dead here are harmless. You know
what museums are, no one’s ever been devoured by the Mona Lisa – an androgynous
Medusa only for esthetes – and you are even less likely to be devoured by Watt’s engine,
a bugbear only for Ossianic and Neo-Gothic gentlemen, a pathetic compromise, really,
between function and Corinthian elegance, handle and capital, boiler and column,
wheel and tympanum. Jacapo Belbo, though he was far away, was trying to draw me
into the hallucinations that had undone him. You must behave like a scientist, I told
myself. A vulcanologist does not burn like Empedocles. Frazer did not flee, hounded,
into the wood of Nemi. Come, you’re supposed to be Sam Spade. (Eco [1989] 2001: 12)
This passage from Umberto Eco’s celebrated novel Foucault’s Pendulum

captures succinctly the central theme of this book: how are places such as the
Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, one of the key settings of Eco’s
novel, transformed into ritual sites? How can scientific and technological
relics, monuments to rationality and Enlightenment thinking, be infected by
the strong enchantment of magical and ritual procedures? A museum of tech-
nology is, as Eco puts it, scarcely the venue one would expect for a bizarre
ritual. Yet, unfolding as it does through time compressed inside the periscope
where Casaubon stows away after closing time, the plot brings us relentlessly
to the point where we are prepared to suspend our disbelief. The long chain
of events leading up to this moment invests the place and its collection with
the fathomless webs of meaning spun by the actors involved in the plot.
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This is exactly the point made – in a different way – by Donald Tuzin in

his analysis of the construction of the Ilahita Arapesh tambaran house, venue
for the Nggwal initiation ceremonies in north-eastern Papua New Guinea. ‘It
took me sometime to rid myself of Judeo-Christian preconceptions as to what
a ritual is – that it is not the substance of an activity which defines it thus,
but rather the significance that attaches to it – and to realise that the ritual
according to Nggwal truly began before the men went out to cut the first
timbers’ (Tuzin 1980: 122–23). Ritual thus generates meaningful action long
before the event. Concrete social activities, such as the construction of a spirit
house and the flow of yams and pigs between exchange partners, are geared
towards this future moment but govern life long beforehand.
We argue that these two instances do not belong to the realms of extrav-
agant fiction and exotic ethnography, but suggest new approaches to the
comparative analysis of the museum as a ritual site and as a ritual process. Let
us briefly consider a case closer to home to underline this point. Museums
(or similar sites1) are repeatedly used as venues for the opening ceremonies of
international scientific organisations such as the European Association of
Social Anthropologists (EASA).
Visiting Malinowski
The reception party for the European Association of Social Anthropology’s

conference in 2000, ‘Crossing categorical boundaries: Religion as politics/
politics as religion’, took place in the National Museum of Krakow and was
combined with the opening of the exhibition Malinowski – Witkacy. Photog-
raphy: Between Science and Art. The ceremonial opening of an exhibition
devoted to one of the key ancestral figures of modern social anthropology,
Bronislaw Malinowski, exemplifies how the museum may be pressed into
service by and for particular groups.2 The differing stakes held by museum
staff, conference organisers, EASA members and wider publics in this specific
event in Krakow, reflect a common pattern that can be found in connection
with museums and related sites the world over. A place, a collection, a build-
ing is filled with various meanings and therefore worth visiting as – for
different reasons – an anthropologist, a tourist, or as a Polish or European
citizen.
In the case of the Malinowki – Witkacy exhibition, the European anthro-
pologists present were paying homage to one of the founding fathers of the
discipline, in the hometown of the Jagiellonian University. The narrative
structure of the exhibition was built around the friendship between
Malinowski, the scholar, and Witkacy, the artist, combining Malinowski
photographs from the London School of Economics’ archive collection with
paintings and drawings by Witkacy. Between Science and Art is a good
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Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion
metaphor not only for photography, but also for anthropology and for the
museum. The exhibition was dramatised by the convergence of anthropolo-
gists from across the world on this town and in the reception hall of this
museum to be present at the inauguration ceremonies. Participants arrived in
Krakow to the accompaniment of a dramatic thunderstorm; the conference
was inaugurated at the Philharmonic Hall, complete with ritual doorway and
a piano recital (Chopin and Paderewski); and followed by the reception and
opening at the National Museum. The exhibition opened in the presence of
Helena Wayne, Malinowski’s daughter. And when everyone had had some-
thing to eat and drink, the EASA congregation climbed the stairs to the
exhibition entrance and made its way through the dimly lit exhibition halls,
looking, exclaiming in small groups and encountering familiar as well as new
faces throughout.
A ceremonial visit to an exhibition of this kind obviously concentrates and
solidifies meaning for a group such as this one. Performing this itinerary,
conference participants (re-)encountered one another, while simultaneously
engaged with one of their own culture heroes summoned up in situ.
Malinowski became a tangible presence in the exhibition which, by focussing
on a relatively unknown relationship, gave further depth and richness to
anthropology as the common factor uniting everybody. The invitation to iden-
tify oneself as a member of the congregation in the act of collectively
remembering Malinowski is one that few anthropologists would have diffi-
culty with. Malinowski belongs to the past and anthropology has moved on,
yet the revelation of this new dimension of the founding father of the ethno-
graphic method endows his memory with a kind of generative immortality.
This was not simply a case of remembering a completed curriculum, but of
opening up a new chapter – and one that resonates with some of the innov-
ative directions being taken by contemporary anthropology. It is with this
generative capacity of the exhibitionary complex that the chapters of this
volume are concerned.
Secular rituals, such as this one from EASA’s history, seem in some sense
to fill a void created by the ‘crossed-out God’ of rational, post-Enlightenment
mankind (Latour 1993: 33), conceptualised by Weber in terms of the ‘dis-
enchantment of the world’. This book sets out to explore how museums and
similar sites may be invested with ritual meaning by both museum staff and
visitors. Carol Duncan’s (1995) seminal work on the art museum as a ritual
site is our point of departure. We aim to extend the scope of ethnographic
analysis beyond the modern western art museum to other kinds of museum
(zoo, science museum, former colonial mission) and sites (natural parks,
former Nazi rallying grounds), both in Europe and in Africa. In this intro-
duction we set out the coordinates that enable us to develop the theoretical
range of Duncan’s argument beyond the exhibitionary site as ‘script’, to
examine the actors taking a hand in museum choreography (in both the long
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and short terms); to go beyond Duncan’s ‘ideal visitor’, whom she conceives
as performing a rite confirming citizenship, to examine ways in which
museum publics actively use the museum for their own performances; and to
consider how their performances dovetail (or fail to) with curatorial agency
in the kinds of encounters that take place between different parties on the
ritual site.
To accomplish this, the authors adopt a strictly ethnographic approach that
allows the comparison of exhibitionary situations. Contributors examine ways
in which museum collections are constituted and technologically manipulated
(Harvey, Wiekzorcewicz, Silva), through the interplay of science and magic;
how collections or collection elements are actively transformed through time
and context (Wastiau); how the constitution of sites may involve both archi-
tectural and sculptural elements (Saunders); the way landscape may be turned
into a museum without walls (Heatherington); or an existing complex be
musealised, reframing its cultural significance by contextual strategy (Fair-
weather); or how a site may become implicated in thwarting curatorial
intention (Wolbert); and finally, posing dilemmas about the contemporary
enchantment of haunted sites (Macdonald). The actors’ share in constituting
collections and their settings, imbuing them with meaning or engaging with
them as visitors, is central to nearly all the chapters. The issue of agency is
therefore a central concern: in the processes of constituting artefacts, collec-
tions and sites; in officially mediating public meanings accessible through
personal guides or technological devices; and in visitors’ performances, appro-
priation or even rejection of what is on offer. This introduction reviews the
forms of agency involved in the constitution, mediation and reception of
contemporary museums and related sites, proceeding towards a theoretical
formulation of the museum as a ritual site in which longer term processes
converge.
Constituting Ritual Substances: the Beholder’s Share
One of Duncan’s principal arguments is that although post-Enlightenment

culture dichotomises the categories of secular and religious, ‘our supposedly
secular, even anti-ritual, culture is full of ritual situations and events’, few of
which take place in religious settings (Duncan 1995: 2). She argues that ‘we
too build sites that publicly represent beliefs about the order of the world, its
past and present, and the individual’s place within it’ (ibid).
Duncan’s analysis of (mainly Anglo-American) public art museums proved
inspiring as a framework for understanding contemporary, secular ritual.
However, her focus on these specific sites also circumscribes the explanatory
horizons of such a model. Our first concern has been to put these limitations
to the test by examining how her insights might be applied to other sorts of
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museum, collections and related sites and also beyond Europe and America.
The ethnographic cases under consideration stretch the term museum3 to the
limits of its application, dealing with museological apparatuses which, even if
developed beyond the museum walls, may nonetheless be conceptualised as
part of ‘museum culture’ (Sherman and Rogoff 1994). ‘Museum culture’
provides a useful framework for putting Duncan’s model into perspective.
According to Sherman and Rogoff, the museum engenders its own specific
practices and representations which they explain through four main concepts.
Object, context, public, and reception provide through their interaction
a means of specifying what the museum is about, beyond the conventional
definition of a collection-based place. Such articulation paves the way for con-
sidering visitor agency in the process. An urban (context) art (object) general
(public) museum – such as the Louvre – is likely to be experienced by its local
Parisian ‘regular’ quite differently than, say, a Japanese visitor on a week’s tour
de France that includes a Saturday afternoon whistle stop whiz through the
Louvre in the two days spent in Paris. In fact, everything is altered by includ-
ing reception in the analysis. Although, however, this notion does accord some
role to visitor agency in the museum process, it does not in itself address the
issue of how that agency works on the museum as a ritual site. The contrib-
utors to this volume go beyond the museum as an institution to consider the
processes and underlying rationales whereby different exhibitionary situations
become ritualised.
Thumbnail Overview of the Volume
The volume is divided into four sections: Part I concerns key moments in the
life trajectories of two distinctive museum objects – a reconstruction of the
first computer (‘Baby’) at the Museum of Science and Industry (MSI) in
Manchester (Penelope Harvey), and the unwrapping of Egyptian mummies
in various museums (Anna Wieczorkiewicz). In both cases, the objects are
enfolded in powerful narratives: the ‘birth’ of an enormous machine as a
public media event and the culmination of a race against time; and the engage-
ment of various kinds of narrative to reanimate the mortal remains of ancient
Egyptians. Casting them in narratives of life and death, involving a subtle
intersection between the techniques of science and magic, is compounded by
specific ways of interpreting these objects in the museums concerned.
Part II zooms in on the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren,
Belgium, from two distinctive perspectives: as a ritual site where artistic
embellishment produces a very directed way of seeing – ‘Congo Vision’ – the
former Belgian colony of Congo (Barbara Saunders); and a curatorial account
of subverting that vision through meticulous historicisation of the paths of
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two ‘masterpieces’, which were part of the temporary exhibition ExItCongo-

Museum (Boris Wastiau).
Part III comprises four cases of encounters between different curatorial and
public actors and exhibited objects. The guided tour brings visitors to
emotional as well as rational understandings of wildlife and its predicament
at Artis Zoo in Amsterdam, the Netherlands (Natasha Silva). Visitors to
Monte San Giovanni in Sardinia are received into a landscape that is a source
of local pride and pastoral identity (a ‘cathedral’), turned symbol of the global
environment by a park authority applying external scientific criteria of ecolog-
ical management; both discourses produce ‘ritual bodies’ that are transformed
by the ‘natural magic’ of the place (Tracey Heatherington). The encounter
between tourists visiting the Nakambale Mission Museum to experience ‘real,
traditional Africa’ and locals who, in performing their tour of the mission and
homestead, confirm a sense of their own modernity, is one of ‘creative mis-
understanding’ (Ian Fairweather). Curatorial scripting of the ‘Rise and Fall of
Modernism’ exhibition in Weimar failed to anticipate the unintended con-
sequences of creating this narrative of failed modernity in three different
locations in the city, provoking ‘resistance fighter’ reactions among critics and
the public (Barbara Wolbert). The zoo in the Dutch capital, the Sardinian
heterotopic park, the modernist mission-turned-museum in northern
Namibia, and an exhibit dealing with the rise and fall of modernism that
stranded in Weimar, all point to site-specific meanings produced through
interactions between the different parties engaged in creating and performing
scripts with outcomes that are by no means predictable.
The ‘magic’ can go seriously astray, leading to conflicts (between zoo guides
and keepers, or between park personnel and locals, or between curators and
the public) about ‘proper’ curation; but it may also lead to forms of ‘creative
misunderstanding’ between tourist and local.
In Part IV, Sharon Macdonald revisits and explores the religion/museum
analogy, reviewing ways in which work on new religious movements contributes
to understanding recent developments in museums. Macdonald goes on to illu-
minate how contributions to this volume reflect these wider developments
concerning canonical authority/knowledge and subjective experience. She also
analyses the dilemmas of trying to achieve a balance between science and magic,
enchantment and authority, for as ‘difficult’ a heritage site as the former Nazi
rallying grounds in Nuremberg. She shows there are contexts in which the semi-
religious aura of ritual sites can pose extraordinary and even moral dilemmas;
where something has to be done with the past, however unsavoury, simply
because of the way it obtrudes into the present. Macdonald concludes with the
reminder that, since museums are such deeply political agencies in public
culture, their responsibility is not simply to enchant but also to educate – in the
broadest sense of the term. Let us turn now in more detail to the complex consti-
tution of that agency in the wide variety of settings that this volume includes.
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Part I Objects of Science? Baby and the Mummies
Science, as the sequence of terms in the title of this volume indicates, is the
point of departure for trying to understand contemporary developments in
museum culture rather than a final destination. Many objects on public display
in science museums today are clearly subject to interpretative procedures that
exceed their status as objects of knowledge. The very idea of memorialising the
future by devoting a gallery to how people conceptualised the future in the
past aims, as Harvey argues in the opening chapter, to engage the audience
with the objects on view in an exercise of ‘imaginative reasoning’. Imaginative
reasoning is also involved in the dramatisation of events, profiling scientists as
‘personalities’ and playing down the rational scientific process of their work
behind the closed doors of the laboratory (cf. Barry 1998). This exhibitionary
strategy can clearly be seen in the ‘birth’ (commemorative unveiling) of a recon-
struction of the first computer, known as ‘the Baby’ at the MSI in Manchester.
Conversely, the scientific procedures may themselves be harnessed to enhance
museum drama. Subjecting the mortal remains of dead Egyptians (‘mummies’)
to ritualised scientific medical procedures may be incorporated to great effect
in museum spectacle, as Wieczorkiewicz demonstrates in the second chapter.
Birth of the Baby in Manchester
Reconstructing the first computer in terms of a Baby, for public ‘delivery’ on

a given date, involved both the creation of a ‘cradle’ (the newly restored MSI
in Manchester) and midwifery by scientific ‘personalities’. The race against
the clock by the scientists involved in building this first computer turned the
whole event into a kind of dramatised family narrative. Harvey argues that in
themselves objects have no intrinsic power to enchant; this depends upon the
exhibition makers. She suggests that museums are increasingly becoming
places where the relationships between objects and people are brought out
and explored. Creating settings where people can make imaginative sense of
objects that have changed the world, nowadays often seem to involve recourse
to mixtures of art and science reminiscent of the seventeenth-century
Kunstkammer. The rituals surrounding the birth of the Baby played down the
rationalized scientific process, while playing up the human passions and strug-
gle involved in making a machine work.
This family narrative fits well with Manchester’s localising claim to be the
new brain centre of England. The birth was given full media coverage via
satellite communication, appealing in a commonsense way to the brave new
world of Manchester. The birth was about giving substance to genius: making
an object whose genealogy or creation story had been ‘lost’ quite literally
materialise, and rendering the human agents involved as highly visible media
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personalities. While it may be a little uncharitable to observe that Michel

Serre’s History of Science refers to neither of the Manchester personalities in
connection with the development of the computer, it does suggest that this
is a very local origin story (cf. Lévy in Serres, 1989 [1996]).
Celebrating the Baby in this way gives voice and credence to Manchester’s
global ambitions to being a science capital. The social drama of the birth
attempts to establish this machine as a specifically local form of competence
that will make Manchester renowned throughout the world. In this respect
the MSI birth ritual makes an interesting contrast with the eminently modern
performance of tradition at Nakambale (see Fairweather, Chapter 7 in this
volume) which, by confining the past to the museum, brings the world to a
remote place in Namibia. Manchester, by contrast, attempts to impose its
claim upon the world by metaphorising it as that most incontrovertible of
events: the birth of a baby. The hope of drawing visitors to Manchester is of
course also there.
Egyptian ancestors
If birth refers to the beginning of a person’s life which, by museum magic,

can be extended to the unveiling of a reconstructed machine, so too can death
– or more specifically the dead bodies of Egyptians treated with preservatives
and wrapped in linen – be manipulated to great effect.
Egyptian collections are in several respects a key case. In her discussion of
Van Gennep’s and Turner’s concepts of the ritual state of liminality – the
betwixt-and-between, out-of-this-world, zone through which initiates pass as
they transit from one social status to another – Duncan emphasises how
museum visitors are led to commune with the spirits of the dead in their
aesthetic contemplation of particular works of art. How might this liminal
state work for other kinds of collections and more particularly for Egyptian
mortal remains?
A related question is why Egyptian mummies are considered to be a suit-
able, indeed an educational, source of fascination for children. Spooky but at
the same time susceptible to neutralisation by scientific procedures, Egyptian
remains have been pressed into service in contemporary stories, rather than
dealing with the incorporation of Egypt into European history. Contempo-
rary Egyptian exhibitions anticipate and cater for visitors’ (and above all,
children’s) fascination with mummies. Wieczorkiewicz unravels this fascina-
tion in her chapter by examining the narrative genres in which they are
commonly placed, and then focussing on the transgressive act of unwrapping
mummies and subjecting them to scientific procedures, such as medical diag-
noses and plastic reconstruction. By personalising these remains but at the
same time distancing the viewer from them, the fact of death is somehow
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suspended for the duration of the visitor encounter with these objects and
may even involve the creation of a new ritual (as in Krakow). This particular
way of exposing children (and adults) to the ancient dead bodies of Egyptians
is also of interest because of what it suppresses about the nineteenth-century
European context of colonial collection.
French campaigns in Egypt were part of Napoleonic imperial expansion
and competition with other colonial powers, especially Britain and Germany,
for control over strategic trading routes and oil. Egyptian objects were
retrieved from ruins and brought to Europe on the grounds that these were
the ancestors of the Greeks and therefore of western civilisation. Deciphering
the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone was one of the crucial events in assign-
ing this African civilisation to Europe, welding it onto the western genealogy
and thus adding extra historical depth and a new identity component to the
period before the Greeks. The presence of Egyptian collections in the newly
constituted national museums that began to appear in the wake of the revo-
lutionary act of opening the royal palace of the Louvre to the people (1793)
added depth and richness to the genealogies of the respective nation states.
For the new citizens of those states, the presence of Egyptian ancestors
assigned to specific spaces within their national ‘temples’, effectively demar-
cated the frontier between civilisation and savagery. In Kristiania (now Oslo),
for example, Egyptian items were the first to be registered in the new ethno-
graphic museum collection, underlining both the Napoleonic origin of
Norway’s assignment to Sweden in the early nineteenth-century and the
nationalist aspirations which later came to centre on that museum (Bouquet
1996: 102–105). The African identity, as well as the colonial circumstances
under which these collections came to Europe, are missing from many Egyp-
tian narratives in European and American museums. These missing factors
greatly contribute to the specific ways that Egyptian materials have been ritu-
ally charged and are received outside as well as inside the museum. Focussing
on mortal remains is an almost magical procedure that deflects attention from
the historical manoeuvre involved, diverting it into the performance of a play.
Domesticated into contemporary popular culture by inflecting them with
‘horror’, science then takes over to neutralise and re-enchant the resulting
materials – especially for children but also, according to Wieczorkiewicz, to
enable us to face up to the existential dilemma of death.
If nineteenth-century Egyptian collections helped to constitute the histor-
ical depth of western civilisation by splicing them onto the classical Greek
genealogy and purging them of their African identity, their removal nonethe-
less implied that contemporary Egyptians (like their Greek counterparts) were
unable to take care of this heritage. This was the explicit justification for trans-
porting archaeological materials to places where they would be valued,
protected and placed on display for modern citizens who would be able to
draw the proper conclusions. The mainly positive reception of the ancient
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Egyptians (notwithstanding ‘horror movies’ showing reanimated mummies) is

almost diametrically opposed to the way that contemporary Congo popula-
tions were evaluated during the same colonial period, as the case of the Belgian
Royal Museum for Central Africa (hereafter RMCA) at Tervuren aptly demon-
strates.
Part II Site Specifics: the Case of Tervuren
Context, as the cases of Manchester and Krakow demonstrate, can be deci-

sive for the specific meanings attaching to museum objects. The ‘same’
scientific procedures for diagnosing and reconstructing Egyptian mummies
were quite differently interpreted in Manchester and Krakow. In order to
examine the workings of site specificity in more detail, this section dwells
upon two different approaches to the RMCA, Tervuren, in Belgium: Saun-
ders analyses the visual parameters imposed by the sculptures used to decorate
the building, and Wastiau gives an account of ongoing transformations in the
meanings of two objects now in the Tervuren collection.
(Belgian) Congolese others
The sculptures adorning the RMCA cupola entrance at Tervuren are, as Saun-
ders explains in her chapter, twofold in character: above, the allegorical figures
of art embody the civilising Belgian input to the relationship with the Congo:
‘Civilisation’, ‘Support’, ‘Prosperity’ and (the end of ) ‘Slavery’. Below, the
naturalised figures of the African ‘Artist’, ‘Chief ’, ‘Woodcutter/Idolmaker’,
and ‘Making Fire’, make native culture visible for the Belgian public. Tervuren
was also a propaganda machine for the early twentieth-century Belgian colo-
nial project, including missionaries as well as commercial interests, in Africa.
The museum was privately financed with the aim of showing what there was
to be developed there. As a day trip out of town for the Brussels public,
Tervuren in its park setting was both entertaining and inviting: King Leopold
II’s civilising mission for his people included showing them the enormous
possibilities for making money in the Congo. The 1898–99 ‘Congo State
solution’ divided equatorial Africa into forty huge territorial units, each of
which was leased to a state-administered company to exploit and rule.
It is perhaps worth underlining the obviously international dimension of
colonial projects in the context of national collections and museums. Belgian
colonialism included many non-Belgian nationals (merchants, explorers,
missionaries and state representatives) who were integrated into local politi-
cal activity during the 1870s and 1880s. In this way the Norwegian medical
doctor Heiberg’s collection of nine hundred Congo pieces was donated to the
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Norwegian Ethnographic Museum from 1902 onwards (Bouquet 1996: 74–77).

This example demonstrates the powerful model established by the Belgian
RMCA – not least for an aspirant nation state such as nineteenth-century
Norway, which was under colonial (Danish and later Swedish) rule. The
Ethnographic Museum became in fact a rallying point for nationalist aspira-
tions. Founding an ethnographic museum was an important way of presenting
the nation’s credentials, thereby constituting a conventional model of the
world (Prösler 1996).
Saunders argues that the Tervuren entrance cupola actively coerces the
visitor into seeing the Congo in certain ways. The relations embodied in the
figures physically engage the viewer (whose gaze goes ‘up’ to the allegorical
figures and ‘down’ to the naturalistic ones), without requiring any mediation
of ‘representations’ or interiorisations of consciousness. This physical engage-
ment echoes that identified by Wieczorkiewicz, for whom visitors’ stooping
to examine the tilted sarcophagus in Krakow marks the inception of a new
ritual. Saunders’ visitors to Tervuren are in some respects comparable to
Duncan’s ideal visitor: they perform a disquieting ritual of citizenship within
a scenario that has frozen early-twentieth-century Belgian understandings of
the colonial project. The spell has yet to be broken. The final part of her
chapter turns to the exhibition ExItCongo Museum as an attempt to do just
that. The extent to which meaning can be transformed by active curatorial
intervention that unsettles the meanings embedded in the site, is the subject
of Wastiau’s chapter.
Curatorial magic
Anthropologist-curator Wastiau’s account of the life histories of two Congolese

‘masterpieces’, which were included in the temporary exhibition, ExItCongo-
Museum held at the RMCA 2000–01, explores the issue of agency from the
curator’s perspective, as well as considering how collections are constituted and
how they are charged with meaning in the course of their life histories. Wastiau
exemplifies the creative and generative use of sites and collections, in which
curatorial intention and mediation can play a critical role.
Wastiau’s curatorial aim was to break the spell of Tervuren (Wastiau 2000).
His chapter focusses on a pair of objects and one collector, illuminating the
making of ‘masterpieces’, as certain well-known and well-travelled Congo
pieces are nowadays classified. Artistic intervention contemporised the histor-
ical narrative of the first part of the exhibition (Exit Congo) in the second
and third parts (Ex-Congo Museum; Exit Museum).
This exhibition succeeded in generating controversy and debate, demon-
strating not only hostility and lament about breaking the spell of the
masterpieces not to mention the RMCA itself, but also support for doing just
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that (see Arnaut 2001; Corbey 2001). This polemic was conducted beyond
the range of the RMCA, which meant that it could elude the agency of
the museum (cf. Porto 2000). One of the most interesting outcomes of
this temporary exhibition was to revive academic/university interest in the
museum. There is a good chance that this will actively contribute to the
creation of a new identity for the museum and new interest in it on the part
of contemporary Belgian and international publics.
Does such an intervention break with the ceremonial role of the curator if
that is understood as mediating the museum’s officially approved message to
the public? The notion that a curator could somehow betray the trust placed
in him by the museum (as was the case with Wastiau, cf. Bouquet 1998) indi-
cates the centrality of agency – including the curator’s – in constituting the
museum as a ritual site. This agency, along with its contradictory potential,
is missing from Duncan’s model of the museum as a ritual site for reaffirm-
ing citizenship, which anticipates identification with what is shown and the
narrative behind it. In some ways, of course, curatorial authority has been
undermined by what Macdonald and Silverstone refer to as the ‘cultural revo-
lution’ that took place in many museums from the late 1980s onwards
(Macdonald and Silverstone 1991). Curatorial authority has been tempered
in many museums by new marketing practices aimed at producing ‘public-
friendly’ exhibitions for entrance-fee-paying customers, thereby giving a whole
range of other museum staff (notably from Communications, Presentation,
Design, Education and Marketing departments) as important a voice in the
exhibition-making process as that of the curator, at least in theory. Despite all
this, successful cultural production in museums as in other institutions depends
upon the ability to develop and unveil new creations, which relies heavily on
curatorial knowledge and creativity. Many contemporary blockbuster exhibi-
tions stress completely new interpretations of works of art resulting from
research; for example, careful scrutiny of the relationship between Van Gogh
and Gauguin formed the basis of an exhibition which made strategic use of
both painters’ work (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, 2001).
However much of a rupture ExItCongoMuseum may represent in the way
that Central Africa was constituted at Tervuren, the question remains: to what
extent is any curator bound by the very nature of the location, space and
collection at his or her disposal to reformulate, certainly, but still to enchant?
The fact that the curatorial team intends a specific message does not guaran-
tee that the message will be received in the same form. For Wastiau, the
exhibition actually starts with fragments of the third part: contemporary
artworks were interjected from the entrance hall and throughout the perma-
nent galleries deliberately disturbing the conventional displays. The first part
encouraged visitors to reflect on the histories and stories of the artworks, by
their unconventional placement, lighting and documentation. The second
section questioned the way Congolese artefacts were naturalised in the
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museum’s space. Between the first section, dealing with the objects’ prove-
nance, and the second about ‘after acquisition’ (their use and abuse in private
and public displays), was a transitional room evoking transportation. A tall
white wall marked the passage to section three, with installations directly
questioning Tervuren’s museography and practice. Behind the wall were instal-
lations by guest artists relating to broader issues including race, history,
exhibiting, and interpretation, some of which were exhibited on the ground
floor in the permanent galleries.
There is, however, no guarantee that the visitor will receive the curator’s
message precisely as it was intended (cf. Wolbert, Chapter 8 in this volume).
Wastiau and his colleagues’ choreography of Tervuren space could in fact be
interpreted as pursuing a quite Turnerian formulation, despite intending a
diametrically opposed argument: up the spiral staircase on one side of the
building as a beginning; through a seemingly conventional – if eccentrically
lit – presentation of the history of the collection; into a central area of limbo
(quoting the much-used packing-case motif ) directly above the small rotunda;
followed by artists’ installations (including the supermarket trolley filled with
‘bargains’ [masterpieces]), the toy railway track, and down the spiral staircase
on the other side of the building to some ‘occupied’ glass cases below. Duncan
certainly anticipated the misreading visitor, but failed to consider the impli-
cations of various forms of agency for the museum as a ritual site. Curatorial
and other forms of agency are central concerns of the next section.
Part III Encounters, Performances and Unpredictables
This section focusses on issues of agency that arise through particular kinds
of performances in four different ritual sites. If the birth of the Baby (Harvey,
Chapter 1 in this volume) was a one-off ritual performance, dramatising the
human struggle to reconstruct a machine as a classic life-cycle rite de passage,
the guided tour of an established site tends to comprise a given repertoire of
objects, stories and other highpoints, yet to leave room for embroidery and
elaboration. Silva’s chapter demonstrates how the volunteer guides at Artis
Zoo mediate visitor appreciation of the specific form of animal sacrifice that
this most popular of museum collections entails. She takes us on a guided
tour of Artis Zoo in Amsterdam that deliberately conducts visitors ‘backstage’,
telling stories about the animals but also showing the complex social relations
that develop between zoo keepers, their charges, volunteer guides and the
public. While going ‘backstage’ at a zoo may have developed into a somewhat
predictable routine, the underlying moral ambivalence of keeping animals in
captivity combined with ongoing tensions arising from the differences in
professional status between keepers and guides is likely to provide visitors with
food for thought.
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Going behind the scenes at Artis Zoo
Zoo animals are not simply ‘there’ in their cages or enclosures but are actively
made ‘present’ by zoo guides. These are the people to convey the personali-
ties, accompanying stories and the sense of order for visitors to this highly
idiosyncratic collection and environment.
Guided tours of Artis Zoo include not only the celebrated feeding of
animals, but also go behind the scenes – into the kitchen where the meals are
composed, or among the pipes and filter system behind the aquarium. This
privileged access to what Goffman (1959) has referred to as the backstage area
of social performances admits visitors to a zone normally out of bounds for
the public, inviting them to experience the position of a zoo employee – in
a way similar to Bennett’s (1995: 67) argument about nineteenth-century
public museums enabling the people to experience what it was to be on the
side of power. Visitors to the zoo are invited to stand in the shoes of their
guide, learning to see and to know the animals through their eyes and expe-
rience. The fact that guides are not ‘real’ zoo personnel does, however, also
introduce a measure of ambiguity and sometimes even verbal conflict
(between guides and keepers) into the tour. Going behind the scenes is also
perhaps about ‘seeing’ certain civic responsibilities regarding these often large
and exotic creatures, in what is explicitly a ‘fun’ visit to areas not normally
accessible to the public. There is an invitation implicit in the knowledge
gained through privileged access to assume greater responsibility toward these
specimens of endangered wildlife.
Visitors on a guided tour of the zoo are being initiated in several different
ways: these may include gossiping about animals (in the way that anthro-
pologists might gossip about people), thereby personalising and often
anthropomorphising them (Silva gives the example of penguins in ‘tuxedos’);
or it may involve seeing beneath the surface of the easily perceptible (‘feeding
time’), through a visit to the kitchens; or having your attention drawn to
reclusive or lesser-known animals whose existence might otherwise be over-
looked. The enormous popularity of the zoo with all sections of the
population means that giving the zoo visit a serious slant is a tempting option,
certainly in the Netherlands. The guided visit through the zoo seems to
involve a trade off between the pleasure derived from maximum insight and
the responsibility that goes with this sort of inside information. Getting to
know the animals leads to an appreciation of the sacrifice that they are
required to make by being in captivity. Going to the zoo is a collective ritual
that almost every child undergoes either en famille or with the school, which
suggests that parents and teachers see it as an opportunity to teach something
as well as being a super-popular destination. The ephemerality of animals’
lives strikes a chord of recognition with humans: the animal condition is also
the human one. Although the zoo might, arguably, just as easily be seen as
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the ultimate expression of rational man, playing God, managing and control-
ling the natural world this does not seem to be the tone of the guided tour,
in Artis Zoo, at least. Set in the heart of Amsterdam, the appeal to moral
conscience and responsibility that can be discerned in the midst of all the fun
is a reminder of the moral fibre still at the core of this local setting (cf. Schama
1987).
The way an external discourse on the environment articulates with local
appreciation of the landscape is the subject of Tracey Heatherington’s chapter
on Monte San Giovanni in Sardinia. The designation of certain landscape
features as being of outstanding natural beauty, requiring protection, also
involves forms of structured contact (such as nature excursions) that enable
visitors to get closer to Sardinian nature. As with the guided tour at the zoo,
these excursions enact environmental identities: learning takes place by visit-
ing, seeing and appreciating Nature. Alternative local narratives about Monte
San Giovanni emphasise, by contrast, local community values and ‘tradition’
in making the landscape what it is.
Performing locality vs. performing ecology
Monte San Giovanni was already a local landmark or ‘anthropological place’,

in Marc Augé’s (1995) sense of being filled with history, identities and social
relations, before its sudden redefinition according to external ‘ecological’ crite-
ria as the centre of a natural park. Monte San Giovanni was already defined
by local people as a ‘cathedral’ – a key symbolic place of pilgrimage to which
people felt attached both on religious and family grounds. Local feeling about
Monte San Giovanni is connected to its survival as common land in the face
of nineteenth-century enclosure. The continuation of pastoral and commu-
nitarian traditions helped to save the commons from deforestation and is one
of the reasons for strong local feelings about this place as being theirs and
pride in showing it to visitors.
The redefinition of Monte San Giovanni as a uniquely valuable symbol of
global environmental heritage places a different frame around the landscape.
The formalisation of the Gennargentu National Park enshrines features of the
natural landscape as a potent source of both knowledge and aesthetics, as
Heatherington puts it. This frame also, however, implies techniques of park
management imagined as custodial techniques. This management effectively
renders invisible the local population and its constitution of the landscape by
framing the park as a space set aside from human use, in its turn a kind of
sacred space – idealised and ritualised as well as regulated and controlled.
Park-organised excursions to Monte San Giovanni effectively sanctify ecolog-
ical identities, emulating scientific observation and sharing in the project of
scientific conservation that should enable the visitor to get closer to nature.
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At the same time, it fosters a sense of responsibility for preserving the purity
of nature in terms of what might be called ‘environmental citizenship’. Locals,
by contrast, think of the purity of nature as evincing cultural authenticity:
reenacting the experience of shepherds, retracing the steps of the Catholic
processions that used to go to the site of an old mediaeval church on the
summit of the mountain until World War Two, imbibing the salubrious spring
waters and going for summer picnics.
The range of discourses generated by Monte San Giovanni over the past
thirty years (local, cultural and external, scientific/ecological), demonstrate
how the meaning of landscape becomes diversified (a ‘heterotopia’) through
the process of musealisation (cf. Hetherington 1996). Local mediators (resi-
dents, tourist guides, forest rangers) are responsible for constituting and
negotiating both external and internal visions of the landscape. This adjust-
ment, producing a plurality of meanings among tourists, environmentalists,
nature lovers and residents, inevitably alters local perception of their own key
symbolic space.
A comparable effect is found in the performance of heritage at a museum
in northern Namibia (Fairweather). It is important to point out that the
museum model colonised not only Europe and the West but has also trav-
elled significantly farther afield – right up to the present day (see Prösler
1996). Fairweather’s analysis of the ex-Finnish Mission Museum in post-
independence Namibia demonstrates how colonisation itself can be musealised
from the other direction.
Nakambale double act: performing heritage
Staff and visitors to the Nakambale Museum in Namibia are involved in a

complex process of (re)constructing their culture. Claiming to preserve local
‘traditions’ and ‘culture’ is modern, Fairweather argues, and has ideological
dimensions associated with Namibian nation building. These ‘traditions’ were
shaped by the encounter with Europeans, and the Nakambale Museum cele-
brates both the arrival of Christianity and missionaries and local customs and
traditions. Staff and community in fact reclaim the colonial past objectified
in the mission house turned museum as their own since this was the way they
came in contact with the wider world. The paradox inherent in the museum
is resolved, according to Fairweather, through the performances that take place
there: foreign tourists who come to visit Olukonda in search of the tradi-
tional are given a guided tour, a meal and the opportunity to purchase local
products from the museum shop. The performers, on the other hand, both
identify with but also distance themselves from the traditional by pointing
out how different things were in the past. They demonstrate to themselves, as
well as to non-Oshiwambo speakers, their modernity in being able to perform
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tradition so well that they can attract visitors from the wider world, thereby
transcending the local.
Enchantment in the Nakambale case consists in the double act of being
able to conjure up tourists in this remote part of North-Central Namibia, and
being able to put on folklore performances and a meal for them. At the same
time, the performance is also for a national audience and clearly claims a
stronger position for Oshiwambo speakers at that level. The syncretism between
Christianity and local narratives (as in the passage from ‘savagery to civilisa-
tion’ that forms part of the display at the museum), demonstrates that this is
not a straightforward case of exporting the museum model. Instead, the
museum as an institution is ingested, digested and remoulded into new forms:
the competitive claims made by local people through their museum demon-
strate a greater degree of open-endedness than Duncan’s original definition of
the museum as a ritual site anticipated. There is room for differing interpre-
tations not only between official museum messages and the reception of those
messages, but also in the highly ambiguous performances that are staged in
and around museums. The Nakambale case provides a good starting point for
considering how the dynamic character of meaning invested in museums artic-
ulates with strategic management of representation on behalf of certain groups
vis-à-vis current social issues. Bringing contemporary postcolonial culture into
a former colonial mission is one form this process can take.
The past may, however, come to haunt the present in quite unintended (as
far as curatorial intention goes) ways, as Wolbert’s contribution shows.
Curating German pasts
The internationalisation of locality associated with the Manchester (Harvey),

Monte San Giovanni (Heatherington), and Nakambale (Fairweather), resur-
faces in the way Weimar chose to give expression to its nomination as
European cultural capital in 1999. Barbara Wolbert’s analysis of the art exhi-
bition, ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, is situated in a city which, like
postindustrial Manchester, became a candidate for recuperation – although,
of course, the case of Weimar is qualified by German reunification after the
fall of the Wall.
The sites connected by the exhibition trajectory (the Castle and Gaufo-
rum) were not associated with the Nazi past, which had always been locked
away in Buchenwald. However, in the event, an unanticipated problem arose
through the superimposition of several ‘pasts’ on the same highly charged
space. This was not initially seen as a problem with which the exhibition had
to deal. The attempt to diffuse this effect, transforming it through artistic
intervention into something tangible for debate, produced instead a kind of
redundancy as an art exhibition. The failure of the curators responsible to
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create the required technology of enchantment (Wolbert refers to the

‘amateurish’, botched hanging in the Castle, and the propped-up art from the
GDR period), led to unified public outcry. Journalists from both former East
and the West, politicians and those writing in the visitors’ book felt insulted
by the treatment of the art at the hands of arrogant curators. Wolbert argues
that the story repeated in the newspapers about the fateful combination of
site, art and curation perfectly reflecting the collective malaise of the reluc-
tantly reunited Germany, was in fact a myth. The terms of the outcry were
in fact unanimous (about art and professionalism) yet came to express anxi-
eties and frustrations connected with East/West divisions.
The outcome was that the great occasion for joining the European club,
on one of its most prestigious circuits, was spoiled by press insistence on unre-
solved conflicts still simmering beneath the surface. The idea of invoking a
European audience to contemplate the rise and fall of modernism subsided
into a witches’ brew of supposed internal divisions, issuing forth from several
pasts. As Wolbert points out, Duncan’s model disregards the actual relation-
ship between curator and visitor, confounding as it does the curator(s) with
the institution. Her analysis of the Weimar exhibit shows that the institution,
the site and the curator(s) are unpredictable components of the museum; and
that the volatile mixture produced in their interaction with visitors may feed
directly back into the local social context.
* * *
These ethnographic approaches to exhibitions, whether in conventional
museums or elsewhere, invite discussion of Duncan’s model of the museum
as a ritual site at two related levels. The first of these is theoretical and relates
to Turner’s model, from which she departs. The second concerns the broad
notion of museum operating in various ways in the different settings
described, which suggests that public involvement with museum culture as a
way of making coherent statements about social identity is far more complex
than she anticipated. Turner himself proposed that liminoid phenomena occur
in very different situations, as he perceived in shifting his analysis from
African rites of passage to Latin American and European Catholic pilgrimage.
Duncan seems to have underestimated the specificities of liminoid phenom-
ena in modern contexts when restricting Turner’s formulation to European
and American art museums.
For Turner, this shift implied considering individual experience rather than
general social structure. The liminoid would, in these cases, not be located in
the domain of ‘the whole’ social group, but among clusters of individuals who,
although identified with one another, might be situated in transnational
spaces, and think of themselves as westerners (cf. Turner 1973). These people
might also think of themselves as belonging to a community defined by shared
common practice such as, critically in Turner’s formulation, attending theatre
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performances (Turner 1986). Duncan’s reading of Turner, and her seminal

approach to museums from this perspective, fails to incorporate the diversity
of ritual experience that these ritual settings permit. This critique had already
been levelled at Turner himself by, for example, Gerholm (1988) who argued
that ritual (in what he claims to be a postmodern view) is structured by non-
ritual procedures. These account for the fact that it is the subject’s point of
view that determines whether or not a concrete situation is experienced as a
ritual situation. Attending a theatre performance may, from this perspective,
be sheer entertainment. The same applies to visiting museums, zoos or natural
parks: it depends how visitors define the situation, which may in turn depend
on many other factors. The main issue concerning ritual experience associ-
ated with museum visiting is that it involves not only the visitor but also (as
with theatre) ritual officials and volunteers: curators, designers, exhibition
makers and the like, as the cases under discussion demonstrate.
A second issue connects with this theoretical position, although it might
also be seen as a product of recent history. This concerns increasing public
awareness of the museological process, and its corresponding impact upon
both exhibitions and museum politics (see Wastiau, Heatherington, and Fair-
weather). As Karp (1992) reminds us, museums and museum-like sites may
be included in what he calls (following Gramsci) the regulatory devices of civil
society. For Karp, ‘civil society’ includes not only – or even mainly – institu-
tions, but covers ongoing processes of negotiation about social identities.
Museums are actively engaged in this discussion and hence in the negotiation
of social identities. In this respect, contesting a museum exhibition may range
from ignoring the museum’s existence to appropriating it as a cultural frame
to value places and people otherwise invisible. Duncan’s focus on European
and American art museums narrows the scope of this process to one category
of museums among many. If, as the cases included in this volume seem to
demonstrate, the ritual spectrum is much broader, then its analysis must
include not only other sorts of museum, but especially museum personnel as
well as visitors, celebrity scientists, and arguably personalised machines,
mortal animals and immortal mummies. In pursuing how and why museum
culture participates in the enchantment of the world, the various chapters of
this book substantially adjust Duncan’s framework by adding agency to the
actors involved. The orchestration of liminality is a complex collective endeav-
our in the museum-visiting process, and we now need to return to the issue
of reception.
Part IV Dilemmas of Enchantment
If the musealisation of culture is an inevitable accompaniment to the process

of modernisation, as Vaessen (1986) has argued, whereby objects that have
19
fallen into disuse as well as newly created objects are used to fill the gap left
by too rapid change, the capacity to reengage with this material either as a
member of the public or as a cultural (= ritual) specialist, becomes one of the
defining criteria of the modern citizen (Bourdieu and Darbel 1991; Solberg
1994). We return to this issue in connection with the fall of the Arapesh
tambaran cult and ensuing production of heritage in the final section of this
introduction.
Macdonald addresses the new religiosity in the concluding part of the book,
where she reviews the preceding chapters in terms of contemporary dilemmas
for the museum as a ritual site. She examines the shift of attention and expe-
rience from the church to other sites which may, in turn, be transformed into
ritual places. Their recognition as significant destinations containing meaning-
ful objects depends on various kinds of knowledge that makes them significant
for different segments of the population.
Macdonald takes Weber’s notion of the disenchantment of the world as her
point of departure for discussing the new forms of religiosity sought by the
modern self, relating this to the project of museums and comparable sites.
The dilemmas associated with the process of musealising the former Nazi
rallying ground in Nuremberg underline the deeply political agency of
museums. The past haunts the Nuremberg project in a way that resembles the
Weimar case (Wolbert). The difference lies perhaps in the explicit use of art
in Weimar in a temporary exhibition, which raises the question of whether
Macdonald’s concept of enchantment is equivalent to Gell’s formulation of
art as a technology of enchantment (1992). Gell conceived of art as a tech-
nology that is magical in the sense that the resulting artefact seems to exceed
productive labour. However, the agency of curators and other museum staff
as well as visitors in producing this enchantment, as repeatedly demonstrated
in the contributions to this volume, suggests that the museum effectively
channels the agency of modern subjects in several directions.
Museum Magic
Carol Duncan’s theorisation of the art museum as a ritual site demonstrated

how a modern, post-Enlightenment, elite institution is scripted as a rite of
citizenship. The neglected issue of agency, both of museum staff and of visi-
tors, is of central importance to understanding the museum as a ritual site,
as the contributors to this volume elucidate in their explorations of various
exhibitionary configurations both in Europe and beyond. Enchantment,
whether in a Namibian village, an Amsterdam zoo, a Sardinian natural park,
or a Mancunian science museum, emerges as something that not only involves
locals in a global discourse (and simultaneously localises global issues), but is
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actively constituted by both producers and consumers through the repertoire

of objects, images and places they have at their disposal.
The museum as a ritual site involves not only the physical constitution of
collection, buildings and choreography in space, but also the active mediation
by ritual specialists, who by no means operate according to precepts concern-
ing the ideal citizen even in the contemporary market-oriented incarnation of
‘target group’ or consumer. This is fortunate since visitors themselves may be
interested in appropriating the museum for their own purposes – actively and
not always predictably. However political the agency of the museum may be,
there are likely to be curators who manage to subvert or alter the course of
official messages just as there are visitors who domesticate the museum for
their own purposes. In this sense, citizenship (if that is what the museum is
‘about’) is subject to continuous overhaul through the museological process
including (but not centrally dependent on) museum visiting.
Malinowski inspires one possible explanation for why this might be so
nowadays. If we connect contemporary social processes of identity formula-
tion in a disenchanted world with the role that museums and museum-like
sites play in it, it may be that such institutions are inherently magical. What
museums and processes of contemporary identity formation have in common
is that they can be grounded on practically anything which may, in turn, be
subjected to musealisation. This observation implies that museums are less
about things in themselves than about the social networks that bring these
marked things to the core of some signifying process. These are long-term
processes that converge in different ways upon museums and similar sites
where they serve to reenchant the world.
The specificity of such sites is that they wrap things in a mythological
universe, indeterminate enough to accommodate multiple layers of identifi-
cation, and thereby providing open-ended comments on everyday life. This
quality is partially derived from their seemingly extraterrestrial origin – the
museum setting is out of this world, in liminoid time and space. In this
respect they seem to be very much like Trobriand gardens. Gardens, to borrow
from Malinowski’s account of yam planting (and its insightful reading by Gell
(1988: 9)), are not simply about growing yams, but about their planting to
the accompaniment of the proper spells and procedures. Gell refers to a kind
of ‘ideal garden’, which strongly resembles the exhibition concept and special
effects, which are developed on paper in a long-term process leading up to
the opening. Applied to the case of museums, the magic involved is as diverse
as contemporary identities are fragmented, and may include exorcisms in
Weimar, ecological empowering at the Amsterdam zoo, rewriting national
history at Tervuren, or domesticating technology at Manchester by walking
around inside a computer.
Museum magic is, in other words, a way of reflecting upon the world –
things, ourselves, others, the past or the future – by creating a framework that
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is both orderly yet more than that: it uses special effects, such as lighting,
which resemble the Trobrianders’ magical prisms. It is magic in that it subjects
only part – a small but significant part – of that world to such reflection in
some ideal historically and socially situated manner. For this reason, museum
magic works by trial and error and is always provisional. It is not magical to
everybody all the time, nor is it completely predictable (as with yam magic).
It is difficult to understand, just as coexisting forms of magic – notably
cinema, theatre, advertising and other practices implying liminoid suspension
of disbelief – are difficult to understand in purely rational terms. Museum
magic does, however, surpass certain other technologies of enchantment since
it provides a spatial venue for wider ritual processes that endure beyond the
time frame normally available to film, theatre or advertising. If the liminal
space of the museum enables visitors to grasp some part of the world in
another light, museum specialists – such as curators, architects, and design-
ers – may be seen as its magical technicians, using the complex means of
museum spells against a disenchanted world.
Postscriptum: The Past, its Presence and the Future
When Tuzin revisited Ilahita in the mid-1980s, the tambaran cult had been
dramatically unmasked at a Sunday morning Revivalist (Christian) service; in
the course of his fieldwork, he was to observe the cultural process of memo-
rialising the tambaran (Tuzin 1997: 142). For if the revelation that the secret
men’s club was a ‘hoax’ led in the first instance to the destruction of cult para-
phernalia and associated practices (1997: 9–11), later on the memory of the
Tambaran came to stand for ‘Ilahita’s past greatness … tainted … but
nonetheless glorious’ (1997: 142). The instigators of the tambaran iconoclasm
‘wanted to remember, but also redefine the value and relevance of, those tradi-
tions, putting them safely at bay from the self ’ (ibid). Life and practice were,
according to Tuzin, transformed by emotional distancing into heritage and
reminiscence. The ambivalence of this redefined tambaran, a source of both
attraction and revulsion, is reminiscent of human attitudes toward caged
wildlife at the zoo (Silva), or the transgressive allure of unwrapping mummies
(Wieczorkiewicz) or even, although in a different way, the Nazi rallying
grounds at Nuremburg (Macdonald). As Tuzin observes, ‘a moral and cogni-
tive dissonance was cast in the form of an “incriminating charter”, in this case
the promulgation of a “heritage”, a cultural enshrinement that ironically
indicts today’s modernist ideology and deprives it of unquestioned legitimacy’
(1997: 142). Fairweather’s interpretation of modernism at the colonial
mission turned museum suggests, however, that the making of heritage may
constitute a significant act of modernism – as indeed the tambaran episode
tends to confirm.
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When Revivalists went as far as staging performances of tambaran music

for a visiting ethnomusicologist (1997: 221–222, n.15), they were first criti-
cised by anti-Revivalist traditionalists for (as they saw it) trivialising custom.
However, once the performances got underway, everyone was soon caught
up in a ‘festive, nostalgic atmosphere’. Tuzin affirms, ‘the experience demon-
strated, however – rather subversively, from the standpoint of the traditionalists –
… that Tambaran art can be secularized, and that doing so might be preferable
to totally abandoning it’ (ibid).
* * *
The detailed cases in this volume illuminate how the ritual processes of
museum magic are an integral component of contemporary culture. We make
into heritage the ‘stuff ’ (Charles Hunt’s term) that comes down to us through
intense social and political negotiation, frequently involving performances
that engage visitors with ritual specialists, either directly or indirectly. The
concentration of meaning in specific spaces uses diverse exhibitionary tech-
nologies that appeal – sometimes on an alternating basis – to the rational and
the emotional, bordering on the religious. As Eco reminds us, ‘[t]o enter the
Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, you first cross an eighteenth-century
courtyard and step into an old abbey church, now part of a later complex, but
originally part of a priory. You enter and are stunned by a conspiracy in which
the sublime universe of heavenly ogives and the chthonian world of gas guzzlers
are juxtaposed’ (Eco [1989] 2001: 7). Günther Domenig’s diagonal slice design
for the documentation centre in the – unrestored – Nuremberg Colosseum
provides a stunning example of the magical as well as the political sensitivity
of making heritage (see Macdonald, this volume). Despite the rhetorical empha-
sis placed on the pastness or alterity of the material involved, attending to its
cultural uses in the present will provide anthropologists, together with contem-
porary scholars from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, with
interpretative challenges for the foreseeable future.
NOTES
We would like to thank Boris Wastiau and Barbara Wolbert for their helpful comments on this
introduction. We are particularly grateful to an anonymous reader of the manuscript for a number
of suggestions.
1. Palau de la Musica in Barcelona was the venue for the 1996 EASA opening.
2. The present volume developed out of the workshop, ‘Science, Magic and Religion, the
Museum as a Ritual Site’, which we convened at the Krakow conference – in one of the old lec-
ture rooms at the Jagiellonian University.
23
3. Although it should be noted that museum as defined by ICOM and certain national museum
organisations would include zoos. The wider term heritage as defined by UNESCO includes
both material and immaterial sites, which certainly border on if not overlap with the term
museum.
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Karp, I. (1992) ‘On Civil Society and Social Identity’, in Karp, I., Kramer, C. and
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PART I
O BJECTS OF S CIENCE ?
B ABY AND THE M UMMIES
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C HAPTER 1
M EMORIALISING THE F UTURE –
T HE M USEUM OF S CIENCE AND
I NDUSTRY IN M ANCHESTER 1
Penelope Harvey
Magic in the Science Museum
Science museums have long been associated with a sense of wonder and magic.
London’s Science Museum emerged from the Great Exhibition of 1851 when
visitors to the Crystal Palace were invited to marvel at the Machine Hall and
admire the inventions and products of the Industrial Age. The importance
and the excitement of science have continued to motivate science museums
across the world. Many adults today remember the childhood thrill of watch-
ing the effects of pushing buttons and pulling levers, of being able to stand
close by and even touch the huge machines of industrial production, and
many parents take their children back to the museums they visited as young-
sters to recapture something of the pleasure of playing with machines. And
the institutionalised practice of science has benefitted from such effects. The
early museums collected objects to inspire good practice and even to loan
apparatus2 and contemporary science museums continue to promote the insti-
tution of science even if in a more abstract way.
This chapter is based on ethnographic work in the Museum of Science and
Industry in Manchester (MSIM) and asks questions about the kinds of knowl-
edge that are produced in contemporary museums of science and industry.
At the time of my involvement with the Museum (1998–99), they were
participating in an EU-funded project, Infocities, in which seven European
cities worked to develop and test the interoperability of networked computer
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Penelope Harvey
applications in various domains of public interest – such as health, education,

commerce, culture, and transport. Manchester was leading the work on
culture. The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester was centrally
involved in this effort and became a focal point for a series of activities
designed to highlight Manchester’s profile as an Information City.
Under the general publicity banner of Digital Summer 1998 the Museum
opened a new exhibition space, a meticulously restored railway warehouse, the
world’s first, built in 1830. A temporary exhibition, ‘Futures’, was produced
to inaugurate this new space and to pilot ideas for a subsequent, permanent
Communications Gallery. The Futures gallery explored the past and future of
communications. It housed a public-access computer centre with state-of-the-
art machines, but the centrepiece of Futures was a replica of a computer,
known as ‘the Baby’, the first computer with stored memory, built at
Manchester University fifty years previously. The rebuild was itself a project
in scientific history. A group of computer enthusiasts worked closely with the
original developers, known as the ‘pioneers’, to recreate a machine able to run
the original programme. The science on display in Futures thus had an explicit
orientation towards the future as well as the past, and was quite clearly part
of a wider political effort to promote one particular way of using scientific
knowledge to change the world.
This distinction between science as knowledge of the world and science as
the means by which the world can be changed is an important one. Tambiah
(1990) has argued that it is the slippage between these two domains of scien-
tific activity that promotes the idea of ‘science’ as a particular autonomous
realm of knowledge, as the motor of history. The Museum of Science and
Industry in Manchester is interested in both displaying science (as knowledge
of the physical world) and in exploring the impact of scientific innovation in
Britain’s first industrial city. This chapter explores how the slippage between
these two areas of interest reproduces cultural understandings of the magical
effects of science.
The expertise of scientists is gained through a cross-dynamic of engage-
ment in the world (as required by experimentation) and disengagement from
the world (as required by the standards of objectivity). Scientific expertise rests
on the acquisition of specialist knowledge and specialist languages which are
used to generate theories or generalised statements to explain observable
natural phenomena. Scientific truths are provisional but not personal. The
emotional, moral and physical characteristics of particular scientists might
affect their capacity to know, but truth itself is not contingent on the char-
acter of those who bring such truths to light.
The gap between science and the science museum thus rests on the fact
that for science the human story of how things came to be known is irrele-
vant to the status of knowledge, once that knowledge has been scientifically
established. Scientific knowledge of the physical world is primarily conceptual
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Memorialising the Future
and abstract. The science museum needs some help in displaying these truths
and tends to appeal to narratives, specific contexts or personal experience to
communicate and render such knowledge relevant to visitors. Objects them-
selves do not necessarily help that much: ‘[O]bjects from science museum
collections are often understandable only in terms of the ideas they helped
form or served to uphold. Technology lends itself more easily to display, but
often the vital innovation within the machine on view is not apparent’ (Butler
1992: 108).
The Museum as Ritual Site
Rendering scientific knowledge relevant and accessible to a general visiting

public requires a disruption of rationalising abstraction, and a communicative
process that restores some sense of visceral engagement. There are various ways
in which such an effect might be achieved. There is the sense of wonder at the
unimaginable (a technique used to great effect in the universal exhibitions of
the past), or the ways in which some museums create a sense of hallowed terrain,
as Duncan (1995) has argued in respect of certain art collections. Science
museums can offer visitors proximity to objects that appear to have changed
the world. In the museum setting the objects themselves can take on the magical
quality of autonomous agents – just as the automata of the past were able to.
Usually these objects cannot be touched but they almost can. Objects can also
stand as silent witnesses to former times, vicarious points of access to former
worlds that facilitate the journeys into the historical imaginary which have
proved so popular in recent times.3 Within the museum, objects are integrated
into collections, and perhaps more significantly into designed environments in
which their relationship to other objects and to people can enhance their
communicative power. The objects held in museums do not have the intrinsic
capacity to enchant. Visitors need to be drawn into relationships with them and
the skill of those who put the exhibitions together is to find a way to articulate
that relationship such that it both attracts and educates.
Many contemporary museums are intensely aware that in the sale of the
knowledge commodity an overbearing appeal to notions of expertise or exclu-
sivity can alienate potential visitors. Contemporary museum exhibits thus
have to find ways to demonstrate the rigour of scientific thinking without
allowing the appeal to authority and expertise to destroy opportunities for
visitors to experience enchantment and personal involvement. Furthermore
the public funding on which the majority of these institutions depend is tied
to a commitment to opening access to all sectors of society. Such access
requires a more horizontal and less hierarchical relationship between museum
professionals and the visiting public. A commitment to transparency is often
articulated as a neat solution to such dilemmas. The expert work of the
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Penelope Harvey
museums can continue, but incorporated into the museum displays. Thus the
daily business of the museum becomes more visible to visitors.
Some curators are inclined to see themselves as facilitators for learning rather than
as sole dispensers of knowledge … the private spaces and processes are sometimes
opened quite literally through inviting visitors on ‘open days’ to see ‘behind the
scenes’. Storage areas, conservation and photographic laboratories, and archives are
demonstrated and explained. Sometimes the activities that, in the past, would
always have been carried out behind closed doors, are pursued in the public spaces.
(Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 200)
The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester has embraced this ethos
in many ways as they try to draw in new visitors and to explore a more
communicative and less didactic approach in their exhibits. There are still
tensions within the Museum between the idea of the museum visitor as passive
consumer of expert knowledge, and the visitor as a person who brings their
own experience (and expertise) to what is conceptualised as an interpretative
and interactive process. Backed by extensive visitor research the new approach
within the Museum has the upper hand, and visitors are encouraged to touch
and feel, to get personally involved in science, to thoroughly mix the social
and the scientific and to produce new unexpected artefacts from the fragments
of past industrial production. Visitors are encouraged to think of knowledge
as experiential, the machines as expressive and communicative. In a radical
innovation in display techniques, the Museum began to employ artists to
produce ‘installations’ (performative artwork) that encourage visitors to ques-
tion the superiority of scientific expertise and value their own responses.
The idea of using art installations was first introduced in 1992 in a tempo-
rary exhibit entitled ‘Home Truths’. The idea was to use the flexible and
creative structure of an artwork to rethink, and re-present the standard cate-
gories through which museums habitually approached the objects in their
care. The point of this exhibit was to problematise the place of ‘domestic’
technologies in human social life.
Within museums, some things are chosen for the collections, others aren’t. For
example, museum curators collect the hardware of pottery, metals, wood, plastics;
they pay less attention to the softwares of teabags, tissues, liquids or bedclothes.
These are domestic technologies which have developed or changed very consider-
ably in the last forty to fifty years. In this museum’s collections, for example, we
have the earth and water closets but not the lavatory paper. Museum staff collect
many artefacts from kitchens and living rooms; they collect few from bedrooms
and bathrooms. (Porter ms 1995)
The idea behind this new approach was to bring people more firmly back into
the exhibition space. The staff involved in these projects wanted to think
more deeply about the social lives of objects, their personal contexts, and the
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associations, emotions and experiences of those whose lives had been inflected
by them. One of the effects of this approach is that the object is replaced as
the central focus of the exhibit by a theme on which there might be many
different kinds of expertise. The idea is that in such a setting visitors can more
easily find a point of connection, or at least of comparison and science and
technology can become less alien and more familiar to visitors. The museum
itself also becomes less important as a source of knowledge about the objects
and more important as the means by which visitors come to recognise them-
selves and their own histories in relation to the general theme of the display.4
As part of Digital Summer 1998, the Museum and Art Transpennine
commissioned an installation by the Canadian artist Dominique Blain.
‘Chorus’ was developed in collaboration with an ethnomusicologist who
records lullabies from around the world, collected as people are singing their
children to sleep. The concept was to introduce the traces of the people who
might have had some connection with the warehouse and the goods which
passed through it. There was a deliberate attempt to insert alternative exhibi-
tionary forms and ‘to introduce notions of the personal, private, intimate,
subtle, suggestive and multi-cultural into a space which was public, industrial,
literal and explicit in its messages and often conceived as “Manchester” and
male’.5 Hammocks hung from the warehouse ceilings occupied by the shapes
of human forms. The lullaby music filled the room. On the ground old oil
drums glowed like the braziers over which people could warm their hands and
inside each drum the photographs of hands of various ages, colours, and sizes
were lit from beneath to invoke the huge diversity of people who might in
some way be connected to that space. No official visitor studies were done on
this exhibit, but anecdotally it appears that some people loved it while others
did not like it at all, and found it hard to interpret.
The Museum also commissioned a community play. The script for the
play, NETS, was written by the director, Mike Harris, but his way of working
suited the Museum’s more open collaborative approach. He began by running
public workshops and encouraging people to explore their ideas of techno-
logical futures. To the images that came out in these public brainstorming
sessions, he added further ideas from novels, documentaries, and from expert
research into bio and information technologies to create a dramatic work that
would challenge and stimulate performers and audience alike.
The interest among certain Museum staff members in juxtaposing their
collections of industrial artefacts with contemporary artworks lay in the possi-
bilities for enhancing the communicative potential of these object, of
animating the collections and making the Museum visit more exciting and
more rewarding for visitors. The focus on futures and on networked comput-
ing became part of this agenda.
Much of the Museum’s profile, site and collections are about the old staple indus-
tries of Manchester – textiles, engineering, transport. They’re about the first
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Penelope Harvey
Industrial Revolution, ‘of atoms’. We needed to put people into these stories; and
to bring history up to date, to include Manchester’s current industrial and
economic profile; as a city of students, music and football, with new industries.
We wanted to feature the second industrial revolution, of ‘bits’ and contribute to
the city’s social and economic regeneration. (Member of the MSIM curatorial staff )
The push was for a conceptual move away from the idea of museums as places
where objects are (re)stored, held and displayed – to places where the rela-
tionships between people and objects can be brought out and explored.
The Futures Gallery
Having spent £5.5 million on restoring the 1830 Warehouse the museum was
looking for a way to draw people into this building with an exhibit that made
an impact, but was not going to interfere with the fabric of the building, now
a precious artefact in its own right. The brief for the gallery was drawn up by
Figure 1.1 ‘The world’s oldest surviving railway building, the warehouse at the ter-
minus of the Liverpool to Manchester railway which opened in 1830’ (photograph by
Penelope Harvey)
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a team made up of the senior designer, the senior curator and an external
consultant. The museum had done preevaluation work using external research
based on focus groups. Communications emerged as the theme. The idea was
to explore the analogy between the age of the railway and that of the com-
puter. Taken together the 1830 Warehouse, the Baby, and Digital Summer
1998 would connect the international movement of commodities and bulk
goods associated with nineteenth-century industrialisation to the proliferation
of networks that characterises twentieth-century globalisation.
There were various institutional partnerships involved in this endeavour.
The Museum, the University of Manchester who wanted to celebrate the fifti-
eth anniversary of the Birth of the Baby, the Computer Conservation Society
who were busy rebuilding the Baby and wanted a home for it, and Manches-
ter City Council who wanted a high-profile media occasion to launch Digital
Summer 1998 and enhance their efforts to rebrand Manchester as a postin-
dustrial information city. The Museum, once it had agreed to accept the Baby,
found itself carried along by the pressing and non-negotiable deadline of
21 June 1998.
Futures was thus a temporary exhibit, a pilot for the Communications
Gallery. They decided to work with the interplay between the past and the
future, and look at how people had imagined the future in the past, high-
lighting the impact of technological change on people’s lives. The exhibit
would work as a memorial to previous imagined futures, and a testimony to
the developmental impact of new technologies. Two large spaces covering one
floor of the building were used. The first housed three mini exhibits each
organised around a significant date: the railways in 1830, the telephone in
1880, the computer in 1948. The second space held the fourth exhibit, the
networks of 1998.
The 1830s section depicted the railway age. An image of the journey from
Liverpool to Manchester, shot from the driver’s perspective played on a TV
screen; railway cargoes were on display and the visual and aural effects evoked
the period:
Speed – distance – are still relative terms, but their meaning has been totally
changed within a few months: what was slow is now quick, what was distant is
now near; and in the future this change in our ideas will not be limited to the
environs of Liverpool and Manchester – it will pervade society at large! (Henry
Booth, Liverpool and Manchester railway company secretary and treasurer 1830)
Reference to the mail system linked the railways to the next communications
era, that of the telephone which becomes the focus of the second space. A
telephone from around 1880, designed by Charles Moseley & Son, one of the
first local companies to make and install telephone equipment was on display,
and contexualised by quotations from the time: ‘Until some more expeditious
form of writing comes into general use there is little chance of the telegraph
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Penelope Harvey
Figure 1.2 Railways in 1830 (photograph by Penelope Harvey)
being superseded by the telephone for ordinary purposes of communication’

(Manchester Guardian, 6 December 1881).
A small telephone exchange linked the space of the 1880s to that of the
1940s and again there were examples of contemporary misapprehensions
about the future: ‘Having regard to the changes and swift means of commu-
nication which at present exist by means of the telegraph between the
principal towns in the UK it is extremely doubtful whether there would be
much public advantage in establishing telephonic communication between
those towns’ (Postmaster General, 1887).
The general idea of what was in terms of objects a fairly sparse exhibit, was
to connect particular innovations in communications technologies to the city
of Manchester and to focus on the world-changing nature of the technolo-
gies. The focus was to be on the impact that these technologies made on
people’s lives. The team charged with delivering the brief (a curator, designer
and a technologist) wanted to present effects in terms of the qualitative impact
rather than in terms of abstract facts and figures. The other guiding concept
was the idea of parallel technological revolutions. The building itself was the
surviving evidence of the first communications revolution, that of the railway
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Figure 1.3 Futures – The Telephone, 1880 (photograph by Penelope Harvey)
and the industrial era, the other was the information revolution, in which the
development of the Baby was presented as of key importance. There was also
much play with the notion of transparency in the design of the exhibit. The
designers used transparent plastic CD pockets to display information and
images and photos were printed onto very lightweight, semitransparent gauze
which only partially obscured the walls of the building. All the basic wiring
and cabling for the exhibit – including the wiring of the Baby itself – were
on view, taped onto overhead beams or fitted inside perspex cases running
down the wooden vertical supports of the building. The space was very open,
so that the building itself became an integral part of the exhibit.
However these objects, images and sounds were basically the context in
which to present the Baby. The Baby was presented as a huge machine that
changed the world. Visitors could view it from close up, separated only by a
low barrier made from the chunky shapes of ones and zeros which held people
back just far enough so as to avoid contact (see Figure 1.4). Labelling was
minimal but recorded information played as visitors approached. There was
a panel giving basic facts about the rebuild project, and there were cards to
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Penelope Harvey
pick up and read for those who wanted more information. There was also a
Turing adding machine on display, and classic mistaken predictions about the
impact of computers: ‘There is no reason why anyone should want a computer
in their home’ (Ken Olsen, Founder of DEC, 1960). ‘We have a computer
here in Cambridge; there is one in Manchester and one at NPL (National
Physical Laboratory). I suppose there ought to be one in Scotland, but that’s
about it’ (unattributed).
Finally as a transition into the second half of the exhibit there was a predic-
tion booth, a kind of pod which visitors could enter to record their own
predictions for the future. The idea was to edit these and to play extracts on
screens in the entrance hall but there were technical problems with this device
and it was little used.
The second half of the exhibit was built around a display of networked com-
puting. Here a suite of computer work stations and tools such as digital cameras,
scanners and printers were made available to the public alongside two state-of-
the-art exhibits both related to the city of Manchester. One of these was an
example of the GIS (geographic information system), a computerised mapping
technology which enables the overlay of various kinds of information – spatial,
social, and demographic. The second was a virtual- reality training device devel-
oped at the Manchester Royal Infirmary and used to train doctors in the art of
keyhole surgery. Visitors could try to make the precision movements required
(moving geometric objects rather than simulated body parts) and the machine
would assess the degree of accuracy achieved. Again these exhibits proved too
costly to maintain and were eventually removed from the gallery.
Science and Art
In many ways Futures exemplified the new ways in which museums display
scientific knowledge, and this was done quite self-consciously. The Futures
gallery was building on the successful development of a themed exhibit which
had replaced the Textiles Gallery. ‘Fibres, Fabrics and Fashion’ was a highly
innovative exhibit and was talked about as a third-generation exhibitionary
form within the Museum. Museum staff talked of the necessity of doing some-
thing different from what they had done before. Some of them wanted to
move away from the processes and physical products of the textile, engineer-
ing and vehicle industries, to address information, communication and
distribution technologies. The science that these third-generation galleries
were aiming to display was seen as ‘far more difficult to convey, fugitive and
perishable, transient, immaterial, or complicated and uninteresting’.6 The
quality of visitor experience was also problematic: the first generation was the
Power Hall and Air & Space Gallery – huge, impressive and affective tech-
nologies which worked, were dramatic. In the second-generation galleries the
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main structure of the gallery was text and chronology, objects and displays
were hung onto this framework. The challenge was to find a way to move
away from the textual exhibition, to offer a more emotive, affective, environ-
mental and experiential gallery, to create another language and form, without
the huge, wonderful working exhibits of the first generation.7 Thus despite
the fact that the Baby, a huge, wonderful working exhibit if ever there was
one, was the centrepiece of Futures, and despite the chronological structure,
the gallery was conceived as belonging to the innovative genre of designed
themed environments rather than a collections-based one.8 There were very
few objects on display at all beyond the Baby and the building itself. The idea
of objects as interpretative resource had displaced the notion of collections of
objects as a knowledge resource in and of themselves.9
Contemporary exhibits such as Futures thus seem to combine two power-
ful ways of using exhibits as knowledge resource and as interpretative resource.
Museums educate visually and successful exhibits allow visitors to take the
‘message’ in at a glance.10 We have seen how in the MSIM there has been a
move away from labels towards transparency under an ethos where they try
to provide enough information so as not to mislead, but retain an openness
that is not dictating. The ideal is to leave the visitor to draw their own conclu-
sions. In that sense messages are left open. In the ‘prediction booth’ visitors
were even encouraged to curate a part of the exhibit themselves by recording
their own predictions which could then be incorporated into the exhibition.
These sentiments support the incorporation of ‘art’ in science museums, in
a model of learning that is in many ways reminiscent of renaissance under-
standings of the relationship between knowledge, art and play. Horst
Bredekamp has written about the relations between art, science and scholar-
ship in early modern Europe (sixteenth to eighteenth centuries) as manifest
in the Kunstkammer, the ‘curiosity cabinet’ that brought together all manner
of objects – which challenged the visitor/viewer to imagine possible con-
nections and to acquire through such imaginative reasoning, some sense of
natural (divine) creative process.
According to the image of deus ludens, the collector, in comprehending the creative
process, preserved the reciprocity of useful application and lack of purpose, in order
to gain knowledge, ‘while at play’. Just as the earth was viewed as the ‘Kunstkam-
mer of God’, the collector also created a world in a building, indeed a museum,
which is a microcosm and a compendium of all extraordinary things. (Bredekamp
1995: 73)
Bredekamp argued that the Kunstkammer brought objects into visual

exchange with one another and ‘stressed the metamorphic potential of the
materials. Especially since natural objects were mixed with works of art and
technology, the historicity of the materials … was conveyed’ (1995: 110). The
point I want to draw out here is his insight that an active laboratory of ideas
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Penelope Harvey
engaged people with a sense of historicity. Indeed it was precisely that connec-
tion which came to dominate the kinds of imaginative reasoning that the
Kunstkammer inspired.
This idea that museums can facilitate imaginative reasoning is thus an
enduring one. The Museum was certainly hoping to provoke people to think
again about the technologies that they might well take for granted in their
lives and through their engagement with the exhibit open up new ways of
thinking about these objects and the differences they have made to people’s
lives. Yet the other kind of reason, the notion of objective knowledge that
draws science apart from art, is still presented and visible ‘at a glance’ in
Futures. For all its openness, Futures also presented ideas that could not easily
be scrutinised, not least the notion of technological progress itself and its
historical connection to the City of Manchester. And while it is clear that the
persuasive techniques of this exhibit did not rest in any straightforward way
on the established expertise of the institution, the exhibit and the rituals
surrounding the rebirth of the Baby certainly endorsed ideas about knowl-
edge, science and progress which ran counter to many of the other activities
within the Museum.
The Rebirth of the Baby
The rituals surrounding the rebirth of the Baby offer an opportunity to discuss
these points. Two key narratives emerged to surround this machine and give
it a place in the public imagination. One of these narratives concerned those
who originally built the machine, the other those who rebuilt it. The men
who actually built the Baby had worked in university research programmes
that fed into both military and commercial applications. The second group,
the rebuilders set out to produce an artefact for public display, an artefact that
would provide a point of origin (in time and space) for a process that at the
time was not deemed to have been of any great significance. For these enthu-
siasts, the rebuild was itself a performative act, surrounded with ritual and
ceremony, a self-conscious enterprise with an eye to media coverage. The
museum exhibit and the context of Digital Summer 1998 brought these two
stories together.11
Two key characters emerged in the media as representatives of the two
moments in the history of this machine: Tom Kilburn and Chris Burton.
Kilburn, a young mathematician from Cambridge, then in his mid-twenties,
went to work with Freddie Williams at the government’s Telecommunications
Research Establishment in the ‘race’ to beat the Americans in finding the solu-
tion to the storage of digital information. These were crucial technologies for
defence systems and early successes were widely circulated (and taken up by
the Americans and the Russians) to bring forth future funding. The Baby was
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built as an experimental machine, to test ‘the ability of the Williams Tube to

read and reset at speed random bits of information, whilst preserving a bit’s
value indefinitely between resettings’.12 Kilburn wrote the first programme
which worked for the first time at eleven o’clock in the morning on 21 June
1948. Some time later in 1974, Freddie Williams is said to have described
that moment in these terms:
A program was inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the
display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was a dance of death leading
to no useful result, and what was even worse, without yielding any clue as to what
was wrong. But one day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in the expected
place, was the expected answer. It was a moment to remember. Nothing was ever
the same again.
However, at the time this earth-shattering moment was not greeted with any
public interest – the emotion was developed over time! And the scientists
themselves moved on to the next step. An experiment successfully completed
enabled them to move forward. They continued to change and develop the
machine.
By the time Chris Burton decided to rebuild the Baby the original machine
had long since disappeared – dismantled, reused, discarded – neither its parts
nor its original form held any interest for the scientists beyond its original
role in the experimental process. This machine only became an historic arte-
fact through the care and motivations of others. Similarly the stories of the
scientists themselves, their own characterisation as key players in the devel-
opment of modern computing became important long after the fact, long after
Ferranti (the company that later became ICL) had put a subsequent machine
into commercial production. The race to rebuild the Baby was a race against
time, a race to meet the deadline around which the project hung – to run the
programme again, fifty years since it had first worked – the deadline loomed
over the project, eleven o’clock on 21 June 1998.13
The challenge was one of historical investigation and contemporary inge-
nuity. Not only were there no remains of the Baby immediately to hand (all
had to be hunted down, replicated, improvised) but there were no original
circuit or engineering drawings and only very few photos. The drawings of
Dai Edwards and Alec Robinson, younger members of Williams’ and Kilburn’s
team were crucial resources for the rebuilders but their notebooks date from
six months after June 1948. ‘The notebook of G.C. Tootill, who had followed
Williams and Kilburn from the British radar laboratories, the Telecommuni-
cations Research Establishment, did not have circuits but is nonetheless
crucial, since it contains the contemporary notes of the 1948 machine, includ-
ing the first program’ (Agar 1998: 130).
So the rebuilders set about the complex process of using diverse sources to
try and recreate as exactly as they could a machine that had been discarded
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Penelope Harvey
without ceremony by those who had originally built it. The intellectual task
of the new generation of computer scientists (the rebuilders) was to overcome
the inaccuracies or inconsistencies in these records and actually get the
programme to run.
For Burton the first strategy for ‘back-extrapolation to June 1948’ has been to ‘put
ourselves in the minds of the creators’, and when vague to ask the pioneers. The
boundary between reliable memory and creation of new knowledge, which to the
textual historian is highly awkward, is highlighted – indeed celebrated – by the
rebuilders: episodes where pioneers who when distanced from the machine find
details difficult to remember remark ‘of course it was like that’ when confronted with
the rebuild are eagerly reported. However, likewise, there are cases when a pioneer
states, ‘it’s like that’, whereas for Burton ‘it couldn’t have been’. (Agar 1998: 130)
Agar argues that Burton wanted to recreate not only the machine but the orig-
inal emotional response, to capture the spirit of their invention, to feel how
they did about the first computers. Chris Burton was quite explicit about his
motivations. In 1989 he had formed the Computer Conservation Society and
had set out to make something tangible to mark the origins of the age of
computing, the second Industrial Revolution. He wanted something for the
younger generation to go and look at, and he wanted to claim a place for
Britain in this story to counteract the idea that computers are an American
invention. It was of crucial importance to the rebuilders that the machine
should actually work, and that this working machine would inspire the
viewing public: ‘I hope [visitors] go away thinking, my golly, it started in
Britain, in Manchester.’14
It was this idea that was taken up and localised by Manchester’s city author-
ities as they used this moment to mark Manchester’s place as the origin point
for the Computer Age. Throughout the summer of 1998 there were many
activities held under the banner of Digital Summer – but two in particular
concern the unveiling of the Baby to the world’s press. On 17 June there was
a ceremony to open the Golden Anniversary Conference hosted by the
University of Manchester. The event was held in the Bridgewater Hall, home
of Manchester’s Halle Orchestra, and the city’s most prestigious modern archi-
tectural arts venue. The programme blended art and science in a way that was
to characterise the memorialisation of this ‘event’. It opened with what was
billed as ‘a dramatic reconstruction of the invention of the world’s first stored-
program computer’, followed by Tom Kilburn’s personal perspective on events
and then a live satellite link to the MSIM so that the audience could ‘see’ the
Baby – which was switched on by Tom Kilburn and Freddie Williams’ widow.
Speeches were made by representatives of Ferranti and of ICL (the commercial
developers of computing in Manchester) and by people working on contem-
porary applications. Honorary degrees from the University of Manchester
were conferred on Chris Burton, Tom Kilburn and Sebastian de Ferranti.15
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Finally the leader of the City Council brought the focus back to the City’s
place in the contemporary IT industry and the Digital Summer celebrations.
I did not go to Bridgewater Hall, but watched the activities from the
Museum end where the TV crew responsible for the satellite link rehearsed
Chris Burton as he waited to go on line to talk to Tom Kilburn. He was to
be the human face, there to confirm that the machine was indeed switched
on and working. My memory is of tense nervous waiting, silence, and gestic-
ulations from the floor manager as she kept urging the compère at the
Bridgewater Hall end to shut Tom Kilburn up, they could only sustain the
satellite link for seven minutes, if they didn’t switch over to the Museum the
link would be lost. There were no tensions as to whether or not the Baby
would turn on, but there was a lot of worry about these latest ICTs, could
they keep the link running long enough to create the impression that so many
had worked so hard to orchestrate?
Four days later, at exactly eleven o’clock, Tom Kilburn and Chris Burton
were in the Museum, together with crowds of journalists and local worthies,
to run the programme. This time I did hear the speeches and the claims made
for the city. People crowded in to see, but although the machine was huge and
Figure 1.4 Tom Kilburn and Geoff Tootill pose in front of the ‘Baby’ for the press on
21 June 1998 (photograph by Penelope Harvey)
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Penelope Harvey
spectacular, its workings and the running of the programme were not visible
to most people. What was visible were the scientists, together, posing for
photographs, answering the same questions for different news programmes as
the message that ‘we’ did it ‘here’ emerged in various forms. At this stage it
mattered more to display the scientists themselves, since the ‘pioneers’ authen-
ticated the Baby for the ‘rebuilders’. The object was successfully historicised,
while the scientists between them carried the knowledge that was by now as
historical as the machine itself.
However, it was clear that it was not primarily the knowledge but the
effects of that knowledge that were put on display in the summer of 1998.
The mathematics and electronic engineering were alluded to in the design of
the exhibit but the rationalised, scientific process was subordinated to the
human story – the search for the parts to rebuild the Baby, the struggle to
recover the process, the desire to replicate (and enhance) that original
moment. It is these more personal, symbolic, less rational (and more magical)
dimensions of the scientific process which museums (unable to adequately
represent the science) in fact recapture with great alacrity. For the challenge
is how to make ‘knowledge’ (abstract and rationalised) concrete for display.
This was Chris Burton’s aim and he understood that it was only through the
drama of this kind of display that Tom Kilburn’s scientific work could be
objectified for public consumption.
It is in this sense that the Museum display of the rebuilt Baby joined imag-
inative reasoning with a sense of historicity. They used the drama of the
scientists to make the scientific process appear impressive. The size of the
computer was indeed dramatic. But the computer in itself does not invoke
wonder – except in terms of its self-evident obsolescence. How were they to
inspire wonder when what that huge machine could actually do was so dispro-
portionate to its size and to the hype surrounding contemporary computing?
Human drama was thus built into the story, the race to recover the original,
the struggle and the passion required to make this machine work, now and
then. Drama was also made of the gap between the two generations of scien-
tists and the effects of their work. The ‘pioneers’ who developed the
knowledge in ignorance of what they were doing, while the rebuilders fash-
ioned an origin and thus a history for both the men and the machine. But
the Baby was also part of another exhibit, Futures and the history of commu-
nications. Here the Baby appeared as one key point in a history of climactic
developments. The Museum exhibit made both these moves, and furthermore
located the achievement and claimed it for the city, drawing people in as
collaborators – this is your city, your computer, your invention – your future.
It was in the NETS play that the potential for symbolic transposition from
the field of computing and information technologies to that of a narrative
about technology and assisted conception was made concrete. I never heard
anyone suggest that Tom Kilburn might be thought of as the Father of the
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Figure 1.5 The Baby as exhibit, with the image of Chris Burton (photograph by
Penelope Harvey)
Baby with Chris Burton acting as facilitating specialist. However the play that
emerged from the community drama workshop and the fertile imagination of
Mike Harris homed in on this connection to produce a wonderfully wide-
ranging mythic tale that drew together some of the major cultural
preoccupations of our times. The play fused the genres of political thriller and
romantic drama and was set in a futuristic present.
A girl fell in love with a piece of software, an artificial intelligence able to
download into any object or body. This caused problems for her mother, the
Prime Minister of a city state in which she was managing a shaky alliance
between her own party which offered full citizenship to clones and the natural
human party. The basis of the alliance was a determination to prevent the
extension of human rights to cyborgs and Artificial Intelligences (AIs). As the
plot developed the artificial intelligences began to disrupt the workings of the
system, the cyborg police began to destroy many people who thought of them-
selves as fully human, the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman
were challenged. Many of our most deeply held social ideas were brought out
for inspection. At one point the AI downloaded into the body of the girl’s
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Penelope Harvey
father, a scenario made possible by the fact that the father had left his body
and uploaded his mind on to the net. In a parallel moment (and the play was
performed in promenade, with two simultaneous plot lines and a split audi-
ence, linked by the use of screens and recorded material), it was revealed that
this father, while still a scientist had cloned his ex-wife, the Prime Minister,
from his own mother’s DNA. The play ended with a clever and very amusing
courtroom scenario in which the artificial intelligence stood trial for illegal
sexual relations with the human girl. The arguments about the limits of the
self, the body, rights and agencies were all discussed in detail. Finally order
was restored through the assertion of dictatorial power, all machines were
switched off, the artificial intelligence was erased, people were catapulted back
in time to work in a subsistence agricultural economy. The final twist centred
on the romantic heroine, the girl, still pregnant at the end, supposedly by a
clone who had killed all others from his genetic batch, regained his unique
origins and assumed the role of dictator of this new kingdom. She revealed
in an aside to her mother, the now deposed Prime Minister, that she had a
copy of the AI and was now again carrying his baby. The rest of the cast
marched out chanting, ‘the only way forwards is backwards’!
Conclusions: Partial Enchantment, Divergent Passions
The exhibit and its surrounding rituals produced various truths for the visit-
ing public. There was the strong narrative of locality. The story about science
was also a story about Manchester, and not just Manchester’s past, but also
Manchester’s intrinsic ability to host such projects in the future. The large-
scale, media-focussed attention given to the Baby was part of the city’s
ongoing attempts to build networks for future funding. These rituals do exer-
cise their own magical effects. City authorities have found that there is some
kind of intrinsic efficacy in such branding activities which has enabled them
to draw money into the city. They may struggle to recreate that sense of an
1830s hub city (although in many ways Manchester’s status in relation to the
so-called Industrial Revolution was as much a conscious fabrication as its
status in relation to the Information Revolution), but they do actively use this
image to draw business into the city today – particularly in relation to the
cultural industries. Finally and doubtless most successfully they reiterate the
established modern story about technological progress, about origins, about
people and scientific experiment and about the sense of scientific knowledge
as the motor of change.
The drama that surrounded the scientists is a clear example of the use of
ritual to create the ideological effect of social coherence. As in Turner’s ritual
phases (Turner 1969), both objects and visitors are separated from the
mundane world on entering the museum and hand themselves over to the
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dramas and rituals of the museum presentations. Visitors to Futures are asked
(and were asked most powerfully on the days of the public ceremony) to enter
into the spirit of what it must have been like, to create (and re-create) the
first computer. The scientists appear in this drama as living diorama, and
today the photograph of the rebuild team stands alongside the baby. Science
appears to have been overturned. What we find in its place is a world of
passion and excitement, of inaccuracies and compromises, and a world where
the scientists themselves have little understanding of the longer-term impacts
of their contemporary work. Yet bound into the wider tale of social progress,
the visitor can leave the museum assured that science underpins our civilisa-
tion, that we need science to live decent, civilised lives. The ritual thus
performs its conservative function, and science is celebrated uncritically.
However, as more recent theorists of ritual have pointed out, that which fails
to be integrated into the dominant ritual vision remains as a source of disjunc-
tion around the social issues in question. In the case of Futures there were
many less powerful messages, but messages which nevertheless amounted to
a critique of science, a call for multiplicity, for the other voices that only
emerge in the sound effects of mothers singing to their children in the Chorus
installation, or in the mythical nightmares of the NETS play – and presum-
ably in the interpretations and understandings of all those visitors who were
not captivated, or failed to engage with the narratives and objects on display.
From the Museum’s point of view, the Baby hijacked the gallery, but spaces
for alternative interpretations always remain, not least the possibility that the
Baby itself became an art object in its new surroundings – a possibility that
would have appalled scientists and rebuilders alike.
In the seventeenth century the Kunstkammer brought together natural
objects with machines, human creations and art forms. The boundary between
products of human workmanship and of nature was deliberately blurred, and
the huge interest in automata reproduced ancient desires to imitate life by
inspiring movement. At the beginning of the twenty-first century museums
continue to blur boundaries and these institutions that provide an image of
science as integral to the social process continue to depend on the imaginative
reasoning of the visiting public and the enduring fascination with huge work-
ing machines. However, there is a crucial difference between the Kunstkammer
and open interpretations invited in contemporary science museums. In the
contemporary world, where ‘big science’/‘technoscience’ holds sway, interpre-
tative knowledge is worth far less than in the early modern period when it
was ‘experts’, the social and religious elites who knew the world through imag-
inative contemplation. There is little evidence of devolution of expertise in
the contemporary ‘information society’, just information. Social revolutions
in terms of knowledge are about shifts in where expertise is deemed to lie.
This brings me back to the place of museums in the contemporary world and
the issue of how to relate ‘objects’ to the processes through which these objects
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Penelope Harvey
came into being. The scientists who invented the Baby objectified their
knowledge – in the machine, and in their notebooks and diagrams – but their
purpose and attention was on continued innovation and development. Their
records were in fact quite loose and hard to work from. The Baby itself
was simply an experimental model, taken apart and used to build the next
machine.
Museums arrest the development of objects, and then need to create and
build the contexts through which the objects become meaningful again. This
recontextualising process is the domain of curatorial expertise, a domain that
cannot easily be devolved to visiting publics who come in search of contexts
as much as they come to look at objects. Museums have choices in the devel-
opment of an exhibit as to what kinds of context they wish to provide. The
various dramas and artworks that surrounded Futures offered the opportunity
to think about machines in relation to people and human activity, but little
was done to provide the kind of information that would have enabled a crit-
ical history of computing and communication.
In that respect the Futures Gallery was a missed opportunity, for by default
the exhibit reinstated a model of knowledge as object, authored by single
people and thereby undermined in many ways what the same museum was
trying to do in other areas. Some within the Museum were working to disrupt
hegemonic notions of science and foster a more open-ended interpretative
approach to knowledge. The problem is that as science gets assigned to the
realm of the intuitive and the instinctual and is shown to be motivated by
the passions and dramas of human lives, so too ‘science’ becomes more firmly
established as magical – conceptually opaque yet enchanting and captivating
as social process. Science museums inevitably get involved in recasting the
conceptual basis of science. The use of narrative, art and drama firmly embeds
the scientific process in the contemporary passion for collecting and recover-
ing the past and encourages visitors to explore the relationships between
people and objects and to challenge the autonomous agency of machines. But
the magical effects of science will continue to hold sway as long as the slip-
page between science as knowledge of the world and science as motor of
change is left unexamined.
NOTES
1. The research on which this chapter is based was carried out with funding from the ESRC’s Vir-
tual Society? Programme. Within this programme I was working with fellow anthropologist Dr
Sarah Green, and historian of science and technology Dr. Jon Agar. The project within the
ESRC programme was entitled Social Contexts of Virtual Manchester. Details of the project
can be found at http://www.les1.man.ac.uk/sa/virtsoc/Home.hl. The ideas presented here have
grown from conversations with my colleagues on the project, and on the programme more
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generally. I have also had very helpful feedback from the session at the 2000 meeting of the
European Association of Social Anthropologists held in Krakow, from the Language, Culture
and Society Research Seminar at the University of Bradford’s Department of Modern Languages,
and from the School of Art History and Archaeology at the University of Manchester. Partic-
ular thanks to staff at the Museum of Science and Industry, especially Penny Feltham, Pauline
Webb, and to Gaby Porter whose ideas have been very influential in shaping my arguments.
2. Butler (1992: 21).
3. See Samuel (1994), Lowenthal (1985), Wright (1985), and Hewison (1987).
4. See Porter (1991).
5. Gaby Porter, personal communication.
8. The generations referred to echo Danilov’s (1982) phases in the development of science muse-
ums, as discussed by Stella Butler (1992): ‘Phase One museums are those like the original Sci-
ence Museum in London or the Conservatorie des Arts et Métiers which simply collect
historical material. Museums of Phase Two include the Deutsches Museum and concentrate
still on the past, but seek to bring historical exhibits to life by using working machinery. Phase
Three museums place little emphasis on collections of historic objects and instead concentrate
on participatory exhibits stressing contemporary themes’ (Butler 1992: 56).
9. See J. Bennett’s (1998) discussion of the tension between the inclusivity of collections (as
knowledge resource) and the importance of contextual materials for meaningful display (as
interpretative resource). He argues that exhibitions can embrace both inclusivity and context.
10. T. Bennett (1998).
11. For a historical analysis of this process see Agar (1998).
12. I am drawing on an account published in Manchester University’s campus magazine This Week
Next Week, special edition published on 15 June 1998. Many similar accounts were published
and circulated in Manchester at the time.
13. The Museum itself was caught in this race as they tried to get the gallery finished in time to host
the anniversary celebrations. At this point tensions among the various groups involved were at
their height. The NETS community play were having difficulty rehearsing as the fitters tried
to complete the gallery. The University and the scientists were fully focussed on 21 June, while
for the Museum this was just the opening of an exhibit which they would have to live and work
with for three years or more. However the anniversary had come to dominate proceedings and
clearly had a major impact in what the Museum was able to do with the Futures gallery.
14. See Agar interview with Chris Burton, 22 January 1998, transcript held in the National Archive
for the History of Computing, Manchester.
15. Michael Brady, currently Professor of Engineering at Oxford University, was also awarded an
honorary degree.
REFERENCES
Agar, J. (1998) ‘Digital Patina: Text, Spirit and the First Computer’, History and
Technology, 15, pp. 121–35.
Bennett, J. (1998) ‘Can Science Museums Take History Seriously?’, in Macdonald, S.
(ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London and New York:
Bennett, T. (1998) ‘Speaking to the Eyes: Museums, Legibility and the Social Order’, in
Macdonald, S. (ed.), The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture. London
and New York: Routledge, pp. 25–35.
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Penelope Harvey
Bredekamp, H. (1995) The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The
Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology. Princeton, NJ:
Markus Wiener Publishers.
Butler, S. (1992) Science and Technology Museums. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Danilov, V.J. (1982) Science and Technology Centres. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New
York: Routledge.
Hewison, R. (1987) The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline. London:
Methuen.
Hooper-Greenhill, E. (1992) Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London:
Routledge.
Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Porter, G. (1991) ‘Partial Truths’, in Kavanagh, G. (ed.), Museum Languages. Leicester:
Leicester University Press, pp. 103–17.
–––––– (1995) ‘Museums and Representations of Domestic Artefacts’, m/s ca.
Manchester.
Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory, Vol. 1 Past and Present in Contemporary Culture.
London: Verso.
Tambiah, S. (1990) Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of Rationality. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Turner, V. (1969) The Ritual Process. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Wright, P. (1985) On Living in an Old Country: the National Past in Contemporary
Britain. London: Verso.
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C HAPTER 2
U NWRAPPING M UMMIES AND
T ELLING THEIR S TORIES :
E GYPTIAN M UMMIES IN
M USEUM R HETORIC
Anna Wieczorkiewicz
Secret (Wrapped) Bodies
The caption beneath the photograph of an Egyptian mummy in a museum

guide reads, ‘This Egyptian mummy has its linen wrapping pulled away from
the head to expose its amazing state of preservation’ (Preston 1983: 76). The
picture and caption together suggest that what we should be admiring is the
state of preservation of the dead body. ‘Priests of science’ appear to have
revealed the face of a dead person, buried with the proper rituals; they then
publicly display the dead body in the name of values considered superior to
those current in the culture of origin. The original ritual becomes, in this way,
a form of a picturesque fantasy.
Seen in this light, the information quoted above becomes morally ambiva-
lent – as does displaying the mummy in a museum. The museum is not a
public place like any other: it expresses and authenticates a society’s estab-
lished or official values and images. Nor is a dead human body an object like
any other: human remains have special significance in all societies. Where such
remains have been displaced to become part of museum narratives, the situ-
ation is not morally neutral – especially taking into consideration the
discourse about plurality of cultures, and their right to their own cults, reli-
gion and beliefs. Musealisation of human remains leads directly to an
axiologically laden domain where meanings associated with death are located,
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Anna Wieczorkiewicz
which may trigger some kind of ‘ritual interpretation’. It is also tempting to

use such juxtapositions as museum – temple, or scientists – priests as an inter-
pretative frame. Instead of dwelling upon such value judgements, however, I
propose to reflect upon the cultural fact of inserting mummies into museum
narratives.1
Mummies are the organisational core of many museum exhibits. They are
displayed to attract visitors’ attention in ethnographic, archaeological, and
oriental collections, in museums of natural history as well as those devoted to
the history of medicine. From a rhetorical point of view, museum discourse
takes over the possession of mortal remains and imposes on them its own
metaphorical system of meanings.
This chapter will address a number of questions: which stories are associ-
ated with Egyptian objects? How do we explain ancient History? Which
narratives are used to establish the dialectics of Ourselves-Others? I will begin
by the drift of various museum narratives concerning mummified human
bodies in their possession. I will examine textual and verbal commonplaces
that are actively used in many museum displays, in addition to comparing
and contrasting exhibits in Manchester and Crakow respectively. Finally, I will
relate the ‘Egyptian narrative’ modes to the more general sociocultural context
in order to interpret the deployment of dead bodies by museums.
Egyptian Stories
The fairy tale narratives
‘Ancient Egyptians believed that ...’ is the usual formula for introducing the
narrative mode where everything is like a fairy tale.2 Their distant land is full
of marvels that we can discover if we follow the thread of the tale. A wrapped
mummy, with its sarcophagi and coffins, is the epitome of mystery. The
various components of sarcophagus and coffins are arranged like a Chinese
box, slanting towards the spectator in a way that enables him or her to admire
their ornamentation. Decorated coffins are thus made to reveal successive inte-
riors, leading towards the mummified body hidden inside. This mode of
display summarises and evokes narratives of both concealment and revelation
of a secret. The visitor is usually encouraged to use more than one set of crite-
ria for evaluating what he or she sees – for instance, both scientific and
aesthetic. Judgement based on aesthetic criteria assumes that simple and noble
formal solutions (although not free of symbolic references) appeal to us
because of their intrinsic, autonomic and eternal qualities. The result is that
‘pieces of Egypt’ are included in picturesque spectacles. An Egyptian death,
seen in this way, does not appear to be a real death; it seems instead to be a
performance of beliefs, an artistic achievement, and a spectacle incorporating
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Unwrapping Mummies and Telling Their Stories
carefully prepared and beautiful artefacts. The narrative suspends our belief
in the truth of their religion, or our scepticism about the form of afterlife in
which they believed. One very important outcome of the fairy tale narrative
mode is that our death and their death do not exist in the same reality.
Ghost story narratives
Museum scenarios sometimes adopt ghost story narratives intended to

produce excitement and fear. However, the threat should not be too realistic
– it is ‘just a play’. Mummies: monsters? - we could read at the entrance to the
exhibit Mummies-monsters? at the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden /The National
Museum of Antiquities in Leiden:
Many people think mummies are creepy, and at first sight they are. Mummies are
people or animals who died thousands of years ago. In everyday life, you hardly
ever see a dead person. Moreover horror movies and comic strips make matters
worse. They often feature mummies which come to life again. Do you dare to enter
a room full of mummies?
Although this text is addressed to young visitors, it incorporates some

rhetorical devices that are widely used in museum narratives. Should we be
scared when looking at mummies? Or should we play at being scared, and
eliminating the threat? We may sometimes be persuaded that mummies are
people similar (but not equal) to ourselves,3 and that the Book of the Dead is
like a tourist guide.4 The whole concept of a journey to the Afterlife is not
unfamiliar to computer-games players.5 Sometimes, the ‘Egyptian adventure’
is a nostalgic journey in a picturesque land.6 ‘The voyage of Death./ Death is
a different country./ You must voyage to the west, to the realm of the setting
sun. Death is a different country ... But it is even better than being alive. You
want to stay for ever’ (Leicester, New Walk Museum). Although death seems
to be situated somewhere in the past, it belongs in fact to a different kind of
time, that is not our time.
Arranging Egyptian material in the ghost story frame helps to emphasise
the distance between two worlds: ours and the Egyptian one. Meanings
belonging to the Egyptian world are unclear to us and their obscurity threat-
ens us. However, museum ghost stories do have definite limits. By the end of
the story, ghosts are no longer frightening; indeed, they even collaborate with
curators in their task of guiding the visitor:
Do you find me frightening?/ Funny?/ Mysterious?/ Once I was a living person
like you/ Because of my beliefs/ my body was preserved in Egypt/ Because of your
curiosity I am here in Leicester, a nameless woman. Here you will find wonderful
things by my people./ Enjoy, then, and imagine what my life was like as an ancient
Egyptian. (Leicester, New Walk Museum)
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Anna Wieczorkiewicz
‘My body’ and ‘my beliefs’ are situated on one side of the discursive space,
‘your curiosity’ and ‘your enjoyment’ are located on the other. The nameless
woman declares herself to be a mediator between the two worlds. When she
addresses us, we understand at once that she will not be guiding us in the
way that Dante’s Vergilius did; she will instead act as a carnival dance leader,
conducting us between market stalls filled with Egyptian tourist souvenirs;
she will try to arrange a masquerade that involves everyone in the fun of the
game (‘if you were an ancient Egyptian’), leading us to an area where we play
unreal life and unreal death using more or less original accessories.
Science and scientists: are they mediators only?
Since some of the elements of these spectacles remain obscure to viewers, there
is a need for someone who is able to mediate and decode their narratives for
us. The most obvious mediators are scientists. ‘Extracting information from
tombs’ is one of the central motifs in another set of narratives. Archaeologists
excavate pieces of evidence from the earth; scholars then extract pieces of
information from these objects, which go into narratives about inquiry and
investigation. The story of a buried person gradually changes into another
story, which conveys information about (say) beliefs, everyday life and craft.
The burial place is deconstructed and its contents classified according to
subject and information value. A dead person can also be deconstructed: every
bone can be made to tell a different story. Scientific investigation is frequently
contrasted with the misdeeds of thieves and robbers who looted burial places
in search of rich funerary offerings and vandalised royal tombs. In this respect,
the scientific representatives of our world appear to be experts in semiotic and
moral judgements about past and present reality.7
Narratives about scientists are associated with strategies for translating
funeral stories into the language of life. Egyptians loved life, we are often told;
their beliefs and rites were created to suppress or exorcise the threat of death.
There is a constant suggestion, moreover, that scientific perspective should
be used to reformulate the meanings of other peoples’ cult objects. ‘Non-
destructive’ methods of study are part of the self-presentation of science as an
ethical approach to reality.
Textual and visual information evokes an image of scholars as priests of
science, who can remove the successive layers of mummies with an extraor-
dinary skill and explain this process to laymen. The more information can be
extracted the greater the value of the object, and the more skill scientists can
show. The organisation of scientific knowledge can also be presented as a part
of the story. Scientists give the floor to science in these narrative fragments.
Science appears able to disclose the mysteries of the universe and report
on reality in an objective way. Science, not the scientists, formulates statements
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such as, ‘CAT scan shows that ..., X-rays testify that ...’. There is no place for
interpretation in these statements, only for ‘pure facts’ and ‘evident phenom-
ena’. This is the domain of pure objectivity: labels and information boards
give details of scientific criteria, categories, research methods and technolo-
gies. The process of imposing categories on phenomena is presented as a
discovery.8
Science tells a story about the world which the processes embody:
mummies on display are examples of successive stages in the development of
embalming methods. For instance: ‘Unwrapped by Dr Margaret Murray in
1908, this mummy is a good example of the poor standard of preservation
achieved in the Middle Kingdom’ (1900 B.C.)/ Khnum Nakht mummy/
Manchester Museum. Every mummy on display can be used to exemplify two
kinds of process: first, the natural process of drying bodies; second, the evolu-
tion of religious concepts, which were ‘produced’ by ancient Egyptians. The
rules are the same for both natural and cultural facts:
The earliest Egyptians buried their dead in the hot desert sand, which dried out
the body producing a ‘natural’ mummy. As tombs came into use the dry sand no
longer came in contact with the body, so it would begin to decay. With the devel-
opment of complicated religious beliefs, the Egyptians formed their concepts of
life after death. They believed that when a person was born a double soul called
the ka (‘vital spirit’) was also born and had identical wants and needs. ... To supply
the needs of these spirits, it was essential that a person’s body and name be
preserved, that a tomb be properly outfitted, and that the necessary mortuary rites
be performed. (San Diego, The Museum of Man)
Scientific museum discourse favours reconstructions of general and long-

term processes, such as the development of religion and technology. Reality
is turned upside down: methods and procedures for conceptualising and cate-
gorising reality become more real than the objects themselves. Clear and
structured information is the obvious goal of this performance and focus of
attention. The result is that certain questions become irrelevant because of the
concept of knowledge assumed by the discourse (although not necessarily by
real scientists).
Beneath the surface of stories about ancient cultures, another story is being
told, which celebrates modern Man as Explorer and Discoverer. The audience
is presented with a confident and unquestioning belief in the superiority of
contemporary civilisation above all others. Death seems in this context to fall
into a dialectic: somewhere in-between magic and myth – technology and
rationality. This dialectic forms a significant part of the narratives. Placing
Others’ beliefs in quotation marks contributes to spectacular global knowl-
edge and also helps to supervise such concepts as ‘tradition’ and ‘nature’.
Technology is an essential element in the modern profession of faith. The rela-
tionship between technology (an optimistic healer of civilisation) and death
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Anna Wieczorkiewicz
(an existential event par excellence) is crucial for the rhetoric used in display-
ing human remains. Technical equipment may, for example, be presented as
something that helps people to act in a better way. Instead of the destructive
invasion of other worlds, computer programs enable us to enter the pyramids
and study their treasures. The rhetoric involved merely concerns a selected
means of communication. When these means are included in exhibitions,
however, they participate in the self-description of culture. Science itself may
even gain the flavour of a playful adventure. (‘Entering tombs’ is a favourite
museum publicity strategy, used on posters and leaflets.) In our world, so the
argument goes, we know how to manage the world and how to manage
ourselves. We perceive ourselves as free of irrational (‘primitive’) fears and
anxieties.
The account given above is presented, of course, in rather stark white-black
terms. It is not difficult to find examples of the inevitable grey area: the relics
of saints, which still maintain their ambivalent identity; or the cult of historic
heroes. There are also competing discourses that question the truth of the offi-
cial museum discourse, as when members of another culture reclaim the bones
of their ancestors. Here, science consents to compromise for the sake of a
declared regard for other cultures.
However, when buried people belong to past or remote cultures, the valid-
ity of ceremonies is cancelled out and the dead body may be incorporated
into the museum’s message. The line is thus drawn between those (living and
dead) who belong to our society, and those excluded from it. This corresponds
with a division between people who do not experience irrational fear towards
death and those who do. This Self/Other dichotomy is in a perpetual state of
negotiation. There is, of course, no one common narrative for all museums.
Nevertheless, one feature does remain constant: if death enters the discourse,
it concerns Others; our existence is directed towards life. This is an effect of
the rhetorical work of drawing the line between Ourselves and Others.9
These stories are told under certain circumstances. It does not mean that
there is no hesitation, no doubts about touching the ‘sacred’ of Others. Such
feelings and experiences are reported in personal communications by anthro-
pologists, archaeologists and osteologists. However, these motifs disturb,
weaken or even change the direction of the leading narrative and so they
usually remain ‘personal’ – in the strict sense of the term – and are kept out
of museum discourse.
Detective narratives
Narratives about Egyptians and about scientists are generated by storytellers

of our world. From the narrative point of view, it all starts when we find traces
of the past. There is an active set of commonplaces about discoverers and
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experts who decodify enigmatic meanings. This narrative strategy ‘seduces’ the
visitor in the same way as those of detective story narratives:
The narrative machinery of detective fiction may be constantly backward-glancing
as it infers causes from their effects and makes visible the crime and its perpetra-
tor from the traces he or she has left behind, but it constantly moves the reader
forward. The museum was another ‘backteller’, a narrative machinery, with similar
properties. ... The museum conferred a public visibility on these objects of knowl-
edge. (Bennett 1995: 178)
Retrospective prophecies are generated, which confirm that ‘many hours or

years ago, such and such things were to be seen’. As Thomas Huxley put it,
‘the essence of the prophetic operation does not lie in its backward or forward
relation to the course of time, but in the fact that it is the apprehension of
that which lies out of the sphere of immediate knowledge; the seeing of that
which to the natural senses of the seer is invisible’ (Huxley 1882: 132, cited
by Bennett 1995: 177).
The detective narrative is often used to present scientific procedures as if
they were detective procedures. This is a general strategy for activating the
logic of scientific examination. The detective figure can also appear in
museum rhetoric in a more obvious way. This is the case when, for example,
methods of criminal investigation are applied to the scientific study of
museum objects, and when the mutual benefits of cooperation between scien-
tists from both fields are reported.10 (I am not, of course, talking about the
convergence of diagnostic methods and research, but about the rhetorical
effect of the presentation itself.) Detective procedures lead in these cases
toward a twofold reconstruction: the reconstruction of past events and
processes (which visitors should perceive as important); and the reconstruc-
tion of individual biographies (which they should perceive as interesting). The
reconstruction of individual biographies is the task of a creative Storyteller.
He or she takes up the thread provided by detectives and produces a colour-
ful texture. The rhetorical figure of the Detective is not only present in the
narrative itself but can also be identified beyond the textual level. The detec-
tive figure represents, or exemplifies, the strategy of constructing a narrative
in figurative form. The ideal visitor should be a hybrid creature – Homo
sapiens mixed with Homo imaginans. Homo sapiens will be ready for new
knowledge about other people’s lives; Homo imaginans will notice the dramatic
expression on a mummy’s face. There is perpetual tension between motives
appealing to emotions and those which are purely scientific. Yet, the appeal
to emotion is in fact compatible with the requirements of scientific knowl-
edge. This kind of tension is present both in textual and visual means of
expression. A common set of assumptions underlies both scientific and
impressive discursiveness: that we should protect and preserve certain worlds,
which are distant in time or in space, and different from our own world; and
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Anna Wieczorkiewicz
that one effective way to realise this preservation is as an exhibitionary

structure.
Adventure narratives
Mummies are perfect objects for creating interesting, intriguing and enter-
taining stories. There are two particularly effective motifs: ‘the journey to a
distant land’ and ‘entering the pyramids’. These are occasionally used in adver-
tisements, leaflets and posters, but they may also form the concept for an
entire exhibit. Formulas such as ‘Step back in time to Ancient Egypt’, ‘Explore
Ancient Egypt’, and ‘Enter the Pyramids’, introduce the adventure mode.
(There are even roles for us in this scenario.) Sometimes, individual biogra-
phies of ancient Egyptians are interwoven with romantic narratives about
discoverers who explored pyramids in the past. These explorers enter the story
and start on their way to real and discursive appropriation of a distant land.
Sometimes, the display evokes their image: a mummy’s head under a glass
globe, or a bundle of feet under another glass globe with yellowish labels
attached,11 respect neither the requirements for maintaining the integrity of
an object nor the integrity of the information mediated by an object. Such
displays seem absurd and provoke a sense of confusion – so that extra infor-
mation, concerning past centuries when powder made from mummies was
believed to have therapeutic properties, is required. When this happens,
mummies refer not only to their culture of origin, but are coated with the
residue of centuries dating from various points in time. Temporal distance as
a factor contributing to the perpetual transformation of objects’ meanings
becomes quite concrete. It is from this point that another story emerges,
concerning the lives and works of past explorers, collectors, scholars, and their
romantic passions. This is the world where nostalgia is born.
The history of how the western image of Egypt was shaped can be included
in these stories. Egypt – the land, the culture, and the history – are taken into
protection and ‘adopted’ by the West. Narratives present as a discovery that
which, from another point of view, could be seen as an appropriation. Signs of
our world are implanted in the stories of Egyptian objects, or local European
stories are linked with the history of Egypt. This happens, for example, in New
Walk Museum in Leicester, where Egyptian history is bound up with local
history. This link is mediated through Thomas Cook’s biography. Cook, who
was born in Melbourne, in Derbyshire, moved to Leicester in 1841, where he
developed his tourist enterprise. This makes good material for the narrative:
The first Cook’s tour of Egypt
In 1869, 32 ladies and gentlemen led by Thomas Cook himself, travelled by train
to Italy then sailed across the Mediterranean to Alexandria, for the first Cook’s tour
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to Egypt. Soon the firm obtained exclusive rights to run luxury cruises on the Nile
– and the river was nicknamed: Cook’s Canal.
There are pictures showing early Cook’s tourists at the pyramids, the first
Cook’s tourist steamer, and the poster from Cook’s Nile & Palestine Tour.
Thomas Cook’s biography works not only to link the Egyptian world with
our own; this narrative also converts ‘pieces of Egypt’ into tourist souvenirs.
Egyptian Bodies
What kind of bodies are under the wrappings?
Having reviewed various narrative modes, let us return to the material and
spectacular aspect of presenting mummies in museums. The wrapped mummy
seems to be an obvious symbol of mystery. Unwrapping a mummy is a unique
spectacle: it amounts to the revelation of a secret. Unwrapping mummies was
a form of fashionable entertainment in the early nineteenth century, culmi-
nating in performances such as those conducted by Thomas Pettigrew.
Although nowadays such spectacles are dismissed as nonscientific, unwrap-
ping for research purposes retains its prestigious character, especially in the
form of complex, interdisciplinary research. Many Egyptian exhibitions want
to include the subject of scientific unwrapping, believing that it will make
their museum’s message more complex and objective. They also include the
history of the research itself:
‘Since the Middle Ages, mummies have been a source of interest to the
Western World and in the sixteenth century, they become the subject of scientific
description. When it became popular to collect antiquities in the early nine-
teenth century, the unwrapping of mummies provided a fashionable interest.’
This text, which is taken from an information board at Manchester Museum,
introduces an account of studies undertaken by this museum. The Manches-
ter exhibition provides a clear example of the spectacle of ‘revealing a secret’.
Examining this spectacle, which is created by objects and words, is helpful in
uncovering the rhetorical strategies used for musealisation of dead bodies. The
fragment quoted above refers to the unwrapping of a mummy that took place
mainly to satisfy curiosity. The account then moves on to more reasonable
proceedings and presents (morally justified) scientific approaches. Finally, we
reach the key event: ‘Dr Margaret Murray, the first curator of Egyptology at
Manchester, unwrapped the mummy of the “Two Brothers” in 1908 before a
large audience in a lecture theatre, at Manchester University. She led a team
of medical and scientific experts, and her methods and descriptions were not
superseded until the 1970 and then only as a result of greatly advanced tech-
nological achievements.’
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This text delineates some motifs that suggest ways of interpreting the exhi-
bition to viewers including, ‘the explanative potential of science’ and ‘a
scientist as a mediator of meanings’. Two photographs underneath the text
hint at a very interesting interpretative suggestion. The first is of an invita-
tion to the spectacle of unwrapping a mummy from Thebes in 1850. The
second shows ‘Dr Margaret Murray and her team unwrapping one of the “Two
Brothers” in 1908’. The latter reminds us of the well-known ‘anatomy lesson’
theme. This juxtaposition can be seen as a metaphor: the museum resembles
a huge anatomy theatre where we can observe every detail of the human
organism. In Manchester, however, it is more than a metaphor. The exhibi-
tion gives an account of the real event:
Since the early 1970s a research team of scientists and specialists in many fields
has carried out a major investigation on the twenty-one human and thirty-four
animal mummies in the Egyptology collection at Manchester Museum.
All the mummies were investigated as thoroughly as possible by non-destructive
methods of examination. One mummy – 1770 – was unwrapped, dissected and
subjected to intensive examination.
We can follow this path in search of the topoi that govern museum narra-
tives. We learn about the reasons for choosing the mummy 1770 for
dissection: ‘Because of its unprepossessing appearance, it had never been on
display. ... Mummy 1770 was selected because of its poor appearance and also
because preliminary x-rays had revealed interesting internal features.’ The
mummy was known by its accession number. It did not have a personality,
but it did have a structure that could be discovered by scientists. The scien-
tist’s eye could discern this structure, and build a new mummy personality
upon it.
The information board tells of the detailed studies that allowed scientists
to reconstruct the appearance of the embalmed person. Some of the stylistic
inconsistencies in the text are interesting. The passage on facial reconstruc-
tion, for instance, has a long, descriptive part presenting scientific analytical
procedures. At the end, all the parts are brought together: the information
that ‘the general architecture and size of the bones, lack of supra-orbital ridges,
size of mastoid bone, size and shape of the teeth and palate, all helped to
suggest that the sex was female, ... the state of eruption of the teeth indicated
an age of some 13 years,’ is transformed into a bright, vivid portrait: ‘The
evidence indicated that this was an early adolescent girl with a delicate nature,
a slightly asymmetrical face and persistently open lips.’ This rhetoric reflects
the ambivalence of the object, which is a thing-mummy and a person-mummy
at the same time.12
The result of the reconstruction is the wax bust of a young girl: pink
complexion, long, wavy hair, and costly dress. The ethic of science required
that the margin of inaccuracy be marked: ‘Although it does not attempt to
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provide an absolutely accurate representation, the reconstruction takes into

account all the known medical evidence relating to the girl and shows the
type of face which she would have had.’ In another place, the information
reads: ‘Although it may not be accurate in every detail, this reconstruction
represents the type of face that 1770 must have had.’ This narrative is created
in the area between ‘the truth’ and ‘plausibility’, between may not be accurate
and must have had.
What kind of life do these bodies lead?
In many cases, the museum narratives blur the life-death dichotomy and
obscure the fact that the museum only possesses the remains. The border
between life and death (in ontological terms) does not matter much in the
description of scientific procedures. Narrative has the power to reify and to
personalise the body alternately; it can also occasionally substitute a nonhu-
man body, before reinstating its human identity.13 When reified bodies are
dissected, the former disease with all its symptoms is reconstructed, and the
body regains sense perception. Throughout, the body also remains a sort of
database on ancient times and this stops the humanisation process. However
the narrative can always shift to concrete circumstances, to the sufferings and
feelings of ‘a real person’, as in the case of mummy 1770 from the Manches-
ter Museum: ‘Mummy 1770 also undoubtedly suffered a good deal of
discomfort from this parasite. It is possible that the worm caused so much
damage to the legs that they had to be amputated.’ A new personage is created:
Mummy 1770 becomes a diagnosed Patient. It is the medical situation that
now matters. (Interestingly, the two photographs showing the parasite/guinea
worm are from modern patients.)
Pathologisation of human remains is a frequent strategy: recall the pictures
of human remains prepared for CATscan and x-ray examinations, showing
mummies being studied by specialists seeking to discover some trace of former
diseases. These mummies seem to be treated as if they were neither living, nor
dead. (This ambivalence is present both in visual and textual representations.)
These sensitive bodies require special treatment, preferably by noninvasive
methods. A constant ambivalence of a mummy (mummy-thing and mummy-
person) marks the rhetoric of this kind of display. If the pathologisation of
dead bodies is an effective strategy for glorifying Science, it is also a handy
method of giving individual features to the bodies. Description of the patient’s
body, with all its irregularities or deviations, provides the most personal, inti-
mate and irreducible characterisation. Faced with a trace of the individual fate
of a late Person, the scientific consequences of this information are sidelined
for a while. A puzzle has to be solved since a personal biography is being told.
These ‘interesting stories’ are therefore integrated into a discourse based on
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scientific research on dead bodies. They are aligned with romantic narratives
about explorers and discoverers and with fabulous narratives about the myster-
ies of history.
What kind of death do they die?
At the entrance to the Manchester Museum there are glass cases with coffins
and mummies of Two Brothers. The Brothers are very mysterious personages.
The first puzzle is their racial difference – one was black and the other white
(only the skull of Khnum Nakht has negroid features. The Storyteller specu-
lates: the mother may have had two husbands; or one of the brothers may
have been adopted). The white one was buried in the coffin on which a black
face was painted (another speculation: ‘as a colour, black symbolised rebirth
for the Egyptians and may have been used thus here, to attempt to ensure
Nekht Ankh’s rebirth after death’). We are given hints of intriguing, compli-
cated biographies, about family affairs, and about the Brothers’ diseases.
Khnum Nakht had a deformity of the left foot, but did not suffer from arthri-
tis. He had scoliosis in the thoracic region and an extremely rare developmental
abnormality in his mouth (‘double germination: [fusion of the teeth] the two
central teeth are abnormally large and the left one has two roots’). Nekht Ankg
was in his sixties when he died; he was a eunuch.
Enigmatic traces of individual lives, inserted into museum discourse, refor-
mulate the message giving a special flavour to the scientific reconstruction of
the past. Here museum discourse appropriates a past world with its former
inhabitants, who are granted personalities. The fact that they do not exist as
persons any more, and that there are only remains, which belong to the
museum, is completely overshadowed.
The aesthetic mode of presenting objects from Egypt (both artefacts and
natural objects) gives the museum message a special flavour. This mode corre-
sponds with fabulous narratives on ‘religious beliefs’, which are frequently
introduced by the formula ‘Ancient Egyptians believed that ...’. The spectacle
of death, and more specifically that of Egyptian death, is in effect being
presented to the contemporary public. The real, material, factual dimension
concerning the authenticity and materiality of death, is veiled by the indirect,
aesthetic (and mediating) mode of representation. The metaphysical meaning
of death, which concerns all human beings (both ancient Egyptian and
ourselves), is dispersed.
Two modes of dealing with the problem of death when including dead
bodies into museum discourse have been identified up to this point. The first
involves a strategy of pathologising human remains and medicalising their
modern condition, through the work of scientists and curators. The second
folklorises human reactions to death in other cultures and societies, distancing
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and detaching their death-related behaviours from our world. How can these
strategies be interpreted in a broader sociocultural perspective? It would be
easy to conclude with the sociological cliché about ‘suppressing death in
modern culture’. However this conclusion would, I believe, be false. The
problem of death is not suppressed, but expressed in a specific way that is
compatible with other components of sociocultural life.
An exhibited mummy is attractive, even fascinating, in the same way as a
skull, which is more attractive than any other bone. A skull marked by an
individual biography (with some marks of trepanation, fights and deforma-
tions) attracts special attention from visitors and invites them to reflect on
events presumed to have taken place in the life of its late owner. Curators
know the power of attraction by ‘dead personalities’: for this reason a skull
may be placed in a glasscase displaying pieces of jewellery. This has nothing
to do with the aesthetic value of the ring, or with the technology of produc-
ing earrings (which may be described on a nearby label). The skull was simply
found together with the jewellery in the same tomb. But it is so expressive ...
On the other hand, as we have seen, dead bodies are often subjected to the
clinical gaze (in the Foucauldian sense of the term), which identifies a disease
and focusses on it. We are in fact provided with very detailed descriptions of
the course of diseases, viruses and bacteria, even though such information is
mostly irrelevant to knowledge about the culture of ancient Egypt. The ability
to make a diagnosis and knowledge about possible processes in a patient’s
body become a primary task. Is it not absurd to make a diagnosis of someone
who has been dead for centuries?
Actually, it is quite reasonable in terms of defining a specific meaning in
a more general sociocultural perspective. Imposing medical categories on the
researched material and – in effect – pathologising dead bodies can be inter-
preted as translating past narratives into the language of contemporary
culture. In the contemporary world, we can observe the medicalisation of
public and private worries. ‘Vice had been redefined as illness, immorality as
pathology. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, sin and crime were
blended – in public debate dominated by medical experts – into one, all-
embracing category of the disease’ (Bauman 1992: 147–8; see also Turner
1994). Zygmunt Bauman argues that the problem of death has been substi-
tuted by the problem of health, with the main task being to identify the cause
of a disease. ‘All deaths have causes, each death has a cause, each particular
death has its particular cause. ... We do not hear of people dying of mortal-
ity. They die only of individual causes, they die because there was an
individual cause. No post-mortem examination is considered complete until
the individual cause has been revealed’ (Bauman 1992: 138). This life strat-
egy also dominates our way of dealing with mummies. We have to ‘do
something’ to identify ‘the problem’, to plan how we will proceed and then
follow this plan. The question about the cause of death therefore seems very
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Anna Wieczorkiewicz
reasonable. This does not mean that death is excluded from the narrative;
rather that there is a special mode for dealing with this subject. The Manches-
ter exhibition demonstrates one effective way of employing this mode. The
exhibit appeals both to intellectual capacities and to emotions. It respects both
scientific (informative) and aesthetic principles of arrangement, but favours
the first.
It is perhaps useful to compare the Manchester case with another, in which
these principles are combined in a different way. The exhibition ‘Gods of
Ancient Egypt’ held at the Archaeological Museum in Cracow makes a good
comparative case. There are some significant similarities between the Krakow
and Manchester exhibits. Both treat research on the mummified body as an
important subject. There are even significant similarities between the speci-
mens researched: in both cases specialists studied a young girl with broken
legs and a mysterious amulet in the pelvic area. The cause of her death was
unknown and nothing had been discovered about her life. It is not the differ-
ing interpretations of the facts in each case, but rather the way ‘specimen’
identities are rhetorically constructed, that is essential for my argument.
To convert mysterious bodies into ritual bodies
The ‘Gods in Ancient Egypt’ at the Archaeological Museum in Cracow is a

spectacular and impressive exhibit. Blue, a colour typical for tomb ceilings,
was chosen for the first darkish room, with a star motif repeated on the vaults
(in one place, we can discern an original stone fragment with this motif). The
second room, a long corridor with three windows, is light green, which is
Osiris’ colour; the last room is in ochre – a popular Egyptian dyestuff. Science
has been assigned a very precise place: the scientific approach ‘frames’ the exhi-
bition: an information board with a very detailed description of the research
carried out by the museum is positioned at the entrance to the Egyptian
gallery. The text is supplemented by photographic documentation, with a
video film of the research shown nearby. The video begins with the unwrap-
ping scene, followed by a report of the research process. Finally, we watch
scientists rewrapping the mummy. The picture of the mummy mask closes
the sequence, representing a significant attempt to reconcile the values held
by the culture of origin of the researched body with those of our own culture.
The process could also be interpreted as an attempt at developing a completely
new ritual. (The idea behind Krakow Archaeological Museum’s studies of the
Iset-Iri-Hetes mummy was that unwrapping should be complemented by
rewrapping after the research.) But there are more ritual traces to be found
in other aspects of the museum spectacle.
Entering the first of the three Egyptian rooms, we can abandon the scien-
tific approach and focus on a different way of perceiving the ancient culture.
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The first thing that we see after passing through the door are mummy masks
staring at us from a glass case opposite the entrance. The suggestion is that
we are going to meet something or somebody.
Glass cases filled with objects from various periods surround a pillar at the
centre of this room. The specimens have been classified partly by function
and partly according to material. Labels identify objects by name and prove-
nance; few are thematised in any more detailed way. What kind of information
should we be looking for? For in actual fact we do not look at, we look for;
we do not observe but rather notice. Four intriguing sarcophagi (one incom-
plete) are located in the dark. We are somehow drawn towards their particular
area. We have to bend down, which is when we see a deep space opening up
under the sarcophagus. (This effect was obtained by putting a mirror under
the sarcophagus and installing micro fibre lighting on top of the glass case.)
The exhibition in the green corridor is more traditional with specimens
classified according to subjects such as ‘Money in Egypt’, ‘Ostraca’, and ‘Ptole-
maic-Roman Pottery’. The corridor is a transit area, not a place to wander or
stroll in, unlike the other two rooms where we are free to choose our own
paths.
The third room returns to the mystery mode of display. Various objects
(such as stelas, coptic fabric, bandages with inscriptions from the Book of the
Death, masks, ornaments) are on display in the glass cases. Some of the glass
cases are pyramid-shaped, which is exactly what the visitors were waiting for.
There is a moment of triumphant recognition: ‘So, finally the pyramids!’
Although a ‘mummy mystery’ dominates the scene, this is also where the
scientific approach resurfaces. Sarcophagi and mummies are accompanied by
textual and visual material concerning the research. The texts concern research
methods, technologies and results, while the illustrative material focusses on
that most individual aspect of the human body – the face. We can see
photographs of the skulls and sections obtained by various methods and many
pictures of reconstructions of the appearance of these dead persons. In this
way, we occasionally enter the area of scientific discourse in the course of our
visit to this mysterious spectacular reality. However, this area of discourse is
immanent and constitutive of, and not just supplementary to, the spectacle.
The account of scientific procedures and their results, which suggest a
complete and objective message, coexists with a different, more open-ended
form of rhetoric. Such is the case with the half-open sarcophagus cover,
through which we can discern the mummy’s partially exposed face. ‘This is
the face’, reads the label, ‘of Aset-iri-Khet-es’. A mirror put under her sarcoph-
agus enables us to admire the normally hidden iconography underneath.
Looking at the display involves us physically, emotionally and intellectually.
The arrangement encourages us to walk around the glass case, to bend down,
to crouch, to look at, inside and under it – to look for knowledge that cannot
be fully articulated. The message is open to various interpretations so that the
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Anna Wieczorkiewicz
question about what information we have obtained from ‘Gods of Ancient

Egypt’ seems beside the point. Cracow has produced a spectacular ritual
supported but not obscured by a scientific approach. Krakow contrasts in this
respect with Manchester, where the ritual is hidden by the scientific approach.
Both exhibitions are places of cultural reflexivity, where individuals and soci-
eties can gain a specific knowledge about themselves, but in very different ways.
Why do we want to unwrap them?
One of my initial research questions was how Egyptian artefacts are engaged
in reinterpreting history in museum narratives. My questions when visiting
exhibitions were therefore, ‘Why does it mean in this way?’ or ‘How are the
meanings constructed?’ rather than ‘What does it mean?’ Reformulating my
questions to make the issue more precise, I now ask: ‘What are the discursive
effects of breaking down big narratives and rearranging the material?’ Detec-
tive stories, ghost stories and adventure stories can all be used to rewrite
history. However, this is not the final aim: more general cultural patterns
govern the rewriting procedures. The distance between past worlds and our
own world is blurred in museum discourse, which simulates playing with
different ‘histories’. We can play the discoverer, the archaeologist, the tourist
and sometimes even the ancient Egyptians. However, this is not just a matter
of play. Egyptian stories (which in my view are not about Egypt at all) indi-
cate some essential ways of making sense of our world in relation to the past
and to the future. The past is something that has to be explained; the process
of explanation is figuratively paralleled by the process of examination, which
often has a strong medical bias. (It is a kind of project for the future – the
procedures are implicated in museum discourse.) Seen from this perspective,
the museum provides avenues for intellectual and nonintellectual under-
standings of the human world. The discursive ‘struggle’ between the different
narratives may be conceived of as a (creative) way of dealing with reality or,
to put it another way, with the hermeneutics of reality. The outcome of the
struggle may be a polyvalent statement about the world, as well as the human
condition.
Returning to the problem of presenting dead bodies in museum displays,
one may ask whether Egyptian death is merely a spectacle. Are stories about
particular funerary rites, beliefs and legends the only way of telling Egyptian
death? Does a spectacle about life and death in ancient Egypt founded on the
decisive detachment of two worlds – ours and the Egyptian one – introduce
a qualitative difference between our death and theirs, which is the source of
the narratives created?
Rather than attempting final and decisive answers, I would like to point
out the clue offered by Johannes Fabian’s study ‘How Others Die – Reflections
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on the Anthropology of Death.’ Fabian begins with the question of why

anthropologists have so little to say about death; and why, if something is
told, it is done in such a devious way. ‘Death (in the singular) has ceased to
be a problem of anthropological inquiry; there are only deaths and forms of
death-related behavior’ (Fabian 1991: 174–75). Fabian sees as the main cause
the disappearance of a universal level at which the problem of death might
equally concern ourselves and others. The Geist of the Romantics, the natural
laws of evolution or even the Universal History of diffusionists, once formed
a universal frame of inquiry. ‘Once the anthropological concept of culture had
lost its universal (albeit elitist) character, it was clear that the discipline simply
no longer had a theoretical plane on which to face challenges such as the
problem of death’ (Fabian 1991: 175). With the relativist shift toward the
parochialisation and folklorisation of the concept of culture, studying the
nature and meanings of death finished in various fields. The experience of
death was confined to ‘self-contained acts performed for the sake of a self-
containing social unit’: this concept worked for anthropology a way of escape
from the ‘supreme dilemma of life and final death’ (Fabian 1991: 177; quoting
from Malinowski’s (1948) Magic, Science and Religion.) The Self-Other
dichotomy that emerges from Fabian’s study parallels that embodied in
museum discourse. Exhibits that aim to reflect knowledge inevitably also
reflect its dilemmas.
This is neither the final conclusion nor will I finish with an evasive state-
ment about modern humankind suppressing death. Having considered the
predicament of anthropological writing about death, Fabian discusses the
possibility of restoring the existential dimension and constructing a metalevel
of interpretation, which would include the ethnographic Other as part of the
communicative We. It would require, he argues, hermeneutics that compre-
hends itself as part of the process of reaching understanding.
The museum experience may lead, in my view, toward this kind of
hermeneutics: this occurs when narratives about Their rites and beliefs and
about Our discoveries are suspended for a moment, and when the excitement
of looking at a mummy (a real human body) is not stimulated only by the
desire to expand our knowledge of ancient Egypt. The mummy is always
attractive to visitors, who usually ask, ‘Is it real?’ A reconstruction loses much
of its attraction for visitors; the public is more likely to pay attention and
absorb the information prepared by curators if it is a real human body. But
from the viewer’s point of view, looking at a mummy in a museum may be
the definitive (even if momentary) experience or, to put it in another way, it
may be a play in Gadamer’s (1993: 101–34) sense. Although Gadamer used
this notion to define the existence of a work of art, his concept may be applied
to nonartistic exhibits. Gadamer’s play is a meaningful totality that only exists
when it is performed. The play’s meaning only emerges in the act of perceiv-
ing and interpreting the work of art. Looked at from this perspective the
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Anna Wieczorkiewicz
museum puts on a play which proceeds by bringing certain worlds into being.
The performance requires a visitor to enter, along with his or her own world,
to fulfil the sense of representation. Interpretation is the essential moment of
the play, revealing but simultaneously forming the meaning. The fulfilment
of meaning depends on how the dialogic relationship between a visitor and
an object is established. On one side is the margin left to the ‘player’ for an
individual search for the truth to which the exhibit is supposed to refer, and
the search for the player’s individual and particular place in the world. On
the other side is the continuity of meanings between the museum’s and the
player’s worlds that should be maintained during the play.
What does museum rhetoric do with mummies? It balances on the blurry
line between banishing mummies from our world and appropriating them
into it. ‘Something’ existential evoked by them is a little terrifying. Even if
we would prefer this kind of meaning to be pushed off into the domain of
Others, we are still conscious that in some way it is also our problem. The
point here is the continuous pushing away (although only partly) of the ques-
tions, ‘What actually appeals to us? What kind of message is it?’ The
borderline between Ourselves and Others is weakened, and the meanings of
life and death that were associated with those two domains become somewhat
confused. This is where mummies, skulls and skeletons become our fetishes
in seeking for meaning. It is not so much a question of including these mean-
ings in an exhibition, as that of employing the cultural mode for dealing with
the death/life dichotomy to give it proper (that is, acceptable) form. This may
be conceived of as another level in the ritual function of museums, which
parallels the celebration of civilisation’s values. The narratives inform us that
‘we’ are civilised people, with science at our disposal, and specific life strate-
gies that we use to solve our problems. But we also have nonintellectual needs,
and we arrange some areas of discursive space to satisfy them. Museum narra-
tives are employed in the cultural work of establishing ways of dealing with
certain crucial dilemmas: one of these is the dilemma of death.
NOTES
1. I define ‘narrative’ as a coherent meaningful unity expressed by words, images, and the arrange-
ment of space. It can be told as a sequence of events involving certain characters. The museum
exhibition itself does not need to include all the elements of the narrative, however the visitor
should be able to reconstruct it. I am interested in general preferences toward certain solutions
in constructing narratives. Therefore, I did not limit my research to a single type of museum,
nor to the museums of one country. (I hope that a random choice of museums may indicate a
set of the most active and effective commonplaces in museum discourse about Egypt.) More-
over, this choice reflects the way in which museums are visited. A contemporary tourist moves
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from the Van Gogh Museum to the Marihuana Museum, from the Museum of Holocaust to
the Museum of Sex, and then goes to a wax figures gallery or to Disneyland.
2. Since I deal with museum commonplaces, the examples are meant to show what is frequent and
can be noticed in many museums. The quotations are chosen to exemplify the phenomena
under consideration in a clear and obvious way. The provenance of quotations – including the
time of my research – is specified at the end of the text. Some of my examples are probably no
longer to be found in these places. It is a well-known problem that museum reality is ephemeral
and transitory. However, it articulates (and reveals) some essential features of our culture.
3. Mummies: human beings!
Well...how creepy is that?
Or do you have the feeling that something is wrong? After all these Egyptians mummies once were
human beings just like us? They were mummified long ago, because ancient Egyptians wanted to
control their fear of death. They believed that by becoming a mummy one could conquer death just
like the god Osiris. (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden)
4. Book of the Dead: Guidebook for the Hereafter.
This is both a guidebook and a passport. It contains illustrations which will become reality, charms
and passwords. Many spells deal with the crossing of canals in the hereafter. (Rijksmuseum van
Oudheden, Leiden)
5. Boats and ferrymen
Just like Egypt itself the hereafter has many canals which have to be crossed. That is why you have
boat models in your tomb. Figurines show however that the goods need boats. If you do not have a
boat, you have to go to the ferryman. But mind you: he is unwilling to transfer persons who do not
know the password! (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden)
6. Step back in time to/ Ancient Egypt/ Visit/ a land where it never rains,/ where there are no machines/
and money.../ Explore/ a civilisation which has lasted for 3,000 years/ Meet/ Some real ancient
Egyptians/ Find out/ About their life and death/ Find out/ something about ourselves. Ancient
Egyptians. (Leicester, New Walk Museum).
7. Throughout history, burials of earlier peoples have been robbed for their rich funerary offerings, bur-
ial garments, and ornaments. Tombs in Egypt, Peru and other countries have been looted over the
centuries, the bones and mummies often left as valueless. Many of these have been rescued and placed
in museums where scientific study has given us a window on the past – a view of human life that no
other archaeological study provides. (San Diego, Museum of Man)
8. The example:
Three main types of mummification have been found:
1) Natural mummification caused by dryness, heat, cold, or absence of air in the burial chamber
or grave
2) Intentional natural mummification which took advantage of the natural processes listed above
3) Artificial mummification produced by a variety of techniques which included fire and smoke cur-
ing. (San Diego, Museum of Man).
9. Sometimes, a museum discourse aims to question these dichotomies and aims towards blurring
the borders. The example may be the exhibit in the museum of African and Oceanic Art in
Paris (1999 – 2000) ‘La mort n’en saura rien’. Reliques d’Europe et d’Océanie. Here both Christ-
ian relics (mainly skulls) and ancestors’ skulls and trophies from Oceania were labelled relics.
Here a twofold effort was made: first, to maintain the sacred, transgressional, existential mean-
ings associated with skulls. Second, to relate our sacred values to the values of Others in an
inclusive way. The result was intended to be a kind of ritual in which the link between Our-
selves and Others is created and the sacred meanings are activated and experienced.
10. The example from the Manchester Museum illustrates this very clearly. The fingerprints of one
mummy from the museum collection were examined by experts from The Greater Manches-
ter Force: The Greater Manchester Force obtained the fingerprints and toe-prints of Asru by devis-
ing a special procedure which would not harm the delicate skin tissue. With a special compound now
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Anna Wieczorkiewicz
used in the dental profession, it was possible to take impressions of each of the fingers, thumbs and
toes; black acrylic paint was applied to each of the moulds and then peeled away. Finally, the acrylic
casts were inked and printed in the manner usually employed for living persons.
Although not quite as perfect as those of a living person, Asru’s prints were nevertheless remark-
able, and showed clearly defined rigid characteristics. This evidence bore out other results in estab-
lishing that she had died in her early forties.
Examination of her toe-prints showed little evidence of wear, and it was apparent from her
figerprints that she had not performed continuous manual work. This accorded with her presumed
status as a member of the upper classes.
This technique has subsequently been applied by police in some of their own forensic examina-
tions. The role of the Detective is central in this narrative.
11. These are examples from the Museo Archeologico, Naples.
12. I draw on the concept developed by Louis-Vincent Thomas in his (1980) study.
13. See for instance the unit concerning experiments carried out by R. Garner in order: to ascer-
tain the effectiveness and accuracy of the methods of mummification described by Herodotus. Because
of their availability and easy handling, dead rats were used, and their internal organs were removed.
The experiments on rats are reported in great detail. At the end, the narrative turns to a human
body: Although the human body is so much larger than that of a rat, there is every indication that
providing sufficient natron was used, its preservation would be complete within the seventy days
allowed for pre-burial procedures. (Manchester Museum)
REFERENCES
Bauman, Z. (1992) Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Cambridge: Polity
Press.
Bennett, T. (1995) The Birth of the Museum. London and New York: Routledge.
Fabian, J. (1991) ‘How Others Die – Reflections on the Anthropology of Death’, in
Time and the Work of Anthropology, Critical Essays 1971–1991. Chur: Harwood
Academic Publishers, pp. 173–90.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1993) Truth and Method. New York: Continuum. Second revised
edition. Translation revised by Joel Weinshimer and Donald G. Marshall.
(Original: Wahrheit und Methode. Grundzüge einer pholosophischen Hermeneutik.
Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1975)
Huxley, T.H. (1882) ‘On the method of Zadig: retrospective prophecy as a function of
science’, in Science and Culture and Other Essays. London: Macmillan & Co.
Malinowski, B. (1948) Magic, Science and Religion: and Other Essays. Glencoe, ILL:
The Free Trade Press.
Preston, D.J. (1983) ‘Natural History’, in Hoffman, P. (ed.) American Museum Guides:
Science. New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, pp. 57–102.
Thomas, L.-V. (1980) Le Cadavre: de la Biologie à l’Anthropologie. Brussels: Editions
Complexe.
Turner, S.B. (1994) Regulating Bodies: Essays in Medical Sociology. London and
New York: Routledge.
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Quotes from museum exhibitions concern:

San Diego, CA, The Museum of Man: September 1996 – March 1997. (Research was
supported by the Kościuszko Foundation)
Leicester, The New Walk Museum: November and December 1998. (Research was
under the TEMPUS program)
Leiden, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden: January – March 1998. (Research
supported by the Nuffic Organisation)
Manchester, The Manchester Museum: November and December 1998. (The research
was carried out under the TEMPUS program)
Naples, Museo Archeologico: July and August 1999.
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PART II
S ITE S PECIFICS :
THE C ASE OF T ERVUREN
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C HAPTER 3
C ONGO -V ISION
Barbara Saunders
Introduction
Although this contribution concerns the general possibility of transposing old

rituals of authoritarian paternalism into new rituals of catalytic agency, it is
specifically concerned with how that transposition might be effected in the
Africa Museum of Tervuren, Belgium. I shall first present some theoretical
remarks as well as a framework for rethinking its visualising rituals. My aim
is to try to reimagine the communities – of conscience, of destiny, of discourse
– with which that museum is involved in ongoing practices and forms of
collective social life. I shall then amplify these remarks with an example of
how the performative ritual of viewing erotic somatisation has served to secure
a powerbase of racist paternalism in the Africa Museum. Finally, I shall
examine the reach of one challenge to that power, namely the exhibition Exit-
CongoMuseum, which sets out to question the ideological framework, moral
content and capacities of that museum.1
Although the division between the enduring architectonics of the museum
and a transient exhibition may suggest an analytic framework within which
to conceptualise the Africa Museum, it is that framework which I take to be
part of the problem. As my title ‘Congo-Vision’ implies, the ideological
premise of the Africa Museum is its radical detemporalisation of vision
through distancing devices, its display system of space-time coordinates, its
creation of a subject of detached contemplation, and its programme of
national, gung-ho chauvinism. This provides an inkling of its dehistoricised
scientific epistemology as a set of core signs or codes of modernity, which
serves too to open up the other side of the coin, namely the ‘spiritual’ realm
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of Art. All this serves to induce the public to enter a register of ‘hegemonic
visuality’ vis-à-vis the imaginary of the Congo. The problem can be sum-
marised as ‘the denial of coevalness’ (Fabian 1983). By that I mean the
tendency throughout the histories of anthropology and museology to place
the object of study in a time other than the present, and to view that object
through a technical discourse in terms of external forms alone. It is these ideo-
logical premises that ExitCongoMuseum challenges.
Perduring Value
Transposed by the photological apparatus into a new realm, an object’s purpose

and value, like its outward size or shape, appears as an intrinsic perceptual prop-
erty. This appearance is reinforced by conventional museum strategies – labels,
catalogue descriptions, guidebooks, references in scholarly essays, security, and
the cultivation of an attitude of detached and contemplative reverence. These
become norms and expectations that are fused with and hover over the objects,
and which generations of observers act to congeal. The museum’s conferring
role remains however invisible, with the result that it unconsciously canonises
the objects and their new ‘reality’ (see Wieczorkiewicz, Chapter 2 in this volume).
A recent example is the new Chase Manhattan Gallery in the British
Museum (Peers 2000). The organising principle of this display of Native
American objects is the connoisseur’s image of ‘reality and truth’. It invites
naturalistic, empirical apprehension to grasp how each item equivocates
between the particularity of a ‘token’ and the universality of the ‘type’. A
public trained to spot the cues will ‘see’ that intent spontaneously. It is a mode
of apprehension that requires the senses to be disciplined to accord with a
particular kind of world-picture whose paradigmatic form is found in repre-
sentational images produced by a mechanical apparatus or instrument. Such
images are those of an impersonal or physical subjectivity, divorced from the
perspective of any one subject, and which therefore can claim a higher form
of reality. Together with the unconscious acts of canonising, this reality helps
ramify the museum’s layers of authority.
To sustain its authority the museum requires the acquiescence and collu-
sion of the public, staff, and scholars too, who shape and are shaped by that
authority, and who together forge the identity of the objects with restricted
sets of interpretations (see too, Wolbert, Chapter 8 in this volume). To fix
these structures the first line of presentation is typological or aesthetic. Objects
on display are fixed either by the time-space coordinates of scientific typ-
ologies or through the elevation of objects to the realm of Art. But setting,
architecture, the organisation of interior spaces, the attitude of the staff, the
nature and display of gifts, and the quality of restaurant facilities too act on
the spectator to establish the mise en scène for ‘looking’.
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Ironically the quest by market-driven museums for larger publics and

audiences is partly responsible for growing discontent with collection and
exhibition practices (Hein 2000). Politically sensitised audiences and
colonised peoples such as Native North Americans, who do not participate
in the traditional museum-goers’ reverence, have felt abused by the manner
of their depiction in paternalistic museums. In North America, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, museums have shifted away from
the model of exhibition controlled from within by the curator. Acknowledg-
ing that source communities have cultural ownership of collections, some
museums have recognised ethical and intellectual obligations to care for and
exhibit collections in a manner appropriate to the community involved (Peers
2000). Such strategies draw attention to the multiple responsibilities museums
bear for their collections, and the reassemblage, and framing of those respon-
sibilites. Their mission is no longer aesthetic connoisseurship or scientific
taxonomy, nor is their means the systematised, instrumentalised and natu-
ralised discourse of ‘vision’. Rather there is a sense of creating and providing
something more deeply engaging, experiential, interactive and justifiable.
In some museums curators and source communities have started to exper-
iment with new frames, and frames of frames, to produce new kinds of
intersubjectivities and reciprocities. Recognising that looking shares the same
set of hermeneutical preconditions as reading, museums have begun to enable
different kinds of reception of the visual text, discourse and performance.2
This presupposes that visual perception is the active capacity to ‘read’ or ‘read
into’ appropriate structures or events and form judgments about which they
‘speak’. If the object is viewed as hermeneutical, temporally governed, contra-
dictory or paradoxical, it may ‘speak’ not just in one, but in new and multiple
ways. It might then be possible to envisage a cat’s cradle of intersubjectivities,
in which objects stare back, as in some sense ‘alive’ and vision happens in-
between ‘subjects’. We might try too to imagine that vision is learned,
acculturated, like a language and in some sense not ‘natural’. In this chang-
ing Zeitgeist, museums that perpetuate the ‘official line’ can no longer rely on
the stability and complicity of a monocultural public. Rather they must be
prepared to be contested not just on their intellectual and academic grounds
but on their social and political ones too.
Bodies on Display: Erotic Somatisation
In this section my concern is with the display of naked and seminaked sculp-
tured bodies in the Africa Museum, Tervuren. Opened in 1910 by King Albert
I, the Africa Museum was established as an antidote to the image of the exclu-
sively ‘external’ and ‘practical’ pursuit of economic development of the Congo.
It fitted a long tradition of speculation concerning the internal and external
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in relation to human development – ultimately the material and spiritual

aspects of the human condition. Modern entrepreneurial society was associ-
ated with the external, while ‘genuine culture’, which the Africa Museum
aspired to embody, was an antidote to those ills. It was the pouvoir spirituel
of modern Belgium, the role in which it continues today. In response to the
present moment, that continuity is disguised by public rhetoric which has
shifted from triumphant colonialism to celebratory multiculturalism. It is
important to grasp that this kind of multiculturalism-from-above is nothing
more than a proliferation of authoritarian paternalisms. Multiculturalism-
from-above multiplies and reverses the role of preserving past traditions. It
may for example replace the documenting of history with documenting the
future, as in celebratory science museums. However this proposal does not
rework the epistemological status of analytical categories: either the evolu-
tionary past mutates into technoscientific destiny, or the semiotics of
Primitivity are reversed into Colourful Otherness.
Proud panorama of colonial power, public storehouse of its legacy, monu-
ment to its tropes, the Africa Museum plays out the parabola of its own moral
evolution. Its current theoretical foundations are given by Adorno et al.
(1982) who suggest a psychoanalytic model of an unresolved Oedipus
complex to explain why racism is the preserve of the urban poor, educationally
challenged, and psychologically unstable, as well as our own recapitulationist
selves. Moral evolution means ‘ripening’ to the mature values of the liberal
middle class as displayed in sensitivity to the Arts and an orientation to
Science. The Africa Museum has thus matured from its earlier triumphal colo-
nialism, to its engagement with Art and Science. This of course disguises other
realities and temporalities – of territorialisation, deterritorialisation, reterrito-
rialisation, of an ethnocaust of millions, of the Euro-American support of the
kleptocracies of Mobuto and his successors, and of the denial of the world
war in Africa.
An auto-icon, the Africa Museum now presents itself as a temple of Art and
Centre of Scientific Research, offering a multicultural playground in the life-
world of ‘Others’. But within this rapport de forces the organisation of
spectatorial mastery, knowledge and power has not changed at all. Rather, now
as then, the Africa Museum mobilises a technology of the all-surveying spec-
tator in an illusion of artistic and scientific completeness. If its artistic
productions render the Other by means of naked and seminaked bodies, then
its Science calls on the iconographic traditions of the Natural History Museum,
in which seriation, tabulation and Cartesian coordinates produce a discontin-
uous ‘objectivity’ that delivers naked, empirical truths to the spectator.
In the visualising regimes of Aristotle, St Paul, and Freud, anatomical
distinctions and their signifying surfaces were held to be preconscious,
prephenomenal, preontological a priori axioms. The law of prohibition
governed their viewing. Leviticus warned ‘The nakedness of thy father or …
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Congo-Vision
mother, thou shalt not uncover;’ and Actaeon was torn to pieces by his own
hounds as punishment for coming accidentally on Diana bathing. As too do
sex and excrement, nakedness in the western tradition concerns moral
decorum.3
If the secular nude’s appearance was dependent on the development in
fifteenth- century painting of the notion of a ‘picture’, under certain condi-
tions of patronage and transportation, then artists were encouraged to develop
subtle means to stimulate the spectator pleasurably. So the erotic possibilities
of depicting nakedness were enhanced, and the spectator caught in loops of
hetero and homoerotic ‘seeing’. Before that, the nude’s appearance was regu-
lated by religious norms. The infant Christ is portentous incarnation; stripped
for the Passion, he is exposed and humiliated. In contrast, the confident,
open-air nakedness of Adam and Eve, thematised as classical personages and
mingling Christian and Classical traditions, signifies the lost golden age of
perfect happiness in the story of monogenesis. The transubstantiation of
monogenesis into social Darwinism, coupled to the fabrication of Helleno-
mania (Bernal 1987) created the nineteenth-century Aryan racism and sexism
that lie at the heart of the Africa Museum.
Detemporalised and universalised norms of viewing are themselves the
focus of depiction in such works as Francis Bacon’s ‘meat’, Cindy Sherman’s
‘selves’, the ‘inside-out’ of Lucien Freud, and the ironical play on voyeurism
in Tate Modern’s dyonisian ‘Brontosaurus’. Similarly in underground video
depictions of churning and glistening genitals there is an ironic bid for the
title of ‘Last Romantic Landscape of the Body’. In terms too of the feminist
struggle especially, the question is raised, whether there is any possibility of
presenting an image of a naked woman, as distinct from a man, that can
escape sexist and politically repressive modes of depiction.4
To explore the conflict between well-meaning modernist intention and
racist and sexist performance in the Africa Museum, I shall concentrate on
the display of four sculptural figures by Herbert Ward (1863–1919), four
sculptural figures by Arsène Matton (1873–1953), and one tableau vivant by
Charles Samuel (1862–1939). I shall put the site of spectatorial response and
authority in question, and make Merleau-Ponty’s point: we are no passive
observers of these figures; rather in the economy of ‘seeing’, relays are set up
which coerce and authorise the spectator to ‘see’ in particular ways.5 These
are relations which materially penetrate our bodies without depending on any
mediation of ‘representations’ or interiorisations of consciousness, but rather
locate the spectator in the role of ‘desirer’.
The entrance-cupola at the Africa Museum is redolent of a baroque church.
Beneath the dome where transepts and nave would intercept, a crown motif
is set in the floor. At this point the visitor is surrounded by allegorical figures
placed high on curved marble walls and within the window recesses. As alleg-
ories they uncover ‘nature’ according to a unilinear evolution of social and
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Barbara Saunders
Figure 3.1 Scheme of the placement of sculptures in the Rotunda, Africa Museum
(courtesy of Wendy Morris)
moral institutions, dictated by suprahistorical principles, and determined by

natural generation (Deleuze 1993; Fabian 1983; Saunders 2001). The point
of these figures is to emphasise that Belgium’s special destiny has been to carry
that principle forward in the Congo, and their iconography signifies both the
ménage à trois of Church, State and Crown as well as the monogenesis of that
principle.
The four main figures on the curved walls declare the relation of Belgium
to Africa. This relation is represented by i. Belgium donating Civilization to
the Congo (‘België schenkt de beschaving aan Congo’) Figure 3.2; ii. Belgium
lends its support to the Congo (‘België schenkt zijn steun aan Congo’) Figure
3.3; iii. Slavery (‘De Slavernij’) Figure 3.4; and iv. Belgium dispenses Pros-
perity to the Congo (‘België schenkt de welstand aan Congo’) Figure 3.5.
They were commissioned from Matton by the directors of the Africa Museum
to illustrate the moral mission of Belgium’s conquest of the Congo. Matton
was granted a study trip to the colony, and during his trip in 1911, he made
both sketches and body casts of the local population (Morris 2001). Judging
by a similar project inaugurated in 1907, at the newly established Department
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Congo-Vision
Figure 3.2 ‘Belgium grants civilization to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of
Wendy Morris)
Figure 3.3 ‘Belgium grants her support to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of
Wendy Morris)
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Barbara Saunders
Figure 3.4 ‘Slavery’, A. Matton, 1920 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)
Figure 3.5 ‘Belgium grants prosperity and well-being to the Congo’, A. Matton, 1920
(courtesy of Wendy Morris)
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Congo-Vision
of Anthropology of the South African Natural History Museum in Cape Town

(Van Kets 2001), taking life casts of local people was common practice at that
time.
Although Matton claimed his intent was to create allegory not natural
history, his methods and techniques amounted to the same thing. Art and
Science were engaged in the project of displaying how far removed the Other
was from the present, civilised state of humanity. Matton therefore organised
his figures by two temporalities: the break between the exteriority of Savagery
there, and civil society here; and the break between natural Primitivity there,
and Civilisation here. The Other is the object of real exteriority, made intel-
ligible through an apparatus of observation, collection, classification and
description; Civilisation in contrast, is depicted by Art. The Other-as-natural-
history, and ourselves-as-Civilisation serve to maintain what Morris (2001)
calls ‘the shit and piss of conquest at a sanitary distance’ (Benjamin’s feces et
urinam of class exploitation). She describes how Matton’s ‘België schenkt zijn
steun aan Congo’ achieves this. It:
… depicts a sensual female figure that is, oddly, a personification of male military
might. The imagery is of a dominant female warrior/goddess figure with a banner
clutched in her hand and, at her side, a kneeling African ‘subject’ gazing upwards,
transfixed, toward her face. An African child sits at her feet. In this attempt to
simultaneously present and deny the theme of conquest, Matton has made what
must surely be his most manic work. Eclectic sculptural genres and classical
mythologies are stirred into a breathtaking mix of religious adoration, eroticism
and imperialist propaganda. (Morris 2001: 17)
The male figure of the African reaches up to her in what could be described as
either religious awe or sexual longing. The image of a sensual, naked African man
on his knees in front of an almost naked European woman/warrior/goddess, his
arm crossing her groin and his hand resting on her thigh, must be the highpoint
of mad imperial imagery. (ibid: 18)
The effect, as she says, is to rewrite the historically specific conquest of the
Congo as a mythic victory – an effect intensified by another set of figures,
with which they interact. These are plaster casts painted black, derived from
original bronzes by Herbert Ward (1863–1919), now in the Smithsonian
Institution, though withdrawn from display (Arnoldi 1998). These plaster
figures represent i. an Artist (‘De Tekenaar’) Figure 3.6; ii. the Chief of the
Tribe (‘Het Stamhoofd’) Figure 3.7; iii. the Woodcutter or Idolmaker (‘De
Houtsnijder’) Figure 3.8; and iv. Making Fire (‘De Vuurmaker’) Figure 3.9.
Like Matton, Ward had spent time in the Congo. He regarded himself
primarily as an academic artist, a judgement reinforced by awards from the
Paris Salon. For him Art was a symbol of ideal reality, a poem of Truth, and
Truth was spiritual harmony. Hence he claimed not to want ‘an absolute real-
istic thing like wax works in an anatomical museum’, but rather that his
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Figure 3.6 ‘The Artist’, H. Ward, 1912 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)
Figure 3.7 ‘Chief of the Tribe’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)
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Figure 3.8 ‘The Idolmaker’, H. Ward, 1906 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)
Figure 3.9 ‘Making Fire’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)
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Barbara Saunders
renditions of Africa should capture ‘the spirit … in its broad sense’ (Arnoldi
1998). Insisting his figures were Art, not Science, like Matton’s figures, their
hyperrealism nonetheless relies on contemporary scientific accounts of
‘arrested development’ and popular understandings of ‘ethnographic accuracy’.
The realism is both to detemporalise and universalise, both historical and
particular, an ambiguity used to persuade the spectator both of their eternal
truth and historical verisimilitude.
While the elegantly disposed ecclesiastical allegories are larger than life and
embody the spiritual and universal, the awkward black figures beneath are less
than life and embody the material and particular. As the spectator looks down
onto the black plaster casts, and up at the allegories, the gaze performs –
enacts – the relation between them, folding the spectator into complicity. As
Deleuze (1993: 124) – echoing Aristotle – says, the derivative forces are allot-
ted to the lower area and primal force to the upper reaches, forces which the
spectator cannot help but confirm. In gazing upward, the contemplative spec-
tator gives unity to this scheme by grasping that the projection emanates, as
point of view, from the summit of the dome: the evolution of humanity as
divinely ordained.
The very particularity of the black bodies has an animal-like grandeur,
being well-proportioned, sinuous and healthy. Yet something’s lacking; each
figure is awkwardly displayed, as if devoid of self-consciousness or control.
The ‘Chief of the Tribe’ poses one foot gauchely over the other; redolent of
a lunatic, he stares blankly into space. There’s no framework to accord him
psychic life. Similarly the lower limbs of the ‘Woodcutter’ dangle artlessly over
a rock, while ‘The Firemaker’s’ action is less than dignified. His ‘simplicity’ is
devoid of ‘natural grace’ associated say, with humble but virtuous peasants.
The ‘Artist’ too is posed with awkward ‘spontaneity’. Echoing the classical
theme of the birth of painting, compared to his predecessors, he’s childlike,
confirming the orthogenetic-phylogenetic theory of development. Note-
worthily his ‘drawing’ is not the mimesis of shadow, but free-association
doodling, done with one finger in the dirt. Yet unlike the labouring classes at
home, with whom they were compared, Ward’s specimens held the promise
of redemption. It is almost an Hegelian theme: it is as if, if only they could
see themselves, they would ‘see’ they were mere physicality and only just poten-
tial, incarnate soul.
Of Matton’s four golden allegories one is called ‘the Slaver’. This depiction
of the archetypal Arab Slaver exemplifies the rhetoric of the colonial enter-
prise. Through the latter part of the nineteenth century when the Congo
served as Leopold II’s back yard, he’d galvanised the political and business
worlds on the pretext of banishing Arab slavery. For entrepreneurs, convinced
of their humanitarian mission, anti-slavery legitimated economic and politi-
cal endeavour. To eradicate this evil was not just practical, economic good
sense, but moral imperative and divine injunction too. The figure of the Slaver
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captures this. He savagely grasps a beautiful naked black girl, violently

wrenching her upwards and backwards away from her slain infant’s side. This
allegorical figure, replaying images of Pharisees, Infidels, and other villains of
orientalist discourse, interlocks the black female body with the spectator’s
upward gaze which is itself the reinscription of sexual exchange at the heart
of the colonial endeavour (see McClintock 1995; Young 1995). Sublated to
the allegory of humanitarian and compassionate mission, this image, playing
on secular frameworks of erotic nudes, feeds a lascivious imagination eager
for more. It’s a violent image creating a deeply divided gaze between erotic
enjoyment on the one hand and moral outrage on the other. As Morris (2001:
17) appropriately says:
The benevolence implicit in the titles that Matton gave to his four sculptures is in
stark contrast to the more pragmatic intentions of Leopold II and later the Belgian
colonial authority to ‘harvest’ the Congo for all it was worth. In constrast to the
suggestions implicit in the titles that Belgium’s aim was philanthropic, that all
efforts were aimed to benefit the Congolese, it was clear, to the Congolese certainly
and to a number of Europeans at the time, that the direction of the benefits was
clearly one directional, from South to North. That these sculptures and their titles
still stand in pride of place in the Rotunda, unquestioned and unchallenged, seems
to me to demand a response.
What needs to be emphasised is that the continued display of these sculptures

is not an oversight but part of a deliberate orchestrated whole. The images
are felt appropriate to the self-image of the museum and to the self-image
behind that. Whether it is possible to critically examine that self-image and
perhaps transpose the Africa Museum into a ‘museum of conscience and
destiny’ as, for example, the District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa
is, is a moot point. If so, the Matton and Ward figures in the Rotunda might
well be given pride of place in such a metamuseum. They might be joined by
the disturbing tableau vivant by Charles Samuel, located outside the cafete-
ria (appropriately named ‘Simba’). This tableau, in plaster and real artefact,
commissioned for the Brussels-Tervuren Exposition of 1897, depicts an event
in the tale of the idealised Noble Savage, Vuakusu-batetela.6 He courageously
defends the honour of a delectable naked girl, brutally thrust to the ground
by the evil Arab Slaver. What stares any spectator in the eye is the blatant
display of the sexually signifying surfaces of her body. Other than to whet the
appetite, why might she be so provocatively displayed? Like Matton’s ‘De Slav-
ernij’ the intention is to create the split vision of sexual titillation and moral
outrage (as well as to establish a hierarchy of ethnic and moral types, thereby
providing an alibi for Belgium). Through this ‘innocent’ display of nipples
and crotch, this figure lends credibility to, inviting more of, Belgium’s inter-
vention Figure 3.10.
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Figure 3.10 ‘Vuakusu-batetela protects a woman from an Arab’, Charles Samuel,

1897 (courtesy of Wendy Morris)
Where are the gender-sensitive curators of the Africa Museum who could
explain how the seeing of embodied desires plays no insignificant role in
directing the emphasis and focus of sexual interest, as these are ramified by
racial stereotype and colonial ideology? Where are the questions about how
the play between the ‘objective’ and ‘reactive’ attitudes transforms or confirms
our self-experience in looking at these bodies? Where is the explanation of
how that viewing is not built on any drama evoked by sexual response, but
upon the gratifications of scientifically ramified scopophilia? (McKenna
1999). And if anything exemplifies the colonial ‘thrust’ it is this split,
scopophiliac gaze of the lascivious moralist. For at the heart of the colonial
experience, as many have pointed out, lies the political economy of sex (Young
1995). Compulsory heterosexuality situates anatomy as a critical site in any
theory of production (however problematic the notion of ‘production’ might
be) and necessitates revising estimates of the position of ‘men’ and ‘women’
within it. The reconstitution of the colonial ‘subject’ can then simultaneously
be grasped as the constitution of the site of reproduction. So not only do
detemporalised naked bodies serve to vindicate the endeavour at home, and
encourage and incite new adventures abroad, but they also serve as an alle-
gory of the violent reproductive imaginary that lies at the heart of colonialism.
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Congo-Vision
Naked black bodies – male or female – materialise the imaginary of Other-

ness as limpid specimens, erotic nymphs, or fabulous topographies. Located
in an ideology in which bodylessness is the precondition of rationality, this
‘natural’ gendering is also the concretisation of race. The carefully moulded
and enhanced physiognomies testify to this. Clearly reason is beyond these
positioned, posed, exposed, reexposed black bodies. They are bodily speci-
mens, reproduction machines, or totalising metaphorical vehicles – never
incarnate soul. However split the viewer’s gaze may be, it is deceptively organ-
ised as a one-sided relation, which is wholly instrumental to the museum’s
cause, and the wider cause behind that.
While ethnographic museums can no longer afford to be colonial
museums, and are responsive to wider trends, the Africa Museum is an excep-
tion. Even innovative display strategies cannot divest it of its colonial frame.
This charges the site, its public space, its contents, its aesthetics and the bodies
within it with meanings far beyond their original ideological intent. They
concretise particularities, reiterating deep normativities of racial and gender
imperatives, determining the ‘beholder’s share’.
The continued attempt to locate a monolithic and passive spectator who
resonates appropriately to artistic or scientific cues presented as if universal,
is not only a failure of ethical imagination, but a denial too of the active power
of the ‘look of the thing’ (what might be called depropriation7 or unmastery
of the scopophiliac gaze). In the dialectical interplay of reciprocities between
appropriation and depropriation, what Jameson (1992) has called ‘the essen-
tial pornography of the visual’, is played out by this infolding of the
manipulative registers of eroticism and racial somatocentricity. If we delude
ourselves that we can gaze innocently at these figures, as knowing subjects,
dispassionately contemplating artistic objects, placing ourselves beyond their
force, in one-sided spectatorship, we cannot help but collude in their
programme of negative magic and insidious aura management. For we do not
simply ‘see’ these bodies; rather they show themselves to us, in the ways that
locate us in the play of spectatoriality organised by the authoritarian patri-
archy of the museum.
Reimagining Communities
I have tried to show how the separation of objects of vision and knowing spec-
tators has been opened out and manipulated for anterior, ideological purposes,
through the denial of coevalness and the erotic somatisation of race – as two
sides of the same coin. In contrast to the previous emphasis on the ‘bodies
on display’, in this section I shall, as briefly as may be, discuss ExitCongo-
Museum8 – an exhibition which traces the peripatetic social lives of objects
on their journeys from the Congo to the Africa Museum. By renarrativising
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Barbara Saunders
these stories, the curator of the first part of the exhibition, Boris Wastiau,
attempts to displace past authoritarian paternalisms by reassigning value from
the objects to the larger ideological projects of the collectors, by challenging
connoisseurial and typological norms of display, and by restoring complex,
vernacular and intersubjective temporalities. The effect is to engage the public
with disturbing questions about the nature of the relationship between
Belgium and the Congo, to question the aesthetic and scientific framework
into which the objects have been transposed, and to show how the detempo-
ralisation of that framework is no longer self-sustaining. The curator of the
second part of the exhibition of contemporary African and African-American
art, Toma Muteba Luntumbue, presents artworks authored by renowned
contemporary artists, which stand in contrast to the anonymous ‘masterpieces
of tribal art’ in the rest of the museum. This part of the exhibition is a medi-
tation on the tensions at the core of ‘African Art’.
In the first part of ExitCongoMuseum, the recontextualisation of ‘master-
pieces’ upsets the old visualising frame (see Wastiau, Chapter 4 in this
volume). Instead of an isolated mask or figure whose uniqueness is stressed
by exquisite lighting, objects are ‘wrongly’ lit and ‘masterpieces’ appear as
randomly thrown together. Instead of connoisseurial cues, the sources, acts
and purposes of collection, and the journeys of the objects to the Africa
Museum, are merged in an effort to restore their specificities and temporali-
ties. The stories emphasise that the notion of ‘tribal art’ occludes any proper
account of what these objects once were. The contemporary artworks in
contrast are forthright. They confront the viewer with statements about the
tyranny of place, the tragedy of African politics, the endemic violence that
engulfs whole communities, and the haunting detritus of modernity gone
wrong. By reinserting the authors of the modern works into public space and
by emphasising their political contexts, histories and intersubjectivities, visi-
tors are provoked to compare the anonymous ‘tribal’ artefacts with the
complex intertwined temporalities of Belgium and the Congo, the new range
of moral questions being raised, what future role the museum might play, how
art, politics and culture intertwine, and what purpose has been served in
negating the human presence behind the objects.
Another mood of ExitCongoMuseum is the establishment of new rituals of
catalytic agency (Hein 2000). The traditional distance the Africa Museum
established between itself and the source of its livelihood, is in question.
Where authority is for the most part vested in the hands of the Africa
Museum’s ‘experts’, in ExitCongoMuseum Toma Muteba Luntumbue and the
African artists insert their own priorities, values, and temporalities in public
space. Not mincing their words about harsh realities, double standards, colo-
nial aesthetics, they point to the ‘“lies” of exclusion and rhetoric’ (Clifford
1986) that have characterised the Africa Museum’s presentation of the-Congo-
without-people. They show the erasure of the radical authenticity of life and
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Congo-Vision
contrast it to the truncated aesthetic monsters on display. To confront a public

with these counternarratives is one kind of ritual of catalytic agency. They
evince moral revulsion, provoke a reevaluation of the standards by which
reality and museums may be judged, and set up a metacultural discourse about
the ethics of display.
One of many narratives found in this exhibition concerns the nature of
historiography. It shows how the past like the present, divides and multiplies.
Historiography is a present site of struggle and as Mudimbe (1988: 195) says,
it is a legend, ‘an invention of the present’. The Africa Museum took anony-
mous objects and kept African people out of sight and out of history, framing
Hegel’s assertion that ‘Africa has no history’. Another narrative is a disquisi-
tion on ‘Congo-Vision’ itself. This is the vision that colonises and regulates
meaning. It interrogates, maimes and murders. It colludes with and incorpo-
rates other oppressive and exploitative visions, and yet it claims to purvey the
untainted ‘truth’. Again another narrative concerns the museal framework
itself. While the authoritarian paternalism of the Africa Museum is articulated
by Art and Science, ExitCongoMuseum seeks a self-critical relationship to
the politics of representation and the representation of politics, sometimes
by striking juxtapositions, sometimes by exploding canons of decorum,
sometimes by deconstructing ‘aura management’, sometimes with historical
irony. The attempt is avowedly revisionary. It rewrites, as well as fills gaps
in the already written. It challenges received notions of value and asks
how appropriate notions of art and aesthetic value are to contemporary
African artists. The issue involves debates about craft, available symbolic and
material resources, educational opportunities, access to facilities and equip-
ment, and the state of community-based visual traditions. These are issues
raised by critical interventions by the excluded and marginalised majority,
the effect of which is to produce disturbing, unsettling effects for the Africa
Museum.
If the Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, then ExitCongoMuseum anticipates it.
The Africa Museum cast every identity into a pre-fixed, static ethnotribal cate-
gory. The impulse to collect colluded with the maiming and crippling of its
authors, fixating them in a timeless past, denying them action and change,
producing a sanitised, aestheticised and scientificised economy of Congo-
vision. ExitCongoMuseum questions that economy in discomforting ways. It
sets up innovative comparisons between military and ethnographic campaigns,
between traders and missionaries, between entrepreneurial activity and
culture, and between aesthetics and pornography. In reassigning value Exit-
CongoMuseum has taken the power of museums to signify and affirm value
and has started to reassign it through the museum’s own resources. It sets out
to test the moral capacities of the museum itself, taking responsibility, and
beginning a process of self-evaluation. One register of ExitCongoMuseum is
remorse, however in that it is alone at the Africa Museum.
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Barbara Saunders
While the theme of African Art in transit is not new, the mood that
concerns itself with the specific and concrete cooptations, displacements and
dispersements of the Africa Museum, is. The ethical and historical myopia
and the dishonest rhetoric have never been based on what actually goes on in
the Congo. Rather they have been based on what might now be regarded as
the perverse imagination that created the Congo in the first place.
NOTES
1. For other examples and discussion see Hein (2000: 4). I am also extremely grateful to the excel-
lent thesis of Morris (2001).
2. ‘Reading a text is a paradigm case of a hermeneutical activity. Reading is, or aims at the direct,
self-evident, reception of the meaning of a text. Perceiving, likewise, is or aims at the direct, self-
evident, reception of the meaning of a ‘text’ … Both reading and perceiving share the same set
of hermeneutical pre-conditions, subjective and objective’ (Heelan 1983: 37, 61–75). See too
Illich (2001).
3. ‘In the month of May 1961 I produced and tinned ninety tins of artist’s shit … naturally pre-
served (made in Italy)’ Piero Manzoni, quoted in Blazwick and Wilson (eds) (2000: 109).
4. In response to the question of whether it is possible to present an image of a naked woman that
can escape sexist and politically repressive modes of depiction, Morris (personal communica-
tion) says:
I am inclined to think there is not. A few years ago I painted a series of female body-builders in
response to this problem and as an exploration of the possibility of an ‘anti-pornography’. Since
most paintings of naked or semi-naked or even fully-clothed women over the last four hundred
years have been for the visual titillation of male viewers, I reversed the odds and painted women
that the majority of men would find unattractive. The female body-builders offer a ‘come-on’ with
their blond hair, lipsticked lips set into fixed smiles and tanned, oil bodies, but they negate that
‘come-on’ with their aggressive postures. It is only within a certain sub-culture that the body-
builders are considered beautiful. The irony … is that the judges in the competitions in which
these ‘athletes’ take part are principally men. This influences the manner in which the women
develop their bodies.
5. Aristotle, Whitehead, James, and Dewey have also proposed continuity and ‘reciprocal per-
ception’ with a vibrant responsive world.
6. Full title: ‘Vuakusu-batetela protects a woman from an Arab’.
7. Whitehead (1961: 176) speaks of this as ‘the concern that is provoked in a recipient’ (where the
recipient is not passive).
8. On display from November 2000 to June 2001.
REFERENCES
Adorno, T.W., Frenkel-Brunszik, E., Levinson, D.J. and Nevitt, S.R. (eds)(1982)
The Authoritarian Personality. Abridged edition. New York and London:
W.W. Norton & Company.
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Arnoldi, M.J. (1998) ‘Where Art and Ethnography Met: the Ward African Collection at
the Smithsonian’, in Schildkrout, E. and Keim, C. (eds), The Scramble for Art in
Central Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Baxandall, M. (1991) ‘Exhibiting Intention: Some Preconditions of the Visual Display
of Culturally Purposeful Objects’, in Lavine, S. and Karp, I. (eds), Exhibiting
Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 33–41.
Bernal, M. (1987) Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, Vol. 1,
The Fabrication of Ancient Greece 1785–1985. London: Free Association Books.
Blazwick, I. and Wilson, S. (eds) (2000) Tate Modern, The Handbook. London: Tate
Publishing.
Clifford, J. (1986) ‘Introduction: Partial Truths’, in Clifford, J. and Marcus, G. (eds),
Writing Culture. The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley CA: University of
California Press, pp. 1–26.
Deleuze, G. (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque. Transl. Tom Conley. Minneapolis
MI: University of Minnesota Press.
Doane, M.A. (1988) ‘Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body’, in Michelson, A.,
Krauss, R., Crimp, D. and Copjec, J., (eds), October: The First Decade,
1976–1986.
Fabian, J. (1983) Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Heelan, P. (1983), ‘Perception as a Hermeneutical Act’, Review of Metaphysics, 37,
pp. 61–75.
Hein, H.S. (2000) The Museum in Transition: a Philosophical Perspective. Washington
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press.
Illich, I. (2001) ‘Guarding the Eye in the Age of Show’, transl. B. Duden. Previously
published 1995, ‘Die Askese des Blicks im Zeitaler der Show – INTERFACE’, in,
Klaus Peter Dencker (Hg.), Weltbilder, Bildwelten. Computergestützte Visionen.
Hamburg: Verlag Hans Bredow Institut, pp. 206–222.
Jameson, F. (1992) Signatures of the Visible. New York: Routledge.
Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action. Milton Keynes: Open University Press.
Locke, J. (1964/1689) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A.D. Woozley.
New York: Meridien.
McClintock, A. (1995) Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Contest. New York: Routledge.
McKenna, J. (1999) Sexual Desire and the Aesthetic Experience: Exteriority and Meaning
Within the Intentional Objects of Desire and Aesthetic Appreciation. Unpub. ms.,
Katholieke Universiteit Leuven
Morris, W. (2001) ‘Both Temple and Tomb: Difference, Desire, and Death in the
Sculptures of the Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren,’ (University of
South Africa). Proving Difference, Creating Distance: Visual Authorisations of a
Colonial Project. Unpubl. Masters thesis, University of South Africa.
Mudimbe, V.I. (1988) The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of
Knowledge. Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press.
Peers, L. (2000) ‘Native Americans in Museums: a Review of the Chase Manhattan
Gallery of North America’, Anthropology Today, 16(6), pp. 8–13.
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Barbara Saunders
Saunders, B. (1999) ‘The Photological Apparatus and the Desiring Machine’, Focaal,
34, (special issue Academic Anthropology and the Museum, guest editor M.
Bouquet), pp. 23–39. Also in Bouquet, M. (ed.), 2001, Academic Anthropology
and the Museum: Back to the Future. Oxford: Berghahn Books, pp. 18–35.
–––––– (2001) ‘Lafitau’s Denial of Coevalness’, unpubl. paper at the 22nd American
Indian Workshop, Bordeaux, France, April.
Van Kets, R. (2001) ‘From Negative to Positive Moods in South African Museums’,
unpubl. paper at the Fictions and Art History Conference at Concordia University,
Montreal, Canada, March.
Whitehead, A.N. (1961) The Adventures of Ideas. New York: The Free Press.
Young, R.J.C. (1995) Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. London:
Routledge.
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C HAPTER 4
T HE S COURGE OF C HIEF
K ANSABALA : THE R ITUAL L IFE OF
T WO C ONGOLESE M ASTERPIECES
AT THE R OYAL M USEUM FOR
C ENTRAL A FRICA (1884–2001)
Boris Wastiau
Once the object stops being defined by its function,

its meaning is entirely up to the subject
Baudrillard, ‘The System of Collecting’
Metamorphosis
From October 2000 through June 2001, 125 iconic ‘Congolese art master-
pieces’ that have spent most of their existence in Belgian showcases were part
of the exhibition ExItCongoMuseum. A Century of Art with/without Papers held
at the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Such figures, along with so many
ritual artefacts of African origin, have been involved in the ritual practices of
Belgian collecting and museology ever since western hands appropriated them.
This chapter sketches the ritualised display of two of these pieces over the
past 117 years and interprets aspects of the resulting performativity and
‘magic’. Of particular interest is how the displays in which the two artefacts
were included participated in the continuous creation of a changing image of
Congo among the Belgian public.
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Boris Wastiau
When I became involved in museum ethnography in the mid-1990s, I was

struck by the fact that most museum objects were poorly documented in terms
of their original and intended use and meaning: only a minority of objects
were collected by professional ethnographers. Furthermore, it had rarely been
deemed relevant to document their historical and ethnographic uses from the
moment they entered the collections and the exhibition displays to the
present. Museology, the art (or science, according to some) of presenting
objects often remained unquestioned from within museums, objects being
displayed as if they ‘represented’ some external objective ‘reality’. In Tervuren,
this ‘reality’ appeared to lie somewhere in Africa, although the displays were
blatantly at odds with my own practical experience of that continent. Specif-
ically, the older displays about Congo, inherited from previous generations of
curators, corresponded to what Barbara Saunders has called a hegemonic
‘Congo-Vision’: ‘…images delivered by the observing eye to the spectator are
true renditions of a world as it is in itself ’ (Saunders, Chapter 3 in this volume).
However, other studies have shown how some devices, such as the use of
western-made anthropomorphic sculptures, aimed at ‘proving distance’ and
‘creating difference’ between the colonisers and the colonised (Morris 2001).
Anthropologists have perhaps been more reluctant to engage in self-exam-
ination and reassessment of taken-for-granted practices in ethnographic
museums than has been the case in other sorts of museums. This reluctance
has posed problems in the field of anthropology at large (Shelton 1997), and
in specific museums such as Tervuren (Saunders 1999 and this volume).
Furthermore, subjective practices have traditionally featured a quest for exoti-
cism and interest in the most ‘excessive’ behaviours and radical ‘alterity’. As a
consequence, ‘[p]aralysed by their interest for the bizarre knowledge that they
study, ethnologists most often forget the bizarre character of the credited
knowledge that they do not even consider worth being a possible research
subject’ (Latour 1983: 206).1 Hence the lack of self-criticism.2
Let us begin with the examples in question: two ‘Tabwa cephalomorph
wood carvings’. The ‘traditional’ view is that the nature and ritual use of these
two objects were established once and for all around the date of their ‘collec-
tion’ in 1884. Mikisi figures are identified as central African power-objects,
or ‘fetishes’, whose making and ritual use are more or less extensively described
in catalogues of African art. They have a precise ethnic designation associated
with a clear location and dating. Properly measured, numbered (RG 31663
and RG 31664) and registered in 1930, when they were acquired by the
Museum, they were subsequently analysed by biologists who ‘discovered’ the
wood from which they were carved (Ficus mucoso and Erythrina abyssinica).
Exhibitions in which the objects are shown, catalogues in which they are
reproduced, are most likely successfully to elaborate on these aspects, possi-
bly including comparisons with contemporary ‘traditional’ artistic or ritual
practices as well as a full description of the context of appropriation and
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The Ritual Life of Two Congolese Masterpieces
Figure 4.1 Tabwa cephalomorph carvings, two ‘masterpieces’ of the Royal Museum
for Central Africa (photograph by R. Asselberghs, 1994)
deportation of the pieces (see, for example, Maurer and Roberts 1985; Roberts
1995).
But why not extend the ethnography of the pieces to their present-day
ritual use and their history to the 117 years since their appropriation? Also,
engaging in critical deconstruction of established disciplinary knowledge would
reveal the social and cultural condition of its production, the arbitrariness of
its boundaries, which would be a deviation from the role traditionally assigned
to ‘museum ethnographers’ – at least in Belgium. However, if the project
started and the results were to be exhibited (these two items belong to a 125-
strong masterpiece collection), how could the pieces be displayed? The idea
of exposing the life-stories of some of the pieces against the background of a
critical history of colonial collecting and displaying, so as to ‘delaminate’ the
different ‘meanings’ they have had in the course of their ‘museum careers’,
was born.
The process of becoming acquainted with the objects in collections and
with their histories, with the epistemology of museology as historically prac-
tised in an institution and with past historiographies, is a time-consuming
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Boris Wastiau
business. Uncovering the specific uses of certain objects and the intended
effects of particular displays is arduous, especially since these are traditionally
poorly recorded. Indeed, at the time of their creation showcases were often
considered as the ‘obvious thing to do’, with few questions asked until very
recently. What is generally left for the record are a few photographs of the
displays, labels, catalogue captions and descriptions, as well as a list of exhi-
bitions in which the pieces were included. The motives or criteria for the
selection are seldom recorded and descriptions or analysis of the conceptual
and practical aspects of the ‘making of ’ exhibits are rarely available in publi-
cations or archives.
The fact that the objects in question were displaced in precolonial, colo-
nial and postcolonial times, having been incorporated into new rituals, private
or public, in and out of Africa, means that they have much to tell us histor-
ically. However, there is very little data to recover on the ritual viewing of
particular objects by visitors to temporary or permanent displays. Much of
what follows therefore relates to the fragmented formal aspects that were
recorded in texts or photographs, while the subjective response of the viewers
can only be inferred.
After briefly stating what ‘Tabwa carvings’ may stand for today, I will
review 1. their original use in the context of Belgian colonial expansion; 2.
their transformation into personal war trophies by collector Lieutenant Emile
Storms; 3. their subsequent transformation into ‘national trophies’ at the
Museum of Belgian Congo; 4. their recognition as works of art and master-
pieces of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Finally, I will describe their
inclusion in the exhibition ExItCongoMuseum. Each transformation corre-
sponds to a displacement in space and an inclusion in a new ritual display.
As such, the objects always relate to specific events and to a specific archi-
tecture: they are systematically framed, literally and figuratively speaking, in
a marked-off space where they are attributed a new meaning. Following Hay,
I am also mindful that in the study of intercultural exchanges of art and mate-
rial culture, ‘The operation of displacement has to be excavated to become
visible, through an effort to see the artwork as event rather than object,
embodying and catalysing desire’ (Hay 1999: 9).
According to Toma Luntumbue, guest curator for contemporary art in the
exhibition, the Museum is primarily an expression of the Belgian collective
subconscious in relation to Congo, so that the ritual display of artefacts within
the museum’s walls cannot be fully discussed without an analysis of the social
and political context that historically structured its limits (Luntumbue 2001;
Wastiau 2000). Such an analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter, which
will instead focus on the successive meaningful transfers of specific objects
from specific categories to others.
From the moment of their violent appropriation in 1884, the Tabwa carv-
ings lost their originally intended function to be appropriated by powerful
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hands in which they were, literally, useless. Why, then, have they been
preserved for so long? Any object can clearly have another function than that
of being used. As Baudrillard (1972: 11) has put it, ‘The objects are not
exhausted in what they serve for, and it is in their excess of presence that they
take their signification of prestige, that they “designate” not the world any
longer, but the being and the social rank of their possessor.’ The history of
the pieces is the convergence of individuals’ stories, memories, and a never-
ending flow of viewers who seemingly admire them as mere objects.
Collection Pieces: Tabwa Carvings in the Tervuren Collections
These Congolese artworks are presently among those that the general and
specialised publics demand to be exhibited as ‘masterpieces’ (interviews with
the public and ‘connoisseurs’, visitor’s book). Few will know all the aspects of
their biographies, the multiple meanings and uses they have had in the course
of their ‘lives’, especially during their ‘career’ at the museum. Almost every-
one apprehends them as part of a specific ensemble, which seemingly
constitutes the objective and timeless class or category that best defines their
identity and from which ‘meaning’ or an ‘interpretation’ are inferred. There
are a few established classes in which they may be included, such as the ‘nkisi
power figures’, the ‘masterpieces collection’ or ‘Tabwa art’. This is as much
the case for the curatorial staff as for the public and the connoisseurs. Gener-
ally, in the permanent displays, objects are presented as ‘samples’ of an African
expressive culture, as if the ensemble in which they are included ‘represented’,
‘illustrated’ or ‘transcribed’ a culture (cf. Coquet 1999: 18–19).
In this context, African art, perhaps more than any other, tends to be iden-
tified by means of an ethnic grid of classification: ‘this is Tabwa art’. The
general public ignores the fact that the ‘ethnic’ (read ‘tribal’) label, as opposed
to attribution to an individual artist, is highly reductive and is also oblivious
of the fact that ‘[t]he majority of objects in present ethnographic museums
are testimonies of the past’ (Röschenthaler 1999: 82) and not of present times.
Yet for some visitors, such as ex-colonials, memories of a largely imagined
story of ‘the’ Congo are equally invested in these mementoes, which are
constitutive parcels of the Museum itself as ‘lieu de mémoire’, however true
or false these memories may be. Their ‘meaning’ will be different again for a
Congolese of the Diaspora or the African artist. These multiple mental inclu-
sions of the objects, which reveal a ‘distributed identification’ among viewers,
have seldom been taken into account in the display of the pieces. This synec-
dochic aspect of the collection also refers to various imagined worlds and the
various meanings attributed to the objects, even though curatorial practice
traditionally asserts one interpretation to the detriment of others in the
displays. The trivialising opposition of ‘art’ vs. ‘ethnographic’ approaches to
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Boris Wastiau
non-western art derives in a comparable way from a wholly nonreconstructed

modernist perspective. The intention with ExItCongoMuseum was that of
‘unsettling the meaning’ (Shelton 2001), the established meaning, as well as
the traditional ‘Congo-Vision’.
Mikisi: Late Nineteenth-Century Tabwa Political Art
The two artworks under discussion were first intended as ‘statement art’ for
a chiefly lineage of the expanding Tabwa sociocultural formation around
1880. They were probably made at the time the armed forces of the Interna-
tional African Association were overpowering the Afro-Arabs and the
autochthonous chiefs in the eastern half of the projected colony: ‘Beginning
in the mid-to-late 1800s, there was a conscious invention of tradition among
Tabwa, especially those in closest contact with centralised states, which
included the inheritance of royal names and the definition of bounded lands’
(Roberts 1985: 14). Mikisi ancestral figures allegedly incarnated the chiefly
power of a matriline that claimed political leadership over a specific territory.
Lineage elders were in charge of keeping the mikisi, ‘…which most frequently
represented mipasi or mizimu spirits of ancestors renowned for being “clever”
... These figures had specific names associated to them, and were felt to protect
and offer active assistance’ (Roberts 1985: 11). Nevertheless, they could be
afflictive as well when they wanted to be remembered. If properly addressed
in ritual, they also enlightened and cleared the twilight to favour people’s
success in hunt, health and otherwise. With these chiefly figures, the Tabwa
royal line, mainly anxious to compete with the consolidating Luba Empire,
asserted its growing power and status (Roberts 1985: 11).
Tabwa, as an ‘ethnic identity’, can hardly be determined geographically,
linguistically, politically or in any other sense, today as in the past. ‘What is
the basis of social identity in this region then? Who one says one is, is a matter
of social process and local-level politics, and is reckoned differently according
to the circumstances’ (Roberts 1985: 7). As with most sociocultural forma-
tions, late-nineteenth-century central African Tabwa also had multiple or
distributed identities, and ‘[i]t was in the colonial period that order was
imposed to sort out the complexities, presumed vagaries and contradictions
of multi-referential social identity, a process of “tidying up” through what the
Belgians assumed was a return to ethnic tradition’ (Roberts 1985: 8). What
is therefore the significance, today, of systematically associating a specific
‘ethnic’ name with the two artworks in all ritual displays in and around the
museum without discussing the question of ethnicity and the role of its rede-
finition at the time of Belgian conquest? The most important function the
pieces ever had in their ‘traditional’ context was perhaps that of associating a
discernible style with an emerging polity. Once accessioned to the collections,
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the Museum’s agenda was to integrate these art forms in the classificatory
narrative of colonial African art.
Looting Art, Making Trophies
If such artworks were fetishes, the Devil’s work materialised, to Christian

missionaries, for the military they were insignias of power which, if not
subservient, were symbols of undominated force and therefore potential
trophies. The practical art of war then prevailing among Europeans prescribed
the seizure of artworks as an act of domination. Lieutenant Emile Storms,
who spearheaded the fourth expedition of the International African Associa-
tion to Central Africa, established an outpost in Mpala, on Lake Tanganyika,
in 1883. ‘(He) felt that “all authority which is not based upon force is null
and illusory”, and pursued a “game of wars and allegiances” which included
the armed conquest of several important chiefs around Mpala, including
Lusinga’ (Roberts 1985: 18). When Chief Lusinga threatened Storms’ men
with decapitation if they entered his territory, the lieutenant answered … that
‘if he has the misfortune to execute such a project, his own head could one
day reach Brussels with a label on it, for it would figure well in a museum’
(Roberts 1985: 18). And reach Brussels it did: for his defiance, Lusinga was
shot and decapitated, fifty to sixty men were killed, 125 were made slaves,
villages were razed to the ground and art looted. Despite all this, an heir to
Lusinga was appointed shortly afterwards. However, he in turn was defeated
by Storms in his kinsmen’s village Kansabala where Storms, adding insult to
injury, seized the two figures presented here, which represent Kansabala’s
lineage. Storms certainly knew what he was doing, since he greatly enjoyed
participating in rituals of allegiance and blood pacts. Both his own ethno-
graphic notes (Jacques et Storms 1886) and the archival record leave no doubt
that he knew the added value that his spoliation could have on military
victory.
The objects were brought back to Belgium in 1885, where they became
personal war trophies in Storms’ Ixelles (Brussels) house. At some point, they
were placed in the centre of two framed panoplies, fixed on walls, which
featured mostly African weapons, a few carvings and stuffed animals.
As a window into the ‘heart of darkness’ for the visitors to the Storms
home, the trophies can also be understood as transitional objects or ‘memen-
toes’ (cf. Parkin 1999), curios taken on the voyage back, used to reconstruct
the self upon return to the home country after eighteen perilous years in the
field. The Tabwa carvings acquired new ‘auratic value’ (cf. Röschelthaler 1999)
in metonymic relation to their owner. Private viewings of the objects, mate-
rial and tangible proof of the exploits of the master of the house and national
hero, may have been an opportunity for personal recollection, but it was also
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Figures 4.2 and 4.3 The two Tabwa carvings exhibited as trophies in the middle of
panoplies in General Storms’ Ixelles (Brussels) house (Anonymous photographer (circa
1929) © Royal Museum for Central Africa)
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a way of building aura and fame in Belgian society of the time. Although no
description of the rituals that may have surrounded contemplation of the
objects is available, it is likely that they existed since visitors are invariably
received into a home with signs of ritualised welcome. This can involve
‘showing the house’ (Bouquet 2000) and entails specific and regular treatment
of the visitor in the time and space of the visit. After Storms’ death in 1918,
the objects remained in his widow’s possession until 1930, as family relics,
metonyms of the deceased, and probably thereby implying new ‘rituals’ of
remembrance and devotion.
From Private to Public Memorials: Making National Trophies
Transfer of the objects from house to museum, as a generous gift by General

Storms’ widow in 1930, transformed private mementoes into nationally signif-
icant pieces. ‘Collecting’ being ‘the desire of museums’ (Elsner 1994: 155),
they were prominently displayed in public galleries, along with numerous
other objects collected by the officer. These by-products of ‘colonial travel’
(Clifford 1997) became in the process naturalised to the museum system and
incorporated in its never-ending collection, which has many more properties
than the sum of its constituents. ‘Collections of objects are representations of
power’ (Röschenthaler 1999: 85), the more so if they comprise military
trophies! As such, the objects became distinctive ‘places’ of collective colonial
memory, testimonies to Belgian victory over the reluctant colonised and they
participated in the manufacturing of Belgian identity (cf. Asselberghs and
Lesage 1999; Clifford 1988; Jewsiewicky 1991; Saunders 1999). ‘Places’,
because people literally project their memories into the moveable space or
volume of the material object (rather than pictures, for example). Further-
more, they constituted what might be termed a ‘memorial’, with an ‘auratic
value’ in proportion to the memory of their collector’s greatness, exhibited as
they were in exclusive showcases in remembrance of Storms. Such displays
doubtless aimed at conveying ideas of victory and domination. ‘Collecting’
and displaying had achieved one of their most powerful effects, and viewers
may have responded with a sense of belonging to the victorious party.
The Tabwa pieces were, in the 1930s, along with most central African art,
referred to as ‘Negro’, ‘Black’, ‘primitive’, or, more rarely, ‘melanean’ art. Such
works were generally considered to be the product of a culture rather than of
an individual. The question of authorship was hardly ever asked since the
presumed ‘ethnic identifier’ of the dispossessed was all that was required to
establish once and for all the definitive identity of the pieces. The objects also
became museum and state ‘patrimony’, in a much ‘sited’ place that integrates
a gigantic collection in an ostentatious neoclassical building, itself framed by
a prestigious park and arboretum, all built by order of King Leopold II.
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However, in contrast to some private collections that seem to ‘settle’ on one

meaning and one presentation (Elsner 1994: 155) upon entering a museum,
the mise en scène of these pieces was never arrested. Indeed, this was the begin-
ning of a rich, new ritual life.
Becoming Art Masterpieces
With the development of art history at Tervuren, from the 1950s onwards,
objects such as the ‘Tabwa carvings’ were increasingly presented as ‘Tabwa art’,
with no reference whatsoever to colonial conquest. Now labelled as artworks
in the classical western sense, the trendily displayed objects began to
mesmerise art lovers possessed by an ‘illusion of the absolute’. They were
subjected to an ‘analysis of essence’ (cf. Bourdieu 1992) and to aestheticising
gazes in search of ‘formal universals’.
It was at this stage that the ‘ethnographic gallery’ of the allegedly scientific
institution drifted towards becoming an ‘art gallery’, or at least began to
Figure 4.4 The two Tabwa artworks in the exhibition TABWA. The rising of a new
moon, Royal Museum for Central Africa (Anonymous photographer, 1985 or 1986)
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restrict its presentations to ‘artworks’. This was reinforced in the decidedly

art-oriented displays refashioned after the independence of Congo in 1960,
when the colonial project collapsed and abruptly stopped being a motive for
exhibiting. These displays mainly exhibited masks, carvings and weapons
along ‘ethnostylistic’ themes. This new appreciation, in which the pieces were
given a much higher status (higher for instance than that of the collector), is
the expression of a socially recognised hierarchy of ‘cultural competence’
enabled by acquired cultural knowledge (cf. Bourdieu 1979: i). It was as if
the museum redeveloped its galleries with no other motive than to display its
patrimony, thereby reinforcing the newly acquired status of the objects as ‘art
pieces’:
…the public institutions, such as museums, which have no other purpose than to
offer for contemplation works of art that have often been created for rather differ-
ent purposes (such as religious paintings, dance or ceremonial music, etc.)
effectively found the social caesurae which, tearing the works from their context
of origin, strips them of their diverse religious or political functions, reducing them
in such a way, by a sort of épochè in deed, to their properly artistic function. (Bour-
dieu 1992: 478)
This is in fact a syndrome of unreconstructed ethnographic museums, which

have recently found it easier to promote their treasures against a background
of universalist aesthetics than to question their reason for being and produc-
ing new concepts. Presenting the objects as works of art implied forgetting
the conditions of their appropriation and the reasons for their inclusion in
the museum’s collection. This clearly focusses the meaning of their presenta-
tion on a seemingly unproblematic alleged interest in ‘cultural diversity’.
Bourdieu (1992: 537), by contrast, has argued that ‘[o]ne must thus admit
that it is historical analysis that allows an understanding of the conditions of
“comprehension”, the symbolic, real or fictitious appropriation, of a symbolic
object that may be accompanied by this specific form of enjoyment which we
call aesthetic.’
Growing interest in the cultures of origin enabled partial recovery of the
originally intended ritual use of the objects, which appears in both catalogues
and exhibition texts. Until the 1980s, there was little interest in the artistry
of the objects nor the individual artists who may have created them. The ques-
tion of authorship in African art and its implications in terms of public image
making has only recently received serious attention. The catalogue of the 1986
exhibition TABWA. The Rising of a New Moon, states, ‘This publication and
exhibition are an attempt to present Tabwa visual arts in their cultural context
and so enhance the aesthetic experience by elucidating the philosophical and
mythical associations of the objects’ (Maurer and Roberts 1985: vii). There
was a clear curatorial attempt to change the viewer’s perception of African art,
to raise his/her consciousness of its complexity whilst s/he went through the
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Boris Wastiau
exhibition. The occasional inclusion in major publications and displays

steadily added to the ‘auratic value’ of the Tabwa, making them internation-
ally known and ultimately acclaimed as unquestioned masterpieces. Yet, unlike
western art, it is not necessary to understand the master’s message and precise
motivation about which, in this case, next to nothing is known. It is purely
a question of subjective discernment. However, the transformation of the
pieces into masterpieces was not that simple and univocal. The aesthetic or
the ethnographic interest of the pieces will be emphasised depending on the
type of display. Most viewers, moreover, are not actively trying to revise their
opinions about these masterpieces of ‘primitive’ art, which their ‘well-formed
taste’ enables them to recognise and appreciate. The museum participates in
establishing the judgement of taste in this field through its displays and rituals
of exhibition (cf. Bourdieu 1979; 1992). This process culminated in the
presentation of 250 major pieces in the 1995 exhibition Hidden Treasures of
the Tervuren Museum.
Figure 4.5 Chief Kansabala’s ancestor figures in the exhibition Hidden Treasures
of the Tervuren Museum, Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by
J.-M. Vandyck, 1995)
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Yet Another Round of Meaning Making
In January 2000, I was assigned the temporary redisplay at the Royal Museum
for Central Africa of the masterpiece collection on its return from a two-and-
a-half-year round trip of nine major art museums in the United-States,
Canada and Europe.3 This exhibition had been a conspicuous success, in
terms of popularity and appreciation, in the field of African art exhibits
despite lacking a specific concept relating elements of the selection – apart
from the fact that they all were Masterpieces from Central Africa or Hidden
Treasures of the Tervuren Museum4 (LaGamma 1999). This voyage also
confirmed, among other things, the ‘universal aesthetic quality’ of these great
artworks, just as it confirmed the Royal Museum for Central Africa’s role as
a major keeper and loaner of central African art, very able to circulate and
promote its patrimony.
My initial question, when reflecting on a concept along which to present
this exhibit, was why we should present a collection originating in colonial
travel and practice as art in the first place to the public today? If we do so,
how? Why display the taste of a handful of ‘arbiters of taste’ to the public at
large? It emerged that a fuller ethnographic perspective on the ritual use of
the objects and their successively attributed meanings would need to refer not
only to their original ritual use but also to subsequent reinterpretations by
their custodians. The project thus became to expose visually aspects of the
history of collecting, recategorising and displaying, in such a way that most
visitors would understand that their own history, that of the objects and that
of the allegedly anonymous Congolese artists who produced them, as well as
that of the Congolese people in general, have something in common, which
a study of the pieces can help us recover and debate. The mise en scène, visual
associations with archival photographs, maps and the building’s architecture
would need to be such that everyone would have to ‘take a position’ with
regard to his/her past, the objects and the history of our relationship to the
Congolese artists, traditionally conspicuous by their absence from displays and
labels. The point was not comfortable suspension of disbelief but rather to
compel a critical visit.
The problem was how to involve the public in this approach without
relying on heavy texts and concepts in the displays. Is it possible to avoid
using the categorical synecdoches referred to in the introduction and such
questionable correlated generalising assumptions as ‘ethnicity’? I proposed a
guided and explicit use of newly made synecdoches, regrouping objects
around one aspect of their common history. The idea was to conceptualise
anew the given collection of masterpieces (as objet trouvé) in relation to the
traditional historiography of the colonial practice of collecting and exhibiting
African artefacts. Contemporary art was also proposed as a way of introduc-
ing another discourse on colonialism and the museum itself. The categories
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were ‘military trophies’, ‘missionary fetishes’, ‘administrator’s samples and

mementoes’, ‘a doctor’s collection’, ‘collectors’ items’, ‘pieces from the art
market’, ‘ethnographic samples’, ‘museum glassboxes’, ‘primitivism’, ‘elements
of taxonomy’ and ‘contemporary art perspective’. In every case, except that of
‘ethnographic samples’, the objects were displaced from their usual museo-
logical category to fit in new and unexpected ones. Concomitant to this
critical reinvention of display categories, the idea was to suggest, visually, the
different associated ‘eyes’ that had discriminated these central African art-
works, first as collectibles, then as possible exhibits.
The exhibition was mounted in the whitewashed, recently refurbished,
upper galleries of the first floor of the museum that runs parallel to the old
display on the ground floor. Two spiral staircases providing access at each end
of the floor were marked by the interventions of the architects and of an artist
respectively, articulating the experience of the temporary exhibition with that
of the old permanent galleries. All objects were grouped in long, narrow show-
cases oriented on the North–South axis, which is the geographical axis of the
relations between Congo and Belgium, with a scenographic progression from
darkness to light.
The Tabwa carvings appeared in a showcase of the first main room of ExIt-
CongoMuseum, which was dedicated to the role of military men in the creation
of Congolese art: in defining the borders of a colony named Congo; taking
possession of objects as trophies; facilitating the transit of increasing quanti-
ties of artefacts by way of colonials, traders and porterage routes; developing
internal boundaries that prevented a simultaneous flow of the people who
created the objects. The carvings were displayed prominently, as part a set of
eight impressive artworks that were all collected by military officers, and stood
as synecdoches for this subcollection.
Artefacts had simple, deceptively traditional labels, featuring place and
culture of origin, collection date and the name of the officer who collected
them, topped by a mention of ‘unknown artist’ in bold print. This presenta-
tion was consistent throughout the exhibition, in which the names of only
three artists could be given. Projections of archival photographs behind the
eight selected pieces showed, or in some cases suggested, the location of the
objects in their former context over the 125 years or so that separate us from
their making: a succession of pictures of military men in the field, seized arte-
facts, trophies, panoplies and other memorabilia in Belgian houses. Maps
placed on a large board showed the ‘tracé’ of military expeditions, the porter-
age routes along which objects were sent away, and outposts of colonial
expansion such as the fort which Storms had built in Mpala. This fort was
close to where the carvings were seized; it was later given by Storms to
missionaries to serve as the foundations of a mission station. Again, the
concept was to enable the viewer to position these elements in time and space
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Figure 4.6 Kansabala’s ancestral figures in the display of works of art collected by mil-
itary personnel during the colonial period in the exhibition ExItCongoMuseum. A Cen-
tury of Art with/without Papers, Royal Museum for Central Africa (photograph by Boris
Wastiau, 2001)
and to position him/herself in confronting the object together with the evoca-
tion of its history.
This form of ‘critical museology’ was, together with an essay (Wastiau
2000), a way of conveying a personal analysis of the history of collecting and
displaying the art of the colonised since the 1897 world exhibition in Brus-
sels, at which Tervuren’s ‘Palace of the Colonies’ was to form the embryo of
the Congo Museum itself. ExItCongoMuseum reassessed past and inherited
modes of cultural production, historiographies and museologies, based on
notions of the African primitive, on the one hand, and an uncontested ‘scien-
tific’ superiority on the other.
The anthropologist–curator is no mere analyst. S/he is a decisive image-
making agent in the organised interplay of agencies and remembrances in the
exhibition, able to foster some aspects while playing down others. ExItCon-
goMuseum played down the usual ‘aesthetic approach’ by wilfully and
cunningly ‘concealing’ masterpieces in uneasy angles, very low and dimly lit.
Although displays looked conventional from a distance, closer inspection of
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the aesthetics of the exhibition’s architecture disturbed most conservative

connoisseurs and collectors. They could not see the point of not being shown
the same things in the same light all over again. Lighting was shown to be a
basic element in the structuring of the museum as ritual site (Duncan 1995).
The exhibition architects, Blocks and Van De Gore, developed a diffused form
of lighting, mainly from below, in such a way that the shadows cast were more
important than the properly lit surface. The political aspects surrounding the
display of the pieces over the course of a century were rendered through the
large-scale projection of over 150 black and white slides of archival
photographs, which created a relatively brighter area that diverted the gaze
from the objects.
Where the Exhibition Exceeds the Text
‘Scientific samples’ or ‘facts’, like trophies, are only meaningful and useful if
and when they are brought back by ‘collectors’ to ‘home base’, where they
produce ‘simulacra’ that substitute for the viewer’s lack of personal experience
of that to which they allude. This is one of the main ideas in Latour’s (1983)
now famous article on ‘le Grand Partage’. These necessary displays and simu-
lacra, which effect a major metamorphosis of objects and facts, are as much
the driving force behind museums today as they were in colonial times.
The aim of ExItCongoMuseum and its accompanying essay guide (Wastiau
2000) was to provoke an act of consciousness by interrupting viewers’ (from
various sectors of the public) traditional ‘suspension of disbelief ’ when they
enter the museum. This was motivated both by experimental interests and the
critical-historical tradition informed by such authors as Bourdieu.5 This type
of historicism can be applied to delaminate the various layers of meaning
historically coated onto specific objects and the results analysed without neces-
sarily aiming to unravel the ‘original’ conception that gave birth to the piece
and its primal interpretation and appreciation, which was the traditional work
of ‘ethnography’. The aim here was to show how specific objects could be
translated into successive systems of interpretation and presentation that have
been entirely up to the possessors or curators of the pieces. Such historicism
corresponds to a form of cultural production that is clearly opposed to the
traditional hierarchisation of historical, ethnographic and museological practice.
Reactions to the display of Kansabala’s carvings in ExItCongoMuseum con-
firm the efficacy of unsettling the meaning by collapsing categorical boundaries
and projecting a continuous flow of unexpected archive pictures. How could
anyone dare to present a ‘masterpiece’ of central African art from the Royal
Museum for Central Africa as a ‘military trophy’ or a ‘colonial trophy’ today?
The story of Storms’ looting may, of course, be recalled, in small print at the
back of a slick catalogue, but then you call it ‘collecting’, not ‘looting’. Objects
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were presented in such a way that it was impossible to move around them
without bumping into maps, texts or a slide projection, which immediately
obliges the viewer to take a position, spatially and temporally, vis-à-vis the
objects grouped in those apparently conventional displays.6 Some angles in the
first section of the exhibition, which architecturally were reminiscent of a ship’s
hold sheltering its valuables, were indeed impossible to catch.
Since labels were not provided inside the vitrines, objects had to be under-
stood as part of such ensembles as ‘trophies’, ‘fetishes’, ‘collectibles’ and
‘samples’, although there was no traditional or common(sensical) typology to
be seen.
Most dealers and collectors with whom I discussed the displays regretted
the lack of information about the ritual use of the objects. When it was
explained more emphatically that this exhibition was about all the possible
ritual uses of the objects, they remained adamant that there could be no
comparison between the ‘real ritual use’ and the subsequent ‘employment’ of
the objects.7 Well-known Brussels art dealers complained that masterpieces,
‘many of them religious objects’, did not receive the ‘respect’ they deserved in
the presentation. One dealer could not stand seeing the masks without
mounts and ‘proper lighting’.8 Fond of early military collectors’ stories, collec-
tions and memorabilia, he was expecting a grateful acknowledgement to
collectors for having salvaged those works of art from the climate, woodworms
and neglect of former owners – quite a syndrome among some collectors and
dealers (cf. Price 1989). Of course, as a number of his colleagues had previ-
ously suggested, he could have shown us how to do better… None of these
critics ever pointed to the falsity of the exhibition statements, they only said
that the Museum was ‘not the right place’ to make them, and that ‘master-
pieces’ should not be used for this purpose.
The most violent reactions to the displays however came, as was to be
expected, from those most closely involved over two decades in the painstak-
ing development of the scientised aesthetism that dominates the field of
‘classical’ African art today. The inclusion of contemporary artworks and crit-
ical installations by Toma Luntumbue, Barthelemy Toguo and Audry
Liseron-Monfils, among others, proved unsettling.9 The reluctance to embrace
cross-perspectives tends to confirm guest curator Toma Muteba Luntumbue’s
view that the Tervuren museum is a mere expression of the Belgian subcon-
scious and that, perhaps, it is more the public that shapes the museum than
the other way round. In his view the museum materialises ideas about ‘the’
Congo shared by the dominant public, in the first place, rather than by cura-
tors as such. In the overall ritual work of the museum this would mean that
curators themselves were cultural products rather than producers of culture
(Luntumbue 2001).
We need to remind ourselves here that the general public always expects
to derive sense from museum objects which, as Hunt (1993: 222) suggests,
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are perceived as taboo material, polluting and dangerous: ‘All such materials
are kept within explicitly defined locations whose boundaries are signified and
protected by more or less complex rites of passage. All these materials have
moved over from a context of use and effectiveness to a state of decay, i.e. to
a condition of meaning without purpose. As anomalies they represent a threat
to ordered perception and must therefore be committed to a classificatory
Gulag.’ The French term ‘conservateur/trice’ may actually better reflect this
notion. One of the exhibition strategies was to dissolve the apparently objec-
tive relationship between objects and their accepted ‘class’ or ‘meaning’ by
gently disrupting their usual, formal mise en scène, and by enumerating the
multiplicity of meanings historically imposed on them since they were appro-
priated and ceased to be used for their original purpose. This seems to
engender the kind of ‘cognitive dissonance’ that is dear to artists and inves-
tigative minds but abhorrent to those who visit museums to reassert their
long-established convictions.
The vast majority of visitors, whether specialised academics, laymen or
journalists, welcomed the exhibition as a long overdue exercise in historical
criticism (Arnaut 2001; Corbey 2001). Yet, even they could be disturbed by
some of the visual information, which at times went far beyond what they
expected. There was disbelief at the tiny proportion of the colonial collections
that was gathered by scientists, as well as the fact that only two of the colo-
nial curators from the museum ever went to the field. It struck me thus that
visitors could be moved by one of two radically opposed things: some by
learning about the history of the making of African art masterpieces, others
by feeling exposed. In both cases, the museum ritual failed them as a restate-
ment of their own aesthetic and intellectual expectations. In both cases, the
museum as ‘site of memory’ and the objects as unexpected pieces of histori-
cal evidence about their relationship to the maintenance of the museum’s
tradition, unsettled them by conjuring up disturbing images of the past. These
images demanded a personal reassessment of past and present relationships
between the traditional ‘collectors’ and ‘collected’.
It is the object that inspires passion, because it is the horizon of my disappearance.
(Baudrillard 1994: 179)
NOTES
I wish to thank the editors, Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto, for their comments on
this chapter, as well as Zachary Kingdon.
1. This, and subsequent quotes were translated from the French by the author.
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2. In my own case, I began to study museum natives at the same time that I became a real one
myself, in the course of 1996, when I was appointed to the Section of Ethnography of the Royal
Museum for Central Africa.
3. This is one half of what had been shown in the 1995 Hidden Treasures of the Tervuren Museum
exhibition.
4. This title conveyed the idea that the artworks had remained hidden from public view for a long
time, which hardly applied to the majority of the objects.
5. ‘The reminder of the historical determinations of reason may constitute the principle of a real
freedom as regards these determinations. Freethinking must be conquered through a historical
anamnesis capable of unveiling everything that, in thought, is the forgotten product of histor-
ical work. The resolute act of consciousness of historical determinations, a true new conquest
of oneself, which is exactly opposite to the magical fugue in “essential thought”, offers a possi-
bility to really control these determinations’ (Bourdieu 1992: 508).
6. A former professor who used to indulge in ‘pure aesthetic contemplation’ after duly having
‘contextualised’ the objects in their former ethnographic background, and who ‘knew’ the col-
lection very well, complained bitterly that the objects were barely visible. A colleague whom he
asked to explain replied that perhaps he had never actually seen the objects and never would …!
A bewildered gaze stopped the conversation short.
7. I was told that I must be confused to be blind to this.
8. Although in private he is capable of using one of his own absolute masterpieces as an ashtray,
just to provoke you.
9. ‘Le citoyen Wastiau s’est planté! Un nègre blan! ’ exclaimed a retired academic, who likes to remind
anyone interested that still today ‘there is no such thing as an African intellectual, stricto sensu’,
sometimes cordially adding: ‘and believe me I deplore it !’ These words echoed in my head the
words of G.-D. Perier who replied, when asked in 1927 why Belgian artists did not submit
themselves to the influence of Congolese aesthetics as the ‘Paris school’ had done: ‘Is it not bet-
ter to paint the Congo as it is to us, seen by a white man and not by a fake Black?’ (quoted in
Salmon 1992: 193, italics in the original). See also Corbey (2001), Arnaut (2001) and Vanhee
(2001), for a review of other reactions, including that of a former curator.
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Asselberghs, H. and Lesage, D. (1999) Het Museum van de Natie: van kolonialisme tot
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Corbey, R. (2001) ‘ExItCongoMuseum: the Travels of Congolese Art’, Anthropology
Today, 17(3), pp. 26–28.
Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London: Routledge.
Elsner, J. (1994) ‘A Collector’s Model of Desire: the House and Museum of Sir John
Soane’, in Elsner, J. and Cardinal, R. (eds), The Cultures of Collecting. London:
Reaktion Books, pp. 155–76.
Hay, J. (1999) ‘Towards a Theory of the Intercultural’, Res, 35 (Spring), pp. 5–10.
Hunt, C. (1993) ‘The Museum: a Sacred Arena’, Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 118,
pp. 115–123.
Jacques, V. and Storms, E. (1886) Notes sur l’Ethnographie de la Partie Orientale de
l’Afrique Equatoriale. Brussels: Académie Royale de Belgique.
Jewsiewicky, B. (1991) ‘Le Primitivisme, le Post-colonialisme, les Antiquités ‘Nègres’ et
la Question Nationale’, Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines, 31(1-2), pp. 191–213.
LaGamma, A. (1999) ‘Masterpieces from Central Africa: The Tervuren Museum’,
African Arts, Summer, pp. 15–17.
Latour, B. (1983) ‘Comment Redistribuer le Grand Partage?’, Synthèses, 3(10), 203–36.
Luntumbue, T.M. (ed.) (2001) ExItCongoMuseum: Art Contemporain. Tervuren: Royal
Museum for Central Africa.
Maurer, M.E. and Roberts, A.F. (1985) Tabwa: the Rising of a New Moon: a Century of
Tabwa Art. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Morris, W. (2001) Proving the Difference: Visual Authorisations of a Colonial Project: a
Consideration of Belgian Sculptural Representations of Africans in the Royal Museum
for Central Africa, Tervuren. Unpublished M.A. dissertation. University of South
Africa.
Parkin, D. (1999) ‘Mementos as transitional Objects in Human Displacement’, Journal
of Material Culture, 4(3), pp. 303–20.
Price, S. (1989) Primitive Art in Civilized Places. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Roberts, A. F. (1985) ‘Social and historical contexts of tabwa art’, in Maurer, M. E. and
Roberts, A.F. (eds), pp. 1–48. Tabwa: the Rising of a New Moon: A Century of
Tabwa Art. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Röschenthaler, U. (1999) ‘Of objects and Contexts: Biographies of Ethnographica’,
Journal des Africanistes, 69(1), pp. 81–103.
Salmon, P. (1992) ‘Réflexions à propos du Goût des Arts Zaïrois en Belgique durant la
Période Coloniale (1885–1960)’, in Quaghebeur, M. and Balberghe, E. (eds),
Papier Blanc Encre Noire en Afrique Centrale (Zaïre, Rwanda et Burundi). Brussels:
Labor, pp. 179–201.
Saunders, B. (1999) ‘The Photological Apparatus and the Desiring Machine’, Focaal,
34, 23–39.
Shelton, A.A. (1997) ‘The Future of Museum Ethnography’, Journal of Museum
Ethnography, 9, pp. 33–48.
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–––––– (2001) ‘Unsettling the Meaning: Critical Museology, Art, and Anthropological
Discourse’, in Bouquet, M. (ed.), Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to
the Future. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 142–61.
Vanhee, H. (2001) ‘ExitCongoMuseum: Een Recensie van een Tentoonstelling en een
Essay over Materiële Sporen van onze Koloniale Geschiedenis’, Mededelingsblad
van de Belgische Vereninging voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis, s.n., pp. 25–29; or
http://www.flwi.rug.ac.be/modernhistory/publicaties_nstge.htm (26-04-2001).
Wastiau, B. (2000) ExItCongoMuseum: An Essay on the Social Life of the Masterpieces of
African art of the Royal Museum for Central Africa. Tervuren: Royal Museum for
Central Africa.
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PART III
E NCOUNTERS , P ERFORMANCES
AND U NPREDICTABLES
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C HAPTER 5
PARADISE IN THE M AKING AT
A RTIS Z OO , A MSTERDAM
Natasha Silva
Introduction
Every culture creates images of how it sees itself and the rest of the world.
Incidental to these images of self-definition are definitions of ‘the other’.
Numerous scientific studies reveal that the nature of our relationship with
animals and the ways in which we ‘see’ them are based on how we as humans
see ourselves and our place in the pattern of existence. If this is the case, then
approaching Artis Zoo as a social institution and as a ‘museum with a differ-
ence’1 provides a revealing perspective on Dutch culture and on the ways that
nature is perceived and (re)constructed in the Netherlands.
Though the ‘classical’ zoo has mainly western origins, zoos are now a
feature of almost every country in the world. Since the time that these insti-
tutions changed from menagerie to zoological garden and opened their gates
to the general public, they have been involved in a complex transformative
process. As with all social/cultural institutions, the changes that took place
were consistent with societal, political, legal and administrative as well as
cultural, educational and scientific parameters of their time.
Zoos – as microcosmic presentations of the natural world, endowed with
symbolic meaning and anthropomorphic projections – with their collections
of wild and exotic animals seem to exercise a magnetic pull on human beings.
Zoos are popular in western society, increasingly drawing visitors on a mass
scale to see a unique collection of (mainly exotic and often endangered) living,
breeding and dying ‘wildlife’. Artis Zoo, situated in the centre of the Dutch
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Natasha Silva
capital city of Amsterdam, attracts more than a million visitors annually.2

Moreover, Artis is visited by a broad public of all ages, educational, social,
economic, ethnic and cultural backgrounds, with correspondingly varying
levels of knowledge, ranging from general to highly specialised. The fact that
zoos in general attract such a diverse public is a characteristic seldom seen in
similar institutions.3 Zoos have also received ample attention from the fields
of veterinary science and zoology. However, they have been largely overlooked
in anthropological and museological texts.
This chapter aims to stimulate the reader to see the zoo as a special kind
of ritual site: a liminal space in which cultural expressions of nature are
affirmed, contested and transformed. The ritual qualities of zoos activate a
range of emotions based on both attraction to and revulsion by its collection;
an ambiguity which is at the heart of Artis experience. For instance, visitors
to the zoo feel awe and respect for animal subjects, but also guilt, anger and
sadness reflecting the sacrifice involved in their confinement for human plea-
sure. Conversely, modern zoos see themselves as fulfilling a crucial role in
conservation management. As environmental resource and conservation
education centres, they provide a safe haven for numerous endangered species
and inform the public about their predicament.
In the following passages I would like to provide the reader with a glimpse
of the visiting process in all its complexities by first describing a guided tour.
Embarking on such an account of practice allows one to taste, in condensed
form, meaning-making processes as well as deep levels of signification
constructed among three major actors at the zoo: visitors, animal exhibits and
zoo personnel. My account is based on six months’ ethnographic fieldwork,
in addition to ten years’ experience as a zoo guide. I go on to argue that Artis
is a distinct and complex ritual site and that the guided tour is a special kind
of performance within this particular ritual site.
Touring the Zoo

It is 10:45 on a Sunday morning in May as we approach the entrance to the
zoo. Even before entering the gates we hear parrots squawking, the high-
pitched, melodious and somewhat sad-sounding calls of the gibbons and the
lions’ powerful roar. Having passed through ticket control, we make our way
down ‘Parrot Lane’, where colourful macaws entertain and are entertained by
visitors entering and leaving the zoo. We head towards the ‘Monkey Rock’,
where the standard ‘Wild Tour’ will commence at eleven. Four tour guides
with identity badges wait and talk among themselves. They keep an eye on
the growing crowd and check their watches. Suddenly one of them takes the
initiative to welcome the visitors. She introduces herself and her fellow guides
and splits the crowd in four.
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Paradise in the Making at Artis Zoo
Figure 5.1 A Map of Artis Zoo
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Natasha Silva
We follow our guide, an older man, who tells us that Artis Zoo guides are
volunteers. He gives a summary of his background and experience as a tour
guide. After a short briefing on the duration and route we will follow, the
tour begins. We learn that the Zoological Society Natura Artis Magistra,
commonly known as ‘Artis’, was inaugurated in 1838 and is one of the oldest
zoos in the world. Its history is reflected in the garden landscaping and the
many statues, in the architecture of its historical buildings as well as numer-
ous animal enclosures. In fact, one can literally see more than 150 years of
zoo development in physical form throughout the garden – from trophy
gallery and curiosity cabinet, original postage-stamp-style enclosures, the
‘encyclopaedia of life’ legacy, to modern-day, high-tech and minimalist eco-
displays.
As the Netherlands’ oldest zoo, Artis is interesting in several respects. In
the years following its founding, the zoo expanded by incorporating eighteen
additional plots of land, which included different homes/estates, parks/
gardens and a cafe/brothel (1863), the latter having become the contempo-
rary wolf, racoon, maned wolf and African hunting dog enclosure. These and
other historical artefacts, handed down from different periods of zoo devel-
opment, have been preserved for contemporary viewers. Much of Artis’
architecture is typical of its nineteenth-century origins as an urban zoo, with
influences from the Romantic and Neoclassical period as well as eclectic styles.
It is visible in the plant collection and gardens, and in the architecture of
several buildings and animal enclosures in the zoo, such as the ‘Grote
Museum’ (1855) on the Plantage Middenlaan, the aquarium (1882), the
Minangkabauan house (1916) and the zebra enclosures (1920). Such a congre-
gation of architectural and exhibit styles within a fourteen-hectare landscaped
garden has led Artis’ diverse character to be described by some as ‘a mess’, ‘a
confusion’ and/or ‘old-fashioned’ (see Wennekes, 1997). Yet, it is exactly this
profound mixture of styles and its historical atmosphere that visitors see as
giving Artis its special charm and ambience (see Frankenhuis 1998; Mieras
1998; Silva 1999).
Still standing at the Monkey Rock, we briefly ponder whether animals
have culture while watching the inhabitants, Japanese macaques, washing their
food before eating it. We make a move and cross a bridge leading over the
former Nieuwe Prinsengracht4 to take a look at different bird exhibits. As we
pass the great cormorant and stork display, we learn that they are semiwild
populations, of which the offspring may leave the garden at will. Besides
housing numerous exotic species, Artis also displays European animals, such
as European ibex, lynx and beaver, even participating in reintroduction
programmes. The garden also offers a home to several ‘uninvited’ guests,
which can give rise to problems such as the fishy faecal bombs regularly
dropped by the in-house breeding population of wild grey herons onto the
footpaths below.
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At the Kerbert Terrace, named after one of the zoo’s former directors, we
learn about the feeding habits of the Artis pride of lions, as well as necessary
contraceptive measures used to regulate the often overproductive feline, ex-
situ populations. A walk along the ‘Carnivore Gallery’ takes us back to a time
when postage-stamp-like exhibits were the norm. The gallery underscored the
original zoo philosophy of an encyclopaedia of life, giving at a glance an
impression of the diversity of the carnivore kingdom. Though the actual
enclosure size has increased by reducing the number of species kept, a
constricting façade defies contemporary standards. This historical relic will,
fortunately, disappear in the near future, leaving eleven other historical build-
ings5 on the site.
Our guide discusses the paradox of Siberian tiger populations (dwindling
numbers in the wild and surplus in zoos) and the problems with reintroduc-
tion programmes (how does one teach a zoo-bred tiger to hunt and survive
in the wilderness?). Viewing the Carnivore Gallery and the impressive tigers,
Raspoetin and his new partner Emilia, elicits a mixed reaction from the public
– they are in awe of the fearsome yet magnificent animals, but appalled by
their living conditions in small, ‘outdated’ cages. We then make our way
through the classical Dutch garden6 and approach the kitchen of the ‘Small
Mammals House’,7 which is our first actual glimpse behind the scenes. We
walk in single file along an overgrown side passage intended for zoo person-
nel only. Through a large window the kitchen comes into view. Another
passage leads us into the warm and humid room, where numerous food trays
can be viewed, catering to a range of dietary preferences – from pure carni-
vore to specialist vegetarian. As we enter the kitchen, the zoo keepers retreat.
A tray lies before us with what looks like a deluxe fresh salad and we learn
that the contents are of supermarket quality. Another tray contains a salad
with yoghurt and honey dressing, specially made for the sensitive stomachs
of lemurs. Yet another tray reveals its diner’s preference for meat: boiled one-
day-old chicks tell us that this is for a true carnivore. Numerous jars
containing dry food, vitamin supplements, powdered milk, honey, tea, seeds
and mealworms decorate the windowsill – all part of the daily rations – as
well as small plastic containers with live meaty snacks such as crickets and
grasshoppers, whose chirping song fills the room. The freezer holds packs of
frozen chicks and the refrigerator contains bits of horse and beef, cut to size.
On the stove a pan filled with chicks is being brought to a boil in order to
neutralise salmonella as well as to deter certain residents’ artistic habits.8
The importance of dietary research as well as optimising/customising an
animal’s diet is discussed. We learn of the different dietary preferences, the
importance of dietary research, as well as additional supplements, which are
all necessary to keep zoo animals healthy. Instead of in-situ diets, animals in
Artis thrive on fresh and frozen regional produce. The guide then shows us a
jar containing a chip/transponder no bigger than a fingertip. All the animals
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Natasha Silva
Figure 5.2 Eye to eye with a raccoon (photograph by Natasha Silva)
of the Small Mammal House have been chipped for identification and regis-
tration purposes: a unique code appears when a decoder is held to their bodies
providing, when linked to a computer, all the information we need to know
about the individual. One drawback is that the decoder only activates the
transponder at close range. This brings us to the topic of the different ways
of catching zoo animals (a crush, a mobile trap-cage, a butterfly-net-like bag
for small animals, a blow pipe and a tranquilliser gun for large mammals) and
the risks of anaesthetic as well as transportation.
We leave the kitchen in order to view its diners. Our tour continues past
the tiny, hoofed Chevrotains, the Listz-monkey (with hairdos similar to the
composer), the tea-drinking white-faced Sakis, the pygmy marmoset (proba-
bly the world’s smallest monkey), the highly sociable mongoose (who care for
their weak, ill and elderly), several species of south American rodents, more
marmosets, tiny Fennec foxes, a motionless two-toed sloth whose coinhabi-
tants (red-bellied marmosets) have elected him their soft and warm hammock,
and a playful family of otters. We slowly make our way around and exit
through glass doors leading to the Owl Ruin and several monumental build-
ings. We pass many old trees and newly planted, sweetly scented and brightly
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coloured flowerbeds and head toward the wolves’ (who are a bright white and
could pass for large German shepherd dogs), African hunting dogs’ (strangely,
half the pack is tailless) and raccoons’ (who spend most of their day sleeping)
enclosures – all located around a central ‘house’ that used to be a former bar-
restaurant-brothel.9
We find ourselves eye to eye with three Asian elephants – the females
Jumbo and Suseela and the impressive 47-year-old bull ‘Murugan’.10 Closer
inspection reveals that Murugan’s tusks grow at different angles. Long ago his
youthful curiosity drove him to dig into the enclosure’s foundation, breaking
it twice. Moreover, Murugan has a preference for sleeping on his left side,
which has worn down the outer part of his left tusk. Despite such imperfec-
tions, Murugan impresses with his stature, sheer will power and strength, and
also by his surprising gentleness (according to staff ). The guide disappears
behind a door and swiftly returns with a black bucket filled with an Asian
and African elephant molar, a piece of broken-off nail and a jar of ‘musk’
scraped from Murugan’s cheek gland. The guide gives more information about
these objects. Suddenly the guide frowns and moves us away from the enclo-
sure. Murugan has spotted us and according to our guide enjoys nothing more
than sandblasting a visiting crowd, which he successfully manages with a flick
of his powerful trunk. Most visitors laugh heartily at the incident while
dusting off their faces, clothing and hair. One child, rather upset by the inci-
dent, softly cries while the parent laughingly brushes the sand away.
After some apologetic words and a chuckle, the guide continues his story.
Murugan has passed his prime and zoo staff are still waiting anxiously for his
first ever offspring: ‘The problem is that Murugan does not know how to do
it, having missed seeing his peers engage in the complex mating ritual as he
arrived in Amsterdam at a very young age. Now his keepers hope to give him
a helping hand.’ The solution is artificial insemination. Murugan is now being
accustomed to the act of physical stimulation by his keepers. Some time in
the near future Murugan’s sperm will be tapped off and inserted in another
zoo’s cow – a highly complex operation, since elephant sperm cannot at
present be frozen in for later use. The entire operation needs to be completed
within eight hours.
Anecdotal information on elephant love life as well as their astounding
intelligence is left to sink in as we head towards the Minangkabauan House.
This unique construction was locally made in Sumatra and brought back by
a sea captain and donated to the zoo. Put up in 1916, it represents the archi-
tectural/folkloric taste during the zoo’s ‘romantic period’. It now houses roe
deer, Chinese hog deer and Pudu, in pie-slice-like enclosures that surround
it. We continue southwards, via the bridge through Wolf Valley, towards the
former Masman family’s nineteenth-century country retreat, which now
houses several species of ibis, pass the ‘Pheasantry’11 and approach the aquar-
ium. By now, we are over an hour into the tour.
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Natasha Silva
The aquarium is an impressive and conspicuous building reflecting the

eclectic taste of its designer, the architect G.B. Salm.12 Completed in 1882,
it was the largest and most modern aquarium of its time.13 The main hall was
recently restored and the aquarium now includes an ultramodern addition,
containing four large ecological displays: two coral reefs, an Amazon flood
plain and an Amsterdam canal display. We enter through one of several solid
wooden doors and make our way up the impressive marble stairs and through
the historical ‘great hall’ with geobiological aquariums. At the far end we pass
through two large wooden doors that separate us from the rest of the public.
The same aquariums are now viewed from above, which seems to be an
entirely new experience: ‘it all looks so different from this angle.’ The old
facade is visible all around us, supplemented by modern technology. The noise
behind the scenes impairs communication. The pumping, gurgling and
splashing sounds of more than a million litres of water and machinery in oper-
ation drowns our voices. The guide speaks slowly and loudly but can hardly
be heard and the group reforms into several more intimate groups who shout
in each other’s ears. There is a faint saline odour and in numerous smaller
aquariums we can view fish in quarantine and sickbay, as well as young hatch-
lings and live snacks for carnivorous fish – an aspect not visible to the general
Figure 5.3 Elephant bull ‘Murugan’ (photograph by Natasha Silva)
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public. We follow a narrow staircase down and enter the dark and humid cata-
combs containing tropical fresh and salt water, where the noise is even louder.
Here we view the large filter system and manage to pick up something about
its important role as a hideout during World War Two. A supplementary
account of water management techniques and the difficulty of keeping fish
healthy, let alone getting them to breed successfully, is given. On rare occa-
sions fish eggs manage to pass the filters and hatch in one of the sediment
basins, such as a shark many years ago.
Leaving behind the darkness of the aquarium and the many mysteries it
contains, we enter daylight and make for the ‘warmth-loving’ Black-footed
Penguin colony and its coinhabiting gannets, on the north side of the build-
ing. The penguins, of Southern African descent, brave Dutch winters but do
not necessarily enjoy them. However, careful monitoring and maintenance, as
well as pioneering research, have been good for the Artis penguins. Today this
is one of the largest colonies in captivity and an important export product for
the zoo. Formerly, penguin sales to other zoos were an important means of
income. Since 1994, when a European Endangered Species Breeding
Programme (EEP)14 was established, the penguins have been transferred free
of charge. Instead, a small exchange fee is paid to the Dutch zoo fund for
nature conservation.15 This payment is then forwarded to the account of the
South African National Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds
(SANCCOB) to support their work, which includes cleaning up oil-spillage
victims, as well as nursing wounded and sick penguins and reintroducing
them to the wild when they are fit and able to fend for themselves. The
touring visitors gaze at these ‘amusing’, ‘little’, ‘best-dressed birds’ in their
black and white ‘tuxedos’, shuffling back and forth, keenly feeding and prepar-
ing for the moulting season in June. After nearly two hours, our tour has
reached an end. Before departing our guide gives us a final briefing on special
births, general changes at the zoo, as well as feeding times of the pink peli-
cans, crocodiles, big cats, penguins and Californian sea lions. Then he leaves
us with a farewell and a smile. The group disperses to continue their zoo visit.
The Magic of Life
Artis Zoo epitomises what is understood by the term ‘biopark’. Its holistic
approach enables visitors to view not only a diverse animal collection compris-
ing some 775 species, but also thematic glasshouses and a varied outdoor plant
collection, a geological and a zoological museum, an aquarium and a plane-
tarium as well as numerous works of art displayed throughout the garden.
This comprehensive exhibit, which requires upkeep by some 160 zoo person-
nel, aims to draw attention to the relationship between humans, animals and
their (shared) environment; and also, at a higher level, between the earth, its
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Natasha Silva
life forms and the universe. Artis’ aim is to emphasise the diversity of life
‘from Big Bang to Elephant’. As a ‘Museum of Life’, Artis is a unique natural-
history presentation, in which animate and inanimate subjects form part of
the greater theme. However, this deeper meaning is often overlooked by the
general public. Most visitors simply come to the zoo with the primary goal
of ‘looking at the animals’, with a definite preference for the zoo’s animate
rather than inanimate subjects. Curious to know more about the zoo in
general and its animals in particular, as well as being enticed by the notice
‘behind the scenes’ posted at a central point just beyond the zoo’s entrance,
they embark on a guided tour.
Visitor research in Artis16 revealed that most of those following a Sunday
tour were repeat visitors who consciously chose another guide each time in
anticipation of a different experience. Many tour visitors expect a relaxing and
educational experience. First timers are often surprised to learn that guides
are volunteers. They assume that the guide was an animal caretaker, a zoo
expert, or part of the salaried staff. On hearing of the guide’s voluntary status,
visitors are surprised by the guide’s wealth of knowledge. Many visitors join
the tour behind the scenes hoping to see animals at close range and to be able
to interact with them. This latter point proved a disappointment to the unini-
tiated, while repeat visitors hoped to visit other places behind the scenes. Tour
visitors were, nevertheless, generally positive about the experience and espe-
cially appreciative of new information, being able to visit places not normally
accessible to the general public, and the fact that the guide focussed their
attention on animals they would normally have passed by. Many animals and
aspects of collection management that were previously unknown or not
considered worthy of attention now suddenly seemed fascinating. According
to the visitors, the guided tour was a new or different type of experience,
which gave more meaning to their visit as well as a new perspective on zoos
in general.
If tour visitors’ reactions are generally positive, despite the disappointment
of not being able to touch or see an animal close up, then the volunteer guide
has achieved the set goal of adding recreational and educational value to the
visitors’ day at the zoo. All the thirty-odd zoo guides have been through an
intensive six-week training course, followed by an interim period with a
mentor-guide, before they finally do the job alone. Candidate guides come
from all walks of life, but basic knowledge and interest are prerequisites and
motivation is a must. Since their ultimate task is to increase the zoo’s attrac-
tiveness and underscore the zoo’s mission, guides must also be competent at
transferring information in different ways and at different levels to a highly
variegated audience.17
Throughout the tour, information on zoo history, development and collec-
tion management, as well as conservation efforts, is interlaced with veterinary,
biological and behavioural details. Normally lasting about an hour and a half,
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it often includes volunteer guide favourites such as the penguins, (large)

primates, elephants, big cats, the aquarium and the small mammal house.
Anecdotes and stories concerning animal dramas at the zoo are a significant
component of the tour; love, hatred, deaths and births, as well as animal
tricks, triumphs and disasters – all pass in revue. We learn that many animals
at the zoo are thinking, feeling individuals with definite likes and dislikes, as
well as minds of their own. Visitors get to know the animals by sharing these
secrets and stories, and learning to see through the eyes and experience of the
guide. The zoo-animal soap opera involves visitors at an emotional level.
Consequently, we feel outraged on hearing about the murder of a hyena by a
zoo visitor, in awe of a beaver’s clever escape into the Amstel river and resist-
ing capture for some weeks, sad about the mourning male Siberian tiger and
excited by the current episode of the honeymooning Andean condors (will
their marriage be successful and produce offspring?).
However, there is far more going on during a guided tour. Goffman’s
(1969) notion of frontstage/backstage proves very useful in coming to a more
comprehensive understanding of the complex of activities taking place in the
zoo context as well as during a guided tour. Goffman sees social (inter)action
as a dramaturgical performance: the activity of a given participant on a given
Figure 5.4 A guided tour (photograph by Natasha Silva)
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Natasha Silva
occasion influences that of the other participants. The audience, observers and
coparticipants contribute to one another’s performance. Seen in terms of the
zoo performance the guide, as a ritual specialist and agent, carefully manages
zoo experience by employing backstage–frontstage dialectics to communicate
a specific point of view. The desired effect is that tour visitors are both intel-
lectually and emotionally engaged, by instilling a feeling of fascination, respect
and admiration for diverse animals and nature in general. Zoo guides take
their role as advocates seriously and want their personal enthusiasm to ‘rub
off ’ on their audience. Apart from managing the information conveyed,
guides also control what is (re)viewed by actively avoiding areas and topics
considered negative by themselves and the public, and focussing instead on
more agreeable aspects. Pursuing the frontstage-backstage dialectics, the
guided tour enables us to see the frontstage as a place where the zoo’s perfor-
mance is presented and the backstage as a place where the performance is
prepared, where the suppressed facts make an appearance and where perform-
ers (zoo personnel and animals alike) relax. The backstage is also a place where
there is a familiarity among members of the performing team, where solidarity
develops and where secrets are kept and shared that might otherwise give the
performance away. Moreover, backstage is the place where illusions/impressions
are constructed, readjusted and contested out of sight of the audience. We
will see how this applies to Artis in general as well as to the guided tour.
The frontstage/backstage notion also allows us to see contradictions in the
working consensus and attitudes towards the audience. The special position
of volunteer guides – the fact that they work part time and for free – has
given them an ambiguous status within the zoo. Though guides are consid-
ered to underscore the zoo’s goals of recreation and education, they are not
considered real personnel by many Artis employees. A certain tension exists
between guides and zoo employees which often flares up in misunderstand-
ings and mutual irritation as well as disagreements about public protocol.
Accumulated tension may result in a heated discussion, sometimes in front of
a touring group, and lead to a break in the working relationship or mutual
avoidance. Many zoo-keeper–guide relationships are nevertheless good, with
guides often receiving special privileges.
Goffman asserts that when an individual appears before others, (s)he will
have motives for trying to control and sustain the impressions others receive
by applying and managing certain techniques. The guides’ training and perfor-
mance bear this out, as does their general attitude, which is pro-Artis. Some
aspects of the performance are expressively accentuated when frontstage, while
others that might discredit the impressions fostered, are suppressed. This is
also the case for the guided tour. Backstage, on the other hand, is normally
cut off from the performance by a partition and guarded passageway.
This deliberate division of front and backstage prevents outsiders from coming
into a performance that is not addressed to them. However, for zoo visitors,
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interacting with zoo keepers or with volunteer guides allows them to go back-
stage and share in secrets that would otherwise remain unknown to them.
Such participation may increase visitors’ feelings of solidarity with the
performers. At the same time, backstage/frontstage mobility creates tension
between different types of personnel about which secrets should be shared
with the general public and how. Zoo keepers whose backstage area is visited
during a guided tour also have to contend with the fact that their work is
routinely interrupted. However, it is the information issue that causes most
friction: keepers may argue that guides get their facts wrong, especially
concerning the more intimate details of zoo operation and individual animals,
such as specific dietary elements and maintenance. As mentioned above, such
tensions may come to a head in a heated discussion before an audience,
embarrassing the guide in question.
Goffman (1969: 116) also states that through the process of ‘[work]
control’, individuals try to buffer themselves from the deterministic demands
that surround them. In the zoo context, this especially applies to zoo keepers
but also to volunteer guides who, by controlling (outsiders’) access to back-
stage areas, are actively asserting power. In one potent instance, a zoo guide
demonstratively held up ‘the magic key’ for all to see – the key that, in
the hands of an official zoo guide, opens doors normally not accessible to the
general public. Considering all this, it is scarcely surprising that there are
regular clashes between guides and ‘real’ personnel, since they often have very
different attitudes towards the staged performance and the audience. In the
end, the actual backstage that tour visitors are presented with remains a kind
of intermediary region that is sanitised of ‘normal’ backstage aspects: there is
little death or decay, no sick animals, or anything else that might (further)
tarnish the presentation. Off-duty guides and certain privileged visitors are
rarely given access (still carefully controlled) to the ‘real’ backstage.
Zoo keepers fascinate visitors because of their direct and intensive contact
with the zoo’s animals. Even when there is no animal in sight, a zoo keeper
visibly cleaning an enclosure will draw quite a crowd. However the zoo gener-
ally promotes a ‘hands-off ’ working policy as far as possible – for animal
behavioural reasons as well as staff security. Physical and emotional ‘contact’
does, nevertheless, occur between keepers and ‘their’ animals. Balancing
animal and visitor needs with the educational mission of the zoo presents a
complex challenge and creates many areas of tension. Modern developments
tend towards the visitor-friendly, while keepers try to defend their own and
their animals’ needs. The public, who generate a large part of the zoo’s income,
often ‘win’: animals who prefer privacy are encouraged to remain visible to
the public, increasingly naturalistic enclosures take much effort to keep clean
and presentable, animal shows and acts such as feeding-time sessions for
otherwise motionless animals, are laid on to amuse the public. Many keepers
therefore have mixed feelings about the often critical and ‘disturbing’ zoo
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Natasha Silva
visitors who, when they are not behind the scenes, will eagerly approach them
with all sorts of questions, robbing them of their precious time needed to
complete the day’s chores. Their high-profile job also receives much media
attention in the Netherlands. Perhaps it is their special position in relation to
zoo animals that mesmerises the public. In practice, they operate in a contact
zone between animals, the public and colleagues. Their ambiguity towards the
animals, because of the emotional strain that living charges exert upon them,
is matched by a certain ambiguity toward the public, who compromise their
work. All this helps to account for keepers’ typically reserved behaviour, both
in relation to the animals and the public. However, this aspect is often only
picked up by zoo ‘insiders’, including keen visitors who have contact with
certain zoo keepers and develop an ‘understanding’.
A World Apart
The extensive animal and garden/plant collection as well as the zoo’s history
and diverse architectural styles are said to give Artis its special and peaceful
ambience. This effect can be felt when passing through Artis’ entrance: the
Figure 5.5 The Minangkabauan House (photograph by Natasha Silva)
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contrast between the urban surroundings (noisy, busy, construction, brick

buildings) and the zoo (green, quiet, with a ‘sleepy/dreamy/peaceful’ quality,
[exotic] animal sounds) is striking.
The zoo has maintained a surprising feeling of space despite its relatively
small size and the many winding paths that instil a sense of adventure. The
zoo attracts a highly variegated public, some 85 percent of whom visit as part
of a group outing (family/friends) with varying interests and goals. Many visi-
tors, especially the elderly, refer to ‘being out and about’ in the open air and
in a green, pleasant and safe environment, as a reason for going to the zoo.
Visitors come ‘to look at animals’, ‘to be close to animals’, and ‘to learn18
about animals’, respectively. It is the special combination of relaxation, enjoy-
ment and education that entices visitors to the zoo and keeps them coming
back for more. Many visitors come especially to see young animals. As special
births often make regional and even national news, there may be a consider-
able temporary increase in visitors from near and far. Frequent visitors often
make a tour of new and young animals, finding satisfaction in watching them
settle in or grow. The chance to be close to animals is considered quite unique
to Artis, where animals can be viewed at close range and physical contact is
often possible. Having physical contact with or being able to get close to the
animals is considered by many, both child and adult, to be an important factor
in their enjoyment of the zoo and features strongly in Artis experience. Many
people living in the city look upon Artis as a ‘back garden’: a place where they
can relax and recreate – draw/paint, film/photograph, read a book, have a
picnic, look at and interact with people and other animals, enjoy the
floral/lush scenery, frolic or doze on one of several greens on warm and sunny
days. The fact that this ‘park/garden’ contains numerous exotic animals gives
it an added dimension. Moreover, many visitors extend their zoo experience
by taking home memories in different forms: toys and other souvenirs,
photographs, notes, sketches/paintings and even bits of animals, such as feath-
ers and porcupine quills.
The overall picture is not however entirely positive. There is, in the zoo’s
development and in its present form, a – perhaps inevitable – conscious
mastery over nature. It is not that Artis has deliberately set out to create such
an image but in many ways it still typifies certain themes of Modernity: domi-
nation, assertion of superiority and manipulation (see Ehrenfeld 1995:
xvii–xviii). These are precisely the elements that are being challenged by the
general public in relation to Artis Zoo today. Visitor critique involves espe-
cially animal-welfare issues.19 Many believe that an active animal20 is a healthy
and happy one and that small enclosures contravene that state.21 Such matters
are of considerable concern to many visitors who, during their tour of the
zoo, experience an array of emotions, including feelings of sadness, guilt,
protest, suspicion, anger and frustration. These more negative aspects almost
always feature in the guided tour, when the zoo’s representatives are asked to
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Natasha Silva
explain their dated exhibits. The guide will answer honestly that Artis is
currently taking such critique to heart and is putting its master plan into
action, although it will take some years before the zoo’s less pleasant side is
mitigated. Negative emotions formed by what visitors see coexist with posi-
tive ones, resulting in a zoo experience that is as ambiguous and diverse as its
public. Interestingly, such concerns alter after having been on a guided tour.
Although visitors do not necessarily become less critical or entirely change
their viewpoint, they come to see things in a different light through hearing
the same story told by an educated and well-versed insider. The situation
becomes less ‘black and white’, more grey, and although perhaps just as
disturbing as before, much more complicated than initially suspected. It is
interesting to note that barred and ‘dated’ enclosures face much critique but
more naturalistic enclosures score positively, regardless of their actual size and
whether they meet the animal’s needs.
This brings me to the discussion of Carol Duncan (1995), who compares
the museum visit to a ritual. Duncan believes this secular ritual site to be a
place of enactment. Like the theatre, the ritual involves an element of perfor-
mance, structuring the museum’s central meaning around specific ritual
scenarios. For contemporary Dutch zoos, the primary focus in relation to their
public is ‘experiencing’, ‘feeling’, and ‘discovering’ nature, thereby (ideally)
becoming more involved with and sympathetic towards zoos and their conser-
vation goals (see Linde 1997). Although Duncan specifically discusses art
museums, her viewpoint can also be applied to similar institutions. It may be
argued that Artis Zoo and (specifically though at another level) the guided
tour contain elements of performance by providing both the stage set and the
script, thereby structuring visitors’ experience. Duncan (1995: 20) believes
that the ritual experience – which contains elements of sacrifice, ordeal or
enlightenment – has a purpose: that of transformation, by conferring or
renewing identity or restoring order in the self or in the world. Duncan (1995:
10) furthermore says that museum space, like ritual space, is carefully marked
off and designated a specific function – that of contemplation and learning
– which is also one of Artis’ goals. Being marked off in space and time
promotes a mode of consciousness outside the everyday. The museum is a
place where time seems suspended and where individuals can temporarily
distance themselves from the practical concerns and social relations of every-
day life, look at themselves and their world (or some aspect of it) with
different thoughts and emotions. In a way this also applies to Artis. On enter-
ing the gates one clearly steps into another world – a special place containing
a collection of exotic beings – which is clearly marked off from the rest of
urban life – considered by visitors to be a relaxing and pleasant (and educa-
tional) experience.
Similarly, anthropologist Nelson Graburn (1995) argues that museums
offer something akin to a religious experience. This reverential experience is
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thought to fulfil the public’s need for ‘ ... something higher, more sacred, and
out of the ordinary than home and work are able to supply’ (Falk and Dierk-
ing 1992: 15). Graburn’s museum is a place of peace, fantasy and of awe,
where visitors can escape the mundane, everyday world. Graburn believes that
people think of museums as places where society’s treasures are preserved,
whether these are objects or ideas. People enter museums to see and learn
about things outside their everyday experience – things of great historical,
cultural or scientific importance; precious and/or unusual things. Experienc-
ing such things inspires a reverential feeling, though Grabrun states that for
most it is a subconscious process. Likewise, this applies to Artis Zoo with its
collection of exotic and endangered animals in a beautiful and serene, park-
like environment.
According to Graburn, the alienation of today’s urban fast-paced society
has made nature, history, rural people and areas, key elements in tourist
nostalgia. Museumification of these key concerns has made such experiences
more easily available (museum, cultural centres, theme parks and other ‘arti-
ficial’ amusements are becoming the most popular and profitable tourist
attractions in the Netherlands). Artis undoubtedly meets many of these nostal-
gic needs and is highly popular, as visiting numbers show. Moreover, there
seems to a strong trend in thinking that ‘authenticity’ lies outside the every-
day modern urban life (in which there is a proliferation of reproductions), in
the past, the countryside and nature, and in the lives of more ‘natural’ people
(Graburn 1995: 169). This coincides with the general trend in zoos toward
increasingly naturalistic displays, which may even include such special effects
as tidal pools, unusual underwater encounters and tropical rain showers.
However, modern tourists travel in search of icons that confirm that the world
‘out there’ is how they believe it should be. When the experience is different
from their expectations, they become concerned about its authenticity. Like-
wise, Artis is commonly questioned about its authenticity, since visitors’ views
are laced with romanticism as well as with impressions formed by spectacu-
lar nature documentaries.
The ultimate aim of many museum rituals is the experience of enlighten-
ment, revelation, spiritual nourishment, restoration or rejuvenation. Similarly,
Dutch zoos increasingly collect objects that relate to ideas, stories and themes.
The total experience is supposed to be both educational and soothing/relax-
ing, with conditions designed to enhance enjoyment and pleasure. While this
is also true of Artis and of the guided tour, there is much more at stake in
the zoo experience, not all of which is positive. The zoo experience is much
more complex, as the different perspectives afforded by the analysis of the
guided tour demonstrate.
Zoos may, in the final analysis, be considered sanitised versions of nature
where the ideal and the romantic have been deliberately heightened through
design and supplemented by ornamental bushes, trees, flowers and statues.
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Natasha Silva
Figure 5.6 Visitors watch grey meerkats sunbathing (photograph by Natasha Silva)
Meticulously clean gardens and carefully managed exhibits bespeak cultural

conditioning and human control. Human intervention in the zoo context
tones down Nature’s nastiness, death and disease, as well as species/individ-
ual incompatibility. There is no live prey for carnivores, no aggressive
behaviour (only compatible animals/species), no illness, and death occurs
behind the scenes, away from the public gaze. Visitors are spared the less pleas-
ant aspects that are normally part of natural life, thereby perpetuating the
peaceable-kingdom myth of the natural world. The zoo’s representation of the
natural world can sometimes assume ‘hyperrealistic’ (see Graburn 1995: 166)
proportions: copies of the original (in another setting) which have assumed
the form of a perfected version of the original. Despite all this, visitors
‘enlightened’ by television nature documentaries as well as those who have
‘seen the real thing’ may discredit zoos when they do not match up; or
conversely, they may enjoy them for what they are.
Research in Artis Zoo shows that visitors’ thoughts and perceptions follow
the zoo’s mission to a certain extent (see Silva 1999: 117–35). However, visi-
tors also make their own personal ‘play’ based on that with which they are
presented. Physical proximity and contact with animals feature prominently
in Artis visitors’ (ideal) experience. In this sense, animals can be considered
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as having highly transformative powers, although in many more ways than

conceived of by Duncan (1995) and Graburn (1977, discussed by Falk and
Dierking 1992: 15). The experience resulting from zoo ritual is not only or
purely one of enlightenment, revelation, spiritual nourishment, restoration
and rejuvenation. Although Artis presents something out of the ordinary, it
features more than peace and fantasy. Artis’ ritual experience also involves the
notion of sacrifice (of the animals’ liberty) and ordeal regarding the animals’
general wellbeing.22 Artis, in its present state, is incapable of calming minds
and creating a purely reverential, purifying, transformational and restorative
experience, even though it is considered a place where one can temporarily
step out of everyday life and in a sense make a mental journey to far and
fabulous places and see living testimonies. Furthermore, as I have shown, there
are many points of view regarding the ritual process. This is where Graburn’s
view becomes too narrow, since visiting Artis proves too complex to compress
the different scripts into a single outcome. The same situation is open to
diverse interpretation; it all depends on where you stand and how you look
at it.
The Eden Effect
Artis can thus be considered as having strong transformative powers with, as

its greatest distinction and strongest trump card, the possibility for closeness
and physical contact in a green environment. In Artis people gather out of
almost reverential feelings or simply for fun and relaxation, to be entertained
by young sloth bears riding on their mother’s back, to mourn dead gorillas,
to watch crocodiles being fed or, in one extreme case, to kill a hyena. Both
positive and negative feelings are entwined in Artis experience, as already
noted. Artis is a place where deep-seated cultural values find material expres-
sion, in a complex mix of intellect and emotion. The zoo (re)presents and
transforms reality; at the same time, it is a place where new and diverse real-
ities are created by those who engage in its performance.
Artis offers a retreat, a refuge and a balance to an otherwise fast-paced
urban lifestyle. The transformative power of being able to get close to wild
animals in a peaceful environment features strongly in drawing a crowd. Both
visitors and personnel consider that the zoo has many valuable aspects and
leads to positive experiences despite its negative facets. Nor is Artis simply a
sanitised version of nature since human nastiness continually disturbs any
such idealistic/nostalgic representation and enlightening experience. However
the less pleasant aspects of nature are not to blame, since death and disease
are still mainly an offstage issue, but rather certain characteristics of human
nature that shatter the peaceable kingdom/Garden of Eden effect. Domina-
tion, assertion of superiority, human intervention, control and manipulation,
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Natasha Silva
the selfish appropriation of nature, and subsequently issues of privacy and

welfare are still part of the frontstage area at the zoo, producing an ambigu-
ous space that keeps minds open. However, as Artis and zoos in general
continue to transform into naturalistic and hyperrealistic institutions, and as
the difference between zoos and nature reserves diminish (with animals
considered healthy and happy in both), questions pertaining to ethics and
authenticity may gradually fade away.
In a country where nature and animal-welfare organisation membership, as
well as specific awareness, is on the increase, Artis has unintentionally become
a contested site and a place for debate with Dutch society, history and tradi-
tion: it tells how it once was and what is wrong with how it now is. Artis
thereby directs attention to what is difficult and painful to contemplate in a
completely different way than its script ideally intends. Nevertheless, the
blending of repulsion and attraction, condemnation and celebration, in all its
ambivalence, reveals that critique does not necessarily erode appeal, since
visitor numbers remain high. Drawing upon Duncan’s ideas: Artis – far from
being neutral in the configuration of its space as well as in the way of present-
ing its collections, reflects specific values and beliefs about individual, social
and political identity.
Conclusions
In this chapter I have discussed the zoo as a specific and complex ritual site
where three major actors (zoo personnel, animal exhibits and visitors) affect
the performance that is staged. My analysis of the zoo’s (re)presentation and
its backstage management, the many points of view in the ritual process, as
well as the multiple experiences going on at the same time, goes beyond
Graburn’s discussion and underscores Duncan’s arguments. Moreover, the
volunteer guide as a ritual specialist provides a specific script that transforms
individuals (if only temporarily) and (re)constructs identities through a ritual
process that operates especially on groups, through the manipulation of
perceptions and emotions. Despite the complexity of the zoo setting, a kind
of unity of experience does take place. For zoo guides (who are appropriately
educated volunteers, well versed in and committed to ecology) visiting the
zoo is a way of affirming their citizenship, building an ‘Amsterdamian’ loca-
tion and contributing to ecological awareness; whereas for visitors it is
(mostly) a family/group experience, Amsterdam consumer location and a kind
of ecological conversion.
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NOTES
1. According to the Dutch Museum Association (NMV), a museum is: ‘a permanent, non-profit-
making institution in the service of society and its development, open to the public, which col-
lects, preserves, researches, presents and informs about the material evidence of humans and
their surroundings, for the purposes of study, education and enjoyment’. This definition
includes more traditional museums, but also visitors centres, planetaria, botanical and zoolog-
ical gardens – the latter being unique in that it houses a living, breeding, behaving and dying
collection. See also Silva 1999: 31–38. Moreover, Artis contains a geological and zoological
museum and a planetarium on its premises.
2. Of which an estimated 10,000 follow a guided tour (unofficial figures for 2000).
3. See NVD 1991, IUDZG/CBSG 1993, and Hancocks 1995.
4. One of several canals that flows through the city’s centre and which used to separate the origi-
nal zoo from land bought for expansion purposes.
5. Many buildings on the site have been declared national monuments, which means that rules
and regulations of the ‘Wet Monumenten Zorg’ apply.
6. The classical Dutch garden contains the Westerman Monument (1891) which was placed here
in the year following his death of one of the zoo’s inaugurators: Gerard Frederik Westerman
(1807–1890).
7. One of the larger and more modern buildings, built in 1977 to house small mammals, who are
displayed in indoor as well as outdoor enclosures.
8. Some monkeys had the habit of smearing the dead chicks’ juices (yolk) on the enclosure’s glass
panels. This soon hardened to form a sticky yellow screen which had to be labouriously
removed by the keepers on a daily basis.
9. Called the ‘Eik en Linde’ (Oak and Lime), situated on annexed land bought in 1863.
10. The elephants Murugan and Suseela were official gifts. Murugan was donated to the Dutch
youth by President Pandit Nehru of India in 1955. Suseela was donated by the Indian youth.
11. Built in 1888 and renovated in 1985.
12. Architect Salm designed other buildings on the Artis terrain, including the Carnivore Gallery
(1859).
13. Today it is one of the oldest aquariums in the world.
14. In order to secure future zoo populations, European zoos have set up 127 breeding programmes
for endangered species, as well as 51 genealogical registers.
15. The nature conservation fund ‘Stichting Dierentuinen Helpen’ (1997) is a joint fund of the
Dutch Zoo Association (NVD) – inaugurated in support of various in-situ as well as ex-situ
conservation projects.
16. As researched by and described in Silva 1999: 102–35.
17. Guided groups normally consist of approximately twenty persons. According to a survey car-
ried out by biologist, teacher and zoo guide Lieke Kievits (1997), ‘Wild tours’ attract an aver-
age of 36 persons a week, which have an adult-child ratio of 1:1. Conversely, specially requested
tours have an adult-child ratio of 3:1. The latter type of tour is on the increase as more busi-
nesses have discovered the zoo as an ideal location for meetings/gatherings of all sorts.
18. ‘Learning’ as described by visitors especially involves looking at animals and discussing the ani-
mals being viewed and to a lesser degree, reading zoo labels.
19. The contemporary visitor may be more informed, though not by definition well-informed.
Many visitors are influenced by nature documentaries that show an entire life cycle in 45 min-
utes or by zoos who produce hyperrealistic presentations of nature.
20. Often the public is misled by nature documentaries displaying a sequence of shots spaced over
a year, but compressed into a forty-five-minute program. This makes the public suspect that
our pride of lions, who spend most of their day ‘relaxing’, must be suffering in their cramped
conditions (see Note 21). However, in the wild lions spend at least half the day ‘lying about’,
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Natasha Silva
just as domestic cats do. Contrary to public opinion, Artis lions are displaying natural behav-
iour.
21. Most visitors equate space with wellbeing – the more space the better. As many enclosures in
Artis are relatively small (which, conversely, increases human-animal contact – a positive aspect
in zoo experience), visitors automatically assume that an animal’s wellbeing is at stake.
22. This applies especially to persons above a certain age. Young, preschool children had no nega-
tive feelings regarding the zoo and animal wellbeing. Often their parents did but complied with
their children’s wishes to visit Artis because their children considered it exciting and great fun.
REFERENCES
Duncan, C. (1995) Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums. London and New
York: Routledge.
Ehrenfeld, D. (1995) ‘Foreword’, in Norton, B.G. et al. (eds), Ethics on the Ark: Zoos,
Animal Welfare and Wildlife Conservation. Washington, DC and London:
Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. xvii–xix.
Falk, J.H. and Dierking, L.D. (1992) The Museum Experience. Washington, DC:
Whalesback Books.
Frankenhuis, M.Th. (1998) Variaties in Artis: Over Paren en Baren en Mensen en Dieren.
Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Nieuwezijds.
Goffman, E. ([1959]1969) The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Harmondsworth:
Penguin Books.
Graburn, N. (1995) ‘Tourism, Modernity and Nostalgia’, in Akhbar, A. and Shore, C.
(eds), The Future of Anthropology. London: Athlone Press, pp. 158–78.
–––––– (1977), ‘The museum and the visitor experience’ in Draper, L. (ed.), The
Visitor and the Museum. Washington, DC: American Assoc. of Museums,
pp. 5–32.
Hancocks, D. (1995) ‘Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh No!’, in Norton, B. et al. (eds),
Ethics on the Ark, pp. 31–37
IUDZG/CBSG (1993) The World Zoo Conservation Strategy: the Role of the Zoos and
Aquaria of the World in Global Conservation. Chicago: Chicago Zoological Society
and IUDZG, The World Zoo Organisation.
Linde, I. van der (1997) ‘Mamma, Ik Heb nog Geen Olifanten Gezien’, Intermediair,
7 August, pp. 11–19.
Mieras, M. (1998) ‘Een Facelift voor Artis’, Intermediair, 11 June, p. 41.
Nederlandse Vereniging van Dierentuinen (NVD) (1991), Dierentuinen en Natuur-en
Milieueducatie: een Beleidsvisie van de Nederlandse Vereniging van Dierentuinen.
Amsterdam: Nederlandse Vereniging van Dierentuinen.
Silva, N.J. (1999) Signifying Zoos and the Zoo Experience. The Meaning of Zoos and Their
Creation of Meaning. Master’s diss., University of Utrecht.
Wennekes, W. (1997) ‘Vergeleken met Andere Zijn Wij Slechts een Postzegel’, NRC
Handelsblad, 12 August.
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C HAPTER 6
T HE N ATURAL M AGIC OF
M ONTE S AN G IOVANNI :
AUTHORIT Y, AUTHENTICIT Y AND
R ITUAL IN S ARDINIA 1
Tracey Heatherington
Figure 6.1 The road to Monte San Giovanni, Orgosolo (photograph by Tracey
Heatherington)
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Nature on Display
Monte San Giovanni is one of the most celebrated peaks of central Sardinia
(Italy). On a clear day, they told me in Orgosolo, from its height of 1,316
m, you can see clear across ‘from Arbatax to Oristano’, the Mediterranean
coasts on both sides of the island. This panorama attracts tourists and local
residents, as well as the forestry lookout maintained throughout the summer
when fires can quickly threaten the landscape. Monte San Giovanni is
Orgosolo’s gateway to the famous Supramonte, the high plateau linked to a
romantic history of anti-colonial resistance, rugged transhumant shepherds,
outlaws, and kidnappers. With its dramatic calcareous formations, Monte San
Giovanni has long been a distinctive symbol of the town of Orgosolo, and in
1997, the town council petitioned to have the peak named as a national
monument. It is frequently also adopted as an emblem of the proposed
‘Gennargentu National Park’. If the park is made, Monte San Giovanni will
constitute an important designated visitor area.
What I call the ‘natural magic’ of Monte San Giovanni refers to the way
that the components of an open landscape are made available to the social
and the ecological imagination. This chapter explores how three qualities –
authority, authenticity and ritual – structure the special kind of ‘museum
effect’ at Monte San Giovanni. Svetlana Alpers has suggested that a museum
is characterised by ‘a way of seeing’ that releases objects from their original,
locally-defined frames of meaning and history and heightens the power of
aesthetic imagination (1990). By comparing a national park to a museum, I
highlight the ways in which a national park decontextualises an ecosystem
from its cultural milieu, displaying local species and geographic features as
aesthetic objects and objects of knowledge in themselves.
Inasmuch as Monte San Giovanni constitutes a prominent feature for
‘display’, whether as part of a national park or as a part of Orgosolo’s commu-
nal heritage, it is located at the centre of continuing debate. Palumbo (2001)
argues museums in Italy are foci of social tactics and social poetics mediating
relations between nation state and local community, as well as public and
private spaces. Macdonald’s (1996) analysis of several recent case studies has
shown that the ‘museum experience’ is not predetermined but open to nego-
tiations of meaning and representation throughout the processes of
production and consumption associated with the displays. As Kevin Hether-
ington (1996) has convincingly shown for Stonehenge in that same volume,
the museumisation of unenclosed spaces can carry with it a particularly
dynamic, ongoing process of negotiation over symbolic power. Parks and
natural reserves are open to a play of discourses and cultural practices with
regard to history and environmentalism, generated within a range of politi-
cal, institutional, and social contexts. The ‘nature’ of the magic at Monte San
Giovanni is thus ultimately in the eye of the beholder.
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The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni
Rituals of Environmentalism
What is a National Park, in reality? The National Park is an important structure
for the protection of nature, a space that is not subjected to human interventions,
exploitation and destruction, in which animals and plants live and reproduce in a
wild state. But it is also a place where one can go, to visit and know the environ-
ment better, observe plants and animals, entering silently into the solemn and
intact temple of nature. (APN 1999: 2)
A Park Authority attempts to superimpose order on the way visitors ‘see’ a land-
scape and in so doing, it affirms a set of stories about environment, history and
citizenship. These visions of ‘nature’ are instruments used to negotiate cultural
and political identities. Although contemporary advocates of protected areas are
concerned about the connections between parks and their peripheries, and ‘resi-
dent peoples’ are increasingly appreciated as participants in habitat conservation
(Brosius, Tsing and Zerner 1998; West and Brechin 1991), the concept of a
‘national park’ continues to be defined by the idea of a space ‘set apart’ from
human use (IUCN 1980; Wright and Mattson 1996). It is this very act of
‘setting apart’ that establishes a landscape as a kind of sacred space. Like other
kinds of official narratives, the environmental discourses of ‘the State’ entail
moral and symbolic dimensions that come to be legitimised or even taken for
granted through the enactment of ‘secular rituals’ (Moore and Myerhoff 1977;
see also Moore 1993). National parks create contexts within which the rela-
tionships enacted between individuals, communities and the environment
become idealised and ritualised as well as regulated and controlled.
The growth of the parks system throughout Italy is an important focus of
the ‘moral rationality’ (Prato 1993) cultivated by various ‘green’ lobbies in the
Italian context. Italy’s first national park was inaugurated in Abbruzzo in 1922
and its exhibition leaflet, ‘Park Effect’ illustrates the narratives of environ-
mental citizenship current during the late 1990s. After several expansions, the
Abbruzzo National Park occupies 44,000 ha and receives about two million
visitors per year. Its work to protect areas of primary forest, endangered species
and biodiversity is represented as having positive links to various levels of
cultural identity. The leaflet celebrates the park’s beneficial influence on local
culture, as ‘ecodevelopment’ is shown to have provided markets for traditional
cheese, biscuits and honey (shown in photographs with the ‘DOC’ mark of
the national park) (Centro Parchi 1997: 8). It asserts the park’s centrality to
a flourishing national culture of environmentalism, noting its accessibility
from Rome and Naples, and the many NGOs and individual volunteers in
Italy who collaborate in park improvement. Finally, the leaflet sets the park
within the context of ongoing Europeanisation by noting its official status as
a ‘green region of Europe’ and calling it ‘a splendid jewel in the European
Crown’ (Centro Parchi 1997: 12). Cultural-political identities are thus
subsumed within a master narrative of environmentalism.
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How do nature excursions engage the mind and the senses in the manifes-
tation of ecological self/identities? In the Abbruzzo National Park leaflet, the
park is seen as an opportunity for ‘discovering nature: with your eyes, with your
heart and with your hands’ (Centro Parchi 1997: 10). In the promotional liter-
ature and conferences on the Gennargentu National Park (Camboni 1991;
Colomo and Ticca 1987; Scuola di Pubblica Amministrazione et al. 1992;
WWF 1998), there are repeated references to how people may become ‘closer’
to Sardinian ‘nature’ by visiting, seeing, learning about and appreciating places
like Monte San Giovanni. Pictures in an information leaflet featured campers
in the Supramonte, while the text implied the ritual context of their experience
by describing the aesthetic and spiritual rewards to be derived from ‘entering
silently into the solemn and intact temple of nature’ (APN 1999: 2).2 A park
visitor who seeks out visual and sensory knowledge of plant and animal species
ritually emulates scientific processes of empirical observation and, through self-
monitoring against littering, lighting fires, or disturbing plants, shares in the
project of scientific conservation. The ‘ritual bodies’ (Bell 1992: 98) of park
visitors can be directly engaged with the surrounding ‘wilderness’ and
metonymically aligned with the larger project of scientific ecology.
Excursions within a national park, then, can be seen as a means of ritually
structuring direct contact with a richly imagined and often personified ‘nature’,
in a special domain ‘where nature is sovereign’ (Centro Parchi 1997: 4). Ethnog-
raphy among some Sardinian forest rangers3 suggests the centrality of such
nature excursions to the enactment of environmentalist identities in Italy.
Sharing several months’ training in environmental protection as well as their
daily work, many of these individuals identified themselves as interested in the
environment, pursued hobbies such as nature photography or spelunking on
their off time, and expressed pleasure in hiking through isolated countryside
over the course of their patrols. Soon after I had introduced myself as having
a critical interest in the park project, among themselves they adopted a project
to show me the living sight of a moufflon, an endangered species of indige-
nous wild mountain sheep. After two excursions with no sign of the animals,
it became a point of concern among my hosts. At last we did glimpse a pair
of moufflons some distance away, and whenever I appeared at the station for
awhile after, someone else would inquire to confirm approvingly, ‘so, you’ve
seen the muflone then?’ From the perspective of these forest rangers, such direct
visual/experiential contact with real examples of Sardinian flora and fauna was
germane to the development of my interest in environmental issues.
Scientific Authority and the Authenticity of Nature

The richness of a protected area lies not in what man has constructed, but in all
that he has left intact and natural. (APN 1999: 4)
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Figure 6.2 Geological formations at Monte San Giovanni (photograph, courtesy of

Francesco Pili)
At Monte San Giovanni, a range of geological formations and indigenous wild

plants and animals can be found in a striking, beautiful setting. Orgosolo’s
own nature enthusiasts – members of the hiking club, ecotourism guides,
forest rangers, as well as herders and others – talk about the naturally occur-
ring ‘botanic garden’ in the forest at the foot of the mountain, and comment
on the inspiring presence of rare moufflon herds and royal eagles in its envi-
rons. The objects of scientific and aesthetic discourses of ecology are thus
directly available to the senses. When a conference of the World Wide Fund
for Nature (WWF) was held at Orgosolo in 1997, excursions to Monte San
Giovanni and the Supramonte were planned. Monte San Giovanni is fre-
quently chosen for school excursions from all over the island, as a relatively
accessible and educational day trip. The immediate, vivid experience of
authentic nature is framed by a meaningful discourse of environmentalism.
Great educational and scientific value is perceived to reside in national
parks (cf. Tassi 1998). These ecological museums derive authority from
scientific models of vision, that is, from epistemological models that isolate
specific objects of inquiry and celebrate empirical observation as the means
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of legitimate knowledge. One biologist from the University of Florence

exhorted the value of central Sardinia as an ‘open book’ of science:
The relatively uninhabited landscape of the territory of the park is a book open to
the naturalistic perception, [open] to ecological reading, to the reflection and
admonishment of that which nature can be and often, unfortunately, no longer is.
(Prof. Pier Virgilio Arrigoni in APN 1999)
What our Florentine scientist has in common with the WWF (cf. Colomo
and Ticca 1987; WWF 1998) is an understanding that the ecological wealth
of indigenous flora and fauna in the Supramonte has flourished in relative
isolation from human activities, rather than benefited from the custodianship
of local communities. The landscape is described as resisting human influence.4
It is the powerful visibility of accepted symbols of indigenous nature, and the
equally powerful invisibility of contrasting signs of modern human inhabita-
tion, which potentially render the tourist’s experience of the local environment
genuine and transformative from this kind of environmentalist perspective.
There are notably few elements of recognisably modern architecture visible
upon the landscape around Monte San Giovanni: apart from some springs,
picnic areas and special animal enclosures maintained on the commons by the
town, there are only a few simple cement shelters and animal enclosures built
by herders themselves and scattered thinly, away from the road. There are
some buildings maintained by the forestry service at the foot of Monte San
Giovanni, where the government has already been supervising the planting
and harvesting of trees for several decades. There are no houses, since Sardini-
ans continue to favour a pattern of aggregated villages and there are legal
restrictions to any construction in the highland countryside. The area around
Monte San Giovanni is considered by experts to be both representative of
central Sardinian wilderness, and a memorable example of it.
If a museum is a place of pilgrimage made powerful by human art and
science, a park is a site where the features of a ‘natural’ landscape are taken
to enshrine, without apparent artifice, a potent source of knowledge and
aesthetics. The ‘authenticity’ of ‘nature’ is essential to the idea of a national
park, since it is designed as a means of ‘protecting’ or ‘preserving’ what are
considered to be ‘typical’ examples of physical features and biogenetic
resources. The techniques of park management – zoning, trail making, moni-
toring of flora and fauna, and so on – are imagined as custodial techniques,
techniques that simply discipline human intervention in the ecosystem and
facilitate the natural balance of local ecologies.
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The Museumisation of Monte San Giovanni?
How does the environment ‘set apart’ as a protected area become part of
strategic everyday debates about cultural identity and difference? The Sardin-
ian case involves a contested national park in an area of Italy that is
stereotypically associated with ‘banditry’ and ‘backwardness’. Monte San
Giovanni constitutes a focus of alternative narratives about how ‘culture’
shapes the local environment. The mountain is also used by different groups
of people – that is, the area around the peak is integrated into different
patterns of cultural, political and economic practice – in ways that evoke
vastly disparate expectations about the categories of social belonging, exclu-
sion, and legitimate entitlement.
The regional and national governments first began planning to create a
‘Gennargentu National Park’ in the late 1960s. This was related to a Euro-
pean Economic Community campaign to increase the percentage of land
devoted to natural reserves, and it was expected that a national park would
promote economic development through increased tourism to the Sardinian
interior. In central Sardinia at that time there was a particularly intense period
of what state discourses referred to as ‘banditry’ – that is, increased problems
of homicide, blood feud, kidnappings, theft and so on. Because Sardinian
criminality was seen to be linked to an economy still dependent on transhu-
mant shepherding, a number of economic development initiatives were
focussed on generating alternative employment opportunities. In Orgosolo,
most households included one or more full-time herders who depended upon
access to communally owned lands, ‘su cumonale’ (the commons), including
the valleys flanking Monte San Giovanni. These same lands, as well as the
forestry-service-managed area of ‘Montes’ including Monte San Giovanni
itself, were targeted for incorporation into the new park, and herders quickly
became alarmed at their potential exclusion from these areas.
Local responses to the 1960s park project were extremely negative; resi-
dents of Orgosolo contested the loss of the commons in 1969 and ultimately
maintained control over it (see Moro 1982). Local authority over land
management was nevertheless gradually eroded through legislation and, in the
late 1980s, the decisive expansion of the regional forest-ranger corps.
Although the economy of Orgosolo has transformed and diversified, many
residents continue to view the commons as a source of economic security and
potential economic development. In 1989, a new ‘framework’ law 394 was
passed, outlining a system of new parks and reserves to be created in Sardinia.
The Gennargentu National Park reappeared here, and although the revised
project5 won tentative support from some local residents, many saw the spec-
tres of clientelism and corruption looming in the background. In 1998, the
region and the state signed the final agreement defining the Gennargentu
National Park. The legislation was suspended for review after another large
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demonstration at Orgosolo highlighted ongoing local controversy, particularly

given some last-minute enlargements to the park perimeters.
In central Sardinia, competing discourses about the park and the future of
Orgosolo’s commons emanate from various contexts, including political-
administrative spheres and informal social spheres and categories. In the first
category we find Italy and the European Union, the Autonomous Region of
Sardinia, the province of Nuoro, municipal governments, and environmental
lobbies as well as the Sardinian Forestry Service and the Sardinian Regional
Forest Ranger and Environmental Protection Corps. In the more ambiguous
second category we find tourists themselves, and the various interest groups
(especially occupational classes) present within local communities.6 The World
Wide Fund for Nature has remained particularly active through internet
campaigns and attempts at public education (WWF 1998). Some moderate
advocates of the park such as the Legambiente movement have supported calls
to renegotiate the 1998 agreement in a way that better acknowledges the
democratic process in local communities (see Chironi 1998; Diana 1998;
Scroccu 1998).
Time on a Landscape: Science and Social Practice
Advocates of the Gennargentu National Park favour the creation of a single,

centralised institution for environmental management. Environmental lobbies
and members of government bureaucracies often recognise the ongoing work
of the forestry service and the corps of forest rangers, as well as the innova-
tive, scientifically informed initiatives of Orgosolo’s agricultural cooperative,
in maintaining and improving the quality of the local environment. Refer-
ences to scientific authority, however, support calls for more comprehensive
and systematic ecological management techniques.
Technical discourses of environmentalism tend to model time in a linear
way, gathering agency and moral authority over the landscape into the expert
hands of institutions.7 They presume the history of human cultural ecology
to have progressed from naive resource management on the part of isolated
traditional rural cultures to inadequate resource management by transform-
ing and economically developing societies as they become more open to the
outside world (Heatherington 2001). For example, a technical report for the
U.N.’s Man and Biosphere Project indicated that traditional methods of
pastoral production in the Mediterranean had been subverted by a new
cultural-economic context, and so transformed into the source of ecological
disequilibrium (Tomaselli 1977). Some government sources contend (see for
example IASM 1983) that local institutions for common property manage-
ment have recently fostered ‘irrational’ resource use in central Sardinia. The
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ongoing problem of forest fires is often linked to pastoral traditions and local
‘ignorance’.
Small-scale, community-based natural resource regimes are typically dismissed as

an aspect of the cultural past, which no longer ‘works’ within the contemporary
world.8 The perceived failure of local management structures has been used to legit-
imize the appropriation of rural environmental resources by centralized
institutions, to satisfy the needs of a larger, national community with a large urban
population. Alfonso Alessandrini, national director for the mountain economy and
for forests in Italy during the late 1980s, has claimed that the public interest in
forests transcends the immediate needs of those who depended upon exploiting
them in ‘traditional’ ways. (Cerrina 1987: 87)
The politician visualised rural populations as uninterested in proper forestry

management, and believed only scientific authority, in the form of ‘data’ that
were ‘true, controllable and up-to-date’ (Cerrina 1987), could support good
resource management. Modernist tropes often represent authentic environ-
mentalism to be the outcome only of public institutions supported by an
‘educated’, forward-looking, urban citizenship.
In national park literature, landscapes become enwrapped in a scientifically
authorised discourse about large-scale changes in cultural ecology.9 These
sweeping historical narratives often obscure the variety of structural possibil-
ities for comanagement and decentralised rural ecodevelopment, in favour of
‘monumentalising’ historical landscapes – or rather, archetypal representations
of them. Herzfeld has persuasively argued that efforts at historic conservation
enable institutions and governments to affirm ideologised, monolithic
versions of history, which he calls ‘monumental time’ (Herzfeld 1991). Monu-
mental time can be written into spaces, so that state bureaucracies attempt to
reify nationalist visions by controlling the preservation, reconstruction, and
conversion of architectural landscapes. The linear histories told to explain and
support initiatives to ‘conserve’ ecosystems are similarly inscribed, I argue,
upon the ‘natural’ landscape, through the exercise of environmentalist ‘ways
of seeing’.
In contrast, residents discussed ways to preserve, reauthorise and gradually
transform an existing traditional ecology. Their everyday social practices
enveloped the commons in a reforging of dynamic ties between past, present
and future; such local discourses fixed the landscape not in time, but rather,
within a definitive cultural space. The fluid time of Orgolese ‘tradition’ corre-
sponds rather well to what Herzfeld describes as ‘social time’: the unkempt
flow of experience, managed and remembered by pragmatically and socially
oriented actors. Herzfeld sees social time, like monumental time, as written
into material spaces by human protagonists. In the case of Orgosolo, we can
see how residents contested the national park by ‘inscribing social time on a
landscape’ (Herzfeld 1991).
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Contested ‘Ways of Seeing’
Gino is a partner in a thriving ecotourism enterprise that provides outdoor

lunches for large groups and small charter tours of Orgosolo’s commons.
Cultural tourism (cf. Satta 2001) began to play a role in Orgosolo’s economy
only after the Second World War, while two or three guiding businesses with
jeeps began to promote ‘ecotourism’ during the 1990s. In July of 1998, Gino
picked up four tourists and drove us all out of town, continuing on past the
end of the paved highway to navigate rugged roads that begin near the foot
of Monte San Giovanni. We trundled through forested areas and along steep
slopes. The visitors were enthusiastic, assured of penetrating hidden land-
scapes.
Gino produced a lively, well-informed account of local ecology that
subsumed elements of environmental discourse within a master narrative of
indigenous culture. The itinerary included sites of prehistoric archaeology
(nuraghe Mereu, domus de janas, tombe dei giganti) and geographic landmarks
(the source of the Cedrino river, Monte San Giovanni). The ‘cultural’ and the
‘natural’ wonders of the communal territory were presented as intrinsically
Figure 6.3 ‘Lunch with the Shepherds’: Egidio Manca demonstrates cheesemaking
for Sardinian schoolchildren (photograph by Tracey Heatherington)
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bound together throughout history: the traditional and semitraditional animal

shelters and shepherds’ huts marked ongoing ecological bonds between the
people and the land. Our guide pointed out both wild and semidomesticated
animals as we passed near their haunting grounds; he pointed out eagles over-
head, spoke with reverence of the beauty of the mufflons and told us about
the adaptive characteristics of indigenous cattle kept on natural pastures. The
perception of inherent blending of nature and culture on the local topos
informed Gino’s subtle argument against the institution of a Gennargentu
National Park by the state: ‘il parco già c’è’ (there is already a park), he said.
‘Il parco, l’abbiamo fatto noi’ (We have made the park ourselves).
Gino explained that Orgosolo’s forest was ‘l’unica foresta vera’ (the only true
forest) in the area designated to become a Gennargentu National Park.
Orgosolo’s sar Vaddes is a very rare example of mature oak forest at the heart
of its communal territory, long treasured, used and husbanded by shepherds
and by the town administration. When we reached this area of living sanc-
tuary, we found oaks of astonishing size, a few small cows of indigenous breed,
a sow with a litter sired by an indigenous wild boar, and both ‘traditional’
(old shelters fashioned from rock and juniper) and semitraditional animal
enclosures. The landscape itself was represented by our guide as a testament
to pastoral traditions. A couple of lovely old stone shelters were now roofed
by garish plastic; according to Gino this was the result of a mistake on the
part of the forestry service, which had forbidden the herders to use juniper
branches to make traditional-style rooves. When the tourists marvelled at a
dead trunk of magnificent girth, Gino said that this ‘patriarch’ oak had been
hit by lightning in 1994. ‘Ci sono pastori che hanno pianto per quell’albero
quand’è morto,’ (There are shepherds who cried for that tree when it died), he
told us. The authentic symbiosis of herders and forest was a key theme in
Gino’s narrative. The shepherds had made the place ‘un giardino’ (a garden),
he said, since by pruning juniper branches for their enclosures and shelters
they rendered the shape of the trees aesthetically pleasing, without harm to
the ecology. Our picnic lunch provided by Gino featured distinctive local
meats and cheeses to further persuade us that pastoral traditions at Orgosolo
remained authentic.
The climactic finale of the day trip was the view from Monte San Giovanni.
We left the jeep and climbed up towards the peak. Midway up the mountain
slope there was an animal shelter still in use, built from natural materials by
contemporary herders. Once we attained the view from the summit, Gino
explained that evidence of Orgosolo’s ‘traditional’ pastoral life was spread out
for the eye to see, since around the base of the mountain there are high plateau
areas of the commons used extensively for pasture. Gino showed us the
outlines of a chapel on the mountain crest used during medieval times, and
noted that Catholic processions were made on foot to visit the mountain once
a year until just after the Second World War. Gino also introduced us to local
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men stationed by the forestry service to watch for fires. We were offered local
wine by the men and shown around the lookout, transformed from tourists
into guests by the cultural magic of hospitality. Our view from the peak of
Monte San Giovanni was therefore not the distanced vision of a wilderness
from on high, but a social vision anchored within a web of ongoing, distinc-
tively localised and personalised relationships.
How does a landscape become a story, a narrative testament to the struc-
ture of time, and the ‘nature’ of history itself? Where scientific eyes have seen
wild spaces, rare species, the odd anachronistic shepherd, and the potential to
‘preserve’ an historical ecosystem, Gino saw signs of traditional, cultural habi-
tation not only in prehistoric architecture and old-fashioned shepherds’ huts,
but also in the rich forests, the pure springs, and the profusion of wildlife.
Gino did not see the Supramonte of Orgosolo in a state of historical isola-
tion, where the impacts of the world system have led to the abandonment
and degradation. Rather, his vision of the landscape powerfully situated the
commons in fluid social time, the time of a self-regenerating, custodial and
adapting pastoral community.
The creation of a new Park Authority would reorganise both land use and
the means of self-portrayal available to people in Orgosolo. Herzfeld (1991)
suggests that the ‘museumisation of the landscape’ tends to favour official
narratives of identity, yet contrasting historical visions and political agendas
may also be inscribed in key spaces. As a ‘natural cathedral’, Monte San
Giovanni is in fact a strategic and sensual site for the representation of
contested histories.
The Cathedral of Orgosolo

Santina, what can you tell me about Monte San Giovanni?
Monte San Giovanni is the ‘cathedral’ of Orgosolo.
Why do you say that?
In general, everyone presents the most precious things to their friends. We take them to
Monte San Giovanni if time and the weather permit. It has a high symbolic value, [an aes-
thetic] landscape value, also [it is the focus of] an attachment to the land. I mean to say that
it is the most vital site of, let us say, the feeling of being owners of the land. Here it becomes
most manifest. There is a symbiosis between man and the environment that here, at least,
is more marked than in other places … It is the most representative part of the whole terri-
tory in this particular sense.
The ‘cathedral’ would be the point where a citizenship gathers, let us say, in the deepest,
most spiritual moments, and so we have Monte San Giovanni, though of course we also
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have churches … [it is] the most beautiful thing that I can show, that I can offer [to guests],
and with a great, great sense of pride. Santina Cossu, Orgosolo, April 2000
The eloquent comments of Santina, former president of the nature-hiking
and spelunking club at Orgosolo and an independent member of the town
council, suggest that we can see the mountain as a special place to which the
people of Orgosolo are drawn to confirm meaningful relationships to a
community, a cultural tradition, and the land itself. Cultural identity is
strongly invested in Monte San Giovanni, so that the very ‘purity’ of nature
itself is seen to bear witness and tribute to cultural authenticity. Both air and
the water from ‘Fantana Bona’ at the foot of Monte San Giovanni are consid-
ered salubrious, and people make family excursions to the area for picnics in
summertime. Popular magical lore also specifies how to gather herbs around
the mountain at auspicious times, to make natural medicines. From a local
perspective, true Sardinian history – a history based in pastoralism and the
commons – becomes manifest in the taste of spring water, the freshness of
the air, and the healing properties of herbal remedies. So, just as ritual bodies
and the senses are key mediators of environmentalist discourses for outside
visitors, they also mediate the cultural discourses generated in the town.
Local residents think of Monte San Giovanni as a special place inscribed
with deep traces of indigenous human history. Archaeological ruins in the
neighbourhood of the mountain are a source of interest and pride for local
people, and the ruins of the Catholic chapel tie the mountain top into still-
vibrant traditions of festival procession from the town into sacred places in
the landscape. In their own visits to the site, ‘ritual bodies’ are aligned with
their own perceptions of the past: by going out to the mountain, they sample
and reenact the experience of pilgrims as well as that of herders who once
lived for months at a time in the surrounding countryside. They also recon-
firm the ongoing presence of the community, and thus their own part in
shaping the aesthetic landscape. The centrality of authentic local food to gath-
erings in the countryside emphasises how the landscape is incorporated within
a local system of social reciprocity and cultural practice that self-consciously
celebrates its pastoral roots.
Cultural Authority
One may ‘see’ Monte San Giovanni as a symbol of the global environment,
or as a symbol of local culture, or as a mixture thereof, depending on how
one is introduced to the spectacle. Legitimate authority over ‘nature’ is not
currently taken for granted – rather, the thirty-year-old debate about whether
or not to create a Gennargentu National Park in Sardinia has generated a
range of narratives about the Sardinian environment that engage wider
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Figure 6.4 Roundup on the commons (photograph by Tracey Heatherington)
discourses about ‘science’ and ‘culture’ in very different ways. Visitors to

Monte San Giovanni may in fact position themselves (or find themselves posi-
tioned) in relation to two different kinds of authority over landscape and
ecology: scientific authority and cultural authority.
Reference to cultural authority recognises the historical importance of local
ecological knowledge, and the role of local commitment to pastoral and
communitarian traditions in maintaining the quality of the environment. In
particular, some ethnonationalist-style discourses have emphasised that the
resistance of local communities to the land privatisation schemes of the nine-
teenth century functioned to protect areas of common land from deforestation
(see Salis 1990; Zucca 1992). Orgosolo’s rare old growth forest, for example,
lies in a remote area of the municipally controlled commons rather than the
area of Montes (around Monte San Giovanni and Monte Fumai) that has been
managed by the government forestry service. Local opponents of the park
scheme sometimes argue that a Park Authority would be guided not by
science, but by a corrupt politics they believe to be ubiquitous throughout
Italian public institutions. In contrast, residents say, they themselves depend
upon the commons and it is their custodianship that has made the landscape
desirable for a national park.
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One’s position with reference to ideas about both scientific and cultural
authority over the environment frames actual visions of the mountain and its
surroundings. Although the creation of the Gennargentu National Park may
immanently privilege the former, it is important to recognise that local resi-
dents, tourist guides, and forest rangers with sensitivity to issues of local
identity and welfare will continue to play a role in mediating the experience
of Monte San Giovanni to visitors. Many of these individuals blend discourses
of scientific and cultural authority together in their stories and explanations
to outsiders, as Santina and Gino have done. Visitors themselves may arrive
predisposed to witness elements of either nature or culture in the panorama
before them. The ‘museum experience’ associated with a park or a landscape
is therefore as much a product of processual negotiations over self-identity
and representation as in any more conventional museum.
Entangled Authenticities
The authenticity of ‘nature’ is deeply complicated by the way that local history
and culture continue to be inscribed upon the landscape. Orgosolo’s public
image as a ‘traditional’ shepherd village inevitably heightens the historical
mystique of the landscape. One typically encounters cattle, sheep, pigs, goats,
horses and herders themselves in the environs of Monte San Giovanni, and
they are easily visible along the main road followed by tourists seeking to visit
the peak. Still more thrilling for some tourists is the idea that the un-
domesticated landscape below also harbours the secrets of historical and
contemporary bandits, outlaws and kidnappers. I once attended a special
outdoor May Day concert held high on the slopes of Monte San Giovanni in
honour of sequestration victim Sylvia Melis. Some thought that Melis herself
might be held in one of the numerous caves or hidden features of Orgosolo’s
Supramonte; if so, she would actually hear the music. Many local residents
were insulted and skipped the concert, but a strong turnout of tourists and
nature enthusiasts from outside suggested that the venue appealed to the
imagination.
What is the link between ideas about the authenticity of ‘nature’ and the
prevailing stereotypes of local culture? Notions of ‘wilderness’ in Sardinia
are intrinsically connected to a vision of cultural wildness associated with
shepherds and bandits (Heatherington 2001). Environmental discourses
commonly represent the landscapes associated with ‘traditional’, rural societies
as more ‘natural’ than those associated with ‘modern’, industrial or urban soci-
eties. It is important to consider how representations of cultural authenticity
may be used to reinforce the idea that the landscape itself remains much as
it was in the past.
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Natural Magic
The ‘natural magic’ of Monte San Giovanni is an example of the ‘museum

effect’ possible with a landscape on display. In museums, objects are physi-
cally taken out of their original social and cultural contexts; the creation of a
national park entails a similar process by setting legal and symbolic bound-
aries between park and community, ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, and excluding some
traditional activities such as hunting from the reserve area. To ‘set apart’ an
area of ‘genuine nature’ and evoke discourses of scientific authority with which
to give it meaning is a powerful alchemy. The sensuality of immersion in the
‘wilderness’ adds a special quality to what Steven Greenblatt (1990) has called
the ‘resonance and wonder’ of museums. And, because our cultural relation-
ship to ‘the environment’ is increasingly important to our ideas about who
we are (or would like to be) as moral persons and citizens, our visits to parks
and nature reserves often acknowledge a sacred character to the landscape. Yet
issues of authority, authenticity and ritual structure the museum effect at
Monte San Giovanni in ambivalent ways, cautioning us against a simplistic
idea of how the museumisation of the landscape actually works.
Monte San Giovanni constitutes a key symbolic space for both local resi-
dents and tourists, not to mention environmentalists. Ritual action is clearly
a component of their visits to the mountain, as they perform politically rele-
vant self-identities and seek the sensual affirmation of an imagined connection
to history or the environment. A community of nature lovers and environ-
mentalists and a cultural tradition of conservation may well be the most
important points of reference for some visitors, so that the sensory apprecia-
tion of the landscape is linked to a discursive framework of scientific ecology.
Other visitors may seek a tourism experience that allows them to appropriate
‘otherness’ by means of pilgrimage to an exotic cultural landscape.
Within Orgosolo itself, only some residents continue to work on the land,
and there is considerable diversity in how they themselves envision their
pastoral heritage. There is significant fragmentation in the interpretation of
tradition in the town despite the tendency to represent ‘local culture’ as a
reified whole. Santina and Gino had extensive reading knowledge of local flora
and fauna and were outspoken critics of pollution, arson, and overgrazing in
their own community. They represent a growing nucleus of indigenous envi-
ronmentalists who found value and authority in local knowledge and objected
to the museumisation of the landscape.
What is distinctive about Monte San Giovanni is that it not only allows
space for contesting narratives of ecology and identity, it establishes alterna-
tive structures of authority, authenticity and ritual orientation. The symbolic
boundary between ‘cultural’ and ‘natural’ landscapes in central Sardinia
continues to be highly permeable. The museum effect is thus a paradox:
although aspects of local ecology have been objectified and abstracted in the
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public imagination, they are never irrevocably deprived of their sociocultural

context. The area designated to become a park is actually fixed in space rela-
tive to local communities, and local people frequently play a role in mediating
the ‘naturalistic perceptions’ of visitors. Visions of nature ultimately remain
embedded in multiple frames of experience including those of local historical
self-identities. Monte San Giovanni casts many different spells upon its
wondering visitors, and while some are intent upon reading the scientific
secrets of ecology, others celebrate an intrinsic symbiosis of pastoral culture
and the Sardinian environment.
NOTES
1. Research in Baunei, Sardinia (1991–92) was supported by Fonds FCAR with additional assis-
tance from the M.A.R.E. team at McGill University. Research in Orgosolo (1996–98) was sup-
ported by Fonds FCAR, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Minda de Gunzburg Center for
European Studies at Harvard University, and the Mellon Foundation. An additional visit in
early 2000 was assisted by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. Spe-
cial thanks to Francesco Pili, Gino Dore, Pietrino Cossu, Santina Cossu, Franco Dettori, Mau-
rizio Bassu, Gavino Diana and many others in Sardinia. I am grateful to the editors and
reviewers of this volume for helpful comments.
2. There is an abundance of environment and outdoor sports magazines in Italy that elaborate
cultural discourses around wilderness adventure hiking.
3. During fieldwork in the town of Baunei, another community whose extensive local territory
has been targeted to become part of the Gennargentu National Park, I spent considerable time
with a large group of forest rangers drawn from all over Sardinia, including Orgosolo. At that
time (1991–2), most of this group favoured the creation of the park but were often critical of
how higher levels of government treated local communities and herders (Heatherington 1993).
4. Throughout central Sardinia, however, areas of the high plain were used for cereal agriculture
in a mixed agropastoral system until recent decades (Angioni 1989; Meloni 1984).
5. Note the changing philosophy of national parks since the 1960s and integration of both tradi-
tional activities and local development projects in the new park plan (Masnata 1989/90; Sanna
and Boccone 1989/90; Regione Sardegna 1996). From the perspective of towns such as
Orgosolo and Baunei, which are targeted to contribute large areas of their communal lands to
the project, the lack of clarity about how development funds and access to lands will be allo-
cated has been problematic.
6. In Orgosolo, the most prominent groups today are the shepherds, the agricultural and con-
struction cooperatives, the unemployed, the tourism operators, the forestry service workers and
other wage workers (see Heatherington 2000).
7. Greenhouse (1996) has explored how linear representations of time shape the parameters of
legitimate social agency.
8. Italian forestry experts have insisted on the need to introduce scientific principles to the prac-
tice of herding in Sardinia, as they complain about ‘the free and uncontrolled wandering of ever
larger and hungrier herds’, ‘wild forms of pasturing’ (Podda 1986: 257), and ‘uncontrolled pas-
turing’ (Casu et al. 1984: 31). Angioni notes that Sardinian shepherds have frequently been
portrayed as the ‘prototype of the pyromaniac’(1989).
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9. Models drawn from scientific ecology have animated landscape architecture traditions in the
American context. See Conan (2000) for discussion of environmental rhetorics and philoso-
phies in landscape planning.
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Conan, M. (ed.) (2000) Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture. Washington, DC:
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Diana, G. (1998) ‘Cinica Partita sulla Pelle delle Popolazioni’, Nuoro Oggi, 11(3/4),
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Greenblatt, S. (1990) ‘Resonance and Wonder’, in Lavine, S. and Karp, I. (eds),
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Greenhouse, C. (1996) A Moment’s Notice: Time Politics across Cultures. Ithaca, NY:
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Heatherington, T. (1993) Environmental Politics in a Highland Sardinian Community.
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Meloni, B. (1984) Famiglie di Pastori : Continuità e Mutamento in una Comunità della
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Moro, G. (1982) ‘Le Lotte di Orgosolo (1966–1969)’, in Lussu, E. (ed.), Lotte Sociali:
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Naturale in Sardegna. Sassari: Carlo Delfino, pp. 247–58.
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Studi per l’Istituzione del Parco Nazionale del Gennargentui. Public document.
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Sanna, E. and Boccone, P. (1989/90) ‘La Stima di Accettabilità dei Parchi’, Regione
Sardegna, Enti locali notizie, 1, 22–26.
Satta, G. (2001) Turisti a Orgosolo: La Sardegna Centrale come Attrazione Turistica.
Naples: Liguori Editore.
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Scuola di Pubblica Amministrazione e Governo Locale di Nuoro, Università degli Studi
di Cagliari, and Assessorato all’Ambiente della Provincia di Nuoro (eds), (1992)
Il Parco del Gennargentu: un’Occasione da non Perdere. Conference proceedings,
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Tomaselli, R. (1977) ‘Degradation of the Mediterranean Maquis,’ in Mediterranean

Forests and Maquis: Ecology, Conservation and Management. Man and Biosphere
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Dilemmas and Strategies in International Conservation. Tucson, AZ: University of
Arizona Press.
WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature, Sezione Regionale Sardegna and Sezione
Gennargentu) (1998) Parco Nazionale del Golfo di Orosei e del Gennargentu:
Facciamo chiarezza. Public document.
Wright, R. and Mattson, D. (1996) ‘The Origin and Purpose of National Parks and
Protected Areas’, in Wright, R.G. (ed.), National Parks and Protected Areas: Their
Role in Environmental Protection. London and New York: Blackwell Publishers,
pp. 3–14.
Zucca, P. (1992) ‘Il Dovere di Opporsi a Operazioni di Colonizzazione’, in Il Parco del
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di Pubblica Amministrazione et al. (eds). Cagliari: EdiSar.
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C HAPTER 7
T HE P ERFORMANCE OF
H ERITAGE IN A R ECONSTRUCTED ,
P OST-A PARTHEID M USEUM IN
N AMIBIA
Ian Fairweather
Introduction
Every Wednesday and Friday a luxury coach leaves the world-famous Etosha
national park in Namibia. Its European occupants have spent the last few days
viewing big game in the park. Their only contact with indigenous Africans
has been with the well-groomed, English-speaking staff at the park’s luxuri-
ous lodges. For most tour operators, the next destination is one of the
well-established tourist attractions in the south of Namibia, but for the occu-
pants of this bus, the next item on the itinerary is to ‘experience the real Africa
close at hand.’
In order to do this they will cross the ‘red line’, a cordon sanitaire into the
communal areas to the north. There, among ‘the beautiful plains of North-
ern Namibia, amidst the makalani palms, mahangu fields and Owambo
homesteads’ (museum publicity leaflet 1997) they will find their destination.
The Nakambale museum is situated 5 km from the tarred road and 8 km
from the town of Ondangwa, in the village of Olukonda. The museum occu-
pies the premises of the first Finnish Evangelical Lutheran mission station in
the region, and its name ‘Nakambale’ comes from the local name for the first
missionary leader, Martti Rautenen. It is supposed to refer to a straw hat he
wore.
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Here the visitors are guided through the physical space of the mission
house, where they view several collections of objects, explained by an English-
speaking Owambo1 guide. They are also taken into the old church and
cemetery and around a ‘traditional homestead’, reconstructed on the site.
More recently the tour has come to include a visit to a local homestead
where they see mahangu (pearl millet) pounding and cooking in progress.
There are also demonstrations of basket weaving and ‘hair making’, the local
term for the creation of elaborate coiffures using plastic hair extensions. After
the tour visitors are given a demonstration of ‘traditional’ dancing, and served
a ‘traditional’ meal in ‘traditional’ Owambo bowls. They are also given the
opportunity to buy woodcarvings from local sellers. Hence visitors are
confronted not just by a collection of objects, but also by a performance that
involves a significant number of local people. Satisfied by their ‘African expe-
rience’ the visitors return to their bus to be taken to their accommodation in
the town of Oshakati. The museum staff, their friends and local people who
have taken part sit down to consume the remains of the ‘traditional’ meal,
before returning home.
What has taken place here is not only a staged performance for the benefit
of the visitors, but a moment of ceremonial interaction in which local bound-
aries are transcended and individuals meet on a kind of imaginary level which
is to some extent shared. Participants, both locals and tourists act out prede-
fined roles that allow the creation of this imaginary space for the exchange of
cultural information.
Nakambale museum is at the forefront of a developing tourism and
heritage industry in North-Central Namibia, aimed at wealthy Europeans
visiting the Etosha national park. Although the main ‘tourism product’ of the
region is its distinctly local culture and ‘traditions’, the discourse of heritage
makes it clear that in order to take part in this arena it is necessary to tran-
scend the local and become part of a ‘regional product’ and a ‘national system’
in order to appeal to a ‘global market’. In Olukonda, the local discourse about
‘tradition’ and its meaning suggested that in the context of a museum and a
developing heritage industry, talking about ‘tradition’ is modern. This chapter
examines the meaning of the categories ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘global’, as well
as terms like ‘traditional’ and ‘cultural heritage’ to the inhabitants of what is
essentially a small rural community in Olukonda.
The Meanings of ‘Heritage’ and the Importance of the ‘Traditional’
In 1992, years after Namibia’s independence, the old missionary church at

Olukonda was restored with the stated intention of ‘keeping the building as
original as possible’ (proposal to the National Monuments Council, Dumeni
1992: 1). In the same year, at the request of Bishop Dumeni the church,
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Heritage in a Post-Apartheid Museum
mission house and cemetery were declared a national monument, because of

their historical importance. The Church council then began restoration of the
mission house in 1995 with the intention of creating a museum so that, in
the words of the local pastor, ‘people could come and see the history of this
place’.2 Once this project was complete, a ‘traditional homestead’ was
constructed which was intended as an ‘open air museum of its own’ (museum
publicity leaflet 1997), in which guests could sample Owambo food and watch
demonstrations of ‘traditional’ activities. It is significant that none of the
people involved in this project saw any contradiction in the idea that a Euro-
pean mission station should be the venue for a museum dedicated to the
preservation of Owambo tradition.
I want to consider the meaning of ‘heritage’ and especially museums in the
local context. It is interesting to note that the upsurge of interest in things
traditional is articulated largely among the members of educated elites.
Furthermore it comes at a time when speakers of Oshiwambo dialects who
trace their roots to the rural north are filling positions of power in the young
nation of Namibia. Despite its modernising, unifying rhetoric, the new
government does not want to be seen as the enemy of traditions and cultural
activities. Even the president, himself an Oshiwambo speaker, and leader of
a party who for forty years have fought under the banner of modernisation
and national unity has recently spoken out about the importance of preserv-
ing Namibia’s cultural heritage.
The preservation of ‘traditions’ and ‘culture’ has ideological dimensions
associated with Namibian nation building. Furthermore the ideological
importance of ‘heritage’ is not new to Namibians who have been exposed to
the ethnic policies of an apartheid regime. Many people are well aware of the
wider implications of identifying one’s self with a particular ‘culture’. A local
official at the Ministry of Basic Education and Culture wrote: ‘In the past
culture was misused and this has left the impression that talking about culture
means talking about invaluable things aimed at separating people’ (Nandi
1994). He refers of course to the apartheid era, when the South African
administration, with the participation of traditional leadership, organised
‘cultural activities’. These activities were seen by many as a means of distract-
ing people from oppression and emphasising cultural divisions between
Namibians.
The Nakambale museum clearly celebrates the arrival of the missionaries
and Christianity, at the same time as seeking to preserve the local customs
and traditions that missionaries are often supposed to have suppressed. The
museum staff and the community manage this tension by reclaiming a colo-
nial history of missionisation as their own. Whilst the museum displays create
a picture of unchanging rural life and tribal organisation into which mission-
aries entered as a dynamic force for change, this sits uncomfortably with the
dress, words and manner of the local people involved. For them Christianity
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Ian Fairweather
is not something externally imposed, but an important aspect of their iden-

tity. In the local context their participation in ‘traditional activities’ in the
museum associates them not with the ‘traditional’ past, constructed in oppo-
sition to Christianity, but with the Christian present. As they perform the
story, Christianity becomes their own property, whilst ‘the traditional’ is put
in its proper place – preserved in the museum.
The villagers of Olukonda, newly emerged from the traumas of apartheid
and war, look hopefully towards the future and the wider world. They
frequently distinguish between the categories of the ‘traditional’ and the
‘modern’, but far from glorifying a precolonial past, they enthusiastically
embrace what we might call the symbols of modernity, from Christianity to
Coca-Cola. In fact, they are reluctant to reminisce about a past that they
describe as a realm of paganism, illiteracy and isolation. Though they are
certainly aware that the museum has the function of preserving things that
might otherwise be forgotten, this is not its primary importance to them.
Rather they are engaged in a continuous process of reconstructing their
culture and the transformation of Nakambale’s house from mission to
museum is an outward expression of this process.
In North-Central Namibia the discourse of modernity is linked, via the
tourism and heritage business, to a heightened concern with objectified and
commoditised notions of ‘tradition’ and ‘culture’. Oshiwambo speakers are in
the process of constructing a meaningful category that they call the ‘tradi-
tional’ in opposition to the ‘modern’. By doing so they are able to place
themselves firmly in the latter category, and the museum is an important part
of this process. Firstly, it serves to circumscribe and contain those aspects of
local identity that are categorised ‘traditional’. Perhaps more importantly
however, this chapter will show that by presenting the story of the commu-
nity’s development into a centre for trade and missionary activity, the museum
celebrates its transition to ‘modernity’.
Owambo ‘traditions’ have been shaped in the course of a long encounter
with Europeans and thus ‘owe their meaning and shape to that encounter as
much as to anything “indigenous”’ (Piot 1999: 1). Furthermore, like the
Kabre of Piot’s study, the people of Olukonda found in the ‘traditional
features’ of their lifestyles a means of entering the modern world. If tourists
come to seek the ‘traditional’, locals welcome them precisely because they
value cosmopolitanism and modernity. This makes for an interesting and
revealing encounter.
The work of Jean and John Comaroff (1993) highlights what they consider
to be a particularly European myth, ‘a narrative that replaces the uneven
protean relations between “ourselves” and “others” in world history with a
simple epic story about the passage from savagery to civilisation’ (Comaroff
and Comaroff 1993: xii). Although the Comaroffs suggest that this story is
one told by Europeans from their own point of view, it is also a story
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frequently told in Namibia, and clearly displayed in the Nakambale museum.3

The idea that modernity is the end point towards which nonwestern societies
move in a teleological fashion may be characteristic of Euro-American social
thought, but for Namibians and Oshiwambo speakers in particular the move-
ment from a ‘traditional’ past to a state of ‘modernity’ is perceived as a reality
to be striven for. Their place in the ‘modern’ world, long promised and strug-
gled towards is perceived to be just around the corner, but in order to
demonstrate when one has reached the state of ‘modernity’, it is necessary to
have a clear understanding of what is ‘traditional’. The category known as
‘modernity’ is thus defined only in contrast to tradition.
The myth of passage from savagery to civilisation is reproduced frequently
in North-Central Namibia, in ways that valorise local people’s participation
in this journey. The Nakambale museum presents a particularly graphic
retelling of this story, which has developed from an interaction between Oshi-
wambo speakers and Finnish missionaries that lasted over one hundred years
and continues in the present day. For this reason, it is a privileged site for an
analysis of the conjunction between global forces and local historical trajec-
tories.4 The buildings of the mission station are in one sense monuments to
the missionary movement that accompanied European colonialism, and the
museum itself is in part produced by the current global interest in heritage
and cultural tourism, but its success is made possible by the specific forms of
interaction that occurred between missionaries and local people at the end of
the nineteenth century, and is currently occurring again between villagers and
tourists, ironically in a space created by the previous interaction, which acts
as a contact point for the present one.
Nakambale Museum publicity states its aim to ‘introduce to the public,
the church, mission and local cultures of the North with respect to both past
and present’ (museum publicity leaflet 1997), thus representing itself as a
cultural centre for the whole region.5 We will see that the Nakambale Museum
is not only a central place in the current domain of tourism, but also a means
through which the community of Olukonda represents itself as being at the
very heart of the former ‘Ovamboland’6 in the past. It does so by emphasis-
ing the role of Nakambale’s church in uniting and modernising the
Oshiwambo speakers as well as connecting them to the outside world.
This is a paradox, for it is not Olukonda’s role as a cosmopolitan centre
from which new ideas diffused into North Namibia that attracts the tourists.
Rather tourists come in search of ‘the real Africa’, the image projected by the
tourism industry of the rural African village, a small, stable, bounded commu-
nity with a homogeneous local ‘culture’ which they can sample. In the domain
of the tourism sector, outsiders move through a landscape populated by ‘locals’
who remain static in both space and time. It is the changeless rural existence
and the continuity of traditions that tourists are supposed to want to see.
Local people are expected to benefit in terms of revenues and employment
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Ian Fairweather
opportunities, but they appear in some sense as exhibits rather than partici-
pants. Despite the necessity of providing this image, people consistently
unseat this notion by their active engagement with the outside world. The
movements of outsiders are important to local people, and not just as a source
of income. The unique history of the area, from the people’s enthusiastic
acceptance of Christianity, to Namibia’s internationally orchestrated transition
to independence has given Oshiwambo speakers an outward-looking perspec-
tive. Not only wealth but also status and prestige in the local context can be
achieved by demonstrating one’s relationships to outsiders, and links to the
wider world. Tourism provides a new opportunity to forge these links, and
for that reason is attracting a lot of attention in North Namibia.
Claiming the Colonial Past
The reclaiming of a colonial past that takes place at Nakambale Museum is

possible because of the particular historical contingencies of colonialism in
North-Central Namibia, and the ambiguities of memory that have allowed
Martti Rautenen, a nineteenth-century Finnish peasant, to become a twentieth-
century Owambo folk hero.
Despite much recent writing encouraging anthropologists to regard their
subjects as active agents of history,7 it is still all too easy to regard colonial-
ism and mission Christianity only as an imposition of the cultural values of
a dominant foreign power upon a purely local culture. Oshiwambo speakers,
however, have never regarded their Christianity in these terms. The people of
Olukonda remember the colonial era in terms of a cleavage between those
who developed a close identification with Finnish mission Christianity and
those who did not. In order to understand how this cleavage came to be such
a powerful social fact we must return to the late nineteenth century, when the
first Finns arrived in the territory then known as Owamboland.
In the mid-nineteenth century, southern Namibia was evangelised by the
London Missionary Society and the Rhenish Missionary Society. The two
societies worked closely together and their outlooks had important similari-
ties. Northern Namibia however was not fully incorporated into the German
colonial polity, and remained a largely autonomous labour reserve. When
Rhenish missionary Hugo Hahn visited Owamboland in 1866 the Owambo
kings were insistent in their demands that he send them missionaries. The
RMS itself lacked the manpower to open up a new field, and so when Hahn
returned to Europe and addressed a gathering of the newly constituted Finnish
Missionary Society, he invited them to come to Owamboland.
The Finnish Mission Society had been formed in 1857 with the aim of
sending Lutheran missions to the Finno-Ugric speakers of northern Russia,
who were linguistically and ethnically related to the Finns, but were practically
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pagan. The Lutheran church had always been implicated in the development
of a Finnish national consciousness and so this aim was consistent with the
emergence of Finnish nationalism, but when the Tsar refused the Finns
permission to preach in Russia, they were left with little choice but to accept
Hahn’s invitation, and the first missionaries arrived in Owamboland in 1871.
The attitudes of Finnish missionaries differed from those of many others.
Unlike British and German missionaries, they had no interest in spreading
their own language in Namibia. Instead they made a great effort to master
local languages. Furthermore they believed that religion should be a matter
of individual choice and that, as in Finland, church and state should coexist
independently. They saw their duty as preaching the word of God and no
more (Du Plessis 1911). The fact that Finns were engaged in a project of
cultural nationalism at home made them very sensitive to issues of culture,
nationality and religion. They saw themselves in one sense as guardians and
protectors of the ‘Owambos’ and their traditional way of life, but at the same
time were ready to denounce most African traditional behaviour as unac-
ceptable and unchristian.
Although missionaries were prepared to defer to kings in all matters that
they considered to be secular, they were increasingly prepared to defy them
in matters of religious conscience. From a local perspective, it was precisely
these matters that constituted the greatest challenge to the king’s authority.
At the same time they offered literacy and education to all who would accept
it and empowered their converts by making them teachers and pastors. This
implicit challenge to a traditional system of authority increasingly weakened
by the encroachment of the colonial power certainly encouraged local accep-
tance of the missionaries’ message.
For Oshiwambo speakers in North-Central Namibia the twentieth century
has seen an unprecedented amount of historical change but their performative8
social order has tended to assimilate itself to historical contingencies so that
‘circumstances [we]re often marked and valued for their differences’ (Sahlins
1985: xii), because they allowed people to reconstruct their social conditions.
The colonial history of North-Central Namibia presents Oshiwambo
speakers with a set of ambiguities. They value its beneficial elements, roads,
schools and hospitals, but the memory of oppression and terror, whilst rarely
brought out into the open, lurks just below the surface. As a forward-looking
people, the tendency is to move on and to think of the past only in terms of
its usefulness today. In the experience of Oshiwambo speakers, it was not their
own traditionalism, but the apartheid state that restricted their access to the
benefits of modernity offered to them by the Finnish mission.9 It was their
party, SWAPO (South West Africa People’s Organisation) that demanded
modernisation, whilst the apartheid regime tried to emphasise tradition.
What does this mean for a heritage industry aimed at preserving
local Owambo traditions? A close look at the heritage movement reveals how
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Ian Fairweather
Oshiwambo speakers are once more incorporating a received idiom into their
own understandings in response to the dilemmas of postcolonial nation build-
ing. Since Owambo history is one of intrusion and domination by Europeans
it is tempting to see current developments, including the heritage movement
itself, as reproducing the dominant European order. Museums after all are a
western cultural idiom that has been incorporated into postcolonial African
societies. ‘It is only recently that peoples or groups, nations and even cities
have felt that to be represented in a museum was to be given recognition as
a culture’ (Alpers 1991: 30).
Alpers argues that museums are conditioned by a particular western way
of seeing that she calls the ‘ritual of attentive looking’. Objects are selected
for visual interest and displayed in ways that transform them by isolating them
from their contexts and offering them up for attentive looking. Therefore not
all cultures lend themselves to representation in a museum since some have
more artefacts of visual interest than others. The Europeans who helped create
the Nakambale Museum had in mind this particular way of seeing and so it
is inherent in the layout of the displays, but that in itself may have a local
significance. Although many objects in the museum are still to be found in
use today, those in the museum are out of context and are regarded by locals
as ‘old things’. As such they are considered to be of interest to foreign visi-
tors, and also legitimate representations of ‘the traditional’.
The museum itself is not only about seeing. It is also a site of ceremonial
performance during which, many objects are encountered in context. With
each visit, the particular version of the past presented by the museum is
enacted, and thus given meaning in the present. Now in a climate of postwar
reconstruction the villagers are taking advantage of this opportunity to reclaim
past events. The tourism and heritage movement gives them an opportunity
to tell history from their own point of view rather than simply reproducing
colonial and postcolonial hegemonic narratives precisely because that history
is performed rather than written.
Media images directed at tourists present racial and ethnic differences as
natural and unchanging characteristics. At the same time they attempt to
rewrite history by projecting current ideals of a unified nation into the past.
These images contrast the ‘traditional’ nature of rural Namibian life with the
modernity and cosmopolitanism of the capital, but despite the images of
rurality and locality projected in the discourse of tourism it is in fact
cosmopolitanism that is celebrated at Nakambale Museum.
The central places on the tourist map are central precisely because they are
where people both local and foreign come together. They are also places
defined by ceremonial performances in which local history and culture are
presented to outsiders. These performances reflect the perceptions of tourism
developers and local people of what tourists want to see, whilst struggling to
conform to the official narrative of Namibian nation building. Nevertheless
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the performances themselves are an opportunity for local people to express

their identities and to portray themselves in the ways in which they want to
be seen. These presentational strategies may conflict with the narratives of
nationalism and cultural tourism being performed, but, at Nakambale, they
are successfully woven together into a complex whole that is meaningful to
both locals and visitors. This is not a conscious subversion, for the perform-
ers at Nakambale museum would not regard their culture as antithetical to
modernity. For them the museum itself serves to demonstrate their history of
successful incorporation of the foreign and new.
The past importance of this place is a source of pride to the people of
Olukonda, and I argue that this comes through in their performances for
tourists at the museum. Whilst they are reenacting a ‘traditional’ past in the
shell of an old colonial building, they are claiming the place, and its poten-
tial to bring in coach loads of outsiders as their own. The museum’s displays
may present a story told through the eyes of the missionaries, but it is precisely
because it celebrates the community’s past links to the rest of the world that
it is a source of pride in the present. If the tourists come to see a presenta-
tion of the local and the traditional, local people want to present the
cosmopolitan and the modern.
The museum performance results from a compromise between the two. This
compromise is made possible because of the different understandings of the
categories ‘traditional’ and modern’ on the part of locals and tourists and the
different meanings attached to the museum itself. The people of Olukonda
refuse to be simply living exhibits in the museum. In fact, after spending a long
time in Olukonda I came to see that from a certain angle it is the tourists who
are on display as local people gather to meet them. When thirty or so tourists
file into a local homestead to see people engaged in ‘daily life’ they find it full
of local visitors who are not interested in the mundanities of millet pounding
and cooking, but in the ‘modernities’ of cosmopolitan social interaction.
Both villagers and tourists are engaged in an encounter with an exotic other
and both bring their own meanings and understandings into play. This opens
up space for what Sahlins might call a ‘creative misunderstanding’ (Sahlins
1985), which confirms and enriches the participant’s sense of agency and indi-
viduality. It does this because both locals and tourists have different
understandings of what is actually taking place. This brings me to the museum
itself and its importance in this compromise, for museums are unequivocal
symbols of modernity. Only those in a position to forget the past have a need
to preserve it. For the villagers there is an obvious continuity between
Olukonda as the centre for the church, and Olukonda as a centre for the
tourist trade, and this comes from a sense of the community’s success in adapt-
ing to change. From the point of view of the people of Olukonda, the museum
represents this success, and this is the underlying impression conveyed in the
museum performance.
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Ian Fairweather
The Museum as a Site of Ceremonial Performance
The performative nature of the regular interactions between local people and
tourists at the Nakambale Museum is particularly striking. Museum tours are
complex communicative events, combining visual displays with verbal and
nonverbal interactions that leave considerable room for improvisation. As
such, no two visits are the same, but all are acceptable versions of the museum
story. There is however a considerable amount of standardisation in these
performances. The displays remain fixed and the tour always takes the same
format. Guides tend to stop at the same points and the similar narrative frag-
ments are inserted in response to particular displays. Tours therefore combine
ritualised repetition with spontaneous performative moments. For this reason
I treat them as ‘ceremonial performances’.
Ceremonial rites and everyday routines are all forms of symbolic practice.
As the Comaroff ’s (1993) observe, applying the study of ritual to mundane
meaningful practice and detaching it from the sacred we allow the possibility
that ritual may be created in practice, transforming rather than reproducing
the environment in which it occurs. These secular rituals or ceremonies can
be seen as vital elements ‘in the processes that make and remake social facts
Figure. 7.1 A plan of the Nakambale Museum showing the route of the guided tour
and highlighting several important stops on the tour (from a handout given to visitors
at the start of the tour)
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and collective identities everywhere’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xvi).

Intricately situated performances like those at the Nakambale museum have
complex historical potential.
The Comaroffs (1993) among others have shown that the ongoing reval-
uation of signs has always been a feature of African creativity. Ritual
innovators have long redeployed colonial introductions including Christian-
ity to ‘craft novel forms of practice, and offer commentaries on African history
as it unfolds’ (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xxii). Most importantly, this has
often been accomplished without written words or texts and the Nakambale
Museum performances accomplish precisely that. The production of new
wealth often depends on appropriating the productive resources of others,
while collaborating to some degree in their authority. Ceremonial perfor-
mances like those at the museum make this possible because they are able to
express ambivalent and ambiguous motives that both contest and confirm
aspects of the dominant orders.
As guardians of collective memory, museums partake of the larger cultural
struggle over conceptions of shared history and ways of speaking about the
past (Katriel 1992: I). Despite their reproduction of the collective master
narrative (Katriel 1992: II), museums provide opportunities for an appropri-
ation and rewriting of this narrative, in the performances of local individuals,
Figure 7.2 Local schoolchildren perform ‘traditional dances’ at the Nakambale

Museum (photograph by Ian Fairweather)
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Ian Fairweather
or the understandings of their audiences. This accounts for the power of the
heritage movement as a means of ‘reconstructing the past and nurturing
cultural roots’ (Katriel 1997: 3). At Nakambale Museum, tourists not only
interact with the guide, but also with the family whose homestead they visit,
the performers of the local dance group, the ladies who cook and serve the
meal, craft sellers and sundry spectators from the community. Although these
interactions are very limited they are a part of the overall performance expe-
rienced by the visitors and as such all these individuals contribute to the
construction of the museum experience.
All museums draw on the cultural assumptions of their makers. Some
elements are emphasised at the expense of others, some truths are asserted and
others ignored (Karp and Lavine 1991: 1). Thus, by its nature the exhibiting
of cultures is a contested terrain. In the present climate of globalisation and
multiculturalism, ‘the inherent contestability of museum exhibitions is bound
to open the choices made in those exhibitions to heated debate’ (Karp and
Lavine 1991: 1). It is usually taken for granted that the role of museum guides
and those who perform reenactments in museum settings is to increase the
visitor’s sense of identification with the museum’s version of the past. The
‘inherent contestability’ of museum displays however suggests the possibility
of simultaneous, multiple interpretations of the past being presented. Museums
can no longer be regarded as objective models of reality, but are better con-
ceived as a ‘forum’ for debating the past (Cameron 1972: 201). If we allow
this possibility we are forced to consider, which version of the past does the
museum performance encourage identification with?
European visitors to the Nakambale Museum come in search of an
encounter with the exotic. The job of the performers and guides is to stimu-
late their interest by bringing the displays to life. They act as mediators
between the world presented in the museum and the world of the visitors,
and the identification they seek to create is a two-way encounter. I have argued
that despite the images of a localised, ‘traditional’ society that attract visitors
to the museum in the first place, Owambo cultural identity has long been
articulated in an ongoing interaction with the global system. The story of
Martti Rautenen’s arrival in Ondonga, and the subsequent conversion of
Oshiwambo speakers to Christianity is an important turning point in that
interaction and is remembered as such by the villagers of Olukonda. It is from
this starting point that local people interpret the museum narrative, as
cosmopolitan citizens of a ‘modern’ world that they share with the visitors.
The museum story thus serves as a way to link visitors to a world that the
locals situate in the past at the same time as it situates locals in the contem-
porary world of independent Namibia.
The museum narrative of progress and civilisation is presented in reverse,
a kind of journey back into a pagan past. On entering, the visitor is imme-
diately confronted with a display of traditional Owambo weaponry, apparently
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setting the scene for our tour, but this first impression is dislocated when we
read that the weapons were donated by the missionary museum in Helsinki,
disturbing our sense of the locality of these items. The contrast is emphasised
when we see that this display stands back to back with one devoted to the
ordination of the first local pastors and is located in a room dedicated to the
‘development of the church’. From the comforting familiarity of contempo-
rary Owambo Christianity we are led into a reconstruction of Nakambale’s
study and through a room filled with items collected from old mission stations:
lanterns, medical instruments, sewing machines and old shotguns. Only in
the last two rooms do we encounter the ‘traditional household’ and ‘tradi-
tional society and livelihoods’. Here the exotic and the unusual are emphasised
in displays of hunting and fishing equipment, ivory and ostrich eggshell
jewellery, wooden statues, gourds and pots. Among all this exotica however
we find the museum shop, selling ‘traditional’ baskets, T-shirts and soft drinks.
The layout of the museum thus contrasts the ‘traditional’ with the ‘modern’
Owambo way of life, but it also charts the rise to importance of the commu-
nity of Olukonda as the centre of the church, and emphasises its current
renaissance as a centre for tourism. The story of missionisation and the
gradual permeation of European ideas into the Owambo way of life can be,
and is, presented as a success story, for the community’s fortunes are linked
intimately with the development of the Lutheran Church.
The museum’s publicity proudly announces that ‘throughout the German
colonial time, it [Olukonda] was the “capital of The North”’ (museum public-
ity leaflet 1997). It became so because of the arrival of Nakambale and the
Finnish missionaries and the museum’s raison d’être is to celebrate this event.
For a time Olukonda became the centre of Christianity, and the arrival of the
missionaries’ ox carts from Swakopmund bringing cargoes from Europe
brought both wealth and prestige to the community. Its importance grew as
Christianity spread until it became a centre not just for the kingdom of
Ondonga, but also for the whole region. At the end of the last century,
Olukonda was the undisputed centre of the rapidly growing Finnish mission
church, which by then spread from Ondonga to the neighbouring kingdoms.
From this centre came the voice of the church’s folk hero, Martti Rau-
tenen or Nakambale, a figure who, according to the stories, was even able to
assert his authority over the kings on occasion. One important stop on the
tour is at the staircase to the attic where visitors are invited to climb up and
experience the stifling heat of the cramped space below the roof. The guide
explains that sometimes, young women would run to the missions to escape
the dreaded Efendula initiation ceremonies for girls.10 Sometimes the girl’s
parents, or even the king, would come to take them home, but Martti Rau-
tenen would hide them in the attic until they could be baptised and thus
exempted from the ceremony. The king, we are told, knew that the girls were
there but he did nothing because he was afraid of Nakambale. The guide who
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Ian Fairweather
tells this story makes it clear that Efendula is as foreign to her as it is to the
visitors, and we are left with a comforting sense of Nakambale’s protective power.
The relationship between the museum displays and the museum perfor-
mance is a multilayered one. The displays and their contexts set the limits for
the performance as well as acting as triggers for performative acts. These acts
are ceremonial in that they are repeated in each performance and are intended
to produce certain meanings. They include the explanatory narratives of the
guides at the various stops along the tour, but also nonverbal performances
like the serving of the meal in Owambo bowls in the reconstructed home-
stead, and the millet pounding and cooking in the ‘real’ homestead. On one
level these acts reaffirm the meanings encoded in the displays themselves –
that is they demonstrate the exotic, ‘traditional’ nature of Owambo society,
but this is not all they do. By elevating the museum story from the level of
visual display to that of personal interaction they serve to render its meaning
more complex.
Local people figure largely in the displays, and especially the photographs,
which come from mission archives and ethnographic collections. However
these present images of ‘natives’, partially clothed, exotic looking and in some
cases posing at different angles for the camera. What is brought into focus by
the arrangement of objects and photographs in the collections is the civilis-
ing mission of the Finnish missionaries. In a report on the Nakambale
museum, Werner Thaniseb, of the National Museum in Windhoek, notes that
the museum presents a ‘very colonial picture’ (Thaniseb 1998: 1). He argues
that the subjectivity of the displays influences the visitors’ understanding of
history, particularly if they are foreigners with little understanding of
Namibia’s past. However the staged performances or ‘ceremonial interactions’
that take place at Nakambale museum allow local people and their audiences
to construct ways of interpreting the displays ‘that do not merely rehearse
traditional western ways of organising experience and that respond imagina-
tively to the presuppositions of visitors not acquainted with the areas involved’
(Karp and Lavine 1991: 7).
That the museum’s displays appear to present a colonial view of Owambo
history is partly a reflection of its stated aim, to celebrate the history of the
church in North-Central Namibia, and partly due to the influence of the
church in its development. Nevertheless the villagers did not seem to feel that
they were engaged in a project which did not do justice to their own under-
standing of the past, or which presented only the views of a colonial minority.
The fact is that, for better or worse, the history of the people of Olukonda
is bound inextricably to that of the Lutheran church and any attempt to disas-
sociate them would lead to misrepresentation. What Thaniseb’s report does
not comment upon is the way that the church’s message is appropriated by
local people in their performances for visitors. It is not by open contestation
or deliberate subversion that local people transform the message encoded in
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Figure 7.3 A reconstruction of Nakambale’s study which forms part of the display
entitled ‘Translating the Bible’ (photograph by Ian Fairweather)
the museum displays. Rather their infectious enthusiasm and obvious enjoy-
ment of the interaction invite the visitor to share their own orientation to the
story of the mission in the north. This is most apparent in the performances
of the guides. Each guide has her own ‘patter’, which is repeated with only
minor changes in each tour. Certain displays are always pointed out and
similar stories told.
Two of the most important displays are situated at the beginning of the
tour. The first, entitled ‘Translating the Bible’ is positioned beside the recon-
struction of Nakambale’s study where the first Oshindonga bible takes pride
of place in a display cabinet surrounded by examples of early literature. The
second is a display board headed ‘Olukonda as the ‘capital’ of Owamboland’,
which bears five old maps showing old travel routes from Swakopmund, the
port that connected colonial Namibia to the rest of the world. On these maps
Olukonda is clearly marked, along with larger towns in the south like Outjo
and Omaruru.
At these points the guide stops and draws her audience’s attention to the
display by dramatically removing a dust cover. In the former case she gestures
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Ian Fairweather
to the reconstructed study and explains that it was here that Martti Rautenen
sat and translated the bible into Oshindonga. The latter display requires
further explanation, describing the old missionary route and the dangers it
involved. The key moment however is when she proudly points out that the
nearby towns of Ondangwa and Oshakati are not marked on the maps,
because at that time they did not exist. In these two examples the guide
invokes a sense of the importance of this place in a historical chain of events
that involved the whole world. Olukonda was quite literally ‘on the map’ with
regard to the spread of Christianity.
These displays present Olukonda as a ‘central place in a nationwide net-
work’ (Werbner 1973), which links it to the international arena. What is being
celebrated here is not just the arrival of the missionaries, but also the arrival
of literacy, and trade with its attendant prosperity, and most of all the incor-
poration of Olukonda into a wider sphere. Interaction with outsiders is
portrayed as a positive thing, in which Oshiwambo speakers actively engaged.
The coming of the missionaries brought the wider world to Owamboland and
with it, literacy, healthcare and a sense of belonging to a larger community.
These were perceived as beneficial by many people and accepted to such an
extent that by the 1920s local headmen were complaining to the native admin-
istration that the numerous bush schools of the Finnish mission were undermining
their authority.
Another strategy employed throughout the tour is what Katriel (1997) calls
‘identification within distance’, a kind of enacted ambivalence to the museum
displays, which seems to convey the performers’ sense of distance from the
objects under scrutiny. A revealing demonstration of this strategy takes place
at a popular stop on the tour in the room entitled ‘Owambo culture’. The
guide points out a display case filled with heavy copper ankle rings and
explains that these were worn by young women when they were betrothed.
The number and size of these rings displayed the wealth of the woman’s fiancé
but, the guide explains in conspiratorial tones, they also made it impossible
for her to walk to the next village to find another husband. In sharing this
information, the guide also shares the European women’s sense of outrage at
this practice. It is clear from her dress and demeanour that this independent,
respectable young woman, employed in an important position, would never
subject herself to this kind of control.
This form of ‘identification within distance’ is employed by all the par-
ticipants in the performance, including those who do not speak. Their
participation in ‘traditional activities’ clearly invites identification, but at the
same time their actions and attitudes convey their own sense of distance from
what is portrayed. This is particularly apparent in the way everyone, the local
‘visitors’ who await the tourists in the local ‘homesteads’, the cooks and even
the children in the ‘traditional dance group’ always wear their best western
clothes for the performance. It is as if the displays of Owambo ‘traditional
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Figure 7.4 Copper anklets, part of a display of ‘Ladies’ Ornaments’ in the section
entitled ‘Traditional Personal Belongings’ (photograph by Ian Fairweather)
culture’ in the museum serve as a kind of background against which contem-

porary Oshiwambo speakers can demonstrate the cosmopolitan nature of their
culture today. Thus even whilst demonstrating their ‘traditional’ culture, local
people enact their own versions of modernity, and demonstrate their own
agency in embracing change.
The impression given is not the unambiguous story presented by the
displays alone for the performers use the objects on display, and the physical
space of the museum to create a kind of collage. The objects and images are
arranged in ways that suggest a changeless tribal society awaiting the advent
of the missionaries in order to become civilised, thus reproducing the colo-
nial myth of passage from savagery to civilisation. The demonstrations, the
dancing and the serving of the meal all call to mind the traditional, but at
the same time bring the performers into contact with a wider world of which
they feel a part. The local staff of the museum, the young dancers and the
‘performers’ who demonstrate ‘traditional’ activities do not feel themselves to
be enacting a story of European words and deeds, but one of their own strug-
gle to become the people they are today. This story includes their acceptance
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Ian Fairweather
of Christianity with its attendant benefits of literacy and healthcare, and their
adoption of European clothing and technologies.
This ritualised performance in its entirety draws the visitors more deeply
into the world of the local participants in which they construct themselves as
a community that has welcomed change. The result is a complex juxtaposi-
tion of present and past, which highlights both contrast and continuity. It
reaffirms villagers’ understandings of themselves as independent actors in
the very act of performing the hegemonic narratives of church and state,
and providing the visitors with the experience of ‘traditional Africa’ they
sought.
Conclusion
This chapter developed from research focussing on issues of identity in a post-

apartheid state by collecting life histories and historical narratives in the
community of Olukonda.11 The intention was to understand how people used
the remembered past to position themselves in relation to the community and
the nation state by analysing the way they expressed their experiences of colo-
nialism, from conversion to Christianity to participation in the liberation
struggle. Most people, however, were reluctant to talk about the past, as if
they did not regard the momentous events of the last century as significant
events in their lives. Instead they wanted to distance themselves from the past,
or to project current realities like Christianity back in time.
Retrospectively it seems that people placed me in their own categories as
a kind of glorified tourist, for is not the traditional object of anthropological
enquiry very similar to the traditional African village that cultural tourism
demands? My questions about the past were projecting my own notions of a
rural, local society caught up in global processes of change onto them, and
they in turn were resisting these notions by emphasising their cosmopoli-
tanism and modernity.
The context of the heritage movement however allowed people to present
the past on their terms rather than mine. To be the object of the anthropol-
ogist’s (or the tourist’s) attention implies being part of a narrow, bounded,
local society. The villagers of Olukonda did not regard themselves as confined
by any such category. In contrast, to be a participant in the tourism industry
is to be part of a translocal phenomenon. To talk about how different things
were in the past is to identify one’s self with the ‘traditional’, whereas to
preserve one’s traditions in a museum is an eminently modern thing to do.
Owambo understandings of heritage unseat the categories of local/global and
traditional/modern. By performing ‘heritage’ for tourists at centres like the
Nakambale Museum local people create links to the wider world and so tran-
scend locality. Furthermore this interaction opens up new ways to express the
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past and to reclaim it for a reconstruction of themselves as ‘modern’ subjects.

It is therefore no paradox to say that in the rural hinterland of post-apartheid
Namibia, the exaggeration of the distinctively local as ‘traditional heritage’
realises cosmopolitanism and the reenactment of the ‘traditional’ expresses
modernity.
NOTES
1. The Owambo people are the largest ethnic group in Namibia today, occupying the North-Cen-
tral region, as well as being dispersed throughout the country. In precolonial times they were
divided into a number of culturally similar but distinct polities or kingdoms. The name
‘Owambo’ was used by colonial officials to refer to the inhabitants of all these polities, but it
remains uncertain that they ever used the term themselves. In post-apartheid Namibia the term
Owambo has political associations with apartheid, and many people prefer the term ‘Oshi-
wambo speakers’. I have tried to use this term also when referring to the people themselves, but
retain the term ‘Owambo’ when referring to objects or abstract entities such as ‘Owambo cul-
ture’. This also reflects local usage.
2. Personal conversation with Rev. Johannes Mvula, pastor of Olukonda, November 1998.
3. The Nakambale museum was the most important site in which I conducted my fieldwork. I
stayed there for a total of eighteen months between November 1997 and September 2000 and
was able to witness its development from a small-scale attraction, catering mainly for those with
an interest in the Lutheran Church, into one of the most important tourist attractions in
North-Central Namibia.
4. The Comaroffs call for analyses that ‘do justice both to the global forces that have driven the
colonial and postcolonial histories of large parts of Africa and ‘the specific local and cultural
conditions, conjunctures and indeterminacies have imparted to distinct African communities
their own particular histories’ (Comaroffs 1993: xii). The regular performances at Nakambale
Museum are unwitting attempts to do exactly this.
5. At the time of writing it was the only fully operational tourist facility attempting to present
‘Owambo culture’ in the north, but many more were in the planning stages, including a cen-
trally located ‘museum of the seven kingdoms’, referring to the seven traditional Owambo poli-
ties within present-day Namibia. The management of Nakambale Museum were already
making plans to meet this challenge to their hegemony.
6. The discourse of tourism has potentially far-reaching implications, particularly in its insistence
upon treating former Ovamboland as a single unit, the ‘cultural heartland of Namibia’ (Denker
and Schalken 1998). The past existence of ‘Owamboland’ is treated as unproblematic but it has
no official existence under present circumstances outside the discourse of tourism since it does
not correspond to any sociopolitical reality that is publicly recognised. It is however roughly
contiguous with the ‘traditional realm’ (Werbner 1977) of the Evangelical Lutheran Church,
which was established and had its first regional headquarters at Nakambale’s mission in
Olukonda.
7. See for example Sahlins 1985 or Comaroff and Comaroff 1992.
8. I use the notion of a performative culture in Sahlins’ sense, which is to say that, culture is cre-
ated in the course of the daily interaction between the ideal cultural order and the actual lives
of ordinary people. During this interaction the received meanings of persons and things are
applied to actual persons, their practical projects and social arrangements. In so doing they are
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Ian Fairweather
subjected to a process of continuous reevaluation. Relationships are continually made out of

practice, so that culture reproduces itself in a flexible way. As Sahlins observes,’The more it stays
the same the more it changes’ (Sahlins 1985: 31).
9. In the 1930s the South African administration came into direct conflict with the Finnish Mis-
sion Society over the issue of native education, resulting in the closure of most of the bush
schools operated by the mission. Space does not allow me to discuss this conflict in detail here
but I have dealt with it at length elsewhere (Fairweather 2004).
10. Efendula ceremonies were by no means dreaded by everyone, and still take place today in some
villages, but in Olukonda they would seem out of place. The way this story is told surrounds
them with an aura of fear and superstition.
11. This research was conducted for my Ph.D. thesis in Social Anthropology, presented at the Uni-
versity of Manchester in July 2001. It was funded by the Economic and Social Research Coun-
cil and involved eighteen months’ fieldwork in Olukonda, Northern Namibia (see Note 1
above).
REFERENCES
Alpers, S. (1991) ‘The Museum as a Way of Seeing’, in Karp, I and Lavine, S. (eds),
Exhibiting Cultures: the Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC
and London: Smithsonian Institute Press.
Cameron, D. (1972) ‘The Museum: a Temple or a Forum’, Curator, 14(1),
pp. 11–24.
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L. (1992) Ethnography and the Historical Imagination.
Boulder, Westview Press.
Comaroff, J. and Comaroff, J.L. (eds) (1993), Modernity and Its Malcontents: Ritual
Power in Postcolonial Africa. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Denker, H and Schalken, W. (1998) Tourism Survey in the Four ‘O’ Regions. Windhoek:
NNEP with NACOBTA.
Dumeni, K. (Bishop) (1992) Letter to the National Monuments Council, Republic of
Namibia, 10 February, 1992 (unpublished).
Du Plessis, J. (1911) A History of Christian Missions in South Africa. London:
Longmans.
Fairweather, I.S. (2001) Identity Politics and the Heritage Industry in North Central
Namibia. University of Manchester, Unpublished Ph.D. thesis.
–––––– (2004) ‘Missionaries and Colonialism in a Postcolonial Museum’, Social
Analysis, 48(1), pp. 16–32.
Karp, I. and Lavine, S. (eds) (1991) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of
Museum Display. Washington, DC and London: Smithsonian Institute Press.
Katriel, T. (1997) Performing the Past: a Study of Israeli Settlement Museums. London:
Lawrence Erlbaum.
Nandi, D. (1994) ‘Working towards a Cultural Rejuvenation’, New Era, 27 Jan.–2 Feb.
Piot, C. (1999) Remotely Global: Village Modernity in West Africa. Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press.
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Sanders, T. (2000) ‘Rain Witches in Tanzania.’ Paper presented to the Slatterthwaite

Colloquium, April 2000 (unpublished).
Sahlins, M. (1985) Islands of History. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.
Schildkrout, E. (1995) ‘Museums and Nationalism in Namibia’, Museum Anthropology,
19(2), pp. 65–77.
Thaniseb, W. (1988) The Nakambale Museum, Olukonda. Report for the National
Museum, Windhoek (unpublished).
Werbner, R.P. (ed.) (1977) Regional Cults. London: Academic Press.
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C HAPTER 8
H AUNTED A RT: V ISITING AN
E XHIBIT IN W EIMAR 1
Barbara Wolbert
Introduction
The art exhibit ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’2 caused a great stir in Germany
in 1999. This exhibit was one of the events of the cultural pilgrimage to
Weimar during its regency in 1999 as Cultural Capital of Europe.3 The small
Thuringian town, with an average of a million tourists a year (Gerlach 1992:
20), attracted seven million visitors that year (Jacobsen 1999; see also Frank
1999 and Roth et al. 1999). The reactions to this exhibit, which took place
in a museum and a hall that functioned for the first time as an exhibition
site, motivated me to rethink Carol Duncan’s concept of the art museum as
a ritual of citizenship (Duncan 1995). My analysis of the Weimar exhibit will
explore Duncan’s understanding of the museum and the limits of the role she
allots to the visitor.
Unlike any other art show in Germany in that year, ‘Rise and Fall of the
Modern’ drew enormous public attention. Altogether about 1,500 articles,
comments, and reports on this show have been published in the press alone
(Baake 2000: 305). The exhibit was covered not only in the regional press but
also in the major German tabloids, newspapers, and weeklies.4 Even The New
York Times reported on it.5 Strangely enough, the Weimar exhibit was – in
one breath – compared to ‘defamation ... in the Nazi time’,6 seen as ‘a “scan-
dalous relapse” into the Cold War era’,7 and understood as ‘an expression of
the West German victor’s mentality’.8
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Haunted Art: Visiting an Exhibit in Weimar
A number of artists wanted to withdraw their paintings from the show.

One of the lenders to the exhibit, a Leipzig bank, was successful in pulling
out a piece.9 A fistfight even erupted between two artists and one of the cura-
tors when the latter tried to prevent the artists from taking down their works.
He became violent and then left the site. This happened half an hour before
the visit of Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands was expected (Tannert 1999).
Another artist sued and the art show became an issue to be dealt with in two
courts.10 A couple of weeks after the opening, more than thirty works that
had been in the show were no longer on display.11
The exhibit took place in two buildings, had three curators, and consisted
of three parts, each covering a certain period of time.12 The first part, on
display in the castle, focussed on the beginning of the twentieth century. The
second and third parts, both set up in the hall, presented the period from 1933
to 1945 and the time between the end of the war and unification, respec-
tively. It was the third part, entitled ‘Official/Un-official: The Art of the
GDR’,13 that caused the great stir.14 With 110,000 visitors, it drew a larger
audience than the other two parts.15 A team of students and graduates of the
local university, Bauhaus-Universität, had prepared this part of the exhibit.
The team was led by Achim Preiss, an art historian, trained in North Rhine-
Westphalia, and since 1993 a professor of history of architecture in the
university’s Department of Design, who was for the first time entrusted with
an exhibit of considerable size and prominence.16 At some point in the
summer it even seemed likely that the exhibit would be forced to close its
doors early. The high cost of precautions that had to be taken to preserve the
paintings in a hall that had never before been used as exhibition space were
given as the reason, when in fact the second and third parts of the show, which
were supposed to stay open until November, were closed down as early as in
September (Wershoven 2000: 35).
But was the art of the GDR really the main issue? Did the debate the
exhibit initiated actually reveal a deep gap between East and West German
views? How did this exhibit address German politics almost a decade after
unification?
The problems of the exhibition were, as it seemed, all embodied in a circu-
lar wall called ‘The Panorama’.17 This wall surrounded the centre space of the
exhibition hall containing paintings from GDR art collections. These paint-
ings were loans from the Weimar Art Collection, the Saxony Art Fund, the
German History Museum in Berlin, which had inherited the GDR Museum
for History, the collection of the Combine Maxhütte near Saalfeld, and from
the documentation centre Burg Beeskow, a depot for artworks that had
belonged to dissolved GDR enterprises.18
According to the first court’s sentence, the lighting, the hanging, as well as
the display material were intolerable. The paintings were hung in irregular,
narrow distances, side by side and one on top of the other. They were arranged
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Barbara Wolbert
neither by collection, motif or style nor chronologically. This, as it was argued,

did not allow the paintings to receive individual attention, but created the
impression that this art is a ‘mass product’.19 Moreover, the material used as
covering for the exhibition walls, a grey plastic film, also used for trash bags,
was deemed to devalue the paintings.20
A title page of the regional magazine Weimar Kultur Journal visualised the
nervous debate of that summer. This magazine cover shows two identical
views of the wall in question, two copies of the same picture, both enlarged
to the same size. They were digitally manipulated in different ways: in one of
the pictures, the wall is left blank and appears as a white background behind
the paintings; in the other one, the grey plastic film and the beams of the
spotlights are visible but the fields within the frames of the artworks are left
blank.21
When the press did address other sections of the exhibit, they contrasted
these to the rotunda to prove that the display of the GDR art was ‘derogatory’
and ‘disgusting’.22 When I saw the exhibit, I was therefore surprised that, as I
will demonstrate, the display of the rest of the exhibit was not any less ques-
tionable. Why then did the majority of the journalists focus only on the third
part of the exhibit? Why did the critique centre especially on the display in
the rotunda and why was this wall depicted in every second illustrated article?
The Sites
To understand this exhibit and the debate it launched, which indeed uncov-
ers politically significant sensitivities in Germany ten years after the fall of the
Wall, we have to go beyond the limitations of the debate mentioned above
and analyse the exhibit’s spatial setting.
Weimar is situated between Frankfurt and Dresden, in the western part of
former East Germany. As home to Goethe and Schiller,23 the founding place
of the first German Republic,24 and the town in walking distance from the
concentration camp Buchenwald,25 it is itself a politically vexing place. The
exhibit made visitors tour significant places of this political trajectory of
Weimar. They started at a classic site, the castle, rebuilt after a fire in 1774
under Goethe’s supervision,26 and since 1923 a museum.27 Just as the Louvre,
which Carol Duncan (1991: 89–90) sees as a ‘prototype’ of a national art
museum inviting one to a ritual of citizenship, this provincial museum is built
upon the collection of a regent, here the Grand Duke, that was housed in his
residence. This art collection, which was accessible to the public and later,
during the Weimar Republic, turned into a museum, can also be seen as a
secular temple defining local and national identity.
To continue viewing the exhibit the visitors walked to a so-called ‘Multi-
Purpose Hall’, the second exhibition site. This hall borders the largest square
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in Weimar, Karl August Allee (Karl August Avenue), named after the Duke
who was Goethe’s contemporary. This name strives not only to gloss over the
location’s earlier saints but also to whitewash the character of a space that had
been named Adolf Hitler Platz (Adolf Hitler Square). During the American
military government of Thuringia, before the Americans exchanged control
over this part of Germany for a share of Berlin, the square was renamed Karl-
Marx-Platz. Today, this square, which had been planned for rallies at the
Gauforum (Loos 1995: 341–42), is a parking lot. The hall itself remained an
incomplete, indestructible, and unused skeleton with a hoarding façade (Loos
1995: 345) until 1967, when it was converted into depot, office, and produc-
tion space. At this time, lamellas were attached on the outside, which give the
building a vertical structure; an annex, equipped as a cafeteria, was added;
and the interior of the hall was divided into storeys. Because commodities
from the West, which played a crucial role in the GDR’s currency politics and
economic strategies, were stored in this building, it was under special obser-
vation by the state’s security police (Wirth 1999: 47).28
Originally planned as Halle der Volksgemeinschaft 29 the building was part
of the Gauforum designed by Hitler’s architect Giesler (see Korrek 1996; Loos
1995; Wirth 1999; Wolf 1996). Even though Hitler had been passionate
about erecting such representational administrative complexes in many other
places as well, Weimar was the only NS-Gauhauptstadt – capital of a National
Socialist administrative region – where a structure of this kind was actually
realised.30 Astonishingly, in the mid-1990s, the Gauforum became a postcard
motif promoting the Cultural-Capital-of-Europe project (Loos 1995: 333).
This building, referred to as ‘Multi-Purpose-Hall’, represented thus by no
means a neutral space.
The hall as remaining product of Nazi Germany recalls German engage-
ment in National Socialist politics in Weimar, Thuringia, and most other
towns and regions. As a construction for the first time in use in the late 1960s,
its appearance is a result of East German design and it is a reminder of the
GDR centralised economy and the surveillance of GDR citizens. As part of
the castle, the art gallery refers to Weimar as a place of the German classic and
to the feudal order and federal structure in Germany’s past. As a museum, the
art gallery reminds one of democratic achievements and republican institutions.
These two different locations, the hall and the gallery, which incorporate
the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century Germany, the visitors’ oblig-
atory procession from gallery to hall, and the title of the exhibit ‘Rise and
Fall of the Modern’, which forebodes tragedy, are crucial when trying to
understand the extreme reactions to the show. As already mentioned before,
Carol Duncan (1991: 90–91, 1995: 7–20) and others have compared a visit
to a museum to a ritual.31 The visitors stride – as they did here – through a
definite and structured space, which gives their visit the form of a passage.
This anthropological concept, borrowed from Arnold van Gennep and Victor
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Barbara Wolbert
Turner, defines the experience principally as a transformative one.32 It is this

transformative potential of a visit to a museum that is of interest to us when
we investigate the causes of the extreme reactions. This study of ‘Rise and Fall
of the Modern’ will follow Duncan’s idea of the museum as a site of ‘civiliz-
ing rituals’ (1995) in order to explore whether this exhibit and the reactions
to it touched sensitive issues in the German nation-building processes almost
a decade after unification. However, dealing with two different museum envi-
ronments, an art museum and an exhibition site that is neither a museum nor
a traditional place for royal or clerical treasures, this case study will question
Duncan’s concept of the museum and take her ideal visitor to task.
Focussing on the museum site, Duncan analyses the museum’s history
and its purpose. She describes the building, its space, and its interior and
interprets the message they contain. She sees not only a ‘stage’ inscribed into
the museum space but a ‘script’ (1995: 12) or narrative – a concept adopted
by scholars in museum studies.33 This script refers to the interconnectedness
of elements in an exhibit that lends meaning to the ensemble and presumes
visitors who read it.34 However, according to Duncan (ibid.), visitors can
‘misread’ the narrative or ‘resist the museum’s cues’ and ‘actively invent,
consciously or unconsciously, their own programs’. My criticism of Duncan’s
understanding of the visitor’s role is not grounded in the fact that her work
is not based on interviews with visitors or on observations of visitors’ behav-
iour. It is based on her disregard of the actual relationship between curator
and visitor: not only does she interpret the exhibit exclusively from
the museum’s view, but her concept of the museum identifies a site with an
institution and an institution with the curator. By calling the museum
the ‘impresario, or more strictly a regisseur’ (Duncan 1995: 12), she person-
ifies the museum and idealises the curator. The museum setting is, according
to Duncan, a structure ‘that constructs its personae dramatis’ (Duncan 1995:
13). She explains that these characters, the visitors, ‘are, ideally, individuals
who are perfectly predisposed socially, psychologically, and culturally to
enact the museum ritual’ (ibid.). However, it is not only her concept of the
ideal visitor, but her implicit idealisation of the curator that I want to throw
into relief. The curator handles the ‘sacra’ (Turner 1967: 103–108) –
artworks and other treasures as well as display elements – and prepares the
ritual ground. Thus, the curator prescribes the narrative and the visitor
pays, more or less consciously, attention to it. In the case of ‘Rise and Fall
of the Modern’ it is not enough to understand the curator’s narrative. Here,
we have to consider the question of agency. Moreover, we also have to study
the visitor’s story independently. Furthermore, we need to reexamine
the museum space and investigate the limits of a museum’s institutional
authority.
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A Visit
To compare the disputed display with the rest of the exhibition design and
to analyse the narrative I would like to invite you on the tour you might have
taken as a visitor to the exhibit in summer 1999.35 Let’s cross the castle’s court-
yard, pay the admission fee, and walk up the marble stairs. A ticket check and
we are on the first of two floors of the first part of the exhibition trilogy. We
should not miss looking at the unlighted back of an exhibition wall placed in
the foyer on the second floor. There we see a series of pictures by the local
court photographer that contextualise the ambivalent history of modern art
in Weimar.36 In the adjoining rooms, we learn that, while still rejected in
Wilhelmenian Berlin, neoimpressionists like Paul Signac and Georges Seurat
were already exhibited in Weimar. We are introduced to German artists like
Paul Baum, Carl Herrmann, and Christian Rohlfs, who were inspired by their
French colleagues. Their views of Weimar and its surroundings are presented
in the show.37 Then we become acquainted with the metropolitan Graf
Kessler, who presented these paintings to Weimar’s permanent art collection,
which was still dominated by the naturalist Weimar School of Painters
(Scheidig 1971). Graf Kessler motivated modern artists, Edvard Munch for
Figure 8.1 A view of the courtyard of the castle, which hosts the Weimar art collec-
tion and, in summer 1999, the exhibit ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999
(photograph by B. Wolbert)
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Barbara Wolbert
Figure 8.2 A view of the display of Graf Kessler’s portrait by Munch in the castle.
‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)
example, the author of a portrait of Kessler, which was displayed in the

exhibit, to come to Weimar.38 We learn that Kessler’s activities were not unan-
imously appreciated and that eventually he was forced to resign from his
honorary post as the director of the Grand Duke’s art collection.39
Let us take a second look at the display wall with Kessler’s portrait! It blocks
a door without entirely covering it. Was this intended? Did the designer see
this as a way to emphasise Graf Kessler’s appearance rather than Munch’s
painting? Looking at the middle-school poster-board type of display on the
wall with Kessler’s portrait, we may doubt that the people in charge were
professionals who were aware of the effects of their display decisions. The
means of other instructional displays – computer printouts and glue, and a
pathetic easel holding a poster board – seem to confirm our conjecture.
However, the square hole that allows us to see the painting on one of the walls
behind the exhibition wall makes us realise that it was indeed a curator’s and
designer’s ambition that was responsible for this display. But the weak light-
ing and clumsy overlay of a temporary onto a permanent exhibit in mostly
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Figure 8.3 An exhibition wall with a painting by Rohlfs, depicting a Weimar street,
and an opening that allows a view of the paintings from the permanent collection on the
wall behind it. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)
narrow rooms and hallways make it difficult to actually see either display, the
paintings from the permanent collection or the paintings brought together for
this show. The introduction to the catalogue by Rolf Bothe, the director of
the Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, who was together with his cocurator
Thomas Föhl, the associate director of the museum in the castle, responsible
for this part of the show, provides an explanation. The catalogue explains that
the choice of the site and the decision not to remove the paintings and the
furniture should demonstrate ‘the contrasts and parallels between the courtly
society and the democratic new art’ (Bothe 1999: 9–10). But because of the
flaws of the display this objective was not achieved. Rolf Bothe also mentions
the scarcity of local exhibition space as the reason for the decision to overlay
paintings (ibid.). However, this decision compounded the display problems
even further.
On the third floor, where the exhibition about the history of modern art
in Weimar is continued, we do not find this overlay but here, too, the light-
ing is poor. The narrative of this section which deals with the local history of
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Barbara Wolbert
modern art after World War One repeats the story line of the first narrative:
we learn that when the castle as residence had become a museum accommo-
dating the temporarily public art collection, its first director, Wilhelm Köhler,
devoted a central position to the works of Feininger, Klee, and Kandinsky.
We are then told about the ban on modern art in Weimar: anticipating the
art politics of 1937 as early as 1930, the first National Socialist to occupy a
governmental post, Thuringia’s minister of education, supported by the local
press, forced Köhler to replace these works with pieces classified as ‘German’
art.40 As we leave the museum in the castle, we understand a lot about art
and politics, European art connections and national restrictions, and federal
leeways and local power plays.
We now leave the castle and after a short walk reach our next station, the
Multi-Purpose Hall. Huge letters, white on black, spell the exhibition’s title,
‘Art to the People – The Adolf Hitler Collection’41 horizontally on the facade.
To enter the hall we walk through a foyer and pass a series of photographs
attached to panels flanking the entrance of the exhibition hall. This display
appears like snapshots for sale, quickly put up in a photographer’s window
after a public ceremony: while passing by the window, the participants in these
Figure 8.4 A view of a part of the Gauforum complex with the annex building
of Multi-Purpose Hall and a banner of the exhibit’s second part ‘Art to the People –
The Collection Hitler’. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by
B. Wolbert)
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events would have checked if they had been in any of the photos and, if so,
they would have ordered a copy. This was most likely also the way these
pictures by Ella Beyer-Held, the daughter of the local court photographer, had
been on display in the Weimar studio in 1930, after she had taken these
pictures of Nazi parades and festivities in Weimar.42 Many of the photographs
depict women and men marching and leaders carrying signs. One of the signs
reads Fachgruppe Bildende Kunst, indicating that this is a group of politically
organised artists. Who were these artists? How did they understand their
work? How did they become involved in Nazi politics? Questions like these
the exhibit will not answer. It contains nothing more than 120 paintings, a
selection of Hitler’s collection.43 The display allows us to look at each picture
from every conceivable distance and angle, but it does not offer any insights
into either art politics in Weimar during the Nazi regime or Hitler’s relation
to art. The Weimar story, the prehistory of Nazi seizure of power as seen
through the lenses of the local art world, is not told.44 The omission of this
story trivialises fascism, rendering it harmless. The two curators of this part
of the exhibit, Thomas Föhl and Achim Preiss, avoided any explicit comment.
Yet they arranged the paintings tamely and tacitly according to topics and
thus legitimised their claim to realism. In the catalogue, Achim Preiss explains
his efforts to make this part of the exhibit appear more acceptable: works of
better technical quality were selected for the show and landscapes were under-
represented in their numbers, because more of these would have appeared ‘too
dull, banal, and boring’.45 He rationalises the fact that pieces showing Nazi
emblems, for the most part in U.S. archives, could be neglected here, since
they would ‘in terms of style not represent specifically national socialist art’.46
He concludes, ‘...the collection is on the whole more mediocre and banal than
this exhibit’ (Preiss 1999a: 407). In other words, these curatorial decisions
made Hitler’s collection classier and distracted from its full banality. Preiss
proudly emphasises that these paintings, discovered in an Austrian cavern and
stored in Munich, were now, for the first time, available to the public in such
large numbers (ibid.). However, the pictures seem to have been here forever.
The display alludes to an art depot, although an actual depot would look quite
different. The slanted boards seem to allow the works to rest. Rather than
seeing these pictures pulled out into the scrutiny of daylight, we come in to
share their space. And it is certainly an intimate encounter with Hitler’s trea-
sures. Visiting Hitler’s collection is of course not necessarily an appreciation,
but it does imply acknowledgement.
Now we have to exit, because the entrance to part three is outside, at the
south side of the same building. We enter through the building’s top floor
after climbing a ramp, which is covered with a blue tarp with huge yellow
letters attached to the hall. The inscription reads – ironically in an upward
stroke – ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern: Official/Un-Official: The Art of the
GDR’.47 The improvised entrance is framed with partly torn and faded posters
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Barbara Wolbert
Figure 8.5 A view of the presentation of Hitler’s art collection on the first floor of
the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photograph by
B. Wolbert)
Figure 8.6 A view of paintings, a.o. by Schult, from Hitler’s art collection on the first
floor of the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999 (photo-
graph by B. Wolbert)
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Figure 8.7 A view of the ramp leading to the entrance of the exhibit’s third part
‘Official/Unofficial: The Art of the GDR’. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999
of the exhibit.48 We pass through the doors, which do not augur well, and
find ourselves in a huge hall. But before we have a chance to look at any
painting in the hall, we are whisked into a makeshift gallery with low ceil-
ings. Inside, the small formats and objects recall exhibitions in school
hallways. We learn about the reintroduction of Bauhaus ideas at the local
college of art and about their modifications according to the educational and
economic politics at the end of the 1940s.49 Then, finally, we are released into
the hall with the GDR art. As far as the eye can see: monumental paintings
on the right and small formats – documentary photographs – lined up in
a neon-lit showcase set into the wall on the left. We are overwhelmed by
the colours of the celebrated German Democratic Republic and the greys of
the real East Germany. No background information. No comment. The large
paintings, some of them triptychs, sit on the concrete, leaning against
the wall.50 Unlike Hitler’s pictures, which kept their prestigious frames, these
canvases are deprived of their original trimming and framed in heavy strips
of cheap, unfinished wood. Vent’s ‘People at the Beach’,51 Heisig’s ‘Ikarus’,52
Neubert’s ‘Yesterday and Today’,53 Willi Sitte’s ‘The Red Banner – Struggle,
Pain, and Victory’54 and all the other paintings had been exhibited in the
Palast der Republik before it closed down. But here they are not really exhib-
ited. They do not look like being stored either. Rather they appear as if they
have just been taken down.
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Barbara Wolbert
Figure 8.8 A view of ‘the curve’ with paintings from the Palace of the Republic in
Berlin by Vent, Heisig, Neubert, and Sitte in the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of
the Modern’ Weimar 1999 (photograph by B. Wolbert)
This is the very point of transition for the visitors. They become engaged.
They don’t want to repeat a historical mistake. Isn’t this exactly what the
curator’s dramaturgy has prescribed for them at this point? They have by now
passed ‘The Curve’ – as this section is called – and are dismissed into the
rotunda. The visitors should now finally be prepared to realise the banality of
the pictures painted at the behest of the Party and the State. They should be
ready to share the curator’s idea of ‘three styles of the Anti-Modern of the
twentieth century: the academic-conservative art …the image production of
the National Socialism …[and] the Socialist Realism’ (Preiss 1999b: 10).
But they might finally refuse to follow the curator’s narrative trajectory!
They might even want to say something! They might write entries in the
guestbook.55 Journalists from all parts of Germany respond with articles. They
portray the curator as arrogant Wessi and engage in protecting the GDR
artists. Artists whose works are displayed feel betrayed and try to detach them-
selves from this show. Representatives of institutions react as well: The
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts declares the exhibit a defamation of
GDR art.56 The Artists’ Association encourages an artist to bring a lawsuit on
behalf of a group of colleagues and funds the suit. Thuringian politicians, its
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Minister of Culture for example, hurriedly distance themselves from this

Cultural Capital project.57 Even the President of the German Parliament,
Wolfgang Thierse, raises his voice in protest.58
Let us follow the visitors who did not engage in such public action. When
they enter the rotunda, they realize that there is only one small triangular
section left to be toured. This section, called ‘The Wedge’ contains mostly
abstract paintings representing, as announced in the title, the ‘Un-official’.
Knowing that they have almost finished their tour, they can now take the time
to walk along the wall or to rest on one of the many plastic garden chairs and
look around the rotunda.59 They might attempt to figure out if there is any
plan to the hanging. They might compare the paintings, and – as trained
consumers – pick and choose which ones, as they might say, ‘are actually not
so bad’. They might recall commentaries about the exhibit they have heard
on the radio or read in the newspaper and make up their own minds. But
despite the much criticised presentation, these paintings receive a lot of indi-
vidual attention, definitely not any less than the works of Seurat, Munch, or
Feininger presented in the dark of the castle.
I want to finish our tour at this point. No one was able stay very long,
since there was an acrid stench in this hall that was simply overpowering.
Figure 8.9 A view of ‘the panorama’ with garden chairs and paintings from GDR
collections in the Multi-Purpose Hall. ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’, Weimar 1999
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Barbara Wolbert
Imaginary Witnesses
Many visitors, both journalists and tourists, perceived the exhibit as a provoca-
tive display. Rather than sharing the curators’ additive concept of a series of
three versions and periods of anti-modernism in a contemplative mood, they
found themselves in a politically explosive situation. They started their tour
in the Weimar art collection. The ennobled spirit of this museum space and
the authority of art history purified the actually disturbing display of that part
of the show.60 The audience followed the curatorial narrative about the lost
battle of modern artists and their sponsors. The visitors were reminded that
the works of expressionists and other modern artists had been removed
without rousing considerable protest. This narrative reinforced German pity
and shame about the past and, at the same time, reclaimed the expelled paint-
ings as part of the legitimate Weimar and German heritage. This art museum,
borrowing Duncan’s words, ‘gives citizenship and civic virtue a content
without having to redistribute real power’ (Duncan 1991: 94). Here, we found
a museum which allowed for a ritual of citizenship to happen. Its visitors
resembled Duncan’s ideal visitors. Then the visitors had an unexpected inti-
mate encounter with Hitler’s favourite pictures. When entering the
Multi-Purpose-Hall, most visitors will have remained in receptive mode. After
all, they were just seeing another part of the same exhibit, again under the
direction of the same museum. We could say that part two functioned like a
trap because, at this point, the visitors, who had entered this exhibit as faith-
ful museum audiences, were no longer in the sphere of influence of a
museum’s purifying forces. Although Hitler’s collection actually belongs, since
1998, to a museum, the German History museum, in the Multi-Purpose Hall
the objects were not marked and framed as a national museum’s property.61
Furthermore, in spite of its use for exhibition purposes, the hall was not conse-
crated as a museum.62 Just the opposite, it was a space haunted by the ghosts
of the Nazis. Here, these ghosts, so carefully locked away in the Buchenwald
monument, surfaced suddenly in the town of Weimar.
This exhibition site thus worked like a time machine. The visitors lost the
safe distance that the museum guarantees through its institutional authority.
They became spectators. Hitler’s intact collection turned works and viewers
into contemporaries. After the tour of art’s suffering, having dragged them-
selves up the ramp63 again into this scary house, like pilgrims doing the
stations of the cross, the visitors had finally become highly sensitised. Viewing
the paintings produced in GDR times represented for most of them a first
immediate encounter or the first public reencounter after unification. With
the lesson about Klee’s, Feininger’s, and other artists’ works being removed
without rousing considerable protest – this embarrassing constitutional part
of national history – still on their minds, how could the visitors not be sublim-
inally affected by the confrontation with pictures that were sitting on the
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floor? They might have felt as if they were forced to silently partake in the
act of ‘taking down’ paintings by GDR artists. Of course, a taking-down has
never occurred in this place. One of the press articles mentions that the exhi-
bition walls would not even have been strong enough to support the heavy
paintings (Stadler 1999). Whether deliberately or not, the positioning of the
paintings evoked memories of the places from which they had in fact been
removed. This particular section of the Multi-Purpose Hall thus re-placed the
Gallery in the Palace of the Republic, one of the many places that are, phys-
ically or symbolically, no longer accessible. The Palace of the Republic, for
example, housed the East German Parliament and functioned, at the same
time, as a popular cultural and gastronomical centre, where people went to a
concert, ate out or danced. The building also provided space for an art gallery.
After unification, this building was closed down. A seemingly endless debate
ensued as to whether it should be torn down or reconstructed and reopened.
After the Palace was closed, the paintings had been transferred to the archive
of the German Historical Museum. In the Weimar exhibit, these paintings
were once again presented to the public, alas, with their backs to the wall.
Hence, a dearrangement was enacted in Weimar. In other words, it was not
the paintings from the Palace that were on display but a humiliating gesture.
The memory of acts of political violence against artists, whose works were no
longer appreciated by the newly established curators and museum directors,
was evoked, but not controlled by the director of this stage. Thus a lieu de
mémoire (Nora 1989) generated the public outcry.64
Why then did the critics of the exhibition seem to disregard the huge paint-
ings leaning against the wall? Why did everybody point to the grey plastic film,
the lighting, and the hanging? In this respect, the visitors had indeed followed
the curator. He and his team had prepared the ‘ritual ground’ by means of a
floor plan.65 They themselves had in fact directed the visitors’ anger toward the
‘panorama’ wall. They had constructed the section with the paintings leaning
against the wall as a ‘curve’, as a passage, which leads to the ‘panorama’. They
had thus created a forum, a place for confession and protest. To the curator’s
dismay the visitors’ criticism hit the walls and not the paintings.
The fact that parts two and three of the exhibit were only organisationally
authorised as a museum initiative is crucial here. The absence of such an insti-
tutional framework leaves the curator in a position unforeseen in Carol
Duncan’s concept of the museum as ritual of citizenship. Visitors do read the
curator’s narrative only more or less correctly, as Duncan admits. But not only
do the visitors read the curator’s narrative more or less correctly, the curators
themselves write their scripts effecting only more or less the reactions they
want in the reader. The museum’s monumentality has the potential to back
the curator and function as a corrector. The Weimar exhibit shows that the
institution, the site, and the curator are much more unpredictable com-
ponents of the museum than Carol Duncan suggests. The museum’s
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Barbara Wolbert
composition, however, has to be taken into account in every single case. Only
then can the visitor’s narrative be fully understood.
The visitors experienced themselves in the role of witnesses. They became
imaginary witnesses of an act of violence. This was their script. By criticising
the exhibit or even protesting against it, they had written themselves into the
play as heroes. As if obliged to revise an unhappy ending, they attempted to
rewrite the curator’s play, announced as a tragedy. The artists who had been
caught unawares, finding themselves as supporters of the curator’s script – the
exhibition team failed to invite them or even inform them about their paint-
ings being on display – could take down their own work in protest. The
visitors who felt uneasy about the exhibit, by contrast, had to find other ways
to express their resentment. Rather than this one single display, the wall
wrapped in grey plastic film, it is the compressed historical self-concept of the
audience as potential resistance fighters that leads to the protest. In this regard,
we may understand the experience caused by this exhibit as a transformative
one. The curator directed but did not intend this liminal experience. The visi-
tors identified with the victims and adopted a protective role – a role that in
fact only very few people had played in Germany’s past. Now we understand
why, according to visitors’ individual perspectives, the exhibit could be inter-
preted simultaneously as a second Degenerate Art show, a repetition of Cold
War propaganda, and an act of West German conquest.
What has been discussed in the press, the East–West conflict about art, was
only one thin layer of meaning. Moreover, the fact that all the newspapers,
whether based in the west or the east of Germany, and the politicians repre-
senting westerners and easterners criticised the exhibit makes us understand
that although the exhibit itself was controversial it did not divide the public.
This interpretation that reduced the problematic of the exhibit to an
east–west conflict, which was favoured by the media, concealed another sensi-
tive issue: the relation of post-Wall Germans and the Nazi past. It hid the
questions at stake such as issues of agency, responsibility, and the role of the
spectator. These issues became prominent topics in the following summer,
after racist violence had again dramatically increased.66 No week went by
without several attacks on refugees, immigrants and people in exile in
Germany and the lack of Zivilcourage, the courage to stand up for one’s
beliefs, became a popular topic in the German press. Unintended and uncon-
trolled, these questions had already come up in the context of a sloppy art
exhibit, set up at an awkward site in a German town with an ambivalent past,
which was given the honour of representing European culture in the year of
ultimate millennium excitement.
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NOTES
1. My first thanks go to Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto for convening and chairing the extraor-
dinarily stimulating EASA panel session ‘Science, Magic, and Religion: The Museum as Ritual
Site’ in July 2000 in Cracow. In this panel I had the chance to present a paper, a short version
of this chapter, which benefitted greatly from Sharon Macdonald’s contribution as commenta-
tor and from Mary Bouquet’s and Nuno Porto’s editorial suggestions. I presented another short
and in some parts different version of this chapter at the panel session ‘Cultural Capital and
“Capital of Culture”: Exhibiting German Art’ at the conference of the German Studies Asso-
ciation in October 2000 in Houston, which was organised by Mark Rectanus, moderated by
Karen Achberger, and commented by H. Glenn Penny. I am also very grateful to all three of
them for their criticism and inspiration. On one aspect of this exhibit, which was not part of
the previous papers, I elaborated in the panel session ‘Arranging Places: Regions, Nations, and
Museums in Europe’ organised and chaired by Jane Nadel-Klein and commentated by
Margaret Rodman at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association 2000
in San Francisco. I thank them as well as the copresenters and the audiences of all three pan-
els for their comments. I am grateful for the invitations to the German Department at the
University of California (Berkeley) and the Centre Canadien d’Etudes Allemandes et
Européenes at the University of Montreal, where I had the opportunity to discuss my Weimar
research in more detail. I am further thankful to Reinhard Spier for giving me access to the
BBK collection of newspaper articles on ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ and to him and Her-
bert Mondrey for informing me about the court case the exhibit caused. I thank Deniz Gök-
türk and Silke Roth for discussing their views of the Weimar exhibit with me. Peter Jelavich
and Heather Mathews I thank for their comments on my description of the show. I am grate-
ful to Dr Ulrike Bestgen, Office for Public Relations, Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, for
allowing me to take photographs at the 1999 ‘Aufsteig und Fall der Moderne’, and for per-
mission to use a selection of those photographs for this chapter. For her revision of earlier
manuscripts as well as of this final version of my chapter, I thank Renate Wise. The short-
comings of this article are, of course, my responsibility.
2. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne’ is the German title. I will follow the translation published in
the The New York Times, ‘Rise and Fall of the Modern’ (see Cohen 1999). In Art in America the
same translation is used by Galloway (1999).
3. The twelve ministers of the European Community assigned to cultural affairs in their countries
decided on 13 June, 1985, to choose every year another town within the EC as Cultural Cap-
ital. The first cities to be chosen were Athens, Florence, Amsterdam and Berlin (Dittrich von
Weringh 1988: 473). In 2000, nine cities were elected as cultural capitals – Avignon, Bergen,
Bologna, Brussels, Cracow, Helsinki, Prague, Reykjavik and Santiago de Compostella (Jacob-
sen 1999). In 1999, however, Weimar alone performed as Cultural Capital, in German some-
times referred to as either Kulturhauptstadt Europas (Cultural Capital of Europe) or Kulturstadt
Europas (Cultural City of Europe). Weimar as Kulturstadt is also the subject of a sociological
study developed by Silke Roth and conducted by her, Susanne Frank, and Caroline Buchar-
towski, under the supervision of Dieter Hassenpflug, Professor of Sociology and Social History
of the City at the Department of Architecture of the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (Roth, S.,
Frank, S. and Beinert, A., n.d.).
4. Most of the German papers I checked reported on this exhibit more than once. The Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, for example, published at least four articles dealing with this exhibit; the
Tagesspiegel published at least five articles; and another daily newspaper in Berlin, the Berliner
Zeitung, informed their readers in at least eight articles.
5. Cohen (1999).
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6. Winfried Bullinger, an expert in artists’ copyright and the attorney of the suing artist, hired by
the artists’ association Bund Bildender Künstler, was cited in BILD 1 June 1999: ‘Dif-
famierungen solchen Kalibers gab’s zuletzt in der Nazi-Zeit’ (‘Skandal-Ausstellung in Weimar’).
7. This statement by the Vice President of the Academy of the Arts Berlin-Brandenburg was cited
in the Süddeutsche Zeitung as well as in other newspapers. The Süddeutsche Zeitung wrote: ‘Die
Akademie der Künste Berlin-Brandenburg hatte die Weimarer Ausstellung als ‘skandalöser
Rückfall’ in Zeiten des Kalten Krieges kritisiert’ (‘Café Deutschland’).
8. This statement by the painter Wolfgang Matteuer was also cited in several newspapers,
for example, in the Süddeutsche Zeitung: ‘Das ist Ausdruck westdeutscher Siegermentalität’
(Café Deutschland ). I cite the translation of this quotation in The New York Times (Cohen
1999).
9. The Leipziger Sparkasse withdrew their painting ‘Schuld der Mitte II,’ a work by Hans Hendrik
Grimmling (‘Wut über den Wessi’).
10. The sentence of the first trial in the Landgericht, the communal court in Erfurt, was announced
on 17 June 1999. The second trial, which ended with a settlement, took place at the Oberlan-
desgericht, Thurigina’s state court in Jena on July 28, 1999.
11. See ‘Kai Uwe Schierz. Weimar’.
12. Rolf Bothe cooperated with Thomas Föhl as the curators of part one. Thomas Föhl cooperated
with Achim Preiß as the curators of part two. Part three was curated by Achim Preiss
alone.
13. The German title was ‘Offiziell/Inoffiziell – Die Kunst der DDR.’
14. In contrast to the German press, which focussed on the third part of the exhibit, the afore-
mentioned article in The New York Times mainly discussed the exhibition of paintings from the
Nazi time.
15. The first part, which was closed in August, had 85,000 visitors and the second part, closed in
September, had 95,000 visitors (Wershoven 2000: 35).
16. Achim Preiss has his Ph.D. from the Rheinische Friedrich Wilhelms Universität in Bonn. He
taught at the Bergische Universität-Gesamthoch-schule Wuppertal until his Habilitation in
1991.
17. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne III’: 1.
18. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne III’: 3–4.
19. See the court’s sentence, ‘Urteil in dem einstweiligen Verfügungsverfahren der Künstlerin
Ellena Olson gegen die Stadt Weimar, Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar und Weimar 1999 Kul-
turstadt Europas GmbH wegen Urheberrechtsverletzung, verkündet am 17.08.1999’
Landgericht Erfurt 3 u O 16/95: 8.
20. The following titles of newspaper articles take up this comparison: ‘Exhibiting the Art of His-
tory’s Dustbin’ by Cohen (1999); ‘Weimar, die Kunst und der Schrott’ [Weimar, Art and
Garbage] by Beaucamp (1999), a title which alludes to the controversial performance of Rainer
Werner Fassbinder’s theatre production in Frankfurt entitled ‘Der Müll, die Stadt und der Tod’
[Garbage, the City and Death]; and ‘Kulturkampf mit Müllhaufen’ [Cultural War with Trash-
Heap] by von Klinggräff (1999), a title which plays with the term for the struggle between
church and state 1872–1882.
21. The photograph of this title page, entitled ‘A Rise and Fall in Weimar,’ was taken by Jörg
Behrens. The visualisation for this title was prepared by Klaus Nerlich. (Weimar Kultur Jour-
nal. Zeitschrift für Weimar, Erfurt, Jena, Apolda, Vol. 8, No 7, 1999.)
22. Very few articles described and criticised the display in the first and second part of the exhibit
as well. The third part, for example, was honorably mentioned by Beaucamp (1999) in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In one sentence Jenssen (1999), writing for the Berliner Zeitung
mentions the exhibit in the castle as the site of the ‘good prewar-art’: ‘Schon die Orte folgen
einer Regie der Denunziation. Im Schloss wird die gute Vorkriegskunst, in einer garstigen
Mehrzweckhalle die Kunst der beiden Diktaturen gezeigt’. The display in the castle was
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criticized by Bisky (1999) in the Berliner Zeitung and by Knapp (1999) in the Süddeutsche
Zeitung.
23. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who initially followed Duke Karl August’s call to his court in
1775, was a high administrator in Weimar, where he also devoted himself to scientific research
and literary work and later became the director of the theatre. After sojourns in Italy, Goethe
returned to Weimar where he continued working as a writer and scholar until he died in 1832.
Friedrich von Schiller went to Weimar in 1787 where he worked on historical, philosophical,
and literary publications and translations. He died in 1805 in Weimar. Goethe’s and Schiller’s
influence shaped the cultural and politic life of Weimar and beyond. It has ultimately made the
town a centre of tourism.
24. The ‘Weimar Republic’ lasted from 1919 to 1933.
25. Buchenwald, founded in 1937 and situated only eight kilometers from Weimar, was the largest
concentration camp within Germany. More than 40,000 persons, about as many people as
Weimar had inhabitants at that time, were murdered there (Schley 1999).
26. The ground of the castle was the location of a feudal residence for 1,000 years (Hootz 1968:
405). A former castle called Wilhelmsburg, built in 1651, burnt down in 1774 (Dehio 1991:
314). Goethe coorganised the reconstruction. The castle underwent reconstruction between
1790 and 1803, 1835 and 1840, and 1913 and 1914 (Salzmann and Zühlke 1971: 100).
27. This municipal art collection is called ‘Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar’. The castle hosts part of
the collection and its administration.
28. Thus Weimar’s population associated the hall with Alexander Schalck-Golodkowski who was
in charge of the so-called ‘KoKo’, the ‘Commercial Coordination’, a section of the GDR Min-
istry for Foreign Trade. He was involved not only in the GDR’s trade with Arab, Asian, and
African countries but also in the negotiations with West German politicians and the govern-
ment of the Federal Republic of Germany, which included credits of billions of Deutschmarks
granted to the GDR. When the Wall fell, he moved to West Germany and, after German uni-
fication, he was accused of violating the narcotics laws, fraud, misappropriation, and espionage.
This information was provided by the data service LeMO by the Fraunhofer Institute, the Ger-
man Historical Museum, and the House of the History of the Federal Republic of Germany at
www.dhm.de/lemo.
29. The title translates as ‘Hall of the People’s Community’.
30. Rather than central planning, it is the high ambition of Thuringia’s Reichsstatthalter, Fritz
Sauckel, residing in Weimar, that is seen as decisive for the realization of the construction pro-
ject (Ehrlich, John and Ulbricht 1999a: 29).
31. Antjé von Gaevenitz introduced a similar idea in her contribution to the 1986 XXVIth Inter-
national Congress of the History of Art. She applied the concept of ritual to certain works of
art considering also the role of the exhibition space of a museum or gallery in this context
(Graevenitz 1989: 588).
32. Duncan refers to Les Rite de Passage by Van Gennep (1908)1960 and to Turner’s Drama, Fields,
and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (1974).
33. See, for example, Irit Rogoff ’s ‘From Ruins to Debris’ (1994: 223–49).
34. Victor Turner conceptualises a ritual as a process that intensifies the neophytes’ reflexivity and
sees this reflexivity as originating stories. These narratives, in turn, lend meaning to the whole
experience (Turner 1982).
35. My snapshot photographs used as illustrations were taken on 27 July, 1999. Since the exhibit
was changed a couple of times, they represent, of course, only this particular state of the exhibit
on the day before the trial in the second court.
36. These photographs by Louis Held were also used in the catalogue (see Bothe and Föhl
1999).
37. See the painting on the exhibition wall in Figure 8.3. Christian Rohlfs. Strasse in Weimar (Gasse
in Ehringsdorf ) 1889, oil on canvas, 40x50 cm, Kunsthalle zu Kiel.
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Barbara Wolbert
38. Edvard Munch, Portrait Harry Graf Kessler, oil on canvas, 200x84 cm, 1906, Staatliches
Museum zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Nationalgalerie Inv. B 50.
39. See also the articles in the section ‘Weimar 1890: Der Aufbruch in die Moderne’ and ‘Das Neue
Weimar 1902-1918’ in the catalogue of the exhibit (Bothe and Föhl 1999: 14–245).
40. See also the articles in the section ‘Tradition und Avantgarde in Konflikt’ in the catalogue
(Bothe and Föhl 1999: 246–385).
41. ‘Die Kunst dem Volke – Die Sammlung Adolf Hitlers’.
42. Ulbricht (1999) describes Nazi parades and festivities in Weimar.
43. Whereas in the catalogue (1999: 407) and in his booklet (1999: 45), Preiss states that this pre-
sentation of Hitler’s collection contained 140 paintings, in the exhibition brochure the num-
ber is given as 120 paintings (‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne II’: 1).
44. Findings by historians who studied Nazi leaders’ practices of collecting art and who wrote about
Hitler’s collection, such as Petroupoulos (1998: 181–86), are neither mentioned in the cata-
logue nor in the exhibition brochure.
45. ‘...zu eintönig, banal und langweilig...’ (Preiss 1999a: 407).
46. ‘...weil es sich nicht um eine im stilistischen Sinne spezifisch nationalsozialistische Kunst han-
delt’ (Preiss 1999a: 407).
47. ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne: Offiziell/Inoffiziell - Die Kunst der DDR’.
48. Such an understated entrance to an exhibition may lead to an insider-tip show in some sub-
culture contexts, but in the context of a prominent European Cultural Capital event it is rather
unexpected.
49. The curator of this section was, as the volume in which it appeared after the exhibit reveals, Dr
Anne Hormann (see Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar 2000: 20). Hormann has also written an
article in the catalogue (Bothe and Föhl 1990: 422–39).
50. While the critique concentrates on the display in the rotunda, this section of part three of the
exhibit is hardly mentioned by the press. Exceptions are the articles by Stadler (1999) and
Knapp (1999) who wrote in the Süddeutsche Zeitung ‘An die Wand gestellt’ (Their backs to the
Wall).
51. Hans Vent, Menschen am Strand [People at the Beach], oil on plywood, 1976, 280x552 cm,
Federal Republic of Germany (permanent loan), former Palace of the Republic, East Berlin.
52. Bernhard Heisig, Ikarus, oil on plywood, 1975, 280x540 cm, Federal Republic of Germany
(permanent loan), former Palace of the Republic, East Berlin.
53. Willi Neubert, Gestern und Heute [Yesterday and Today], mixed technique on plywood, 1975,
280x345 cm, Federal Republic of Germany (permanent loan), former Palace of the Republic,
East Berlin.
54. Willi Sitte, Die rote Fahne. Kampf, Leid und Sieg [The Red Banner, Struggle, Pain and Victory]
oil on plywood, 1975/1976, 280x300 cm, Federal Republic of Germany (permanent loan), for-
mer Palace of the Republic, East Berlin.
55. The unusual number of guestbook entries is mentioned in an article in the newspaper
Tagesspiegel (see ‘Umstrittene Weimarer Ausstellung’) and in an article in Die Welt (on-line)
(Berg, ‘Kunst neben Agitations-Klecksereien,’ www.welt.de/daten/1999/05/25/
0525ku66895.htx, by 4 June 1999). Not even a month after its opening 20,000 visitors had
seen the exhibit and 166 entries had been left in the guestbook (Stadler 1999).
56. ‘Umstrittene Weimarer Ausstellung.’
57. ’Bankrotte in Weimar.’
58. ‘Die neue ‘Entartete Kunst’?’
59. The chairs chosen for this exhibit were plastic garden chairs, which German stores sold for less
than ten marks or 5 Euros respectively. In summer 1990, these chairs were for the first time
available in stores in eastern Germany. They found homes on private porches, in snack bars, in
garden restaurants, and in many other areas. They became a visual marker for East Germans’
start into western consumer culture.
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60. No journalist who covered the exhibit wrote about the irony that lies in the fact that once more
in this place an audience was hindered from seeing modern art.
61. This fact is only mentioned in the catalogue, the brochure, and the booklet sold at the entrance
(see Preiss 1999a: 407; Preiss 1999b: 44; ‘Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne II’: 1).
62. Besides, because of its enormous dimensions, this construction did not fit into the reassuring
classic environment.
63. Visitors might have associated this construction, which the exhibition’s architect might have
simply chosen as a means to enable wheelchair users to visit the exhibit, with cattle transports
to slaughterhouses or the ramps the Nazis built to facilitate deportations.
64. This idea is eleborated in my article ‘De-Arranged Places: East German Art in Unified Ger-
many’s Museums’ in The Anthropology of East Europe Review.
65. Achim Preiss based the interior design on the work of his student Eva-Maria Schüler, an archi-
tect, who had received her degree for this plan (Preiss 2000: 15–17).
66. A ban on the NPD, the right-wing National Democratic Party of Germany, was widely dis-
cussed and a huge demonstration against xenophobia was organised for 9 November 2000.
REFERENCES
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Baake, B. (2000) ‘Anatomie einer Aufregung. Ein Blick auf 1.500 Rezensionen,
Berichte, Nachrichten, Kommentare’, in Der Weimarer Bilderstreit. Szenen einer
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und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften: 305.
Beaucamp, E. (1999) ‘Weimar, die Kunst und der Schrott. Wie man die Ästhetik nich
entsorgen darf: “Aufstieg und Fall der Moderne” in drei Akten’, Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 15 May.
Berg, M. (1999) ‘Kunst neben Agitations-Klecksereien. Volkes Stimme spricht:
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17 June 2000.
BILD (1999) ‘Skandal-Ausstellung in Weimar: Berlinerin klagte ihre Bilder raus’,
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Warum die Ausstellung in Dresden ein Desaster ist’, Berliner Zeitung, 12 May.
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Weimar: Hatje Cantz Verlag.
Cohen, R. (1999) ‘Exhibiting the Art of History’s Dustbin: Dictator’s Treasures Stir
German Anger’, New York Times, 17 August.
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Graevenitz, A. von (1989) ‘Rites of Passage in Modern Art’, in Lavin, I. (ed.), World
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PART IV
D ILEMMAS OF E NCHANTMENT
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C HAPTER 9
E NCHANTMENT AND ITS
D ILEMMAS : THE M USEUM AS A
R ITUAL S ITE
Sharon Macdonald
Introduction
Museums have often been compared to religious sites: temples, churches,

cathedrals, mausoleums, tombs. Moreover, in some cases the boundaries
between the two are far from clear-cut. In Krakow, Poland, where the work-
shop on which this book is based was held, churches brim over with splendid
artworks and artefacts, museums are packed with religious treasures; one of
Krakow’s synagogues has been restored for use as a museum; and nearby, and
also on the tourist trail, lies Auschwitz-Birkenau – itself a kind of large
museum with a disturbing tangle of visitor information areas, artefacts of past
atrocity, graves and religious memorials.
Museums and religious sites may also share an aesthetic: hushed tones,
dimmed lighting, a sense of reverence – of being in communion with the
sacred; they may emanate an aura of age, the past, anachronism. There are
also similarities in contemporary debates about them: in particular, a preva-
lent concern with demise – the anxiety that they are institutions of yesterday
which are unlikely to have much place in the world of tomorrow. At the same
time, however, and paradoxically considering the discourse of demise, there is
considerable evidence to the contrary. Rather than the disappearance of reli-
gion, what we witness globally is the emergence of numerous new religious
movements and fundamentalisms. And museums likewise seem to be under-
going an efflorescence, with not only extensive numbers of new museums
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opening in many countries, but also new variations on the museum theme,
new exhibitions and architectural innovations which seem to be propelling
museums to greater prominence in public culture.
In this chapter I seek to explore the museum-religion analogy in order to
reflect upon these changes and the apparently contradictory discourses in
which they are enmeshed. In doing so, I draw especially on attempts to char-
acterise so-called ‘new religious movements’ which suggest that these reflect a
particular, and increasingly prevalent, formation of ‘religiosity’ – entangled in
changing conceptions of authority and subjectivity – in the late modern
world. At the same time, I look at museums as ritual sites in which science
and magic are mediated, and, moreover, as sites dedicated to such mediation.
Museums can be regarded as ritual sites in that they are culturally demarcated
spaces of concentrated meaning involving a degree of culturally regularised
collective performance (cf. Duncan 1995). Furthermore, they involve a partic-
ular kind of mediation of, and interplay between, authoritative knowledge
(science) and enchantment (magic) – an interplay which to some extent varies
across time and space, and across different kinds of museums and their rela-
tives. What a reading of certain commentaries on new religious movements
suggests, however, is that the nature or balance of this interplay may be chang-
ing, to some extent at least. This may involve a greater explicit recognition of
– and even increasingly rationalised attempts to manufacture – enchantment
and subjective experience.1 This, however, can raise dilemmas for museums
and museum-like sites, especially those which seek to deal with ‘difficult’
subject matter – such as the Holocaust or National Socialist history. It is to
some of these dilemmas that the final part of this chapter is addressed.
Beyond Secularisation
The idea that society would become progressively more secular has been
shared by a broad array of commentators, many accepting, albeit in more
sophisticated form, Sir James Frazer’s Enlightenment assumption of an evolu-
tionary progression from magic, to religion, to science. In many contexts,
aspects of what has come to be called the secularisation thesis do seem to hold
(Martin 1978). In particular, established churches in many parts of the world
– though by no means all – seem to have experienced declining attendance
and aspects of conventional religious practice have disappeared. Moreover,
greater institutional differentiation seems to have led to religion in many
contexts becoming progressively more institutionally discrete from other
domains, such as law and politics; though this does not necessarily mean that
churches come to be irrelevant to such domains for ‘religions are everywhere
influencing public affairs in the contemporary world’ (Hann 2000: 14,
discussing Casanova 1994). It is the continued, and in some contexts even
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Enchantment and Its Dilemmas
increased, influence of religions in public affairs, together with the growth

of so-called ‘fundamentalisms’ and ‘new religious movements’, the latter of
which have also been associated with ‘the rise of a new religiosity within
established religions’ (Beckford 1986: vii), that has thrown the secularisation
thesis into question and has even led some to posit an ‘antisecularisation
thesis’ (see Kurtz 1995: 163). Globally the picture is highly varied and we
should not, perhaps, expect or attempt an account which transcends so much
deep-rooted historical and cultural specificity. Yet, the ‘second life’ of reli-
gion in countries such as the United States and those of western Europe
(which tend to act as implicit models in secularisation discussions), never-
theless clearly highlights the fact that certain forms of religion continue to
hold a good deal of popular appeal (see Beckford 1986; Castells 1997: Ch.1;
Kurtz 1995; Wilson 1999).
Of contemporary religious movements, two that have attracted particular
attention are fundamentalisms and new religious movements, the latter term
being used both as a fairly loose category to cover all kinds of new sects and
cults, whether still fairly closely affiliated with established religions or not, as
well as a term to describe what are sometimes called ‘alternative religious
movements’ (Kurtz 1995: 192), especially those involving a type of ‘detradi-
tionalized’ religiosity with a particular emphasis on ‘self-spirituality’ (Heelas
1996, 1999). Fundamentalisms and new religious movements are sometimes
regarded as almost diametrically opposed developments: fundamentalism as a
‘pursuit of certainty’ (James 1995) and unquestioning acceptance of a set of
canonically defined absolutes; and new religious movements as more individ-
ually expressive and syncretic, with relativity of commitment permissible
rather than ‘belief ’ being a crucial lynchpin. In practice, such distinctions may
be harder to pin down (new religious movements may, for example, have their
own canon which must be accepted, and fundamentalisms may be more
syncretic than they typically admit). More importantly, however, rather than
seeing them as opposed and contradictory developments, some commentators
have suggested that they are both part of a response to a similar set of late-
modern anxieties: both involve the pursuit of some kind of deeper meaning
and ontological security in the face of perceived instabilities and uncertain-
ties in the world today (see Beckford 1999 for discussion). The list of forces
implicated in such instabilities and uncertainties is sometimes cryptically
condensed into terms such as ‘globalisation’, the ‘risk society’ and ‘late moder-
nity’, but otherwise is long and heterogeneous, including, inter alia, declining
optimism that science and technology will be able to provide answers to world
problems and even a growing sense that they are responsible for environmental
and medical ‘bads’, a related need to rely on expertise coupled with a greater
distrust of many forms of expertise themselves, a growing critique of
‘consumer culture’ and ‘materialism’ in relation to which individuals are often
conceptualised as losing hold of ‘more important’ or ‘deeper’ meanings, and
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a more general apperception of being uprooted and without sufficient anchor-

age in a context of increased social and geographical mobility.
If fundamentalisms seem to offer a relatively straightforward retreat from
the late-modern sense of impending danger and burgeoning doubt into appar-
ently ‘older’ and self-proclaimedly ‘foundational’ bastions of certainty, the
reflex of new religious movements is in some respects more complex. Rather
than looking to what have been called ‘paternalistic’ forms of authority (see
Greenwood 2000: 10), new religious movements entail an emphasis on indi-
vidual subjectivity and experience. In such forms of religiosity the self often
comes to be regarded both as an authentic source of real meaning and as an
appropriate object in itself of religious attention. As such, new forms of spir-
ituality often become entangled with other technologies of self-realisation
which offer the opportunity to access the ‘inner’ or ‘deeper’ self.2 (Indeed, one
version of the secularisation thesis has it that the modern cultural emphasis
on notions such as ‘individual autonomy’ and ‘self-expression’ can be seen as
part of ‘a sort of invisible religiosity’ (Kurtz 1995: 207).) Experience is a cate-
gory which is given particular privilege in such constellations because it is
conceived as fundamentally subjective and the route to such access. Moreover,
as this access is regarded as relatively direct and unmediated, ‘experience’ is
foregrounded as especially ‘authentic’. One institutional correlate of this is
that new forms of religiosity are not so likely to involve legislative and pater-
nalistic forms of religious leadership but put the emphasis instead on more
interpretive forms of religious mediation which allow for more individualised
practices and expressions of spirituality. The decline of the canonical in favour
of a quest to discover whatever set of religious (or other) practices best allow
individuals to realise their inner selves also predisposes new religious move-
ments – and established religion too – to change and adaptation as they search
for means to allow their devotees to get in touch with themselves. In the
overall religious marketplace this is likely too to lead to an appearance of
proliferation and experimentation as new cults and off shoots of the formerly
new appear (and disappear).
Sites of Science and Magic
Museums, I have suggested, have always involved an interplay of science and

magic, authoritative knowledge and enchantment. Whether their subject
matter be art, science and technology, ethnography or history, museums have
sought to present to their audience knowledge grounded in disciplinary exper-
tise. This canonical knowledge, the museum equivalent to the Holy Truth,
has also, however, always been entangled with a kind of magic in its realisa-
tion into exhibitions. This magic consists of both the relatively calculated
enchantment of museums – the architectural and aesthetic exhibitionary
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strategies used to attract the visitor – and also the magical excess provided by
objects, which allows visitors to read their own ‘occult’ (in the sense of alter-
native to the Holy Truth) meanings into that which is displayed.
The ‘established church’ of the museum world is surely the nineteenth-
century public museum – that confident expression of, especially, nation state
identity, of the worthiness of public learning, of progress and the achieve-
ments of science and the arts, and of the ambition of civil society itself.
Although many national and municipal museums formed on this nineteenth-
century model continue today, they have, especially since the 1970s, come
under increasing criticism and at the same time there has been a considerable
increase in new kinds of generally independent, local and specialist museums
and museum relatives, such as heritage and science centres, as well as other
spaces in which leisure time might be spent, including zoos and nature parks.
In response to this, and particularly in response to falling attendance in a
political climate in which visitor numbers are one of the justifications for
public funding, many established museums, as well as new museums, have
developed new philosophies, new forms of working, new exhibitions and
building programmes. In doing so, they have sought to redefine their role and
their place in public culture.
What light do discussions of new religious movements throw on these
museum developments? In raising such a question, my intention is neither to
try to identify analogies for their own sake nor to embark on an extensive
empirical investigation. Rather, my aim is to draw on aspects of the analysis
of new religious movements to identify some areas to which we might direct
attention in thinking about museums. In doing so, however, I also want to
try to keep the categories of ‘science’ and ‘magic’ in the investigative frame in
order to think about the nature of the interplay between them. The level of
my account here is intentionally schematic, though it draws on my reading
about museums and ‘museum watching’, as well as on some of the material
presented in this book. What I hope is to explore more fully the conventional
religion–museum analogy than is usually the case and thus to open up more
of its potential for helping us to understand museums. My discussion is organ-
ised around the following overlapping areas: (1) institutional forms,
philosophies and forms of mediation; (2) relationship to subjectivity and
knowledge/experience relations; and (3) public culture and controversy.
Forms and philosophies
As in the religious sphere, the last several decades in particular have witnessed
a proliferation and diversification of museums. Eco-museums, heritage and
science centres and museums of unusual and specialist subjects, such as pack-
aging, lawnmowers or the museum of emotions mentioned by Anthony
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Shelton (paper presented in the Krakow workshop), are just some of the many
new types – not all of which are uncontroversially credited as ‘museums’. Zoos
– whose history overlaps with that of museums – have also experienced a similar
challenge, in part from nature parks (see Silva, Chapter 5, and Heatherington,
Chapter 6, this volume). Just as there has been debate about what counts as
‘religion’ – the extent to which it incorporates new-age therapies and alterna-
tive medicine, say – so too, new ‘museum-like’ forms have prompted a good
deal of boundary discussion about the nature of museums and what might
constitute their ‘key’ characteristics. An apparent leakiness of boundaries in the
field of new religiosity, whereby religion has been suggested to have become
invisibly more pervasive in modern culture, could also be argued to characterise
the museum field, the museum perhaps losing its walls (as Malraux 1954
expressed it) and practices of ‘collection’ and ‘heritage’ seeping into more and
more areas of consumer culture and domestic life (see e.g. Dorst 1987) – some-
times to include peoples themselves, as described in rather different contexts in
the chapters here by Ian Fairweather (8), Barbara Saunders (4) and Anna Wiec-
zorkiewicz (3). This all has implications for established museums too; and these
have adopted presentational strategies pioneered in ‘new museums’ – especially
the use of reproduced ‘total environments’ and sets, interactive exhibits and
drama, and they have mounted exhibitions on unusual, popular and sometimes
controversial subjects (for example Wolbert, Chapter 8 in this volume). No
longer is there a canon of what might be expected in an established museum:
exhibitions and approaches change as often as do the liturgies in the Church
of England (for which a software program called ‘Worship Master’ is now avail-
able to guide through the myriad alternatives; Flanagan 1999: 152).
Of course, new approaches are taken up to varying extents by different
museums; and more ‘fundamentalist’ authoritative strategies (emphasising the
primacy of curatorial scholarship) may well still be mobilised in certain contexts
and fundamentalist arguments remain of importance in political debates within
and between museums. Individual museums may cope with their different
constituencies and demands by a collage of approaches: trying out one strat-
egy for one type of exhibition and another for the next. A museum such as the
Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, discussed here by both
Barbara Saunders and Boris Wastiau (Chapters 3 and 4), is strikingly illustra-
tive of this, showing great sensitivity to the semantics of labelling exhibits in
one exhibition (Wastiau) and a remarkably insensitive colonialist representa-
tion in its entrance hall (Saunders). This ‘pick and mix’ approach – sometimes
referred to as the ‘multimuseum’ concept – may itself be justified in terms of
providing choice for the visitor (see Macdonald 2001). While a similar motif
of ‘choice rather than fate’ has been claimed as a feature of many new religious
movements (Heelas 1999: 64), in some ways museums are much more adapt-
able in this regard, for religious movements, although they may change over
time, generally have less scope for the kind of experimentation possible in
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museums. Moreover, while adherents to new religious movements may well

change from one ‘faith’ to another much more often than was typical in the
past, sampling Buddhism for a year or so followed by trying out Shamanism
then Neopaganism, and while there are reported to be visitors who go to their
local museum every Sunday afternoon, commitment to a religion is never-
theless conceptualised as a deeper and more long-term matter than is visiting
a museum.
The demise of a canon and the attempt to provide variety and novelty also
have implications for the role of the museum priesthood. A much broader
consortium of participants is now typically involved (in the UK at least) in
making an exhibition than was previously the case; museum directors and
curators being supplemented by specialist designers, practitioners in the
subject matter, education consultants, visitor researchers and, crucially, visitors
or ‘members of the community’ themselves. Disciplinary scholarship-based
subject expertise no longer provides the guiding dogma but is just one of the
‘voices’ worthy of being heard in the museological practice of exhibition
creation. The role of museum staff is not so much to provide ‘the Truth’ but,
in a manner analogous to that of the scientists in the case of ‘the Baby’
discussed by Penelope Harvey (Chapter 1), to contribute to a more discur-
sively produced and possibly contested ‘truth’. That is, they are generally
expected to adopt less paternalistic priestly roles and instead to act rather as
‘spiritual managers’ or the ‘focalisers’ of the Findhorn Community new reli-
gious movement, a role which is intended to be entirely mediatory rather than
authoritative, and which is dedicated towards enabling religious aspirants to
‘find’ and express themselves (Heelas 1999: 73). At the same time, however,
in an apparent paradox also noted in discussions of new religious movements,
alongside the ideology of ‘responsibility without authority’ (quoted in Heelas
1999: 73) there may well be very marked authority in practice exercised by
particularly charismatic figures. In the museum field this has in some instances
become institutionalised in the adoption of ‘star’ curators or designers who
are given ‘artistic licence’ to create exhibitions with relative autonomy (as in
the exhibition discussed by Wolbert).
Subjectivity and experience
One of the most frequently discussed features of new religious movements is

their emphasis on ‘individuals’ and ‘the self ’, and such movements have been
described in terms of ‘the turn to the self ’ (Charles Taylor, in Heelas 1999:
75) and a late-modern imperative of ‘self-discovery’ (Heelas, ibid.). While
individual salvation might be argued to be a feature of many religions, what
is said to be distinctive about these new forms of religious movement is that
the self per se becomes both the subject and object of religiosity. ‘Truth’ is
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then sometimes talked about as that which is ‘within’; and the goal of many
religious practices is not to acquire knowledge as a correlate of belief (for
example knowing catechisms or scriptural texts by heart) but to discover ways
of ‘finding’ this inner self and gaining understanding on the basis of ‘experi-
ence’. The practices of new religious movements are, therefore, likely to be
directed to accessing ‘experience’, something which may well involve ideas
about removing perceived ‘impediments’ to such access, perhaps by avoiding
aspects of modern life (such as certain foods, consumer culture, noise and
pollution) which are deemed detrimental to ‘getting in touch with oneself ’.
Inner-directed contemplative practices such as meditation and unstructured
prayer are often characteristic of such movements. So too, however, may be
practices intended to provide a sense of direct contact with ‘nature’ or the
‘sublime’, or transcendence through denial or hedonism.
Within the newer museum formation, experience could also be said to have
gained some ground relative to knowledge; a shift which we might also char-
acterise as a relative shifting of the balance from science and towards magic.
Although many museums certainly still do seek to provide information or to
encourage ‘learning’ (a term which is used in preference to ‘teaching’ in the
less paternalist ethos), the balance of emphasis in the ‘new museums’ may be
tilted towards other matters such as providing enjoyment, entertainment or
spectacle. In some types of museums, this is reflected in an emphasis on fun
and play, the attempt to create ‘whole’ or ‘total’ environments, and the use of
interactivity, animation, installations and drama. While such experiential
modes of presentation may be argued to assist learning, the direct appeal to
visitors’ sensory subjectivities is regarded as a relevant component in itself of
‘the museum effect’ (see Heatherington, Chapter 6 in this volume). So too is
direct appeal to, and mobilisation of, the enchanted properties of objects.
Rather than as an ‘excess’ to the illustration of an authoritative narrative, the
aesthetic, mysterious, intriguing and magical qualities of an object may be
presented as most noteworthy (for example, as in some ancient Egyptian exhi-
bitions, as discussed here by Wieczorkiewicz, Chapter 2; see also Bann 2003).
One mode of harnessing this entails an attempt to ‘strip away’ the appearance
of mediation in order to try to provide the visitor with as ‘direct’ an experi-
ence of the enchanted object as possible. This is described in attempts to put
‘the Baby’ computer on display in Penelope Harvey’s chapter here (1); and
also in the emphasis on ‘fully natural nature’ in the contexts of zoos and nature
parks in the chapters by Natasha Silva (5) and Tracey Heatherington (6). The
production of the appearance of a lack of mediation or of ‘naturalness’ gener-
ally requires careful mediation, of course, as these chapters illustrate, and as
contributions by Ian Fairweather (7) and Barbara Saunders (3) also show in
different ways. It is also potentially problematic in its openness to alternative
readings as I discuss in the final section of this chapter. Rather than the
unmediated approach, museums may instead seek to emphasise the ‘magical’
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qualities of objects by using display techniques such as dramatic lighting, back-

ground noise or music, and labels which use suggestive questions (addressing
the visitor in direct, individualised terms: ‘What does this object say to you?’),
cryptic quotations or fairy-tale-like narratives (Wieczorkiewicz, Chapter 2).
The magical and spectacular qualities of museum spaces or buildings them-
selves may also be played up – visually arresting and sometimes outlandish
architectural designs, which strive to make individual ‘style statements’, being
one of the signatures of the current museum movement (cf. Prior 2003).
Where new religious movements couch their appeal especially in terms of
individuated self-seekers, the established church often seems keener to
mobilise a more collective discourse of ‘community’. In museums too, while
established museums undoubtedly have often adopted a discourse of indi-
viduated ‘consumers’ or ‘customers’, this has frequently run (sometimes
uncomfortably) alongside agentic notions of ‘the public’, ‘community’ or ‘citi-
zenry’. As has been pointed out by those such as Benedict Anderson (1983),
museums (especially national and other public-funded museums) have been
one of the key institutions through which collective identities have been imag-
ined; but, of course, this process is not a ‘once and for all’ matter but needs
to be constantly reiterated and perhaps revised (Ringrose and Lerner 1993).
While established museums may, then, continue to be called upon to imagine
communities, the discourse of ‘the public’ and ‘the community’ is simultane-
ously part of the way in which they imagine themselves. It is through such
idioms (to some extent at least) that established museums define their own
worth and perhaps even seek to morally elevate themselves over their newer
counterparts. The idioms are, however, used flexibly (this is part of their
rhetorical advantage) and may be conceptualised in a more plural manner than
previously – ‘community’, for example, may be used as synonymous with
‘multicultural population’ (cf. Baumann 1996; Welz 1996). ‘Reaching out to’
the community and ‘bringing the community into the museum’ are strategies
frequently discussed and enacted in museums today; and they involve such
experiments as consulting local populations on future exhibitions and letting
people make interventions in museum displays (as in Sheffield City Museum’s
recent ‘Memory Gems’ exhibition in which members of the Afro-Caribbean
lunch club were invited to work with a curator to insert their own
photographs and commentaries into display cases throughout the museum).
In this way, museums also position themselves as ‘facilitators’ (Walsh 1992:
Ch.8), as agencies capable of representing communities in the public sphere.
Public culture and controversy
The capacity in some circumstances to claim to speak on behalf of commu-

nities is, for both museums and churches, one factor in their (in some respects
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Sharon Macdonald
surprising) presence and influence in public affairs in the late twentieth, and
into the twenty-first, century. In multicultural societies, cultural and religious
differences have become matters of considerable, and sometimes potentially
explosive, political sensitivity; and this has as a corollary that institutions
which manage or represent culture and religion are both called upon for their
expertise in these matters and at the same time easily find themselves entan-
gled in political controversy. This is perhaps especially the case for
ethnographic museums, and chapters here by Saunders and Wastiau (3 and
4) illustrate some of the areas of difficulty, though, as other chapters illus-
trate, other kinds of exhibitions are far from immune (see especially Wolbert,
Chapter 8). The recognition of the politics of dealing with cultural difference
has also been accompanied by a more widespread public acknowledgment of
‘culture’ as political (something reflected in academic attention too) and repre-
sentation as potentially highly socially influential. This recognition has also
been reflected in the politicisation of museums – the increased political inter-
vention in their organisation.
At the same time, the recognition of the plural or multifaceted nature of
‘the public’, together with a relativisation of knowledge, has to a degree freed
museums from representing either a canon or occupying consensual positions.
This has enabled them to create exhibitions which do not necessarily repre-
sent either the viewpoints or the constituencies which would traditionally be
represented in established museums; and this has led to the creation of some-
times controversial exhibitions which challenge the status quo or received
knowledge (see Macdonald 1998 for discussion of various examples). One
reason why some such exhibitions have been controversial, however, is that
museums are widely seen as inappropriate sites for the representation of
perspectives deemed marginal or that adopt explicitly positioned or unortho-
dox standpoints. Just as religious institutions are widely regarded as ‘morality
experts’ (Bauman 1992: 203) even by ‘nonbelievers’, established museums in
particular are mostly understood as authoritative (if fallible) ‘knowledge
experts’. Moreover, it is the provision of such expertise, a source of anchor-
age in a perceivedly mobile world, that might be argued to play a part in the
ongoing efflorescence of museums (and religious movements) and their
public position. This gives them a respectability in public culture which
makes some feel that it is irresponsible for them not to seek to provide view-
points that are as consensual or ‘true’ as possible. This is a perspective shared
by some, perhaps many, who work in museums. While on the one hand
museum staff may recognise the existence and even validity of alternative
knowledges and truths, and while they may have come to understand their
own role as mediatory rather than legislative, they rarely fully embrace rela-
tivism. Although ‘truth’ in many museums may be understood as negotiated
and plural, as Penelope Harvey notes (Chapter 1), it is unlikely to be fully
discarded.
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Museums’ presence in public debate, then, is partly a consequence of the

fact that they continue to be seen as possessing authority, expertise and some
kind of privileged access to ‘truths’ in the cultural domain. Although that
expertise today is not so likely to be seen to rest on special access to any single
source so much as on their expert and increasingly professionalised mediatory
and representational capacities, it remains a significant source of influence.
This means that museum representations not only remain political but that
museums have become to an even greater extent regarded as institutions which
can, and perhaps even should, deal with controversial and ‘difficult’ matters.
Dilemmas of Enchantment and Profanity
It is to museological attempts to deal with subject-matter deemed ‘difficult’

that I now turn. Such attempts highlight the delicate balance between magic
and science, between enchantment and authority, that museums may have to
negotiate. As I try to show, there are contexts in which museum magic and
the semireligious aura of ritual sites themselves can pose exhibitionary and
even moral dilemmas.
The main case on which I focus here is the former Nazi party rally grounds
in Nuremberg, Germany. This is an apt case to consider in relation to these
questions because it was originally designed as a site of popular enchantment
and the whole area has, to an extent, been defined as a museum. Its postwar
history is replete with attempts to cope with its potentially enchanting residue
as well as instances of reenchantment; and it illustrates the deployment of a
range of different museological strategies and, as such, the varying cultural
and political work of which museums may be capable.
The Nazi party rally grounds (the Reichsparteitagsgelände) were intended
explicitly as a ritual site.3 They consist of a large area of architecturally impos-
ing ‘monumental’ buildings and marching fields in which the ritual-packed
week-long party rallies were held between 1933 and 1938. The site was to
form an impressive backdrop for Nazi propaganda, such as Leni Riefenstahl’s
famous Triumph of the Will; it was an area of very carefully choreographed
enchantment whose aim was to generate a collective ‘Volk’ identity and to
fuel the ‘Führer Myth’.
The Nazi building programme was never fully completed, however, and
after the war Nuremberg was left with a partial building site with construc-
tions which were variously complete, partly finished, only just begun or
war-damaged. Nevertheless, the ‘Colosseum’ building (modelled on that at
Rome but, in typical Nazi gigantomania, larger) or Congress Hall, the
Zeppelin building – with its podium at which Hitler was so often filmed
ranting to the gathered masses on the marching ground in front, the Luitpold
field with its war memorial, and the Great Road were undeniable reminders
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Sharon Macdonald
of the area’s former use. What to do with the area became a major problem
for the city. In the immediate postwar years it was mainly used for mundane
purposes such as storage; though some prewar usages, such as motor racing,
and even the German equivalent of Remembrance Day, were resumed there.
Parts of the area were also blown up and grassed over, though in 1973 it was
designated as ‘worthy of protection as a monument’ (denkmalschutzwürdig)
under Bavarian state law, a designation which meant that Nuremberg was
compelled to try to maintain the site, though with some subsidy from the
state. In a sense this designation defined the rally grounds as a museum – as
a site of artefacts of historical significance which should be preserved for the
future.
Some in Nuremberg were uncomfortable with this ‘museumification’,
however, for it seemed to fulfil to some extent the Nazi’s own aspiration to
create buildings which would endure over time (for a thousand years); and
indeed the city of Nuremberg sometimes failed to comply with the preserva-
tion requirements where these were especially costly. Yet to let the buildings
fall to ruin was argued to be an equally dangerous strategy by members of the
city government, such as the culture minister Hermann Glaser, for this would
give them a romantic allure (which architect Albert Speer had also looked
forward to), something which he feared was especially attractive to the
German psyche.4 His own argument was to neither restore the buildings nor
to allow them to become ruined, but to leave them in their partly finished
and rather unkempt state. This was part of a strategy for which he coined the
term ‘profanieren’ – a strategy of ‘profaning’ the site. This strategy also entailed
using the site for banal and ordinary uses such as storage, practice rooms for
the Nuremberg orchestra, car parking, building exhibitions, twice-yearly
funfairs and even pop concerts. That the site could be put to new everyday
use – while preserving it to some extent – was up to a point a counter to its
conservation and museumification.
Despite the ‘profanieren’ strategy, however, some parts of the site were
restored; and some were destroyed even after the application of the conserva-
tion legislation. Thus in 1983 the so-called ‘Golden Hall’ (also originally
called the ‘Hall of Honour’) inside the Zeppelin building was partially
restored to its former glory, complete with its marble cladding donated by
Mussolini and its golden ceiling which features an intricate ‘meander’ design
from classical antiquity. This design was similar to that in the Zeppelin build-
ing’s galleries which had been destroyed in 1967, officially due to their
structurally insecure and dangerous state. In 1965, shortly before the decision
to destroy the galleries had been taken, however, a visiting Israeli student had
accused the city of still having swastikas (officially banned in postwar
Germany) on open public view. He was referring to the pattern on the ceiling
of the galleries of the Zeppelin building – a pattern which can be seen as
made up of swastikas. City officials reacted angrily and defensively, calling in
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an art expert to say that such patterns would be found in many places in the
classical world and that to see them as Nazi symbols was absurd. Neverthe-
less, their destruction of the galleries in the wake of this accusation made it
possible for the city’s actions to be read as a reaction to the accusation. Restor-
ing the Golden Hall was both an appeasement to the state monument
conservation office (showing the city to be spending money on the buildings
– something over which there had long been discord) and could perhaps also
be seen as a belated validation of the official position that the ceiling design
should not be regarded as a display of swastikas.
The Golden Hall was not simply opened to the public as an unmediated
example of a Nazi interior, however. Instead, in the continued intricate tacking
back and forth between the politics of enchantment and profanity, it was used
as a site of plays and exhibitions critical of Nazism. These included various
touring productions and installations and then, from 1985, a more perma-
nent exhibition designed specifically for the site called ‘Fascination and
Violence’ (Faszination und Gewalt). This sought specifically to address the
connection between fascination – enchantment and propaganda – and violent
power under the Nazi regime, and included commentary on the party rallies
and their location. In its presentational form, the exhibition also used the
‘profanieren’ strategy: information was presented on large rough wooden
boards, and these were placed not only in the Golden Hall but also in some
of the damp, dingy and decaying side rooms. While being welcomed as an
attempt to at last address the nature of the site, rather than to ignore, bury
or blow up the past, the exhibition also initially received criticism for putting
too much emphasis on ‘fascination’ and too little on ‘violence’ – an empha-
sis which some said was highlighted by its location in the Golden Hall. In
response to this the exhibition was soon extended to also address matters such
as racism in order to try to make the link between aestheticisation and
violence more explicit still.
Nevertheless, it was still suggested in the Nuremberg press that the exhi-
bition was, perhaps, an ‘alibi’ for the city – a minimal and inadequate
appearance of addressing the Nazi past and Nuremberg’s role in it so that
Nuremberg could say that it had done something and then forget all about
it. With such an alibi in place the city could go ahead with its ‘profanieren’
strategy and ignore the previous meanings of the site in the search for usages
which would help to pay the bills of the costly maintenance of the buildings.
Disquiet over ‘profanieren’ came to a head in 1987 when a private company
put forward proposals to turn the Congress Hall building into a leisure and
shopping complex, complete with golf drives, jogging avenues, and luxury
hotel suites. At first the city welcomed the proposals but after a group of
concerned citizens argued that this was a ‘historically inappropriate’ usage for
the site the plans were shelved.
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Sharon Macdonald
In the wake of this, various proposals were put forward to create perma-
nent artistic installations in the rally grounds which would, sometimes rather
obliquely, remind of, and comment on, the history of the site. None of these
was deemed to strike quite the right chord, however; and there was a partic-
ular fear that the developments might themselves unwittingly sacralise the site
and thus make it even more attractive to neo-Nazi pilgrims. Whether
artworks, with their own particular kind of magic, would be capable of inter-
vening critically in such a monumental and large-scale site was doubted by
some, particularly given a fear of also falling into monumentalism and gigan-
tism – both of which are regarded as Fascist styles. Proposals were also made
for replacing the existing ‘Fascination and Violence’ exhibition; though these
too stalled, one of the sticking points being the city’s argument that the cost
of any major development at the site should not be borne by Nuremberg alone
as the Nazi party rallies were the responsibility of the whole country.
In 1997 this argument finally succeeded and the German Bundestag (the
national government) as well as the Bavarian state agreed to help finance a
new exhibition development in the rally grounds to replace ‘Fascination and
Violence’. This opened in 2001. According to those involved, however, it is
not a ‘museum’: instead, they refer to it as a ‘documentation centre’, a matter
on which I was corrected several times when I began my research on their
project. The term ‘museum’ was seen as inappropriate, I was told, because this
was not a place where visitors would come to look at objects. This was not
to say that the exhibition space would lack authentic period artefacts: origi-
nal documents and film (including a considerable quantity of original footage
which has never been shown before) would be central to the exhibition. What
were deemed ‘inappropriate’ were ‘memorabilia’ – objects valued for their orig-
inal association with the period itself rather than for their informational and
educational value. This distinction was made clear to me one day in one of
the offices where the exhibition was being created. I was shown a box of
rolled-up papers which, I was told, were ‘really interesting’ – they had also
been something of a surprise discovery. These were the original plans for the
rally-ground buildings and showed alterations made during the planning (such
as the increased dimensions demanded by Hitler of several buildings). Above
the box were some shelves scattered with a motley collection of party-rally
commemorative items such as beer steins, badges and brochures. ‘Would these
also be going on display?’ I asked. The project worker with me laughed and
said not: these were items which had been given by local people but were ‘just
kitsch’. Unless they could be embedded in strongly educational narratives, the
placing of such items in the documentation centre risked turning it into a
museum – a site with the power to accord value to artefacts just by the fact
of their being there, and a site which would invite a kind of gaze which the
exhibition makers wished to deter. In fact, a few such items are included in
the finished exhibition. However, the visitor gaze is carefully controlled by
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presenting them unlabelled and simply as illustrative of the fact that many
such items were produced for the party rallies, and by positioning them fairly
inconspicuously and a long way into the exhibition and thus thoroughly
embedded in its overall narrative.
The dangers of inviting the ‘wrong kind of gaze’, of adding to the aura of
the site, and even of sacralising it, were given a great deal of creative and sensi-
tive thought in the planning of the exhibition and its linked ‘learning and
study forum’. The architecture of the documentation centre was the most
obvious – and to some extent most problematic – example. The new exhibi-
tion was to be housed in the Congress Hall building rather than the Golden
Hall – something which would give more room and scope for organising the
internal space as well as avoiding the potentially dominating aesthetic of the
Golden Hall. However, the monumental aesthetic of the Congress Hall was
also a concern and the organisers wished also to avoid beautifying the build-
ing by restoring it further. The winning architectural design, by Austrian
architect Günther Domenig, achieves this by leaving the building mainly in
an unrestored state and locating the documentation centre in a structure of
glass and steel which is described as a ‘stake’ slicing diagonally through the
building in ‘a deconstructive cut ...[intended to] break the monumentality and
the strict geometry of the Nazi building’ (project outline, my translation).
Other parts of the building continue to be put to ‘profane’ usages, such as
storage, to further help to counter the possible enchantment.
Within the exhibition too, the project workers have faced many problems
of potential enchantment in representing the subject matter. To give just one
example, at one stage in the planning the designers wanted to include a large
photograph of Hitler at the end of a corridor in order to lead into a section
about the construction of the ‘Führer Myth’. However, the panel of external
advisors which periodically scrutinises the plans was concerned that this would
replicate for visitors an experience of being under Hitler’s gaze – a gaze often
described as enchanting – and that this would not necessarily lead them to
critically appraise this experience. In response, the designers initially decided
to still include a large photograph of Hitler at this position – but of the back
of his head instead. Later still, however, this was still seen as problematic,
arguably inviting visitors to identify with Hitler looking out over the masses,
and it was decided that being literally faced by Hitler was appropriate to the
ideas being conveyed. The large photograph is, however, rather blurry, helping
to mute any possibly enchanting effect.
Those creating the exhibition at the party rally grounds have, then, had to
think extremely carefully about the ways in which the exhibition might possi-
bly be read by visitors and this has meant that they have taken a much more
authoritative and legislative approach than that typical of many other museum
developments today, as described above. This does not mean that they have
not carried out visitor research or involved inhabitants of Nuremberg. On the
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Sharon Macdonald
contrary, they have done both, but this has been oriented around finding ways
in which to educate about the Nazi period and its perceived continuing
dangers as clearly and unambiguously as possible. So, work with school chil-
dren, for example, has been dedicated particularly to working out the best
language and media in which to speak to them. And artefacts (as with the
party-rally memorabilia) or interviews contributed by local people are only
included in the exhibition where they can be embedded in the educational
and political message that is the rationale of the exhibition itself.
Concluding Comments
The example discussed above highlights something of the struggle with

enchantment which may be involved in the representation of certain subjects.
The dilemma arises in part, I have suggested, from the magical dimensions
of the museum form itself – in particular, its capacity to ‘sacralise’ spaces and
objects. So often when we are being shown encased objects in an exhibitionary
space, we are being invited to a form of ‘enchanted looking’ that Steven
Greenblatt calls ‘wonder’ (1990) (see also Heatherington, Chapter 6 in this
volume): this is one of the cultural modes of looking associated with the ritu-
alised experience of the museum visit. It is partly for this reason that the
experience of visiting sites such as the Nazi party rally grounds and Auschwitz,
and especially viewing the objects on display at the latter, can be so disturb-
ing. Positioned on the one hand as tourists, on the other we are called upon
to adopt a gaze very different from that at most tourist sites.5
How to draw on the other potential of the exhibitionary form – its educa-
tional potential – in a way which will still make people wish to visit but
without allowing them to be enchanted by the subject matter itself, and espe-
cially by its original intended enchantment, is the dilemma in cases such as
these. This dilemma is not, however, exclusive to such cases. In less dramatic
ways it is a dilemma faced in many exhibitions. Moreover, it is a dilemma
which in many cases is exaggerated for exhibition makers by the shift of
emphasis away from curatorial authority and towards trying to make as much
space as possible for subjective experience, visitor input and the magic of
objects. In making such space, they also open up the exhibition to new read-
ings, not all of which, perhaps, will be desirable.
Looking at the museum as a ritual site and exploring the analogy with reli-
gious institutions and movements helps to highlight the often delicate
interplay between science/authority and magic/enchantment. It also helps to
illuminate some of the subtle shifts underway in museological developments
as well as their patchy distribution and sometimes contested acceptance or
rejection. Hopefully, it also helps to show why museums are not only ritual
sites but also deeply political agencies in contemporary public culture.
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Acknowledgements
I wish to thank all of the participants at the Krakow workshop, especially

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto for organising it. I also wish to thank the
Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for funding my attendance at the work-
shop as well as my research in Nuremburg. I am also very grateful to Eckart
Dietzfelbinger and Hans-Christian Taübrich of the Dokumentationszentrum
Reichsparteitagsgelände for assistance with my research.
NOTES
1. The term ‘enchantment’ bears a Weberian inflection, Weber having argued that modern soci-
ety was characterised by increasing rationalisation which involved increasing ‘disenchantment’.
For a discussion of this, together with an argument that a concomitant quest for enchantment
continues in the modern world, see Jenkins 2000. On the manufacture of ‘enchantment’ see
also Ritzer 1999; though some critiques of Ritzer’s neo-Weberian arguments are also applica-
ble here (see Smart 1999).
2. The kind of subjectivity constructed in this regard is rather essentialised and does not, there-
fore, fit the postmodern notion of a decentred or fragmented self (see Heelas 1999). Indeed, it
is perhaps partly this that makes new religious movements attractive (ibid.).
3. Information on the Nazi rally grounds and rallies is drawn from a range of primary and sec-
ondary sources including Dietzfelbinger 1990,Ogan and Weiss 1992, Geschichte für Alle 1995
and Zelnhefer 2002.
4. Interview with author; see also Glaser 1989 – an article in which he set out this idea.
5. For a discussion of American Jewish tourism in Poland, including Auschwitz, which includes
very interesting discussion of the ritual nature of such tourism (as well as of alternatives to a reli-
gious analogy), see Kugelmass 1992. For a more general discussion of the history of represen-
tation and memorialisation at Auschwitz see Young 1993.
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10_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 229
N OTES ON C ONTRIBUTORS

Mary Bouquet teaches Cultural Anthropology and Museum Studies at

University College Utrecht, The Netherlands. She has conducted ethno-
graphic research on museums in Portugal, the Netherlands and Norway, and
been guest curator of a number of exhibitions. She has published several arti-
cles and books about interpreting collections and making exhibitions, and
edited Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future, Oxford:
Berghahn (2001).
Ian Fairweather (Ph.D. in Social Anthropology, Manchester) is currently a

temporary lecturer at the Department of Social Anthropology, Manchester
University, with a regional specialisation in Southern Africa. He conducted
fieldwork in North-Central Namibia among Oshiwambo speakers and has
interests in museums and the heritage industry, the performance of ‘heritage’
and its implications, and the importance of the discourse of ‘heritage’ in the
construction of national and ethnic identities. His publications include
‘Showing Off - Nostalgia and Heritage in North-Central Namibia’, Journal
of Southern African Studies, (2003); and an edited collection of papers on
‘Anthropology, postcolonialism and museums’, Social Analysis, (2004).
Penelope Harvey is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of

Manchester. She has a long-standing research interest in the politics of
communication and has done fieldwork in Peru, Spain and Manchester. She
has published widely on language, power, technology, knowledge and moder-
nity. She is the author of Hybrids of Modernity: anthropology, the nation state
and the universal exhibition, London: Routledge (1996), and is currently
completing a book on Being Bilingual in the Southern Peruvian Andes: A study
in the politics of language, landscape and history.
Tracey Heatherington (Ph.D. in Anthropology, Harvard University, 2000)

is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. She
10_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 230
Notes on Contributors
completed two years’ ethnographic fieldwork on the contestation over envi-

ronmental projects in central Sardinia, and is working on a book exploring
the political ecology of Sardinian ‘ecodevelopment’ in the context of globali-
sation and Europeanisation. She is the author of ‘Ecology, alterity and
resistance in Sardinia’, Social Anthropology (2001).
Sharon Macdonald is Reader in Social Anthropology at the University of

Sheffield. She is currently carrying out research on post-War approaches to
the Nazi past in Nuremberg, Germany. Her most recent book is Behind the
Scenes at the Science Museum (Blackwell, 2002).
Nuno Porto is Lecturer in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Depart-

ment of Anthropology and Coordinator of the Museum of Anthropology at
Coimbra University. He has conducted research on colonial museology in
Angola. His current research deals with the relations between colonial
concepts and practices of ‘traditional arts’ in the production of national arts
in Angola.
Barbara Saunders (Ph.D. Utrecht) is currently Research Professor at the

Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Leuven.
Her research interests focus on colour, the anthropology of perception, the
history of anthropology, the ethnohistory of the Northwest Pacific coast, the
shifting ideologies of museums, and scientific practice, on all of which she
has published a variety of articles. She is also a member of Clare Hall,
Cambridge.
Natasha J. Silva studied Biology (B.A. University of Amsterdam), Cultural

Anthropology (M.A., University of Utrecht) and Museology (Reinwardt
Academy), and works for the Education department of the Amsterdam
Zoo. She is interested in cultural diversity and attitudes towards wildlife, and
in issues of interpretation within the context of zoos and museums. Her
current research examines conservation education and visitor experience in
Dutch Zoos.
Boris Wastiau (Ph.D. University of East Anglia, U.K., 1998) has been curator
of Central African Art and Ethnography at the Royal Museum for Central Africa
(Tervuren, Belgium) since 1996. His current research includes museology,
ethnographic photography, and trans-ethnic initiation arts from southwest
Central Africa. He is author of ‘Mahamba: The transforming arts of spirit
possession among the Luvale-speaking people of the upper Zambezi’
(Fribourg: Fribourg University Press, 2000), and ExItCongoMuseum: An Essay
on the ‘Social Life’ of the Masterpeices of the Tervuren Museum. Tervuren: RMCA.
230
10_Bouquet 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 231
Notes on Contributors
Anna Wieczorkiewicz (Ph.D. in Humanities from the Polish Academy of

Sciences) is a Fellow of the Polish Academy of Sciences, at the Institute of
Philosophy and Sociology. Her research interests include: cultural representa-
tion, interdisciplinary research on literature and culture, the anthropology
of museums, and the anthropology of tourism. Her publications include
Muzeum ludzkich cia ł. Anatomia spojrzenia (Museum of Human Bodies.
Anathomy of the Gaze), Gdansk: Slowo/Obraz, Terytoria 2000; and
Wędrowcy ficyjnych światów. Rycerz pielgrzym i w łócz ęga (The Knight, The
Pilgrim and The Rough. Travelers in Fictional Worlds.) Gdańsk: S łowo/
Obraz, Terytoria 1997.
Barbara Wolbert (Ph.D. University of Cologne) teaches at the European

University Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder). She is currently working on a book
about art, politics and diversity in Germany. Recent publications include
Multicultural Germany: Art, Media and Performance, (forthcoming special
issue of New German Critique, of which she is guest editor, with Deniz
Göktürk (UC Berkeley); and ‘The Visual Production of Locality. Turkish
Family Pictures, Migration, and the Creation of Virtual Neighborhoods.’
Visual Anthropology Review (2001).
231
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11_Bouquet_INDEX 23/8/04 3:18 PM Page 233
I NDEX

A art
Abruzzo National Park, 143–44 African, 90, 91
Adorno, T.W., 78 contemporary, 98, 107, 111
aesthetic modern, 187, 189, 190, 203–204
approach, 109 in science museums, 32, 38, 39, 42, 47, 48
connoisseurship, 77 tribal, 90
Africa, 161–63, 165–68, 171, 178, 179n.4, Art to the People – The Adolf Hitler Collection,
180n.9 190
African art history, 104 Art Transpennine, 33
Agar, J., 41, 42 Artis (Amsterdam Zoo), 6, 13–15, 119–23,
agency, 4, 12, 186, 198 127–28, 130–32
catalytic, 75, 90, 91 experience, 120, 133, 137
curatorial, 12 Artists Association, 194
visitor’s, 19 Aset-iri-Khet-es, 65
Alpers, Svetlana, 142, 168 Asselberghs, H. and D. Lesage, 103
American Anthropological Association, 199 attentive looking, 168
Amstel river, 129 Augé, Marc, 15
Amsterdam, 120, 138 auratic value, 106
analysis of essence, 104 Auschwitz-Birkenau, 209, 224, 225n.5
Anderson, B., 217 authenticity, 144, 146, 153, 155–56
animals (zoo), 119–20, 122–24, 127–32 automata, 47
animal welfare, 133, 138
anthropological place, 15 B
Anti-Modern, 194 Baake, B., 182, 203
apartheid, 163–64, 167, 178–79, 179n.1 ‘Baby’, 5, 7, 8, 13, 30, 35, 37, 40, 41, 42, 43,
aquarium, 126–27, 129 44, 47, 48
Arapesh, 2, 22 Bann, S., 216
Archeological Museum, Crakow, 64 Barry, A., 7
architecture, 217 Baudrillard, Jean, 96, 99, 112
Aristotle, 78 Bauhaus, 193, 199, 205, 206
Arnaut, Karel, 12, 112–13 Baum, Paul, 187
Arnoldi, M.J., 83, 86 Bauman, Zygmunt, 63, 218
233
Index
Baumann, G., 217 colonial

Baunei, 144, 157n. collecting, 97, 110
Beaucamp, E., 199, 203 era, 166
Beckford, J., 211 frames, 89
Behrens, Jörg, 199 ideology, 88
Belgian colonial expansion, 98 past, 164, 166
Bell, Catherine, 144 practice, 103, 107
Bennett, Tony, 14, 57 subject, 88
Berg, M., 202, 203 travel, 107
Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Arts, 194 colonialism, 165–66, 178
Bernal, M., 79 Comaroff, Jean, 164
Beyer-Held, Elly, 191 Comaroff, John, 164
Biopark, 127 Comaroffs, 167, 174, 179n.4, n.7
Bisky, J., 199, 203 Combine Maxhütte, 183
Blain, D., 33 communications, 30, 31, 33, 35, 44, 48
Bothe, Rolf, 189, 200–203, 205 Computer Conservations Society, 35, 42
Bouquet, Mary, 9, 11, 12, 103, 199 computer networks, 29, 33, 38, 43, 44, 46, 48
Bourdieu, Pierre, 104–6, 110, 113 Congo, 77, 86
Bourdieu and Darbel, 20 Congo-Vision, 96, 100
Bredekamp, H., 39 Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris, 1, 23
Brussels-Tervuren Exposition of 1897, 87 context, 31, 48
Buchartowski, Caroline, 199 controversy, 217–19
Buchenwald, 184, 196, 201, 205 Cook, Thomas, 58, 59
Burg Beeskow, 183 Coquet, Michèle, 99
Burton, C., 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45 Corbey, Raymond, 12, 112–13
Butler, S., 31, 49n.2 cosmopolitanism, 164, 168, 178–79
Cracow (exhibit), 52, 64, 66
C critical history, 97
Cameron, D., 172 cultural authority (over the landscape), 153–55
Casanova, J., 210 Cultural Capital of Europe, 182, 185, 199
Castells, M., 211 cultural tourism, 150
categorical boundaries, 110 culture
Centre Canadien d’Etudes Allemandes et exhibiting, 172
Européennes, University of Montréal, industries, 46
199 local, 162, 165
ceremonial and modernity, 169
interaction, 162, 174 and museum recognition, 168
performance, 168, 170–71 Owambo, 176
Chase Manhattan Gallery in the British and presentation, 168
Museum, 76 public, 217–19
christianity 163–64, 166, 171–73, 176, curator, 11–13, 17–21, 26, 90, 109, 112, 184,
178 194, 197–98, 202
church, 162, 169, 174 gender-sensitive, 88
Council, 163 curatorial decisions, 191
Mission, 165, 173
Lutheran, 167, 173, 179n.2, n.6
classificatory narrative, 101 D
Clifford, James, 103 Dante, 54
Cohen, R., 199, 200, 203 dealers, 111
234
Index
Deleuze, G., 80, 86 European Association of Social Anthropologists

Denker, H., 179n.6 (EASA), 2, 199
debate, 183–84, 197 exhibition hall, 190, 183
Degenerate Art show, 198 ExItCongoMuseum, 6, 11, 12, 75, 89, 90, 91,
Dehio, G., 201, 204 95, 98, 100, 108, 109, 110
dichotomy, life/death, 61, 68 experience, 212, 216,
dichotomy, Self/Other, 56, 67 expertise, 31, 47, 48, 218
Dierking, Lynn D. and John H. Falk, 135,
137 F
Dietzfelbinger, E. 225n.3 Fabian, Johannes, 66–67, 76, 80
Digital Summer, 30, 33, 35, 40, 42, 43 Fairweather, I., 4, 6, 8, 16, 17, 19, 23, 180n.9,
disenchantment, 20 214, 216
displacement, 97, 98 Falk, John H. and Lynn D. Dierking, 135, 137
display, 183, 186–91, 196–98, 200, 202, 204 Feininger, Leonel, 190, 195–96
display material, 183 Ferranti, S. de, 42
distributed identification, 99 Finland, 167
Dittrich von Weringh, K., 199, 204 Finnish Evangelical Lutheran
Documentation Centre Nazi party rally mission 161, 166–67, 173, 176
grounds, 222–23 Mission Society, 166, 180n.9
Domenig, G., 223 missionaries, 165, 167, 173–74
Dorst, J., 214, Finnish Missionary Society (FMS), 166
drama, 42, 44, 46, 47, 48 Finno-Ugric speakers, 166
Dumeni, Bishop, K., 162 Finns, 166–67
Duncan, C., 3–5, 8, 11–13, 17–20, 31, 110, Flanagan, K. 214,
134, 137, 138, 182, 184–86, 196–97, Föhl, Thomas, 189, 191, 200–203, 205
201, 204, 210 formal universals, 104
Du Plessis, J., 167 forum, 172
Dutch Museum Association (NMV), 139n.1 frames, 184, 193
Dutch Zoo Association (NVD), 139n.15 Frank, Susanne, 182, 199, 204
Frankenhuis, Maarten, 122
E Fraunhofer Institut, 201, 203
East-West conflict, 198 Frazer, Sir James 210
Eco, Umberto, 1, 23 frontstage/backstage, 129, 130–31, 138
ecological museums, 145 fundamentalism, 209, 212
ecological self/identities, 144 Futures, 30, 34, 35, 39, 44, 47, 48
ecotourism, 150
education, 163, 167, 180n.9 G
Edwards, D., 41 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 67
Efendula, 173, 180n.10 gallery, 185, 193, 197, 201
Ehrenfeld, David, 133 Galloway, D., 199, 204
Ehrlich, L., 204, 205, 206 Garden of Eden, 137
enchantment, 212, 219–24, 225n.1 Garner, R., 70n.13
entrance, 191, 193, 202, 203 Gauforum, 185, 190, 205–206
environmental citizenship, 16, 143 GDR, 183–85, 191, 193–97, 201
Epistemology of museology, 97 Gell, Alfred, 20, 21
Ethnographic Museums, 96, 104 Gennargentu National Park, 15, 142, 144,
ethnostylistic themes, 105 147–48, 151, 155
Etosha, 161–62 Gerholm, Thomas, 19
Euro-American, 165 Gerlach, H., 182, 204
235
Index
German Democratic Republic, 193 House of the History of the Federal Republic
German Historical Museum, 201, 203 of Germany, 201, 203
German History Museum, 183, 196 Huxley, Thomas, 57
Geschichte für Alle, 225n.3
Glaser, H., 220, 225n.4 I
global system, 172 identification, 166, 172
globalisation, 35, 172 within distance, 176
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 184–85, identities, 169, 171
201 illusion of the absolute, 104
Goffman, Erving, 14, 129–31 imaginative reasoning, 7, 39–40, 44, 47
Graburn, Nelson, 134–38 Industrial revolution, 46
Graevenitz, Antje von, 201, 204 indigenous environmentalists, 156
Graf Kessler, Harry, 187–88, 202 Infocities, 29
Great Exhibition, 29 information revolution, 37, 46, 47
Greater Manchester Force, 69n.10 insignias of power, 101
Greenblatt, Steven, 156, 224 in-situ diet (zoo), 123
Greenwood, S., 212 institutional authority, 186, 196
Grimmling, Hans Hendrik, 199 International African Association, 100
invention of tradition, 100
H Iset-Iri-Heset, 64
Hahn, Hugo, 166–67 J
Halle der Volksgemeinschaft, 185 Jacobsen, D. 182, 199, 204
‘hands-off ’ working policy, 131 Jacques and Storms, 7
hanging, 183, 195, 197 James, W., 211
Hann, C., 210 Jameson, F., 89
Harris, M., 33, 45 Jenkins, R., 225n.1
Harvey, P., 4, 5, 7, 13, 17, 215, 218 Jennsen, J., 199, 204
Hay, J., 98 Jewsiewicki, Bogumil, 9
Heatherington, T., 4, 6, 15, 17, 19, 216 John, J., 201, 204, 205, 206
Heelas, P., 211, 214, 215, 225n.2
Hein, H.S., 77, 90 K
Heisig, Bernhard, 193–94, 202 Kabre, 164
Held, Louis, 201 Kandinsky, Vladimir, 190
Helsinki, 172 Karp, I., 19, 172, 174
heritage, 23, 161 Katriel, T., 172, 176
and business, 164 Khnum Nakt, 62
and culture, 162–63, 168, 171, 178, Kilburn, T., 40, 41, 42, 43, 44
179 King Albert I, 77
discourse, 162 King Leopold II, 10, 86
industry, 162, 167 Klee, Paul, 190, 196
and tourism, 165 Klinggraff, F., 199, 204
Hermann, Carl, 187 Knapp, G., 201, 202, 204
hermeneutics, 66, 67 Knowledge, see science
Herzfeld, Michael, 149, 152 Korrek, N., 185, 205
Hetherington, Kevin, 16, 142 Kugelmass, J., 225n.5
historiographies, 97 Kunstkammer, 39, 47
Hooper-Greenhill, E., 32 Kunstsammlungen zu Weimar, 189, 199–203,
Hootz, R., 201, 204 205–206
Hormann, Anne, 202 Kurtz, L., 211
236
Index
L Mikisi power objects, 96

labels, 108, 110 mission house, 162–63
LaGamma, Alisa, 13 missionaries, 163, 165–67, 169, 173–74,
Landgericht Erfurt, 200, 205 176–77
landscape, 15 missionary, 164–66, 172, 176
Latour, Bruno, 3, 16 Missionary church, 162
Lavine, S., 172, 174 modernity, 164–65, 167–69, 177–79
Legambiente, 148 monumental time, 149–52
Lerner, A., 217 Moore, Sally and Myerhoff, Barbara, 143
Lévy, Pierre, 8 moufflon, 144
lieu de mémoire, 99, 197 Morris, Wendy, 2, 80, 83, 87
life-stories, 97 multiculturalism, 172, 217
lighting, 183, 188–89, 197 celebratory, 78
liminal, 198 Multi-Purpose Hall, 184–85, 190, 196–97
liminality, 8 Munch, Edvard, 187–88, 195, 202
Linde, Irene van der, 134 Murray, Margaret, Dr, 55, 59, 60
literacy, 164, 167, 176, 178 museum
local history, 189 authority, 76
London Missionary Society (LMS), 166 collective ritual, 14
Loos, K., 185, 205 culture, 5
looting art, 110 effect, 142, 156, 216
Luntumbue, Toma Muteba, 4, 17, 90 enchantment, 17, 20
exhibits, 166, 169
M experience, 155, 172
Macdonald, Sharon, 4, 6, 12, 20, 22, 23, 142, guides, 170, 172, 174–75
199, 214, 218 magic, 21–23
magic, 6, 21, 44, 46, 48 performance, 169, 171–72, 174
Malinowski, Bronislaw, 2–3, 20, 67 as ritual process, 2
Malraux, A., 214 as ritual site, 2, 4, 20, 21
Man and Biosphere Project, 148 science, 29, 30, 31
Manchester, 30, 33, 35, 38, 40, 42, 43, 46 space, 186, 196
Manchester (exhibit) 52, 64 strategies, 76
Manchester Museum, 55, 59, 60, 61, 62, story, 170, 172, 174
69n. 10, 70n.13 tour, 170, 172
Manchester University, 59 visiting as ritual experience, 19, 20
Marihuana Museum, 69n.1 Museum for History, 183
Martin, D., 210 Museum of African and Oceanic Art, Paris,
Masterpieces collection, 98 69n.9
Masterpieces of Congolese art, 98, 99, 104 Museum of Holocaust, 69n.1
Matton, Arsène, 79, 80–83, 86, 87 Museum of Man, San Diego, 55, 69n.7, n.8
Mattuer, Wolfgang, 199 Museum of Science and Industry in
Maurer, M.E. and A.F. Roberts, 3, 11 Manchester (MSIM) 5, 29, 30, 32, 35,
McClintock, A., 86 39, 42
McKenna, J., 88 Museum of Sex, 69n.1
meaning making-process (zoo), 120, 128 museumisation of the landscape, 152, 156
memorabilia, 108
memory, 166–67, 171 N
Merleau-Ponty, M., 79 Nandi, Denis, 163
Mieras, Mark, 122 Nakambale, 161–78
237
Index
Nakambale Museum, 6, 16, 163, 165–66, Owambo, 161–68, 172–76, 178, 179n.1, n.5, n.6
168–72, 174, 178, 179n.3, n.4, Owamboland, 166–7, 175–76, 179n.6
n.5
Namibia, 161–68, 174–75, 179 P
narrative, 31, 40, 44–48, 178, 164, 168–72, paganism, 164
174, 186–87, 189–90, 194, painting, 188–89, 193, 200, 201
196–98 Palace of the Republic, 197
nation building, 16, 163–68, 186 Palast der Republik, 193
National monument, 162–63 Palumbo, Berardino, 142
National Monuments Council, 162 panoplies, 101–102, 108
National Museum, 174 Parkin, D, 101
National Museum of Cracow, 2 parks, 142–46
National Museum of Antiquities, Leiden, 53, participants, 190
69n.3, n.4, n.5 passage, 185, 197, 201, 204, 206
National trophies, 98–99 pathologisation
natural magic, 142, 156 of human remains, 61, 62
Nazi party rally grounds 219–24 of dead bodies, 61, 63
Nazi politics, 191 peaceable-kingdom, 136, 137
Nekh Ankh, 62 Peers, L., 77
Neoclassical building, 103 performance, 12, 161, 162, 168–69, 170–74,
Nerlich, Klaus, 199 78, 179n.4
Netherlands, the, 119, 122, 132, 135 performative, 167, 170, 174, 179n.8
Neubert, Willi, 193–94, 202 permanent exhibit, 188
new religious movements 209–13, 217 Petropoulos, Jonathan, 202, 205
New Walk Museum, Leicester, 53, 58, Pettigrew, Thomas, 59
69n.6 photographs, 190–91, 193, 199, 201, 201
Nieuwe Prinsengracht, 122 archival, 110
Nkisi, see Mikisi photological apparatus, 76
Nora, Pierre, 197, 205 Piot, Charles, 164
North-Central Namibia, 162, 164–67, 174, Plantage Middenlaan, 122
179n.3 Poland, 209, 225n.5
Norwegian Ethnographic Museum, 11 Porter, G., 32
Nuremberg, 6, 219–23 porterage routes, 108
Porto, Nuno, 12, 199
O postcolonial, 168, 179n.4
Official/Un-official: The Art of the GDR, 183, power-objects, 96–99
191 Preiss, Achim, 183, 191, 194, 200, 202, 205
Ogan, B. 225n.3 presentation
Olson, Ellena, 199 aesthetic, 76
Olukonda, 161, 169, 172–76, 178, 179n.2, typological, 76
n.6, 180n.10 presentational strategies, 169
Omaruru, 175 Preston, Douglas J., 51
Ondangwa, 161, 176 Price, Sally, 111
Ondonga, 172–73 Prior, N., 217
Orgosolo, 142, 147–57 profanation, 220–21
Oshakati, 162, 176 professional ethnographers, 96
Oshindonga, 175–76 Prösler, Martin, 11, 16
Oshiwambo,163–68, 176–77, 179n.1 public, the 217–18
Outjo, 175 public memorials, 103
238
Index
R scientific authority (over the landscape),

Rautenen, Martti, 161–66, 172–73, 176 144–46
religion/museum analogy, 6 scientific expertise, 30
resonance and wonder, 156 scientised aesthetism, 111
Rhenisch Missionary Society (RMS), 166 secular rituals, 3, 143
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden, see secularisation thesis, 210, 211
The National Museum of Antiquities, self, 212, 215
Leiden senses, 76
Ringrose, M., 217 Seurat, George, 187, 195
Rise and Fall of the Modern, 6, 17, 182, Shelton, Anthony, 96, 100, 214
185–95, 199 Sherman and Rogoff, 5
ritual, 40, 46, 47, 182, 184–86, 196–97, 199, showcases, 98, 102, 104, 106, 109
201, 202, 204 Signac, Paul, 187
bodies, 144, 153 Silva, N., 4, 6, 13, 14, 22, 216
of citizenship, 182, 184, 196–97, 204 sites, 184
of environmentalism, 143–44 Sitte, Willi, 193–94, 202
site/space (zoo), 120, 130, 134, 139 slide projection, 110, 111
Ritzer, G., 225n.1 Smart, B., 225n.1
Roberts, Allan, 97, 100–101, 105 social time, 149–52
Robinson, A., 41 Socialist Realism, 194
Rogoff, Irit, 201, 205 Solberg, 20
Rohlfs, Christian, 187, 201 source communities, 77
Röschenthaler, Ute., 99, 103 South Africa, 77, 163, 180n.9
Roth, Silke, 199 South African National Foundation for the
Royal Museum of Central Africa, Tervuren, 5, Conservation of Coastal Birds
10, 75, 95, 214 (SANCCOB), 127
Russia, 166–67 South West Africa Peoples’ Organization
(SWAPO), 167
S spoliation, 101
sacra, 186 Stadler, S., 202, 206
Sahlins, M., 167, 169, 179n.7, n.8 statement art, 100
Salmon, Pierre, 113 Sumatra, 125
Salzmann, M., 201, 205 suspension of disbelief, 110
Samuel, Charles, 79, 87, 88 Swakopmund, 173, 175
Sardinia, 141–57 synecdoche, 99, 107
Sardinian Forestry Service, 148
Sardinian Regional Forest Ranger and T
Environmental Protection Corps, 148, Tabwa political art, 100
157n. Tabwa wood carving, 96, 98–99
Saunders, Barbara, 4, 5, 10, 11, 26, 80, 96, Tambiah, S., 30
103, 214, 217, 218 Tannert, C., 183, 206
Saxony Art Fund, 183 Tassi, Franco, 143
Schalken, W., 179n.6 Taylor, C., 215
Schama, S., 15 technology of enchantment, 20
Scheidig, W., 187, 205 temporary exhibit, 188
Schierz, Kai Uwe, 199, 204 Tervuren, 96
Schiller, Friedrich von, 184, 201 Thanisaeb, Werner, 174
Schley, J., 201, 205 the suppressing death, 63
science, 30, 31, 38, 44, 46, 47, 48 Thomas, Louis-Vincent, 70n.12
239
Index
Thuringia, 185, 190, 201 W

Thuringian, 182, 194 Walsh, K., 217
title of the exhibition, 190, 195, 199–202 war trophies, 98, 101, 102, 103, 108
Tootill, G.C., 41 Ward, Herbert, 79, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87
tour, guided, 120, 125, 127–31, 133–35 Wastiau, Boris, 4, 6, 10–13, 19, 90, 214,
tourism, 162, 164–66, 168–69, 173, 178, 179n.6 218
cultural, 165, 169, 178 Weber, M., 20, 225n.1
and heritage industry, 162 Weimar, 182–85, 187–97, 199–206
tourists, 162, 164–65, 168–70, 172, 176, 178 Weimar Art Collection, 183, 187, 196
tradition, 162 Weimar Republic, 184, 201
and apartheid, 167 Weimar School of Painters, 187
Owambo, 163–65 Weiss, W., 225n.3
transparency, 31, 37, 39 Wennekes, Wim, 122
Truth, truth, truths, 212, 213, 215, 218–19 Werbner, R.P., 179n.6
Turner, V., 8, 17, 46, 185–86, 201, 206 Wershoven, H., 183, 200, 206
Tuzin, Donald, 2, 22, 23 Wieczorkiewicz, 4, 76, 214, 216, 217
wilderness, 144, 155
U Williams, F., 40, 41, 42
Ulbricht, J.H., 201, 204, 205, 206 Wilson, B., 211
universal exhibitions, 31, see also Great Wirth, H., 185, 206
Exhibition Wolbert, B., 4, 6, 13, 17, 18, 20, 206,
University of Manchester, 35, 42 214, 218
Wolf, C., 185, 206
V works of art, 98
Vaessen, J., 19 WWF, 145, 148
van Gennep, Arnold, 8, 185, 201, 206
Van Gogh Museum, 12, 69n.1
Y
Van Kets, 83
Young, J., 86, 88, 225n.5
Vanhee, Hein, 113
Vent, Hans, 193–94, 202
Vergilius, 54 Z
violence, 220 Zelnhefer, S., 225n.3
vision, 75 Zivilcourage, 198
visiting publics, 48 zoo, 119–20, 122–25, 127–32
visitors, 182–86, 194–98, 200, 202–203, 215, experience, 133–35
222–23 philosophy, 123
ideal, 186 Zühlke, D., 201, 205
as initiated, 14
visual perception, 77
240

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SCIENCE, MAGIC AND RELIGION

New Directions in Anthropology

©2005, 2006 Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages

Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper.

ISBN 1-57181-520-1 (hardback)

List of Figures vii

PART I OBJECTS OF SCIENCE? BABY AND THE MUMMIES

PART II SITE SPECIFICS: THE CASE OF TERVUREN

PART III ENCOUNTERS, PERFORMANCES AND UNPREDICTABLES

6. The Natural Magic of Monte San Giovanni: Authority,

PART IV DILEMMAS OF ENCHANTMENT

1.1 ‘The world’s oldest surviving railway building, the

3.7 ‘Chief of the Tribe’, H. Ward, 1908 (courtesy of

6.1 The road to Monte San Giovanni, Orgosolo (photograph

8.5 A view of the presentation of Hitler’s art collection on the

Coimbra/Wageningen, 13 February 2004

This passage from Umberto Eco’s celebrated novel Foucault’s Pendulum

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

This is exactly the point made – in a different way – by Donald Tuzin in

The reception party for the European Association of Social Anthropology’s

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Constituting Ritual Substances: the Beholder’s Share

One of Duncan’s principal arguments is that although post-Enlightenment

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Thumbnail Overview of the Volume

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

two ‘masterpieces’, which were part of the temporary exhibition ExItCongo-

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Part I Objects of Science? Baby and the Mummies

Birth of the Baby in Manchester

Reconstructing the first computer in terms of a Baby, for public ‘delivery’ on

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

personalities. While it may be a little uncharitable to observe that Michel

If birth refers to the beginning of a person’s life which, by museum magic,

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Egyptians (notwithstanding ‘horror movies’ showing reanimated mummies) is

Part II Site Specifics: the Case of Tervuren

Context, as the cases of Manchester and Krakow demonstrate, can be deci-

(Belgian) Congolese others

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Norwegian Ethnographic Museum from 1902 onwards (Bouquet 1996: 74–77).

Anthropologist-curator Wastiau’s account of the life histories of two Congolese

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Part III Encounters, Performances and Unpredictables

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Going behind the scenes at Artis Zoo

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Performing locality vs. performing ecology

Monte San Giovanni was already a local landmark or ‘anthropological place’,

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

Nakambale double act: performing heritage

Staff and visitors to the Nakambale Museum in Namibia are involved in a

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion

Curating German pasts

The internationalisation of locality associated with the Manchester (Harvey),

Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto

create the required technology of enchantment (Wolbert refers to the

Introduction: Science, Magic and Religion