INTRODUCTION

What is a museum? How do we define a collection? What is an

institution? What does the term ‘heritage’ encompass? Museum
professionals have inevitably developed answers to questions such as
these, which are fundamental to their work, compiled according to
their knowledge and experience. Do we need to reconsider these? We
believe so. Museum work shifts back and forth between practice and
theory, with theory regularly being sacrificed to the thousand and one
daily tasks. The fact remains, however, that thought is a stimulating
exercise which is also fundamental for personal development and for
the development of the museum world.
The purpose of ICOM, on an international level, and of national
and regional museum associations more locally, is to develop standards
and improve the quality of the thinking that guides the museum world
and the services that it provides to society, through meetings between
professionals. More than thirty international committees work on this
collective think tank, each in its specific sector, producing remarkable
publications. But how can this wealth of thought on conservation, new
technologies, education, historical houses, management, professions,
and more, all fit together? More generally, how is what one might call
the museum field organised? These are the questions addressed by the
ICOM International Committee for Museology (ICOFOM) since its
foundation in 1977, in particular through its publications (ICOFOM
Study Series) which set out to inventory and synthesise the diversity of
opinions in museology. This is the context in which the plan to make
15
INTRODUCTION

a compendium of basic concepts in museology, coordinated by André

Desvallées, was launched in 1992 by Martin R. Schärer, Chairman of
ICOFOM. He was joined eight years later by Norma Rusconi (who
sadly passed away in 2007), and by François Mairesse. Over the years
a consensus emerged that we should try to present, in some twenty
terms, a panorama of the varied landscape that the museum field
has to offer. This work has gathered momentum over the past few
years. Several preliminary versions of the articles were published (in
ICOFOM Study Series and in the review Publics & musées, which later
became Culture & musées). We propose here a summary of each of
these terms, presenting different aspects of each concept in condensed
form. These are addressed and further developed in the articles
of about ten to thirty pages each, along with a dictionary of about
400 terms, which will appear in the Dictionary of Museology now being
prepared for publication.
The project to compile the Dictionary is based on an international
vision of the museum, fuelled by many exchanges within ICOFOM.
The authors come from French-speaking countries, for reasons of
linguistic coherence: Belgium, Canada, France, Switzerland. They
are Yves Bergeron, Serge Chaumier, Jean Davallon, Bernard Deloche,
André Desvallées, Noémie Drouguet, François Mairesse, Raymond
Montpetit and Martin R. Schärer. A first version of this work was
presented and discussed at length at the 32nd symposium of ICOFOM
in Liège and Mariemont (Belgium) in 2009.
Two points are worthy of brief discussion at this point: the
composition of the editorial committee and the choice of the twenty-
one terms.

The French -speaking museal world

in the ICOM dialogue
Why did we choose a committee with almost exclusively French
speakers? Many reasons explain this choice, most but not all of
them practical ones. We know that the idea of an international and
perfectly harmonious collective work is a utopian vision, when not
16
 INTRODUCTION

everyone shares a common language (scientific or not). The interna-

tional committees of ICOM are well aware of this situation, which, to
avoid the risk of a Babel, leads them to favour one language – English
– today’s lingua franca. Naturally, the choice of the smallest common
denominator works to the benefit of those who master the language,
often to the detriment of many others less familiar with the tongue
of Shakespeare, who are forced to present their thoughts only in a
caricatured version. Using one of the three ICOM languages (English,
French and Spanish) was unavoidable, but which one? The nationality
of the first contributors, under the direction of André Desvallées
(who had worked for many years with Georges Henri Rivière, the first
Director of ICOM and the founder of French museology) quickly led
to the selection of French, but there were other arguments in its favour.
Most of the contributors can read if not all three, then at least two of
the ICOM languages, even though their command may be far from
perfect. We are familiar with the wealth of Anglo-American contri-
butions in the museum field, but we must point out that most of these
authors – with some notable exceptions, such as the emblematic figures
of Patrick Boylan and Peter Davis, read neither French nor Spanish. The
choice of French in connection, we hope, with a fairly good knowledge
of foreign literature, allowed us to embrace, if not all contributions
in the museum field then at least some of its aspects, which are not
generally explored but which are very important for ICOM. We are,
however, aware of the limits of our research and hope that this work
will inspire other teams to present, in their own language (German or
Italian, for example), a different approach to the museum field.
On the other hand, the choice of a language has consequences
for the structuring of thought – as illustrated by a comparison of the
definition of the museum by ICOM in 1974 and in 2007, the first being
originally drafted in French, the second in English. We are aware
that this volume would not have been the same in Spanish, English or
German, both on the level of its structure and in its choice of terms,
but there would also have been a certain theoretical bias! It is not
surprising that most practical guides about museums are written
in English (such as the excellent manual edited by Patrick Boylan
17
INTRODUCTION

Running a Museum: A Practical Handbook1), while they are much rarer

in France or in the old eastern European countries, which favour essay
writing and developing thought and theory.
It would nevertheless be too caricatural to divide museum
literature into a practical component, strictly Anglo-American, and a
theoretical component, closer to the Latin way of thinking: the number
of theoretical essays written by Anglo-Saxon thinkers in museum
literature completely contradicts this picture. The fact remains that
a number of differences exist, and differences are always enriching to
learn and to appreciate. We have tried to take this into consideration.
Finally it is important to pay tribute, through the choice of the
French language, to the fundamental theoretical work continued for
many years by the first two directors of ICOM, Georges Henri Rivière
and Hugues de Varine, without whom a large part of the museum
work in continental Europe and in the Americas and Africa could not
be understood. A fundamental reflection on the museum world cannot
overlook its history, just as it must keep in mind that its origins were
anchored in the Enlightenment and that its transformation (that is its
institutionalisation) occurred at the time of the French Revolution, but
also that the theoretical foundations were laid on the other side of the
Berlin wall during the 1960s when the world was still divided into two
antagonistic blocs. Although the geopolitical order was completely
overturned nearly a quarter of a century ago, it is important that
the museum sector should not forget its own history – this would be
absurd for an instrument that passes culture on to the public and to
future generations! However, there is still a risk of a very short memory
which retains from museum history only how to run such institutions
and how to attract visitors…

A constantly evolving structure

Right from the start it was not the authors’ aim to write a ‘definitive’
treatise about the museum world, an ideal theoretical system cut off

1. BOYLAN P. (coord.), Running a Museum: A Practical Handbook, Paris, ICOM/Unesco, 2004.

http//:unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0014/001410/141067e.pdf (accessed: June 2010).

18
 INTRODUCTION

from reality. The relatively modest formula of a list of twenty-one

terms was chosen to try to mark out a continuum of thought on the
museum field with only so many waymarks. The reader will not be
surprised to find here a number of familiar terms in common use,
such as museum, collection, heritage, public, but we hope he will
discover some meanings and aspects of these which are less familiar.
He may be surprised not to find certain other terms, such as ‘conser-
vation’, which is examined under ‘preservation’. We have not, however,
taken up all the developments that have been made by the members
of the International Committee for Conservation (ICOM-CC), whose
work extends far beyond our pretensions in this field. Other more
theoretical terms may seem somewhat exotic to museum practitioners
at first sight: museal, musealisation, museology, etc. Our aim was to
present the broadest view possible of what can be observed in the
museum world, including some common and some more unusual
practices likely to have a considerable impact on the future of museums
in the long term, for example the concept of virtual museums and
cyber museums.
Let us first set out the limits of this work: we are proposing a
theoretical and critical reflection on museum work in its broad sense,
which goes beyond traditional museums. We can of course begin with
museum and try to define it. In the ICOM definition of museum, it is an
institution at the service of society and its development. What do these
two fundamental terms mean? But above all – and museum definitions
do not immediately answer this question – why do museums exist? We
know that the museum world is linked to the concept of heritage, but it
is far larger than this. How can we suggest this wider context? By the
concept of museal (or the museal field), which is the theoretical field
dealing with these issues, in the same way that politics are the field of
political reflection, etc. The critical and theoretical examination of the
museal field is museology, whereas the practical aspect is museography.
For each one of these terms there are often not one but several
definitions which have altered over time. The different interpretations
of each of these terms are examined here.
19
INTRODUCTION

The museum world has evolved a great deal over the years, both
in terms of its functions and through its materiality and the main
elements upon which its work is built. In practical terms, museums
work with objects which form their collections. The human element
is obviously fundamental to understanding the way museums work,
as much for the staff working within the museum – the professionals,
and their relation to ethics – as for the public for whom the museum
is intended. What are the functions of museums? They carry out
an activity that can be described as a process of musealisation and
visualisation. More generally, we speak of museal functions, which
have been described in different ways over time. We have based our
research on one of the best known models, crafted at the end of the
1980s by the Reinwardt Academie in Amsterdam, which recognises
three functions: preservation (which includes the acquisition, conser-
vation and management of collections), research and communication.
Communication itself includes education and exhibition, undoubtedly
the two most visible functions of museums. In this regard it seemed to
us that the educational function had grown sufficiently over the past
few decades for the term mediation to be added to it. One of the major
differences that struck us between earlier museum work and today is
the growth in the importance attached to notions of management, so
we thought that because of its specificities, it should be treated as a
museum function. The same is probably true for museum architecture,
which has also grown in importance to the point where it sometimes
upsets the balance between other museum functions.
How does one define a museum? By a conceptual approach
(museum, heritage, institution, society, ethics, museal), by theoretical
and practical considerations (museology, museography), by its functions
(object, collection, musealisation), through its players (professionals,
public), or by the activities which ensue from it (preservation, research,
communication, education, exhibition, mediation, management,
architecture)? There are many possible points of view which have to
be compared to better understand the museum phenomenon, which is
rapidly developing, the recent evolutions of which cannot leave anyone
indifferent.
20
 INTRODUCTION

In the early 1980s the museum world experienced a wave of

unprecedented changes: having long been considered elitist and
unobtrusive, museums were now, as it were, coming out, flaunting a
taste for spectacular architecture, mounting large exhibitions that were
showy and hugely popular and intending to become part of a certain
style of consumerism. The popularity of museums has not failed since,
and they have doubled in number in the space of little more than a
generation, while astonishing new building projects spring up from
Shanghai to Abu Dhabi, at the dawn of the new geopolitical changes
promised in the future. One generation later the museum field is
still changing. Even if homo touristicus seems to have replaced the
visitor as the main target of museum marketing, we can still wonder
about their prospects and ask: is there still a future for museums as
we know them? Is the civilisation of material goods crystallised by
museums undergoing radical change? We cannot claim to answer
such questions here, but we hope that those who are interested in the
future of museums in general or, more practically, in the future of their
own institution, will find in these few pages some elements which may
enrich their thoughts.

François Mairesse and André Desvallées

21
 C
COLLECTION rarely any intention to build a cohe-
rent whole.
n. – Equivalent in French: collection; Spanish:
colección; German: Sammlung, Kollektion; Ita- Whether material or intangi-
lian: collezione, raccolta; Portuguese: colecçāo ble, a collection is at the heart of
(Brazil: coleçāo). the museum’s activities. “Museums
have a duty to acquire, preserve
Generally speaking, a collection
and promote their collections as a
may be defined as a set of material
contribution to the safeguarding of
or intangible objects (works, arte-
the natural, cultural and scientific
facts, mentefacts, specimens, archive
documents, testimonies etc.) which heritage” (ICOM Code of Ethics,
an individual or an establishment 2006, article 2). Without saying as
has assembled, classified, selected, much explicitly, ICOM’s definition
and preserved in a safe setting and of a museum remains essentially tied
usually displays to a smaller or larger to this principle, confirming Louis
audience, according to whether the Réau’s long-standing opinion: “We
collection is public or private. understand that museums are made
To constitute a real collection, for collections and that they must be
these sets of objects must form a built as it were from inside to out-
(relatively) coherent and meaningful side, shaping the container according
whole. It is important to distinguish to the content” (Réau, 1908). This
between a collection and a fonds, an concept no longer corresponds to
archival term referring to a collec- some models of museums which do
tion from a single source, which dif- not own collections, or which have
fers from a museum collection by its collections that are not at the heart
organic nature, and indicates archival of their scientific work. The concept
documents of all kinds which have of collection is also one of those most
been “automatically gathered, crea- widely used in the museum world,
ted and/or accumulated and used by even if we have favoured the notion
a physical person or a family in its of ‘museum object’, as will be seen
activities or its functions.” (Bureau below. However, one can enumerate
of Canadian Archivists, 1992). In three possible connotations of this
the case of a fonds, unlike a museum concept, which varies according to
collection, there is no selection and two factors: on the one hand, the

26
institutional nature of the collection, source of a scientific programme,
and on the other hand, the material the purpose of which is acquisition
or intangible nature of the collection and research, beginning with the
media. material and the intangible evidence
1. Frequent attempts have been of man and his environment. This
made to differentiate between a criterion, however, does not diffe-
museum collection and other types of rentiate between the museum and
collection because the term ‘collection’ the private collection, in so far as
is so commonly used. Generally the latter can be assembled with a
speaking (since this is not the case scientific objective, even though the
for every museum) the museum museum may acquire a private col-
collection – or the museum col- lection which has been built with
lections – are both the source and very little intention to serve science.
the purpose of the activities of the This is when the institutional nature
museum perceived as an institution. of the museum dominates when
Collections can thus be defined as defining the term. According to Jean
“the collected objects of a museum, Davallon, in a museum “the objects
acquired and preserved because of are always parts of systems and cate-
their potential value as examples, as gories” (Davallon, 1992). Among
reference material, or as objects of the systems relating to a collection,
aesthetic or educational importance” besides the written inventory which
(Burcaw, 1997). We can thus refer is a basic requirement of a museum
to the museum phenomenon as the collection, it is just as essential to
institutionalisation of a private col- adopt a classification system which
lection. We must note, however, that describes and can also rapidly fi nd
if the curator or the museum staff any item among the thousands or
are not collectors, collectors have millions of objects (taxonomy, for
always had close ties with curators. example, is the science of classifying
Museums should have an acquisition living organisms). Modern classi-
policy – as emphasised by ICOM, fication systems have been greatly
which also mentions a collection influenced by information techno-
policy – museums select, purchase, logy, but documenting collections
assemble, receive. The French verb remains an activity requiring speci-
collectionner is rarely used because it fic and rigorous knowledge, based
is too closely linked to the actions of on building up a thesaurus of terms
the private collector and to its deri- describing the relations between the
vatives (Baudrillard, 1968), that is to different categories of objects.
say collectionism and accumulation, 2. The definition of collection can
known pejoratively as ‘collectionitis’. also be viewed from a more general
From this perspective the collection perspective to include private col-
is seen as both the result and the lectors and museums, but taking
27
 its assumed materiality as a starting Museum collections have always
point. Since this collection is made appeared relevant provided that they
of material objects – as was the case are defined in relation to the accom-
very recently for the ICOM defini- panying documentation, and also
tion of museums – the collection is by the work that results from them.
identified by the place where is loca- This evolution has led to a much
ted. Krysztof Pomian defines the wider meaning of the collection as
collection as “any group of natural a gathering of objects, each preser-
or artificial objects that are held tem- ving its individuality, and assembled
porarily or permanently outside the intentionally according to a specific
circuit of economic activity, subject logic. This latter meaning, the most
to special protection in an enclosed open, includes toothpick collections
place designed for this purpose, and accumulated as well as traditional
displayed on view” (Pomian, 1987). museum collections, but also col-
Pomian thus defines the collection lections of oral history, memories or
by its essentially symbolic value, in scientific experiments.
so far as the object has lost its use- Z DERIVATIVES: COLLECT, COLLECTION, COLLECTOR,
fulness or its value as an item for COLLECTION MANAGEMENT.
exchange and has become a carrier
of meaning (“semiophore” or carrier ) CORRELATED: ACQUISITION, CATALOGUE,
CATALOGUING, CONSERVATION, DEACCESSION,
of significance). (see Object). DOCUMENTATION, EXHIBIT, EXHIBITION, PRESERVATION,
3. The recent development of RESEARCH, RESTORATION, RETURN, RESTITUTION, STUDY.
museums – in particular the reco-
gnition of intangible heritage – has
emphasised the more general nature COMMUNIC ATION
of collections while also raising new
challenges. Intangible collections (tra- n. – Equivalent in French: communication;
ditional knowledge, rituals and myths Spanish: comunicación; German: Kommuni-
kation; Italian: communicazione, Portuguese:
in ethnology, ephemeral gestures and communicaçāo.
performances in contemporary art)
have led to the development of new Communication (C) is the action
systems for acquisition. The material of conveying information between
composition of objects alone some- one or several emitters (E) and one
times becomes secondary, and the or several receivers (R) through a
documentation of the collecting pro- channel (the ECR model, Lasswell
cess – which has always been impor- 1948). The concept is so general that
tant in archaeology and ethnology it is not limited to human processes
– now becomes the most important of bearing information of a semantic
information. This information is not nature, but is also encountered in
only part of research, but also part relation to machines and to animals
of communicating to the public. or social life (Wiener 1949). The

28
term has two usual connotations and exhibits the tangible and intan-
which can be found to different gible heritage of humanity and its
degrees in museums, according to environment for the purposes of edu-
whether the phenomenon is recipro- cation, study and enjoyment.” Until
cal (E ↔ C ↔ R) or not (E → C → R). the second half of the 20th century
In the first case the communication the principle function of a museum
is called interactive, while in the was to preserve amassed cultural
second it is unilateral and spread or natural treasures, and possibly
out in time. When communication is to display these, without explicitly
unilateral and operates in time, and expressing any intention to commu-
not just in space, it is called transmis- nicate, that is to convey a message
sion (Debray, 2000). or information to a receiving public.
In the museum context commu- If in the 1990s, people were asking
nication emerges both as the pre- themselves whether the museum
sentation of the results of research was really a medium (Davallon,
undertaken into the collections 1992; Rasse, 1999) this was because
(catalogues, articles, conferences, the museum’s communication func-
exhibitions) and as the provision of tion did not appear obvious to eve-
information about the objects in the ryone. On the one hand, the idea of a
collections (the permanent exhibi- museum message appeared only rela-
tion and the information connected tively late, with thematic exhibitions
with it). This interpretation sees the that were principally aimed at educa-
exhibition both as an integral part tion; on the other hand, the receiving
of the research process and as an public remained a great unknown
element in a more general commu- for a long time, and it is only quite
nication system including for exam- recently that museum visitor studies
ple, scientific publications. This is and visitor surveys have developed.
the rationale which prevailed in the Seen from the perspective favoured
PRC (Preservation–Research–Com- in the ICOM definition of museums,
munication) system proposed by the museum communication would
Reinwardt Academie in Amsterdam, appear to be the sharing, with diffe-
which includes under communi- rent publics, of the objects in the col-
cation the functions of exhibition, lection and the information resulting
publication, and education fulfilled from research into them.
by the museum. 2. We can define the specificity
1. Application of the term ‘com- of communication as practised by
munication’ to museums is not museums in two points: (1) it is most
obvious, in spite of the use made of often unilateral, that is, without the
it by ICOM in its definition of the possibility of reply from the recei-
museum until 2007. This definition ving public, whose extreme passivity
states that a museum “acquires, was rightly emphasised by McLuhan
conserves, researches, communicates and Parker (1969, 2008). This does
29
 not mean that the visitor is not perso- Consequences include the many digi-
nally involved (whether interactively tal exhibitions or cyber-exhibitions
or not) in this type of communication (a field in which a museum may have
(Hooper-Greenhill, 1991); (2) it is not genuine expertise), on-line cata-
essentially verbal, nor can it really be logues, more or less sophisticated
compared with reading a text (Daval- discussion forums, and forays into
lon, 1992), but it works through the social networks (YouTube, Twitter,
sensory presentation of the objects Facebook, etc.).
exhibited: “The museum as a com- 4. The discussion regarding the
munication system, then, depends communication methods used by the
on the non-verbal language of the museum raises the question of trans-
objects and observable phenomena. mission. The chronic lack of interac-
It is primarily a visual language, and tivity in museum communication has
at times an aural or tactile language. led us to ask ourselves how we can
So intense is its communicative power make the visitor more active, while
that ethical responsibility in its use seeking his participation (McLuhan
must be a primary concern of the and Parker 1969, 2008). We could,
museum worker” (Cameron, 1968). of course, remove the labels or even
3. More generally speaking, com- the story line so that the public could
munication gradually became the build their own rationale as they
driving force of museum operations move through the exhibition, but
towards the end of the 20th century. this would not make the communi-
This means that museums communi- cation interactive. The only places
cate in a specific way (using their own where a degree of interactivity has
methods), but also by using all other been developed (such as the Palais de
communication techniques, possibly la Découverte, the Cité des sciences et
at the risk of investing less in what de l’industrie in Paris, or the Explo-
is most central to their work. Many ratorium in San Francisco) seem clo-
museums – the largest ones – have ser to amusement parks that develop
a public relations department, or a fun attractions. It appears neverthe-
“public programmes department”, less that the real task of the museum
which develops activities aimed at is closer to transmission, understood
communicating to and reaching as unilateral communication over
various sectors of the public that are time so that each person can assimi-
more or less targeted, and involving late the cultural knowledge which
them through traditional or inno- confirms his humanity and places
vative activities (events, gatherings, him in society.
publications, extramural activities,
etc.), In this context the very large ) CORRELATED: CULTURAL ACTION, EXHIBITION,
EDUCATION, DISSEMINATION, INTERPRETATION, MEDIA,
sums invested by museums in their MEDIATION, TRANSMISSION, PUBLIC AWARENESS, PUBLIC
internet sites are a significant part of RELATIONS.
the museum’s communication logic.

30
 E
EDUC ATION knowledge. Knowledge, know-how,
being and knowing how to be are four
n. (Latin: educatio, educere, to guide, to lead major components in the educatio-
out of) – Equivalent in French: éducation; Spa-
nish: educación; German: Erziehung, Museums-
nal field. The term education comes
pädagogik; Italian: istruzione; Portuguese: from the Latin “educere”, to lead out
educaçāo. of (i.e. out of childhood) which assu-
mes a dimension of active accompa-
Generally speaking, education means niment in the transmission process.
the training and development of It is connected with the notion of
human beings and their capacities by awakening, which aims to arouse
implementing the appropriate means curiosity, to lead to questioning and
to do so. Museum education can be develop the capacity to think. The
defined as a set of values, concepts, purpose of informal education is thus
knowledge and practices aimed at to develop the senses and awareness;
ensuring the visitor’s development; it is a development process which pre-
it is a process of acculturation which supposes change and transformation
relies on pedagogical methods, deve- rather than conditioning and incul-
lopment, fulfilment, and the acquisi- cation, notions it tends to oppose.
tion of new knowledge. The shaping of it therefore happens
1. The concept education should be via instruction which conveys use-
defined in relation to other terms, the ful knowledge, and education which
first of these being instruction, which makes this knowledge transformable
“concerns the mind and is unders- and able to be reinvested by the indi-
tood as knowledge acquired by which vidual to further the process of his
one becomes skilful and learned” becoming a human being.
(Toraille, 1985). Education relates 2. In a more specifically museum
to both the heart and the mind, and context, education is the mobilisa-
is understood as knowledge which tion of knowledge stemming from
one aims to update in a relationship the museum and aimed at the deve-
which sets knowledge in motion to lopment and the fulfilment of indi-
develop understanding and indivi- viduals, through the assimilation of
dual reinvestment. Education is the this knowledge, the development of
action of developing moral, physical, new sensitivities and the realisation of
intellectual and scientific values, and new experiences. “Museum pedagogy

31
 is a theoretical and methodological the work according to the extent
framework at the service of educatio- to which he assimilates the content
nal activities in a museum environ- before him. Training assumes
ment, activities the main purpose of constraint and obligation, whereas
which is to impart knowledge (infor- the museum context supposes free-
mation, skills and attitudes) to the dom (Schouten, 1987). In Germany
visitor” (Allard and Boucher, 1998). the term pedagogy, or Pädagogik is
Learning is defined as “an act of per- used more frequently, and of the
ception, interaction and assimilation word used to describe education
of an object by an individual”, which within museums is Museumspädago-
leads to an “acquisition of knowledge gik. This refers to all the activities
or the development of skills or atti- that a museum may offer, regardless
tudes” (Allard and Boucher, 1998). of the age, education or social bac-
Learning relates to the individual kground of the public concerned.
way in which a visitor assimilates the Z DERIVATIVES: ADULT EDUCATION, EDUCATIONAL
subject. With regard to the science of SCIENCES, EDUCATIONAL SERVICES, LIFE-LONG
education or intellectual training, if EDUCATION, INFORMAL OR NON-FORMAL EDUCATION,
pedagogy refers more to childhood MID-CAREER EDUCATION, MUSEUM EDUCATION, POPULAR
and is part of upbringing, the notion EDUCATION.

of didactic is considered as the theory ) CORRELATED: AWAKENING, CULTURAL ACTION,

CULTURAL ACTIVITIES, DEVELOPMENT, DIDACTIC,
of dissemination of knowledge, the
way to present knowledge to an INTERNSHIP, INSTRUCTION, MEDIATION, PEDAGOGY,
TEACHING, TRAINING, TRANSMISSION, UPBRINGING.
individual whatever his or her age.
Education is wider, and aims at the
autonomy of the individual. ETHICS
We can mention other related
concepts which shade and enrich n. (From the Greek ethos: customs, charac-
ter) – Equivalent French: éthique; Spanish:
these different approaches. The
etica; German: Ethik; Italian: ethica; Portu-
concepts of museum activities or guese: ética.
cultural action, like that of interpreta-
tion or mediation, are often invoked Generally speaking, ethics are a phi-
to describe the work carried out with losophical discipline in philosophy
the public in the museum’s efforts that deals with identifying values
at transmission. “I am teaching you” which will guide both private and
says a teacher, “I am allowing you to public human conduct. Far from
know” says a mediator (Caillet and being a simple synonym of morality,
Lehalle, 1995) (see Mediation). This as is currently believed, ethics is the
distinction aims to reflect the diffe- opposite in so far as the choice of
rence between the act of training, values is not imposed by a specific
and a process of awareness appea- set of rules, but rather freely chosen
ling to an individual who will finish by the individual taking action. This

32
distinction is essential because of its democracies determine values. This
consequences for museums, since fundamental distinction still influen-
the museum is an institution, that is ces the division between two types
to say a phenomenon which exists by of museums or two ways of operating
common agreement and which can even today. Some very traditional
be altered. museums such as fine arts museums
Within the museum, ethics can seem to follow a pre-established
be defined as the discussion process order: their collections appear to
aimed at identifying the basic values be sacred and define a model of
and principles on which the work of conduct by different actors (curators
the museum relies. Ethics lead to the and visitors), and a crusading spirit
drawing up of principles set out in in the way they carry out their tasks.
museums’ codes of ethics, of which On the other hand, some museums,
the ICOM code is one example. perhaps more attentive to the prac-
1. Ethics are aimed at guiding a tical reality of people’s lives, do not
museum’s conduct. In a moral vision consider themselves subject to abso-
of the world, reality is subject to a lute values and continuously reas-
moral order which determines the sess them. These may be museums
place occupied by each person. This more in touch with real life, such
order constitutes a perfection towards as anthropology museums, striving
which each being must strive by ful- to grasp an ethnic reality which is
filling his function perfectly, and this often fluctuating, or so-called “social
is known as virtue (Plato, Cicero, museums” for which questions and
etc.). By contrast, the ethical vision of practical choices (political or social)
the world is based on a chaotic and are more important than the religion
disorganised world, left to chance of collections.
and without any fixed bearings. 2. While the distinction between
Faced with this universal disorder, ethical and moral is quite clear in
individuals are the only judge of what French and Spanish, the term in
is best for them (Nietzsche, Deleuze); English is more open to confusion
they alone must decide for themsel- (éthique in French can be trans-
ves what is good or bad. Between lated as ethic or also as moral in
these two radical positions that are English). Thus the English version
moral order and ethical disorder, a of the ICOM Code of Ethics (2006)
middle road is conceivable in so far in appears in French as Code de
as it is possible for people to agree déontologie (Código de deontología
freely among themselves to recognise in Spanish). The vision expressed in
common values (such as the principle the code is, however clearly prescrip-
of respect for human beings). Again tive and normative (and very similar
this is an ethical point of view which to that expressed in the codes of the
on the whole governs the way modern UK Museums Association and the

33
 American Association of Museums). in development (as proposed by
It is laid out in eight chapters which Stránský), because the study of the
identify basic measures to allow the birth and the evolution of museums
(supposedly) harmonious develo- does not follow the methods of both
pment of the museum institution human and natural sciences in so far
within society: (1) Museums take as it is an institution that is mallea-
care of the protection, documenta- ble and can be reshaped. However,
tion and promotion of the natural as a tool of social life, museums
and cultural heritage of humanity demand that endless choices are
(institutional, physical and financial made to determine the use to which
resources needed to open a museum). they will be put. And precisely here,
(2) Museums which maintain collec- the choice of the ends to which this
tions hold them in trust for the bene- body of methods may be subjected
fit of society and its development is none other than a choice of ethics.
(issues of acquisition and deaccession In this sense museology can be defi-
of collections). (3) Museums hold pri- ned as museal ethics, because it is
mary evidence for building up and ethics which decide what a museum
furthering knowledge (deontology of should be and the ends to which it
research or of collecting evidence). should be used. This is the ethical
(4) Museums provide opportunities context in which it was possible for
for the appreciation, understanding ICOM to build a deontological code
and management of the natural and for the management of museums,
cultural heritage (deontology of exhi- a deontology which constitutes a
biting). (5) Museums hold resources code of ethics common to a socio-
that provide opportunities for other professional category and serving it
services and benefits to the public as a paralegal framework.
(issues of expertise). (6) Museums
work in close collaboration with ) CORRELATED: MORAL, VALUES, DEONTOLOGY.
the communities from which their
collections originate as well as with EXHIBITION
those that they serve (issues of cultu-
n. (early 15c., from O.Fr. exhibicion, from
ral property). (7) Museums operate
Latin exhibitionem, nom. exhibitio, from exhi-
in a legal manner (respect for the bere ‘to show, display,’ lit. ‘to hold out,’ from
rule of law). (8) Museums operate in ex- ‘out’ and habere ‘to hold’) – Equivalent
a professional manner (professional French: (from the Latin expositio, gen. espoi-
conduct and conflicts of interest). tionis: exposé, explication) exposition; Spa-
nish: exposición; German: Austellung; Italian:
3. The third impact on museums
esposizione, mostra; Portuguese: exposição,
of the concept of ethics is its contri- exhibição.
bution to the definition of museology
as museal ethics. From this pers- The term ‘exhibition’ refers to
pective, museology is not a science the result of the action of displaying

34
something, as well as the whole of the setting out of exhibits of all kinds
that which is displayed, and the place in a space for public viewing; also the
where it is displayed. “Let us consi- exhibits themselves, and the space in
der a definition of the exhibition which the show takes place. From
borrowed from outside and not draf- this viewpoint, each of these mea-
ted by ourselves. This term – along nings defines somewhat different
with its abbreviated term ‘exhibit’ – elements.
means the act of displaying things to 1. The exhibition, understood as
the public, the objects displayed (the the container or the place where the
exhibits), and the area where this dis- contents are on display (just as the
play takes place” (Davallon, 1986). museum appears both as a function
Borrowed from the Latin expositio, and as a building) is characterised
the French term exposition (in old not by the architecture of this space
French exposicïun, at the beginning but by the place itself. Even though
of the 12th century) first had at the the exhibition appears to be one of
same time the figurative meaning of the characteristics of museums, exhi-
an explanation, an exposé, the lite- bition thus has a far broader reach
ral meaning of an exposition (of an because it can also be set up by a
abandoned child, still used in Spa- profit-making organisation (market,
nish in the term expósito), and the store, art gallery). It can be organised
general meaning of display. From in an enclosed space, but also in the
there (in the 16th century) the French open air (in a park or a street) or in
word exposition had the meaning situ, that is to say without moving the
of presenting (merchandise), then objects from their original sites natu-
(in the 17th century) it could mean ral, historical or archaeological sites.
abandonment, initial presentation Seen from this perspective exhibi-
(to explain a work) or situation (of tion areas are defined not only by the
a building). In 18th century France container and the contents but also
the word exhibition, as a display of by the users – visitors and museum
art works, had the same meaning in professionals – that is to say the peo-
French as in English, but the French ple who enter this specific area and
use of the word exhibition to refer to share in the general experience of the
the presentation of art later gave way other visitors at the exhibition. The
to exposition. On the other hand, the place of the exhibition is thus a spe-
word exposition in English means cific place of social interaction, the
(1) the setting forth of a meaning or effects of which can be assessed. Evi-
intent, or (2) a trade show, thus pre- dence of this is provided by the deve-
serving the earlier meanings of the lopment of visitor studies, and the
French. Today both the French expo- growth of a specific field of research
sition and the English exhibition have connected with the communication
the same meaning, which applies to aspect of the place and with all the

35
 interactions specific to this place, or than to mark objectivity, to guaran-
to all the images and ideas that this tee distance (creating a distancing,
place might evoke. as Bertolt Brecht said of the theatre)
2. As a result of the act of dis- and let us know that we are in ano-
playing, exhibitions are seen today ther world, a world of the artificial,
as one of the main functions of the of the imaginary.
museum which, according to the 3. Exhibitions, when they are
latest definition by ICOM, “acquires, understood as the entirety of the
conserves, researches, communicates objects displayed, include musealia,
and exhibits the tangible and intan- museum objects or “real things”,
gible heritage of humanity…” Accor- along with substitutes (casts, copies,
ding to the PRC model (Reinwardt photos, etc.), display material (display
Academie), exhibition is part of the tools, such as show cases, partitions
museum’s more general function of or screens), and information tools
communication, which also includes (such as texts, films or other multi-
policies for education and publica- media), and utilitarian signage. From
tion. From this point of view exhi- this perspective the exhibition works
bitions are a fundamental feature as a specific communication system
of museums, in so far as these prove (McLuhan and Parker, 1969; Came-
themselves to be excellent places for ron, 1968) based on “real things”
sensory perception, by presenting and accompanied by other artefacts
objects to view (that is, visualisation), which allow the visitor to better iden-
monstration (the act of demonstra- tify their significance. In this context,
ting proof), ostention (initially the each of the elements present in the
holding up of sacred objects for ado- exhibition (museum objects, substi-
ration). The visitor is in the presence tutes, texts, etc.) can be defined as an
of concrete elements which can be exhibit. In such a situation it is not a
displayed for their own importance question of rebuilding reality, which
(pictures, relics), or to evoke concepts cannot be relocated in the museum
or mental constructs (transubstantia- (a “real thing” in a museum is already
tion, exoticism). If museums can be a substitute for reality and an exhi-
defined as places of musealisation bition can only offer images which
and visualisation, exhibitions then are analogous with that reality). The
appear as the “explanatory visualisa- exhibition communicates reality
tion of absent facts through objects, through this mechanism. Exhibits in
and methods used to display these, an exhibition work as signs (semio-
used as signs” (Schärer, 2003). Show- tics), and the exhibition is presented
cases and picture rails are artifices as a communication process which
which serve to separate the real is most often unilateral, incomplete
world and the imaginary world of and interpretable in ways that are
museums. They serve no other role often very different. The term exhi-

36
bition as used here differs from that whether or not the exhibition was
of presentation, in so far as the first of a profit-making nature (research
term corresponds, if not to a dis- exhibition, blockbuster, stage show
course, physical and didactic, then at exhibition, commercial exhibition),
least to a large complex of items that and according to the general concept
have been put on view, whereas the of the museographer (exhibit design
second evokes the showing of goods for the object, for the point of view or
in a market or department store, approach, etc.). And we note that the
which could be passive, even if in seeing visitor has become more and
both cases a specialist (display desi- more involved in this great range of
gner, exhibition designer) is needed possibilities.
to reach the desired level of quality. 4. The French words exposition
These two levels – presentation and and exhibition differ, in so far as
exhibition – explain the difference exhibition now has a pejorative mea-
between exhibition design and exhi- ning. Towards 1760 the word exhi-
bit display. In the first case the desi- bition could be used in French and
gner starts with the space and uses in English to indicate an exhibition
the exhibits to furnish the space, of paintings, but the meaning of the
while in the second he starts with word has been degraded in French to
the exhibits and strives to find the indicate activities that are clearly for
best way to express them, the best show (sport exhibitions), or indecent
language to make the exhibits speak. in the eyes of the society where the
These differences of expression have exhibition takes place. This is the
varied during different periods, case for the derivatives exhibitionist
according to tastes and styles, and and exhibitionism in English, which
according to the relative importance refer even more specifically to inde-
of the people installing the space cent acts. Criticism of exhibitions
(decorators, exhibition designers, is often the most virulent when it
display designers, stage designers), takes the approach that the exhibi-
but the modes of exhibition also vary tion is not what it should be – and by
according to the disciplines and the association, what a museum should
objective of the show. The answers do – but has become a hawker show,
to the questions regarding “to show” far too commercial, or offensive to
and “to communicate” cover a vast the public.
field allowing us to sketch the his- 5. The development of new tech-
tory and typology of exhibitions. nologies and computer-aided design
We can imagine the media that were have popularised the creation of
used (objects, texts, moving images, museums on the internet with exhi-
environments, digital information bitions that can only be visited on
technology, mono-media and multi- screen or via digital media. Rather
media exhibitions); according to than using the term virtual exhibi-

37
 tion (the exact meaning of which Z DERIVATIVES: AGRICULTURAL EXHIBITION,
would be a possible exhibition, that COMMERCIAL EXHIBITION, CYBER EXHIBITION, EXHIBIT,
is to say a potential reply to the ques- EXHIBITION CATALOGUE, EXHIBITION CURATOR, EXHIBITION
DESIGN, EXHIBITION DESIGNER, EXHIBITION GALLERIES,
tion of “showing”), we prefer the
EXHIBITION PRACTICE, EXHIBITION SCENARIO, EXHIBITION
terms digital or cyber exhibition to STUDIES, EXHIBITOR, IN SITU EXHIBITION, INTERNATIONAL
refer to these particular exhibitions EXHIBITION, NATIONAL EXHIBITION, OPEN AIR EXHIBITION,
seen on the internet. They open up PERMANENT EXHIBITION (A LONG OR SHORT TERM
possibilities (collecting objects, new EXHIBITION), TEMPORARY EXHIBITION, TRAVELLING
ways of display, analysis, etc) that EXHIBITION, TO EXHIBIT, UNIVERSAL EXHIBITION.
traditional exhibitions of material
objects do not always have. While
) CORRELATED: COMMUNICATION, DECORATOR,
DEMONSTRATION, DIDACTIC OBJECT, DIORAMA, DISPLAY,
for the time being they are hardly DISPLAY TOOL, EXPOSITION, FAIR, FICTIONAL REALITY,
competition for exhibitions of real GALLERY, HANGING, INSTALLATION, INSTALLING SPACE,
objects in traditional museums, it MEANS, MECHANISM, MEDIA, MESSAGE, METAPHOR,
MONSTRATION, OPENING, OSTENTION, PICTURE RAIL,
is not impossible that their develo-
POSTING, PRESENTATION, PROJECT MANAGER, REALITY,
pment will affect the methods cur- REPRESENTATION, STAGE SETTING, SHOW, SHOWCASE,
rently used by museums. SOCIAL SPACE, SPACE, STAGE DESIGN, VISUALISATION.

38
tion and how to inventorize museum the message, and the preservation
objects. They create the scenario for of heritage. These aspects make
the contents and propose a form of museographers (or exhibition spe-
language which includes additional cialists) the intermediary between
media to aid understanding. They the collections curator, the architect
are concerned with the needs of and the public. Their role varies,
the public and employ the commu- however, depending whether or not
nication methods most suitable for the museum or the exhibition site
putting across the message of the has a curator to lead the project.
exhibition. Their role, often as the The further development of the role
head of a project, is to coordinate of some specialists within museums
all the scientific and technical spe- (architects, artists, exhibition cura-
cialists working within a museum: tors, etc.) has led to a constant fi ne-
organising them, sometimes clashing tuning of the museogapher’s role as
with them and arbitrating. Other intermediary.
specific posts have been created to 3. Formerly and through its ety-
fulfil these tasks: the management mology, museography referred to
of the art works or objects is left to the description of the contents of
the registrars, the head of security is a museum. Just as a bibliography
responsible for surveillance and the is one of the fundamental stages of
tasks carried out by this department, scientific research, museography
the conservator is a specialist in pre- was devised as a way to facilitate the
ventive conservation and in remedial search for documentary sources of
conservation measures, and even objects in order to develop their sys-
restoration. It is in this context, and tematic study. This meaning endured
in interrelation with the different throughout the 19th century and still
departments, that museographers continues today in some languages,
concern themselves with the exhibi- in particular Russian.
tion tasks. Museography is distinct
Z DERIVATIVES: MUSEOGRAPHER, MUSEOGRAPHIC.
from scenography (exhibition or
stage design), which is understood to ) CORRELATED: EXHIBITION DESIGN, EXHIBITION
PRACTICE, INTERIOR DESIGN, MUSEUM FUNCTIONS,
mean all the techniques required for
MUSEUM OPERATIONS, MUSEUM PRACTICE.
installing and fitting out display spa-
ces, just as it is different from inte-
rior design. Certainly stage design
and museum interior design are a MUSEOLOGY
part of museography, which brings (MUSEUM STUDIES)
museums closer to other methods n. – Equivalent in French: muséologie; Spa-
of visualisation, but other elements nish: museología; German: Museologie,
must also be taken into account such Museumswissenschaft, Museumskunde; Ita-
as the public, its understanding of lian: museologia; Portuguese: museologia.

53
 Etymologically speaking museo- studies its history, its role in society,
logy is the ‘study of the museum’ (or the specific forms of research and
museum studies), and not its practice, physical conservation, activities
which is museography. But the term and dissemination, organisation
museology and its derivative museo- and functioning, new or musealised
logical, accepted in its wider sense in architecture, sites that have been
the 1950s, now has five clearly dis- received or chosen, its typology
tinct meanings. and its deontology” (Rivière, 1981).
1. The first and most commonly In some ways museology contrasts
accepted meaning applies the term with museography, which refers to
museology to anything relating to the practices attached to museo-
museums and generally listed, in logy. Anglo-Americans are generally
this dictionary, under the heading reluctant to accept the invention of
museal. Thus one might speak of new ‘sciences’ and have favoured
the museological departments of a the expression museum studies, par-
library (the reserved section or the ticularly in Great Britain where the
numismatic cabinet), museological term museology is still rarely used
questions (relating to museums) and to date. Although the term has been
so on. This is often the meaning used increasingly frequently applied inter-
in Anglo-Saxon countries, which has nationally since the 1950s, along with
even spread from North America the increased interest in museums, it
to Latin-American countries. Thus, is still rarely used by people who live
where there is no specific recognised with museums on a daily basis, and
profession, such as in France where the use of the term remains limited
the general term curator (conserva- to people who observe the museum
teur) would be used, the term museo- from the outside. This use of museo-
logist applies to the entire museum logy, widely accepted by professio-
profession (for example in Québec), nals, has gradually established itself
in particular to consultants given the in Romance countries from the 1960s,
task of drawing up a museum project replacing the term museography.
or creating and staging an exhibition. 3. From the 1960s in Central and
This use is not favoured here. Eastern Europe, museology gra-
2. The second meaning of the dually came to be considered as a
term is generally accepted in many genuine field of scientific research
western university networks and is (albeit a developing science) and an
close to the etymological sense of independent discipline examining
the word: museum studies. The most reality. This view, which greatly
commonly used definition is that influenced ICOFOM in the years
proposed by Georges Henri Rivière: 1980-1990, presents museology as
“Museology: an applied science, the the study of a specific relationship
science of the museum. Museology between man and reality, a study in

54
which museums, a phenomenon set society” (Gregorová, 1980). How-
in a specific time, are only one of the ever, the likening of museology to a
possible manifestations. “Museology science – even under development
is a self-differentiating, independent – has slowly been abandoned in so
scientific discipline the subject of far as neither its object of study, nor
which is a specific attitude of man its methods, truly correspond to the
to reality expressed objectively in epistemological criteria of a specific
various museum forms throughout scientific approach.
history, an expression of and a 4. The new museology (la nouvelle
proportionate part of memory sys- muséologie in French, where the
tems. Museology, by nature a social concept originated) widely influen-
science, pertains to the sphere of ced museology in the 1980s, first
mnemonic and documentary scien- gathering some French theoreticians
tific disciplines, and contributes to and then spreading internationally
the understanding of Man within from 1984. Referring to a few pio-
society” (Stránský, 1980). This parti- neers who had published innova-
cular approach, freely criticised (the tive texts since 1970, this current of
determination to impose museology thought emphasised the social role
as a science and to cover the whole of museums and its interdisciplinary
field of heritage seemed pretentious character, along with its new styles of
to more than one), but it is nonethe- expression and communication. New
less fertile with regard to its implica- museology was particularly interes-
tions. Thus the object of museology ted in new types of museums, concei-
is not the museum, since this is a ved in contrast to the classical model
creation that is relatively recent in in which collections are the centre of
terms of the history of humanity. interest. These new museums are eco-
Taking this statement as a starting museums, social museums, scientific
point, the concept of a “specific rela- and cultural centres, and generally
tion of man to reality”, sometimes speaking, most of the new propo-
referred to as museality (Waidacher, sals aimed at using the local heritage
1996), was gradually defined. Thus to promote local development. In
following in the wake of the Brno English museum literature the term
school which prevailed at the time New Museology appeared at the end
one could define museology as “A of the 1980s (Virgo, 1989) and is a
science studying the specific relation critical discourse on the social and
of Man to reality, consisting of the political role of museums – lending
purposeful and systematic collecting a certain confusion to the spread of
and conservation of selected inani- the French term, which is less known
mate, material, mobile, and mainly to the English-speaking public.
three-dimensional objects documen- 5. According to a fifth meaning
ting the development of nature and of the term, which we favour here
55
 because it includes all the others, which examine museology from time
museology covers a much wider field to time.
comprising all the efforts at theori- With this last view in mind, Ber-
sation and critical thinking about nard Deloche proposed defining
the museal field. In other words, museology as museal philosophy.
the common denominator of this “Museology is the philosophy of the
field could be defined as a specific museal field which has two tasks:
relation between man and reality, (1) it serves as metatheory for the
which is expressed by documenting science of intuitive concrete docu-
that which is real and can be grasped mentation, (2) it provides regulating
through direct sensory contact. This ethics for all institutions responsible
definition does not reject a priori any for managing the intuitive concrete
form of museum, including the oldest documentary function” (Deloche,
(Quiccheberg) and the most recent 2001).
(cyber museums), because it tends to Z DERIVATIVES: MUSEOLOGICAL, MUSEOLOGIST.
concern itself with a domain which
is freely open to all experiments in ) CORRELATED: MUSEAL, MUSEALIA MUSEALITY,
MUSEALISATION, MUSEALIZE, MUSEOGRAPHY,
the museal field. Nor is it limited to MUSEUM, MUSEUM OBJECT, NEW MUSEOLOGY,
people who call themselves museo- REALITY.
logists. We should note that if some
protagonists have made museology
their field of choice, to the point of MUSEUM
presenting themselves as museolo-
gists, others tied to their professio- n. (from the Greek mouseion, temple of the
muses). – Equivalent in French: musée; Spa-
nal branch who only approach the
nish: museo; German: Museum; Italian: museo;
museal sphere on occasion prefer to Portuguese: museu.
keep a certain distance from “museo-
logists”, even though they have, or The term ‘museum’ may mean either
have had, a fundamental influence the institution or the establishment
in the development of this field of or the place generally designed to
study (Bourdieu, Baudrillard, Dago- select, study and display the material
gnet, Debray, Foucault, Haskell, and intangible evidence of man and
McLuhan, Nora or Pomian). The his environment. The form and the
guidelines in a map of the museal functions of museums have varied
field can be traced in two different considerably over the centuries.
directions: either with reference to Their contents have diversified, as
the main functions inherent to the have their mission, their way of ope-
field (documentation, collecting, rating and their management.
display and safeguarding, research, 1. Most countries have established
communication), or by considering definitions of museum through
the different branches of knowledge legislative texts or national organi-

56
sations. The professional defi nition tage. English has become the wor-
of museum most widely recognized king language most widely used in
today is still that given in 2007 in the council meetings, and ICOM, like
Statutes of the International Council most international organisations,
of Museums (ICOM): “A museum now operates in English too; it seems
is a non-profit, permanent institu- that the work to draft a new defini-
tion in the service of society and its tion was based on this English trans-
development, open to the public, lation. The structure of the French
which acquires, conserves, resear- definition of 1974 emphasised
ches, communicates and exhibits research, introduced as the driving
the tangible and intangible heritage force of the institution: “Le musée est
of humanity and its environment for une institution permanente, sans but
the purposes of education, study and lucratif, au service de la société et de
enjoyment.” This definition replaces son développement, ouverte au public
that used as the term of reference et qui fait des recherches concernant
for over 30 years: “A museum is a les témoins matériels de l’homme
non-profit making, permanent ins- et de son environnement, acquiert
titution in the service of the society ceux-là, les conserve, les communique
and its development, and open to the et notamment les expose à des fins
public, which acquires, conserves, d’études, d’éducation et de délecta-
researches, communicates, and exhi- tion.” (ICOM Statutes, 1974). The
bits, for purposes of study, education literal translation, but not the official
and enjoyment, material evidence of one, reads: “A museum is a perma-
man and his environment” (ICOM nent, non-profit institution, in the
Statutes, 1974). service of the society and its deve-
The difference between these two lopment, open to the public, which
definitions, which is at first sight does research regarding the material
barely significant – a reference to evidence of man and his environ-
the intangible heritage added and ment…”, In 2007 the principle of
a few changes in structure – never- research (modified in French by the
theless attests on the one hand to the word étudier - to study) was relega-
preponderance of Anglo-American ted to a list of the general functions
logic within ICOM, and on the other of museums, as in the 1974 English
to a diminution of the role given to version.
research within the institution. Ini- 2. For many museologists, and in
tially the 1974 definition, written in particular those who claim to adhere
French as the lead language, was a to the concept of museology taught
fairly free translation into English to in the years 1960-1990 by the Czech
better reflect the Anglo-American school (Brno and the International
logic about museum functions – one Summer School of Museology), the
of which is the transmission of heri- museum is only one means among

57
 many that attest to a “specific rela- pret absent facts” (Schärer, 2007) or,
tionship between Man and reality”, in a way that seems tautological at
a relationship which is defined by first, as the place where the museali-
“purposeful and systematic collec- sation takes place. In an even wider
ting and conservation of selected ina- sense, the museum can be unders-
nimate, material, mobile, and mainly tood as a “place of memory” (Nora,
three-dimensional objects docu- 1984; Pinna, 2003), a ‘phenomenon’
menting the development of nature (Scheiner, 2007), covering institu-
and society” (Gregorová, 1980). tions, different places or territories,
Before the museum was defi ned as experiences, and even intangible
such in the 18th century, according spaces.
to a concept borrowed from Greek 3. From this perspective which
antiquity and its revival during the goes beyond the limited nature of
western Renaissance, every civilisa- the traditional museum, it is defi ned
tion had a number of places, institu- as a tool devised by man with the
tions and establishments that were purpose of archiving, understan-
more or less similar to those that we ding, and transmitting. One could,
group under the same word today. like Judith Spielbauer (1987), say
In this regard the ICOM defi nition that museums are an instrument
is considered to be clearly marked to foster “an individual’s percep-
by its time and its western context, tion of the interdependence of the
but also too prescriptive, since its social, aesthetic and natural worlds
purpose is essentially corporatist. in which he lives by providing infor-
A ‘scientific’ definition of museum mation and experience and fostering
should, in this sense, free itself self-knowledge within this wider
from certain elements contributed context.” Museums can also be “a
by ICOM, such as the not-for-profit specific function which may or may
aspect of a museum: a profit-making not take on the features of an ins-
museum (such as the Musée Grévin titution, the objective of which is
in Paris) is still a museum, even if it to ensure, through a sensory expe-
is not recognised by ICOM. We can rience, the storage and transmission
thus more broadly and more objecti- of culture understood as the entire
vely defi ne museum as “a permanent body of acquisitions that make a
museological institution, which pre- man out of a being who is gene-
serves collections of ‘physical docu- tically human” (Deloche, 2007).
ments’ and generates knowledge These definitions cover museums
about them” (Van Mensch, 1992). which are incorrectly referred to as
For his part Schärer defines museum virtual museums (in particular those
as “a place where things and related that are on paper, on CD-ROM or
values are preserved studied and on the Web) as well as more tradi-
communicated, as signs that inter- tional institutional museums, inclu-

58
ding even the museums of antiquity, puters and the digital world the
which were more schools of philoso- concept of cyber museum, often
phy than collections in the accepted incorrectly called ‘virtual’, gradually
sense of the term. became accepted; a notion generally
4. This last use of the term defined as “a logically related collec-
museum brings us to the principles tion of digital objects composed in a
of the ecomuseum in its original variety of media which, through its
conception, that is to say a museal connectivity and its multi-accessible
institution which, for the develo- nature, lends itself to transcending
pment of a community, combines traditional methods of communica-
conservation, display and explana- ting and interacting with visitors..;
tion of the cultural and natural heri- it has no real place or space; its
tage held by this same community; objects and the related information
the ecomuseum represents a living can be disseminated all over the
and working environment on a given world” (Schweibenz, 1998). This
territory, and the research associated definition, probably derived from
with it. “The ecomuseum […] on a the relatively recent notion of vir-
given territory, expresses the rela- tual computer memory, appears to
tionship between man and nature
be something of a misinterpretation.
through time and space on this ter-
We must remember that ‘virtual’ is
ritory. It is composed of property of
not the opposite of ‘real’, as we tend
recognised scientific and cultural
to believe too readily, but rather the
interest which is representative of
the community it serves: non-built opposite of ‘actual’ in its original
immovable property, natural wild sense of ‘now existing’. An egg is a
spaces, natural spaces occupied by virtual chicken; it is programmed
man; built immovable property; to become a chicken and should
movable property; fungible goods. become one if nothing gets in the
It includes an administrative centre, way of its development. In this sense
headquarters of the major structures: the virtual museum can be seen as all
reception, research, conservation, the museums conceivable, or all the
display, cultural action, administra- conceivable solutions applied to the
tion, in particular one or more field problems answered by traditional
laboratories, conservation bodies, museums. Thus the virtual museum
meeting halls, socio-cultural works- can be defined as a “concept which
hops, accommodation etc.; trails and globally identifies the problem areas
observation points for exploring the of the museal field, that is to say the
territory; different architectural, effects of the process of decontex-
archaeological and geological ele- tualisation/recontextualisation; a
ments…duly indicated and explai- collection of substitutes can be a
ned” (Rivière, 1978). virtual museum just as much as a
5. With the development of com- computerised data base; it is the

59
 museum in its exterior theatre of ope- Z DERIVATIVES: VIRTUAL MUSEUM.
rations” (Deloche, 2001). The virtual
museum is the package of solutions ) CORRELATED: CYBER MUSEUM, MUSEAL,
MUSEALIA, MUSEALISATION, MUSEALISE, MUSEOGRAPHER,
that may be applied to museum pro- MUSEOGRAPHY, MUSEOLOGICAL, MUSEOLOGIST,
blems, and naturally includes the MUSEOLOGY, MUSEUMIFICATION (PEJORATIVE), MUSEUM
cyber museum, but is not limited STUDIES, NEW MUSEOLOGY, EXHIBITION, INSTITUTION,
to it. PRIVATE COLLECTIONS, REALITY.

60
 P
PRESERVATION of collections structures the mission
of museums and their development.
n – Equivalent French: préservation; Spanish: Preservation is one axis of museal
preservación; German: Bewahrung, Erhal-
tung; Italian: preservazione; Portuguese:
action, the other being transmission
preservaçāo. to the public.
1. The acquisition policy is, in most
To preserve means to protect a thing cases, a fundamental part of the way
or a group of things from different any museum operates. Acquisition,
hazards such as destruction, deterio- within the museum, brings together
ration, separation or even theft; this all the means by which a museum
protection is ensured by gathering takes possession of the material and
the collection in one place, inventori- intangible heritage of humanity:
sing it, sheltering it, making it secure collecting, archaeological digs, gifts
and repairing it. and legacy, exchange, purchase, and
In museology, preservation covers sometimes methods reminiscent of
all the operations involved when an pillage and abduction (combated by
object enters a museum, that is to ICOM and UNESCO – Recommen-
say all the operations of acquisition, dation of 1956 and Convention of
entering in the inventory, recording 1970). The management of collections
in the catalogue, placing in storage, and the overseeing of collections com-
conservation, and if necessary resto- prise all the operations connected
ration. The preservation of heritage with the administrative handling of
generally leads to a policy which museum objects, that is to say their
starts with the establishment of a pro- recording in the museum catalogue or
cedure and criteria for acquisition of registration in the museum inventory
the material and intangible heritage in order to certify their museal sta-
of humanity and its environment, tus – which, in some countries, gives
and continues with the management them a specific legal status, since the
of those things which have become items entered in the inventory, espe-
museum objects, and finally with cially in publicly owned museums,
their conservation. In this sense the are inalienable and imprescriptible.
concept of preservation represents In some countries such as the United
that which is fundamentally at stake States, museums may exceptionally
in museums, because the building up deaccession objects by transfer to
65
 another museal institution, destruc- aimed at facilitating its apprecia-
tion or sale. Storage and classification tion, understanding and use. These
are also part of collection manage- actions are only carried out when the
ment, along with the supervision of item has lost part of its significance
all movements of objects within and or function through past alteration
outside the museum. Finally, the or deterioration. They are based on
objective of conservation is to use all respect for the original material.
the means necessary to guarantee Most often such actions modify the
the condition of an object against appearance of the item” (ICOM-CC,
any kind of alteration in order to 2008). To preserve the integrity of
bequeath it to future generations. the items as far as possible, restorers
In the broadest sense these actions choose interventions which are rever-
include overall security (protection sible and can be easily identified.
against theft and vandalism, fire and 2. In practice, the concept of
floods, earthquakes or riots), general conservation is often preferred to
measures known as preventive conser- that of preservation. For many
vation, or “all measures and actions museum professionals, conservation,
aimed at avoiding and minimizing which addresses both the action
future deterioration or loss. They are and the intention to protect cultu-
carried out within the context or on ral property, whether material or
the surroundings of an item, but more intangible, constitutes a museum’s
often a group of items, whatever their core mission. This explains the use
age and condition. These measures in French of the word conservateurs
and actions are indirect – they do (in English curators, in the UK kee-
not interfere with the materials and pers) which appeared at the time of
structures of the items. They do not the French Revolution. For a long
modify their appearance” (ICOM- time (throughout the 19th century at
CC, 2008). Additionally, remedial least) this word seems to have best
conservation is “all actions directly described the function of a museum.
applied to an item or a group of items Moreover the current definition of
aimed at arresting current damaging museum by ICOM (2007) does not
processes or reinforcing their struc- use the term preservation to cover
ture. These actions are only carried the concepts of acquisition and
out when the items are in such a conservation. From this perspective,
fragile condition or deteriorating at the notion of conservation should
such a rate that they could be lost in probably be envisaged in a much
a relatively short time. These actions wider sense, to include questions of
sometimes modify the appearance of inventories and storage. Nonetheless,
the items” (ICOM-CC, 2008). Res- this concept collides with a different
toration covers “all actions directly reality, which is that conservation
applied to a single and stable item (for example, in the ICOM Conser-

66
vation Committee) is much more REALITY; COMMUNITY; PREVENTIVE CONSERVATION,
clearly connected with the work of REMEDIAL CONSERVATION, SAFEGUARD; COLLECTION
MANAGEMENT, COLLECTION OVERSIGHT, COLLECTION
conservation and restoration, as des-
MANAGER, CURATOR, CONSERVATOR, INVENTORY,
cribed above, than with the work of
RESTORER; DEACCESSION, RESTITUTION.
management or overseeing of the
collections. New professional fields
have evolved, in particular collection PROFESSION
archivists and registrars. The notion
of preservation takes account of all n. – Equivalent in French: profession; Spanish:
profesión; German: Beruf; Italian: profes-
these activities.
sione; Portuguese: profissāo.
3. The concept of preservation,
in addition, tends to objectivise Profession is defined first of all in a
the inevitable tensions which exist socially defined setting, and not by
between each of these functions (not default. Profession does not consti-
to mention the tensions between tute a theoretical field: a museologist
preservation and communication or can call himself an art historian or a
research), which have often been the biologist by profession, but he can
target of much criticism: “The idea also be considered – and socially
of conservation of the heritage takes accepted – as a professional museolo-
us back to the anal drives of all capi- gist. For a profession to exist, moreo-
talist societies” (Baudrillard, 1968; ver, it must define itself as such, and
Deloche, 1985, 1989). A number of also be recognised as such by others,
acquisition policies, for example, which is not always the case in the
include deaccession policies at the museum world. There is not one
same time (Neves, 2005). The ques- profession, but several museal pro-
tion of the restorer’s choices and, fessions (Dubé, 1994), that is to say
generally speaking, the choices to a range of activities attached to the
be made with regard to conservation museum, paid or unpaid, by which
operations (what to keep and what to one can identify a person (in particu-
discard?) are, along with deaccession, lar for his civil status) and place him
some of the most controversial issues in a social category.
in museum management. Finally, If we refer to the concept of museo-
museums are increasingly acquiring logy as presented here, most museum
and preserving intangible heritage, employees are far from having recei-
which presents new problems and ved the professional training that
forces them to find conservation their title would imply, and very few
techniques which can be adapted for can claim to be museologists simply
these new types of heritage. because they work in a museum.
There are, however, many positions
) CORRELATED: ACQUISITION, DOCUMENT, ITEMS,
MONUMENT, GOODS, PROPERTY, SEMIOPHORE, THINGS, which require a specific background.
RELIC (HOLY), WORK; HERITAGE, INTANGIBLE, MATERIAL; ICTOP (The ICOM International
67
 Living Ethnological Exhibits:
The Case of 1886
Saloni Mathur
University of Michigan

By now it is widely understood that the emergence of international exhibition

during the second half of the 19th century created a powerful stock of image
of the non-Western world for European consumption, which in turn helped r
fashion metropolitan social space (Altick 1978; Benedict 1983; Benjamin
1983; Bennett 1988; Breckenridge 1989; Buck-Morss 1991; Coombes 199
Greenhalgh 1988; Harris 1990; Harvey 1996; Karp and Lavine 1991; Mitch
1988; Rydell 1993). The unsettling phenomenon of "living ethnological d
plays," a popular feature of exhibitions in the final decades of the 19th centur
is perhaps the most objectionable genre in the history of anthropology's sig
fying practices, as well as the most consistently underexamined. For it is on
thing, as Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett has recently observed, to construct an
ethnographic object in a text or to display an anthropological artifact behind
glass: "It is quite another when people are themselves the medium of ethno-
graphic representation, when they perform themselves-when they becom
living signs of themselves" (1998:18).
Researchers have tended to conceive of the phenomenon of living exhibi
as an extension of the specimen orientation of a museum-based Victorian an-
thropology (Hinsley 1981; Stocking 1985) or as an inherently performati
genre, one that crossed the boundaries between science and entertainme
while supporting the hierarchical social evolutionary ideology of the era (Bog
dan 1988; Bradford and Blume 1992; Corbey 1993; Greenhalgh 1988; Lind
fors 1999; Rydell 1993; Stewart 1993). Increasingly, critics across the disc
plines have argued for a reexamination of the "exotic native subject" that wa
produced in early world fairs and popular exhibitions as part of an enduring
script about anthropology, exotic cultures, and racial difference that continue
to have a fundamentally political role within contemporary Euro-Americ
public discourse (Celik and Kinney 1990; Coombes 1994; diLeonardo 199
Haraway 1989; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). Others have recognized that the
complexities of exhibition strategies and intercultural practices in the postcolo
nial era must be understood in relation to the specific histories of colonized
groups and the role of imperialism in collecting and display (Ames 1992

Cultural Anthropology 15(4):492-524. Copyright ? 2001, American Anthropological Association.

492

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 493

Appadurai 1986; Barringer 1998; Clifford 1997; Fusco 1995; Kuri

Mannheim 1995; Myers 1994; Thomas 1991). As Fred Myers obser
analysis of a recent performance by aboriginal artists at the Asia Soc
New York, an understanding of colonial history is significant because
performances are always mediated, always enter into a ground prepar
isting genres" (1994:682).
In this article I turn to a specific historical example-the case of a
ethnological display of native artisans at the Colonial and Indian E
held in London in 1886-to locate this difficult genre within the legac
lonial relationships, on the one hand, and the history of anthropolog
duction, on the other. By reconstructing the journeys of several mar
dian men inducted into the living display-prison inmates from A
homeless Punjabi peasant in London-I show not only how "nativ
constituted by dominant discourses but also how the historical subjects
logical display refused the terms of their representation. My aim is n
recover the "lost voice" of the exhibited subject nor to offer a "whol
from the native's point of view: The very structure of the colonial arc
not allow for such an unmediated act of historical recovery (Chakrab
Dirks 1994; Guha 1983, 1988; Mani 1998; Spivak 1988).' Instead, I
reconstructing the multiple and intersecting contexts, the competing
power, and the complex acts of social management that constituted t
of 1886. At the same time I take the subject's "awareness of his own w
his will to change it" as a point of departure, however "feeble and trag
effective" (Guha 1983:11) that awareness may have been given the den
historical circumstances in any particular instance. In the case of 1886,
show, the Indian men on display were both caught within and constit
complex interplay among the local needs and institutions of Lond
city, the administrative interests of the colonial bureaucracy, the
caste hierarchies of Indian society, and the tensions created by the h
competition between nationalist and imperialist ideologies.
In this article, I am not concerned with the truth or falsity of the eth
cal exhibit as a representation of Indian artisans. The exhibition offic
cruitment of prison inmates and homeless Indian peasants in London
any question of authenticity or purity within this particular cultura
mance. Instead, I emphasize the place of travel in this history: I focus
"journey in[to] metropolitan space" (Burton 1998)-the alternate
through modernity (Clifford 1997)-that constituted the conditions for t
logical display. Ironically, the Colonial and Indian Exhibition helped to
the very concept of travel as a bourgeois, cosmopolitan, and worldly
ence, even turning Thomas Cook, one of the exhibition's highly visib
agents, into an icon of the modern travel industry. And yet, this dom
rative about travel did not apply to the men recruited for the living et
display. This was not simply because they were Indian subjects, fo
1880s there were numerous Indian travelers in London-princes, stude
ing for professional or civil service careers, nationalist leaders, diplom

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494 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

statesmen-who were all generally part of an English-educated

itself a product of the dynamics of rule in colonial society (Burto
terjee 1986; Cohn 1996; Visram 1986). In contrast to the heighten
of elite Indian travelers to the metropolis, who often mingled wi
upper classes to become the "darlings of drawing rooms ... and th
newspapers" as the Viceroy Lord Curzon once complained,2 the tr
Indians to London was, as I will show, a problem for the Briti
elite alike.

In the final section of my article, I turn to the circumstances of a single in-

dividual, a Punjabi peasant named Tulsi Ram, who drove a range of municipal
and India Office authorities to distraction with his ceaseless demands to "meet

the queen." Traveling to London to seek justice for a local land dispute in Punjab,
Tulsi Ram was repeatedly detained in the prisons and workhouses of London's
East End before being inducted into the exhibition's living display. I trace his
movements in the London metropolis through an extensive trail of official rec-
ords: correspondence between officials at the India Office and anxious metro-
politan authorities; prison, hospital, and workhouse proceedings; and police
memos and court petitions. The movement of this subaltern body in the metrop-
olis, I argue, created a crisis for the organization of space and identities
through which the relations of colonizer to colonized were regulated, trans-
forming the spectacle of the living exhibit into a highly contested cultural en-
counter. Against the dominant "official" account of the exhibition in the archive-
one that effaces the will of the exhibited subject-I show how bodies on dis-
play have their own biographies, strategies, journeys, and petitions that refute
their inscription as mere ethnic objects. By offering a detailed examination of
this particular case, I aim to expose the dynamics of objectification and defiance
in the constitution of the so-called native and to help make visible to the anthro-
pological community the ethnological "specimens" it helped to produce.

Victorian Views: The Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886

The Colonial and Indian Exhibition, which ran for six months during
summer of 1886, was an elaborate staging of imperial culture that co
sponded with the celebration of Queen Victoria's jubilee (see Figure 1).3
event opened on May 4 to a "flourish of trumpets" and a royal procession
by Queen Victoria and her son, that traveled through the Indian galleries of
South Kensington site past a re-created Indian Palace and an "Old Lon
street front on its way to the Royal Albert Hall (Cundall 1886:7). Ther
front of a crowd of 14,000 people, the queen sat for the opening ceremonie
an Indian throne of hammered gold, itself imperial war booty taken from
Maharajah Ranjit Singh during the capture of Lahore (Cundall 1886:9
Verses from an imperial ode written by poet laureate Alfred Tennyson wer
cited, and the national anthem, "God Save the Queen," was sung by a r
choir with two verses in Sanskrit, translated for the occasion by Professor
Muller, the famous scholar of Oriental languages at Oxford.

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 495

,OL ON
" S t . .I-,

_I XyFo>S I LF

X; I ", 3 _ to the
A_.T JO F, NL
Figure 1
The Colonial and Indian Exhibition of 1886. Cover of Supplement to the Art Journal
(London: J. S. Virtue and Co., vol. 48,1886).

The purpose of the exhibition, the Prince of Wales stated in his opening
address, was to "stimulate commerce and strengthen the bonds of union now
existing in every portion of her Majesty's Empire." "During the years that have
elapsed since the Great Exhibition in 1851," he explained, few greater changes
have occurred than the "marvelous development" of Britain's colonial posses-
sions (The Hindoo Patriot 1886c). Indeed, the bloody Indian Mutiny of 1857
(conceived of as "the Rebellion" in Indian historiography) had led to the disso-
lution of the East India Company and the implementation of direct Crown rule.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 had dramatically reduced the distance
between Britain and India and transformed the movement of people and goods
between them. In 1876, with the passing of Disraeli's Royal Titles Act, Queen
Victoria had become "Empress of India," redefining both the monarch and the
nation in fundamentally imperial terms. Yet, as Britain increased its power
over India, so too did resistance to its power strengthen. Significantly, the first
meeting of the Indian National Congress in Bombay, marking the beginnings

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496 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

of an organized nationalist movement in India, occurred only six m

fore the exhibition's opening. For some historians, the history o
modern nation-state thus also begins here in 1886 (Sarkar 1983).
One result of these changes was that the Colonial and Indian Exh
offered a far more complex image of India than the picture of ecle
sions presented at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Breckenridge 1989)
ple buildings, pavilions, courtyards, and gardens, for instance, occu
times as much space as the exhibits of India at the Crystal Palace in H
Moreover, the introduction of electricity meant that artificial lighti
manipulated to alter the visual effects of display. Outdoor illuminat
dens and fountains created the site as a spectacle both day and night,
tain interior spaces were more dimly lit, creating darkened chambers
tal fantasy (see also Celik 1992). London's new underground subway
entrance of the Indian exhibits, and 2.7 million visitors to the exhibi-
tion-more than half the overall attendance-were reported to have come
through this entrance alone. The novelty of shuttling to the event underground
created the excitement of a journey to India itself-a fact that the travel firm of
Thomas Cook and Sons, promoting its first season of tours to India, exploited
in its booth at the exhibition site.
By 1886, then, the wide-ranging displays of the Indian sections created
for the visitor a carefully constructed general experience of India, supported by
detailed scientific knowledge, the bureaucracies of the imperial state, and
changing transportation and visual technologies. What defined this experience
for the majority of visitors was an idealized return to a premodern past. "At a
single step," according to The Times newspaper in London, "the visitor [to the
exhibition] is carried from the wild, mad whirl of the individual competitive
struggle for existence to which civilization has been reduced in the ever chang-
ing West, into the stately splendor of that unchanging antique life of the East,
the tradition of which has been preserved in pristine purity only in India"
(1886:5, quoted in Metcalf 1989:146).
The Colonial and Indian Exhibition thus staged for its visitors an elabo-
rate encounter with a timeless and traditional India from within the "wild, mad
whirl" of industrial modernity. At the center of such an image of India was an
idealized notion of the village community, itself the product of the developing
study of the Indian village represented by the classic anthropology of Sir
Henry Maine (Bayley 1991; Diamond 1991). Such a conception of a tradition-
bound India, whose heartbeat was the village community, also dominated the
writings of late Victorian art critics and reformers such as William Morris,
John Ruskin, James Fergusson, and George Birdwood (Brantlinger 1996;
Guha-Thakurta 1992; Mitter 1992). For such writers, India provided a nostal-
gic picture of a precapitalist community characterized by simple craftsmanship
that, above all, contrasted sharply with Britain's own industrial realities.
Within the climate of disillusionment with industrialization that marked the
final quarter of the 19th century, India became increasingly important to
Victorians as an ideal model for traditional craft skills.

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 497

The person on display at the native artisans exhibit at the Colon

tion was thus a reified figure called "the Indian craftsman," who em
timelessness of the Indian village and thus captured the essence of In
(Figure 2). The external features of his body-his dress and adornmen
cial markings, his movements and gestures-were all celebrated as
enduring tradition of artisanship that was somehow perfect and his
pure. It was the "serenity and dignity of his life and work," accordi
critic George Birdwood in his contribution to the exhibition cata
made him meaningful to Victorian spectators (1880:312). As scholars
served, these late Victorian aesthetic ideals, embodied in the "cult of t
man," would later converge with the developing currents of Indian
and acquire a new political importance by the turn of the centu
Thakurta 1992; Mitter 1994). For it was precisely the idealized no
village community, and the romanticized dignity of its indigenous p
that would later be mobilized by Indian nationalism in its 20th-century

Figure 2
The Indian artisans at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. From Supplement to the Art
Journal (London: J. S. Virtue and Co., vol. 48,1886:29).

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498 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

against the British-most notably in Gandhi's ideology of tradit

(Brantlinger 1996). Yet, as I will show, the body of the colonial subje
not be easily contained by the romantic portrait of the craftsman ma
at the Colonial Exhibition. My account of the men who were brough
native artisans display suggests that the powerful frameworks determ
representation of Indian culture were not simply extended to bodies o

The Native Artisans Display

The name of "Native Sixteen" in the Indian artisans display at th

nial and Indian Exhibition was Tulsi Ram. He was identified as a sweetmeat
maker from Agra, aged 42. He was shown seated in the hall of an Indian pal-
ace, where he worked daily throughout the exhibition. With Tulsi Ram were 33
other natives on display from India. They were all men and were identified as
weavers, coppersmiths, seal engravers, ivory miniature painters, calico print-
ers, trinket makers, goldsmiths, potters, stone-carvers, wood-carvers, silver-
smiths, and clay figure makers. The eldest was Bakshiram, the potter, aged
102. The youngest were the carpet weavers, Ramphal and Ramlall, both chil-
dren only nine years old. Two more men, Harji and Dosa, were shown working
as bullock drivers, driving a Durbar carriage around the site outside the Indian
palace. Seven others, identified as "Bombay servants," were shown working in
an outdoor cafe, serving Indian tea as a refreshment to the crowds throughout
the summer.

Tulsi Ram's group, the native artisans in the Indian palace, was celebrated
as "a curiously pretty spectacle of oriental life" (The Indian Mirror 1886g).
Prince Albert, who visited the group with Queen Victoria during the opening
ceremonies, declared "how pleased he is to see them in England," which was
apparently translated to them by Dr. John William Tyler, the superintendent of
the central jail in Agra, who was personally in charge of the Indian natives.
With the exception of Tulsi Ram, most of the craftsmen were also inmates
from the Agra Jail, creating a bizarre context of selection and recruitment,
which I will examine in more detail shortly.
Early in July the queen invited the men, whom the English press referred
to as "her more humble Native subjects" (The Indian Mirror 1886i), to Wind-
sor Castle for a luncheon with other "natives" at the exhibition who were from
Ceylon, Hong Kong, Cyprus, British Guiana, Australia, and the Cape of Good
Hope. Accompanied by Tyler, they proceeded in carriages through the high
street of Windsor, thronged by "an eager but well-behaved crowd" that wished
to "shake hands with the dusky visitors from the colonies" (The Indian Mirror
1886j). In a reception in the Waterloo Gallery, described by the British press in
India as both a "strange event" and a "striking spectacle," the "Indians salaam[ed]
and present[ed]" the queen with gifts, which she ceremoniously "touche[d] and
return[ed]" (The Hindoo Patriot 1886d). Tyler translated a statement from the
group, a "faithful yet humble paraphrase," that began with the sentence, "We
are thy children, O mother!" and was later published in English papers as
"What the Indians Thought of the Queen" (The Indian Mirror 18861). "Living

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 499

long in the minds of the natives" who met the empress, "the scene o
Windsor slopes will never be forgotten," claimed the press (The Ind
1886j). "Illuminated by the rich eastern imagination," the moment
described in many an Indian bazaar and many an African village, an
of that great day [would] be handed down to all future generations"
nies (The Indian Mirror 1886j).
One account of this story was in fact handed down by T. N. Mu
English-educated, upper-class Bengali Brahmin, who was one of thr
hired by the British government to assist in the planning of the Colo
dian Exhibition. "As each carriage rolled towards the Castle," wrote
and "cheer after cheer was sent forth ... we Indians as usual go
hearty reception" (1889:206). After signing the guest book inside th
recounted, "[We were] presented to her [the queen] by the Prince o
As the usher called out the name of each guest ... we made a pro
and as is usual in such cases each passed on, and was succeeded b
(1889:207). "Here again," Mukharji wrote, "I noticed the same sp
look with which Her Majesty always viewed her Indian subjects"
The queen's preference for Indians was "very noticeable" and was bu
"many other instances" that Mukharji recorded in his book, A Visit
that demonstrated the special character of "her Majesty's affect
Indian children" (1889:207).
Tulsi Ram, on the other hand, had not been invited to Windsor
that "great day." In the ten months preceding the Colonial Exhibiti
been arrested well over a dozen times for vagrancy outside the quee
dence at Windsor. For anxious bureaucrats at the India Office in
Tulsi Ram symbolized the "problem of destitute Indians in London,"
lem they saw both as a financial liability and as an embarrassing co
their governance. By the summer of 1886 the man known to exaspe
End officials as "the old Hindoo who wishes to see the queen" was r
for the benefit of western audiences, into "Native Sixteen, a Sweetm
from Agra."

Remapping Urban and Imperial Space

If the West End of the city, the site of national monuments an

ment offices, was a logical location for the Colonial Exhibition,
different kind of imperial spectacle was being staged simultaneousl
don's East End (Walkowitz 1992:26). The East End in the 1880s wa
ous neighborhood of the urban poor. Its dilapidated landscape of do
way terminals, jails, missions, and workhouses was the scene of
overcrowding and an acute housing crisis (Stedman Jones 1971). The
dia Company Docks, through which Indian goods and passengers
London, had contributed to the widespread homelessness that chara
area after their construction in the early years of the 19th century
1975:23). Increasingly, the alternating pessimism and hysteria that
terized middle-class attitudes toward the poor during the 1860s and 18

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500 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

a far-reaching set of social anxieties; as one historian suggests, the

nant reaction to poverty by the 1880s "was not so much guilt as fear
1975:290). The East End was increasingly conceived by middle- and u
Londoners as a world apart. In the eyes of Victorian social investiga
analysts, it was a distinct landscape, home to a largely unintelligible
that required interpretation-its inhabitants were considered a separ
London of the 1880s was thus profoundly mapped in imperi
whereas the West End symbolized the triumph of empire, the East
"foreign, dark, and forbidding" other. In fact, the language of colo
sion and exploration became the terms in which urban social div
conceived (Epstein Nord 1983; Keating 1976; McClintock 1995;
1992). In his 1861 study, London Labour and the London Poor, H
hew was one of the first to observe that entering the city's East En
traveling "in the undiscovered country of the poor" (quoted in
1976:14). For George Sims, writing in 1883, the proximity of the ur
was a racialized "region which lies at our own doors" like "a dark
that is within easy walking distance of the General Post Office"
Keating 1976:65). Similarly, Charles Booth, in the first volume to hi
1889 study Life and Labor of the People of London (it would be exp
17 volumes by 1903), concludes that the life of the East End poor "is
savages" (quoted in Keating 1976:114). The inhabitants of London
were like "a colony of heathens and savages in the heart of our capital,
to William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army (quoted i
1976:150). For W. Booth, the best model for understanding the
Henry Stanley's "Darkest Africa," as even the title of Booth's book,
England and the Way Out (1890), suggests.
Such a discourse functioned to foreground colonial experience in
tropolis by mapping the city's social divisions within the terms of im
raphy. But the language of geographic and social distance in the me
not simply replicate the experience of racial and cultural segregatio
colonies. Although strategies of separation in colonial spaces reflecte
seated racial and sexual anxieties and a constant fear of the danger of
(Stoler 1995), the fears that characterized metropolitan space were mo
mentally bound up with the stability of the nation. London's urban
epitomized by its East End geography, were seen as a threat to t
body itself. For Charles Masterman, writing in 1901, the phenomenon
degeneration meant a "lowering of the vitality of the Imperial Race"
Stedman Jones 1971:330). The poor, especially the foreign poor, wer
as the bearers of contagion and pollution. Because Jews escapin
Europe during the early 1880s had provided the latest influx of forei
the East End, anti-Semitic hostility was particularly strong. Destitute
"foreigners with dark complexions" more generally, were seen as a
the national community. They prevented the Darwinian rise of Brit
to an ever greater level of fitness and health.

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 501

The local crises of urban London in the 1880s thus both reflected and in-
tersected with a growing anxiety about the stability of empire. In India, as al-
ready noted, the rise of organized nationalism, symbolized by the first meeting
of the Indian National Congress in 1885, had created a degree of uncertainty
about the future of imperial rule, which was at its highest since the Indian Re-
bellion in 1857. Moreover, Indians themselves were increasingly divided by
their own conflicting self-interests within the hierarchies and structures of co-
lonial society (Burton 1998; Sinha 1995). Many members of the English-edu-
cated middle classes, such as T. N. Mukharji, who was hired to assist in the Co-
lonial Exhibition, feared that the end of empire might also mean the end of the
social advantages they held from their proximity to the British. If the strategy
of distancing oneself from the lower rungs of the colonial hierarchy was an im-
portant one in India, it was both more urgent and more complicated within the
racism and anti-alien sentiment that pervaded Victorian London. A letter to the
British newspaper The Times by a self-identified Indian gentleman in London
encapsulates a typical response: He was surprised upon arriving from India to
see "several Indian beggars" in the streets of London. They were, he wrote, "a
great annoyance to the public, but moreso [sic] to the Indian gentlemen who
visit England" (The Times 1852, quoted in Visram 1986:19). Arguably, mem-
bers of the Indian upper classes who visited London had more at stake in sepa-
rating themselves from their lower-class countrymen, given the racism of the
imperial city, than they did at home in the colonial society of India.
The clash among local, imperial, and nationalist hierarchies became most
apparent in the winter of 1885, when Liberty's Department Store attempted to
promote its goods by re-creating an Indian village, bringing several dozen Indian
artists and performers from the subcontinent for an exhibit of Indian culture at
Battersea Park. I turn here to the department store's disastrous attempt to create a
"living village of Indian natives" only a few months prior to the Colonial and
Indian Exhibition because it resulted in a telling controversy over the issue of
human exhibits and foregrounded the idea of failure in the public perception of
imperial display.

An Uncivilized Spectacle: The Case of Liberty's

Liberty's Department Store, which emerged in the second half of the 19th
century, was like an extension of the elaborate visual stage that characterized
exhibitions and museum spaces. Its founder, Arthur Lasenby Liberty, was a
successful entrepreneur who began his career in 1862 by importing specialty
items like Indian silks, rugs, shawls, and furniture for his "Oriental Ware-
house" on Regent Street. He shared an interest in Indian design with several
key figures in the Arts and Crafts Movement, such as William Morris, but
largely ignored the critique of capitalism that provided the ideological basis for
the movement. Nonetheless, Liberty's on Regent Street became an important
entrepreneurial space where Indian styles and designs were marketed to the
public. In 1884 an American journalist wrote, "It is as inappropriate to regard
Liberty's merely as a place of business as it would be to regard the public library

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 503

at Boston merely as a storage of books. Liberty & Co. is as much

the metropolis as the National Gallery" (Calloway 1992:39).
The group of Indians that Liberty's brought to London in Nov
included two women, a mother and daughter pair of nautch danc
men-jugglers, acrobats, carvers, weavers, embroiderers, and othe
They were to perform for the crowds in an Indian village setting
Palace in Battersea Park (Figure 3). Though less ambitious than th
spectacle of the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, the intention to
ing village of Indian artisans" (a "taxing undertaking" in one vers
stitution's history) was essentially the same (Adburgham 1975
pose of the Liberty's exhibit was to generate publicity for th
increase the sales in its Oriental Antiques and Curios Departm
goal, Liberty's thus claimed, was "to facilitate the manufactures of
by showing what could be done in India by natives with their ow
(Adburgham 1975:60).
The event proved to be a total disaster, both commercially and
the publicity it generated. "All who touched it went straightawa
ruptcy," reported The Indian Mirror (1886d). The Indians who ap
village were "grossly deceived" by a recruiting agent who had no
the food, salary, housing, and clothing specified in their cont
women in the display, described as "bewitching" objects of sexua
were subjected to even greater humiliation. Many visitors wer
have tried to "touch the nautch girls ... in doubt as to whether th
article" (The Indian Mirror 1886f).5 The group sought the help of
Ghosh, "a fellow countryman not known to have any connection
Ghosh became the chairman of a committee "composed of a few
Indian gentlemen" to "advise and assist" the unfortunate trou
ceedings commenced on their behalf. The London Daily News rep
Indians were not dissatisfied with their treatment but were simpl
and "wanted to get home as fast as possible" (quoted in The I
1886f). Their dispute was widely publicized, and a relief fund to f
return was advertised in the Bombay newspapers. In March 1886,
India reported that

the members of the "Indian Village," numbering forty-two, one hav

reach Bombay by the next mail steamer. They come back in a very
miserable plight. The "show" was a failure from the first; and e
started, the financial arrangements of the original promoter of the
down.... No food had been supplied to the members of the company
and their salaries were in arrears. ... He is now sending them back t
no one is in charge of them, and they are penniless as the result of
adventure. [1886]

To add to their misfortunes, the Indians had arrived in London during the
most bitterly cold months, November and December, during a winter that had
been especially severe, with the coldest temperatures recorded in 30 years

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504 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

(Stedman Jones 1971:291). Elsewhere in London, the below-freezing

tures had brought outdoor work to a virtual standstill, creating mu
among unemployed dock and building workers. In fact, the harshne
winter of 1885-86 would become an important contributing factor i
ing that occurred that February (Stedman Jones 1971; Walkowitz 19
the breakdown of the hot-water pipes in the Albert Palace, the Indi
found itself, along with the rest of London's urban poor, struggling
the cold. Fires were kept going day and night, and a physician was b
to see them. Thirty cobras and rock snakes belonging to the snake-c
Sheikh Imam were killed by the temperatures, so a "fresh batch wa
from Bombay" (The Indian Mirror 1886a). To their European spec
struggle against the cold became a notable, if inauthentic, part of t
"It was odd to see the Indians in European garb," observed one Engli
in a newspaper account: "The management had been obliged to su
with overcoats, trousers, mufflers and boots on account of the cold
them wore English hats; and you cannot imagine how thoroughly a
can vulgarize the Asiatic type of head and face" (The Indian Mirror
The Liberty's experiment had thus failed both as a commercial v
and as an exercise in cultural display, and it received much attention
a result. In a growing climate of nationalist discontent with the Bri
ment of Indians more generally, which had escalated that year with t
annexation of Burma and the confidence generated by the newly form
National Congress, there was outrage at the botched exhibit. Newspa
rials emphasized the irony that a "civilized" culture would participat
barbarous act of displaying human beings. "Strange that the idea of
hibition ... be consonant with European Civilization," suggested the e
The Hindoo Patriot (1886b:1): "There is no knowing where the
shows and exhibitions is to end in civilized society" (The Hindo
1886a). Meanwhile, London writers offered their opposing argument
exhibits display in any way the "inherent aptitude of the mild Hindu
self-government, wrote one, then "the sooner the Indian villages ar
the better" (The Indian Mirror 1886c). Living displays of Indians in
tropolis thus emerged, like most aspects of cultural life, as a contes
sentation in the larger battle of nationalism's challenge to colonial k
in India. If one thing was clear after the Liberty's disaster, as The I
ror noted, it was that "a fresh experiment of an 'Indian Village' in En
heat up few recruits in India" (1886e).

"Selection and Recruitment": The Agra Jail

The issue of recruiting natives was thus a delicate matter for orga
the Colonial and Indian Exhibition as they planned the native artisan
for Queen Victoria' s jubilee celebration later that summer. In spite of
tive publicity generated by Liberty's display, the Royal Commis
tained an "earnest desire to have a number of Indian artisans carrying
various trades and callings" inside the Indian palace. Their strategy w

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 505

Filgure 4
Arrival of Indians at the Royal Albert Docks. From The Illustrated London News
(June 12,1886: 635).

a private shipping company, Messrs. Henry S. King and Company, to bring 31

"skilled workmen" from India for the event. As "official agent" to the Royal
Commission, the company was to be responsible for selecting the men, making
their travel arrangements, and covering the cost of "transport, pay, and mainte-
nance" for the group. One general difficulty, they observed, lay in how to "re-
produce under an English sky" the features of life in an Indian city. "In select-
ing the men," the firm reported, "our first consideration was to include not only
as many trades as possible, but such as were most picturesque, and most likely
therefore to prove interesting to the public."7
In fact, the 31 skilled workmen the firm selected, for reasons that I will
elaborate further, were all inmates at the central jail in Agra. The shipping
company had subcontracted the task of recruitment to Dr. John William Tyler.
The plan was that all of the Indians, accompanied by Tyler, would travel to-
gether from Bombay. They would receive a wage, half of it paid to them in ad-
vance and half to be left with the district magistrates until their return.8 It had
been carefully stipulated that they "should not be absent more than six
months," but the Royal Commission would later "urgently request" a one-
month extension to the six-month agreement. Henry S. King and Co. reported
that this was arranged with the men, "though with considerable difficulty, as
they were extremely anxious to return to their families."9
The Indians arrived in London with Tyler on April 20, two weeks prior to
the opening of the exhibition (Figure 4). They were "at once installed in the
quarters provided for them"-an area known as the Compound that was near

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506 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

the exhibition site that housed all the other natives imported from the
The Compound was a space that contained and segregated the natives f
rest of urban society, although it was celebrated in the media as a
which the "great diversity" of Her Majesty's foreign subjects could be
"On no previous occasion," wrote one observer, "have so many different
sentatives been gathered together... Hindus, Muhammedans, Buddh
Indians from British Guiana, Cypriots, Malays, Kafirs and Bushmen f
Cape" (Cundall 1886:5). Henry S. King and Co. would bill the exhi
about eleven hundred pounds sterling for the total cost of the Indians'
nance, which included "food, fire, washing, and medical attendanc
Royal Commission for the exhibition reported that "no one serious cas
ness or misbehavior occurred" (1887:xlv). It praised the Indians for the
health and behavior in spite of the "somewhat trying circumstances."
Tyler received enormous publicity for his connection to the I
Trained as an M.D. at the Medical College in Calcutta, Tyler had joined t
Medical Department in 1863. But the bulk of his career in India was as
with prisons-with the policing and punishment of colonial subjects, w
cured the exhibition organizers' confidence in him. As a result of the
tion, he would meet Queen Victoria on more than one occasion and enj
media's depiction of him as "the distinguished Dr. Tyler" (The Indian M
1886j, 18861). He was also promoted to inspector-general of prisons in
and the northwest provinces, a post he served from 1890 until his ret
(Buckland 1906:433). Eventually he was knighted, changing his tit
"Dr." to the more prestigious "Sir" John William Tyler. As Metcalf
served (1995:77), such a knighthood often stood as the highest mea
successful administrative career for British officials in India.
The collaboration between the firm of Henry S. King and Co. and the su-
perintendent of the Agra jail that brought the Indians to London was praised as
successful by exhibition officials. Although the firm was responsible for the
men's travel and maintenance expenses, Tyler was in charge of their "comfort
and well-being," of accompanying them from Agra to London, and of super-
vising them while while they were in the metropolis. The media represented
the superintendent's involvement as an act of humanity rather than power; he
became an escort, a translator, even a friend to the Indians, which subsumed
the realities of their warden-inmate relationship. At the same time, Tyler's pro-
fessional training assured the public that proper discipline would be exercised
against any unexpected misbehavior. He became something of a hero during
the course of the exhibition, and the group would become known as "Dr. Ty-
ler's artisans." To Tyler, The Art Journal stated, "the public are indebted" for
the success of the living display (1886:14). (See Figure 2.)
Although the decision to use inmates for the exhibit allowed for stiff social
control of the group while it was in London, it also reflected several assump-
tions about criminality in India and the reform practices of prisons in the colo-
nial context. For instance, the reforming of India's so-called criminal castes
and tribes, that is, entire populations that the British believed to be predisposed

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 507

to crime, required the transformation of the totality of the group's

behavior, dress, and personal grooming. Training so-called crim
tions in skills such as pottery, weaving, carpet making, and so
common method of instilling the moral value of hard work while re
formerly "unruly groups" into disciplined and law-abiding bod
1985; Tolen 1991; Yang 1985). As part of the reform process, in
often initiated under supervision into factories, workshops, an
schools. External markets also were established for the sale of leath
silk products, carpets, and other commodities produced by such cri
form programs. As inmates, then, the men recruited for the display
sess certain skills of craft production, although those skills, ironic
likely to have been learned through the industrializing processes of
form rather than through the ancient, timeless practices of a village
they could be forced to cooperate, under Tyler's "supervision," to pe
petitive task day after day. Further, as men already marginalized i
society, they were unlikely to generate the kind of nationalist publi
that occurred with the earlier troupe of performers for Liberty's.

On Display: The View from Above-T. N. Mukharji's

Exhibition Account

The native artisans display at the Colonial Exhibition was as successf

and seemingly authentic as the Liberty's exhibit was not. "The other day I p
my first visit to the Colonial and Indian Exhibition and ... walked up the lon
gallery containing the life-size models of the different Indian nationalities,
wrote an Indian traveler in London whose account was published in The Indi
Mirror (1886h). In the Indian palace, he commented,

I watched the two Punjabi carpenters hammering away, heedless of the crowd
people looking at their work. Squatting on small rugs bare-footed, they are makin
a fancy door panel.... I go next to the Benares man, robed in a glittering "cha
kan," with the gorgeous kinkhabs and other rich dress materials spread before hi
. . . On hearing his native speech from me, his swarthy face brightens up with a r
ognizing smile. We salaam each other and remain for a little time in conversatio
[The Indian Mirror 1886h]

Threading his way through "the masses of curious people who besiege this I
dian Court to another workshop," the observer stated that "it reminds one
the bazaars of India; in fact the whole Indian Court gives a living representat
of the daily working life of Indian artisans" (The Indian Mirror 1886h).
To the throngs of spectators who came to view the display, the Native Ar
tisans Exhibit was by far the most compelling and "curiously pretty spectac
featured at the Colonial and Indian Exhibition. According to the Indian visit
quoted above, the Indians sit "brave and dignified and motionless as statues."
Moreover, Bakshiram, the 102-year-old potter, "does not look about at all" o
talk to anyone but remained focused solely on his clay (The Indian Mir
1886h). On "the table before him are models" he produced-"of a yogi,

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508 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Brahman, a Bania and others"-all "exact copies of their originals

man "may be seen hammering sheet copper into all sorts of vessels"
Journal 1886:14). Most viewers, the Indian visitor noticed, "do no
work, but only look at them and their movements"; whereas others,
with concern, "seem to look upon them as animals" (The Indian Mirro
For the educated, upper-caste Bengali T. N. Mukharji, being a
with the craftsmen in the display was a source of profound discomf
noted earlier, Mukharji's nine-month stay in London was the sub
travelogue A Visit to Europe (1889). In it, Mukharji reveals that desp
at the exhibition (described as "planning and other public duties"), h
housed with the group of natives in the Compound. Instead, he stay
Museum Hotel in Bloomsbury, which was "not exceptionally good" in
mation because it was meant for "traders and middle-class count
(1889:31). His stay there allowed him, however, to experience the cit
education and enlightenment at the very fountain-head of modern ci
(1889:1). London, he wrote, is "the center of the earth, the heart whi
the life-blood to the commerce of the world" (1889:40). And he was
his British friends, especially George Birdwood, Max Muller, and Mr
ald at the India Office, "for the kindness they always showed" to him
iting their country (1889:33).
In his book Mukharji reveals himself as a loyal supporter of the
who believed in "the mutual benefits between India and Britain" and
the campaign for Irish home rule. Mukharji also states that he was no
for the spectacle created by his presence at the exhibition. Although
part of the native display, he was equally subjected to the gaze of it
"We simply wondered why there should be any excitement at all ov
small matter [our presence]. We gradually came to know better"
"A dense crowd," he explained,

always stood there looking at our men as they wove the gold brocade, san
terns of the carpet and printed the calico with the hand .... We were very
ing beings no doubt, so were the Zulus before us, and so is the Sioux c
present time .... We were pierced through and through by stares from
colors-green, gray, blue and black-and every movement and act of ou
ing, sitting, eating, reading, received its full share of "O, I never!" [18

Mukharji shifts from describing the display of "our men" to usin

lective "we" in his account. The shift communicates his discomfort
subjected to the same "piercing stares" as the men who performed in
display. What he called the gap "between our estimate of ourselves a
timate which others form of us" was, at times, a philosophical prob
cable to all nations"-at other times he found it "more refreshing th
of port wine" (1889:102). Once, Mukharji tells us, he was reading a n
at a restaurant at the exhibition when he became "suddenly aware th
being looked at." A man and his daughter were whispering abou
eventually approached his table. "The young lady talked with a vivac

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 509

I did not expect," he writes: "She was delighted with everything

pressed her astonishment at my knowledge of English, and complime
for the performance of the band brought from my country"-actuall
Indian band composed of "Negroes and Mulattos" (1889:105). The
compliment, he says, "made me wince a little, but nevertheless I wen
tering for a quarter of an hour" and furnished her with sufficient m
"brag about seeing and talking to a genuine Blackie" (1889:105). In
amples, Mukharji is more critical of the racism of the exhibition visito
elty, he writes, "that a European only is capable of" (1889:123). "Woul
discuss us so freely," he askes bitterly, "if they knew that we underst
language?" (1889:101).
Mukharji's account reflects the class anxieties of an elite colonial
in London who felt uncomfortable sharing the category "native" or "
with the indigenous lower classes. It also reveals a unique strategy th
him to escape from the objectifying processes of the "piercing st
transforms the exhibition into a space where "Europe," too, can be ob
"Of considerable interest in the Indian Bazaar," he writes, were the "
England ... [the] men, women and children [who] flocked from all par
Kingdom" (1889:99, emphasis added). Each day thousands of viewe
on the Indian men with "anxious inquisitive scrutiny," and the peculiar
tion of Mukharji's own position was dramatized by his preferred locati
display-to stand, for hours, "behind these people to hear the remarks
from their lips" (1889:79).

To Visit the Queen: The Case of Tulsi Ram

In contrast to Mukharji's firsthand account is the perspective on th

exhibit provided by the trail of correspondence between urban official
don's East End and the Home Office of the Indian government over t
lem" of Tulsi Ram. On February 25, 1886, the India Office headqu
Whitehall received an anxious letter from Fred E. Hillary at the Unio
house in Leytonstone that indicated that a native of India named Tulsi
been admitted to the workhouse. "The man," Hillary wrote, "is a grea
to the Workhouse Officials as his habits are extremely eccentric." The
explained, did not know what to do; they had tried to persuade him to
India, "but he still declines." Because the man reiterated continuall
had been "badly treated," they were now desperately seeking the adv
India Office.1 A few days later the India Office replied: The ma
sponded, "to whom you refer has been several times in different work
London and in jail as a vagrant." Officials said they "cannot interfere
they advise" in the case. It was beyond the control of the India Office.
Less than one month later, a similar letter arrived from the Whit
Infirmary in the heart of London's East End. The Whitechapel neighb
was especially notorious for its degraded and "immoral" landscape. Tw
later it would provide the sensational setting for five of the six brutal m
prostitutes by Jack the Ripper (Walkowitz 1992). Tulsi Ram had been

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510 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

to the infirmary there because of his possible mental disturbance

dated March 15, 1886, is from a sympathetic male nurse "wh
speak to the poor man in Hindoostani."'3 According to him, Tulsi
"no symptoms whatever of unsoundness of mind" but was "under
conviction" that he had been cheated. He repeatedly referred to a
India, a story "consistently adhered to throughout." He also refused
India until his grievance had been redressed. Within five days the
responded: "The case of Tulsi Ram is a judicial one, and has alr
fore the court of appeal.... [I]t is impossible for the Secretary of
Executive Government in India to interfere in the matter."14
Within three weeks another letter arrived at the India Office re
structions about "the case of the Hindoo, Tulsi Ram." This time it w
commissioner of police at Whitehall, Charles Warren, who had ch
Ram with vagrancy for "once again visiting Windsor to see Her M
is an elderly man," he wrote,

by caste a Khetis Brahman, a native of village Lusara, district Jullun

He complains that some Zamindar cheated him of his land, that he a
courts, but that all the judges decided his case against him.... He cam
eleven months ago to get redress and see the queen. He is well known
lice Court in the metropolis, as he has been frequently in custody fo
struction.15

By early April 1886, officials at the India Office began to mark such
memos regarding Tulsi Ram "Immediate." They recognized that "the move-
ments in this country of the native in question . . . render it quite [an] excep-
tional" case.'6 They conceded that if Tulsi Ram could be "induced by the Po-
lice" to consent to return to India, then the Home Office would arrange for the
payment.'7 A week earlier, they had sent a telegram to the administration in Al-
lahabad to enquire into Tulsi Ram's alleged grievances. The telegram re-
quested, "Native calling himself Tulsi Ram, Lusara village, Jullundhar Dis-
trict, asserts property forcibly taken by Raja Ram four years ago; appeal, Chief
Court Lahore, dismissed. Believed here story fabrication, and that he is es-
caped convict. Please inquire, and telegraph anything known about him."'s
The reply from India was quick. The lieutenant governor of Punjab estab-
lished that Tulsi Ram's story was true. In a return telegram, it was confirmed
that Tulsi Ram did file a suit against another man in his village, Raja Ram, ap-
proximately five years earlier. The case, the telegram reiterated, was appealed
in Lahore and "given against him." "He is now said to be in London," came the
reply, "doubtless in hopes of getting reversal of the order. No reason to suspect
him to be an escaped convict."19
With the authentication of Tulsi Ram's story, the Home Office of the In-
dian government determined that it had a "problem" on its hands. More gener-
ally, Tulsi Ram's case revived a long-standing unresolved issue for the impe-
rial administration: the problem of pauper foreigners or destitute Indians in
London. "The question is rather a delicate one," stated an India Office memo:20

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 511

"Great hardship is really entailed on an Indian pauper who has to rem

definitely in the workhouses, where his language is not understood ..
the food is unsuitable to his caste prejudices. On the other hand the pr
such paupers in workhouses interferes with the due enforcement of
and is a source of annoyance and inconvenience to the authorities."21
portant, urban officials always have "resented and resisted ... this cla
have attempted to throw the burden on India."22 The subject of "such
the administration concluded, "is growing in importance as the number
creasing and will probably increase still more rapidly every year."23
By the 1880s the vexed question of "such people," or, more precis
awkward presence of subaltern colonial figures among London's urban
already carried with it substantial historical baggage. The question of
bility for homeless Indians in London was first raised in relation to l
Indian sailors hired by the East India Company to work on its ships as
bor, and again with ayahs, female domestic servants (Visram 1986). A
the system of indentured labor that provided Indian bodies as worker
ous parts of the British Empire such as Ceylon, Burma, South Africa,
Trinidad did not extend to Britain itself, by the 1840s there were abo
thousand lascars arriving in London on East India Company ships
(Visram 1986:48). Commonly mistreated and generally despised, many
were housed in places unfit for humans; others were robbed, aban
abused; others became ill lying in hospitals or workhouses "for w
most desolate condition, without being able to communicate their wan
ter 1873:ii, quoted in Visram 1986:48). Hundreds of servants or ayahs,
in flight from their masters or abandoned, similarly ended up in the
houses, prisons, and hospitals of London's East End. By the middle of
tury, Christian concern for the "wretchedness" of their lives led to t
lishment of the Strangers' Home for Asiatics, Africans, South Sea
and Others Residing in the Metropolis and, later in the 1880s, a fema
called the Ayah's Home. The former, a home for sailors, was open
East End in 1857 and run by missionary Joseph Salter.
In his two books on the subject, The Asiatic in England (1873)
East in the West (1894), Salter reflects on his career as a missionary am
eign "heathens in our great Christian metropolis" (1873:39). It was nec
to establish the Strangers' Home, he recalls, because "the habits of str
are so different from those of our own countrymen" (1873:i). His wo
been more difficult, he claims, than that of the missionary in India. "T
reasons, a missionary was "sent to tell of eternal life and of heaven."
London, Indians were "left in their heathenism, unsought after,
for-forming plague spots of Oriental vice" (Salter 1894:14).
In spite of the fundamentalist zeal that defined Salter's urban mis
career, he was committed to helping colonial subjects in the city, larg
cause the Indian government was not.24 The East India Company
wanted to use its profits to provide relief for abused or abandoned In
ors or servants. This earlier ambivalence was basically extended into o

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512 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

government policy after the mutiny in 1857. According to a revised

Act in 1869, "England is not a place to which emigration from Briti
lawful."25 Although it was "a punishable offense" to assist any "Nat
dia" in emigrating to England-the word emigrate here defined as "d
from India for the purpose of laboring for hire"-an exception w
made for sailors and menial servants. As a result, according to on
during the 1860s and 1870s, "upwards of sixteen hundred destitute
the East-nine-tenths of whom were natives of India," were sheltere
ous London institutions (quoted in Visram 1986:228). The only str
attempted to address their plight was the institution of a security de
European bringing an Indian subject to England was required to leav
in India for the return passage. The European employer would receiv
posit back when the "body of the native" returned to India. The am
at 100 pounds sterling but was reduced to 50 pounds in 1840. Ac
Visram (1986:20), the deposit system lapsed over the years, an
amount was recorded in 1844.
By the 1880s, reports about ayahs and lascars were joined by accounts of
impoverished performers, such as the group brought by Liberty's or the case of
five Punjabees and their performing bear. Salter himself wrote to the India Of-
fice regarding the latter:

Sir, there are five Punjabees in London in very distressed circumstances. They
came here with a performing bear with which they hoped to realize a fair income,
but for want of the English language and other obstacles they have failed alto-
gether and are now huddled together in an empty house.... Is it possible that the
council for India will ... help these men out of their perilous position?26

The India Office, as usual, declined all responsibility. "The five Pun-
jabees are trying to sell their bear and if they succeed they will try to regain ad-
mittance to our home," wrote a staff member to Salter in early December.27
Will the India Office then "pay their food and lodging if we take them in?" the
staff member inquired. The government's response was unchanging. A memo
issued on Christmas Eve replied, "Dear Sir, I am afraid that I cannot be of any
assistance to you in the matter referred to in your letter.... [T]his Department
will not be responsible for any expense incurred."28

The Problem of the Petitioner Class

If the majority of destitute Indians in London were employees-ayahs

lascars, servants, and performers-the administration believed that a new clas
of natives, "not seamen," had compounded the problem after the queen becam
empress in 1877. They dubbed this group "the petitioner class," and Tulsi Ram
was its exemplary figure. The petitioner class, according to Sir Gerald Fitzge
ald, the political aide de camp, was made up of "natives of India, mostly from
Punjab, who have been unsuccessful litigants in the Indian Courts." They com
to London, he explained in a memo, with the hope of gaining a reversal from
the queen "in ignorance of the fact that no appeal lies in this country agains

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 513

the decisions of Indian Courts."29 Fitzgerald, who was initially appoin

as mehmendar (host) to the Indian princes in London and later inherite
sue of destitutes, considered the petitioner class to be his "main prob
declared that "the sooner they return to India the better." They wer
villagers" who flocked to England to take advantage of the queen's ro
press of India; they glorified her as the "fountain of justice," and th
in his view, an "evil" that demanded "legislative remedy."30
"These cases are always extremely difficult to deal with," explaine
dia Office memo marked "private": "In the first place the Secretary of
no funds ... nor does he acknowledge any liability to assist.... In t
place we have found from experience . . . [that these men] generally
at the last moment refuse to go."31 Another official, Sir Charles
agreed with Fitzgerald about the urgency of the question of the petitio
"But I would go further," he stated: "These men, so far as I have seen t
respectable landholders who have been litigating their claims for yea
is very hard on them to be sent to jail, or to the workhouse, because it
ignorance that they have come." Bernard found it odd that there was
darkness and ignorance on the matter in the Punjab than in any othe
ince." At the same time he complained that "it is a scandal that s
should be haunting the gates of the India Office and howling for redre
The problem of the petitioner class was not the financial burden it
edly represented. Its numbers, contrary to what Fitzgerald believed,
"rapidly increasing" and making an already difficult matter "dail
[sic]." Nor was their "evil" a threat to the queen, for characters like T
standing outside Windsor Castle did not constitute any real threat to h
The main problem in the eyes of officials was the ignorance of the pea
lager who sought justice from the physical body of the queen rather t
the abstract processes of colonial law. The visibility of such ignorance
civilized capital was an embarrassing imposition on urban life. The re
lem, in other words, for colonial officials was the manner in which t
brought their petitions to the very foundations of the imperial system
Tulsi Ram, on the other hand, had a very different definition of
called problem of the petitioner class. In his effort to petition for ju
effort that followed the model of seeking justice from the emperor, w
its origins in the Mughal period-Tulsi Ram had endured the oppressio
state judicial system, the cruelty of petty officials, and the chill of ur
erty in London. Above all else, he felt deeply cheated. Enclosed in the
spondence between frustrated metropolitan officials and the stubborn
cracy in the India Office are two translated statements made by T
himself. In one of them Tulsi Ram explains, "About four years ago I l
the village of Lusara, in the District of the Deputy Commissioner of Ju
I had twenty houses there valued at five thousand rupees. These w
from me unjustly and by force by Rajaram."33
Tulsi Ram had petitioned desperately against the action, but his p
was rejected by the chief court in Lahore. He then sent two petitions

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514 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

viceroy in Simla, and "when the Viceroy moved to Calcutta," he explai

went down and sent two more petitions, but with a like result." Despon
in financial despair, he then took a ship to Rangoon with the encourage
an Amritsar merchant, Sher Singh, who, upon their arrival, robbed h
knew I had two hundred rupees and my papers in a bag round my nec
when I was asleep he cut it off." Tulsi Ram then worked for another m
in Rangoon for the next 12 months and saved enough money to come
land. "For ten months," he concluded,

I have been going about trying to see the queen, but a lot of people always c
near me and caused me to be locked up. I have been in about twenty cou
been locked up. At one of the Courts one elderly gentleman offered me two
rupees to pay my passage back to India, but I told him I did not want m
wanted justice and until I get that I will die sooner than return to my own coun

Unfortunately, the administration's method for dealing with the pe

class, to "tackle the problem at its source," was of little use in Tulsi R
(Visram 1986:28). By 1890, the local provinces in India were instructed
sue notices in the vernacular languages warning Indian claimants that
did not lie in England. No petitioners, they were advised, will "obtain an
ing in England from Her Majesty."35 Prospective petitioners were inf
the risk of "becoming destitute" in London. And the provinces were w
that if "any men of this class should be repatriated" by the Home Off
expenses would be billed "to the Provinces to which they may belong"
1986:28-29). But such measures were taken well after Tulsi Ram's a
the capital city. For over ten months, the man had exasperated both me
tan and colonial officials. His claim to "die sooner than return to my ow
try" was seen as unreasonable and irrational. If anything, the man had
more persistent, not less, as a result of his encounters with urban aut
On top of everything, the sight of Tulsi Ram outside Windsor Castle
the kind of imperial spectacle envisioned by officials for the Queen's
In their eyes, his situation required immediate action.
There is an odd silence in the historical record at this point. But on
1886, Tulsi Ram appears as "Native Sixteen" at the Colonial and Ind
bition in South Kensington. Forcibly? Willingly? There is no account o
this decision was made or by whom. For the crowds of spectators, Tul
seated on the floor of the Indian palace, was reinvented under the title
meat Maker from Agra." Perhaps he produced sweetmeats that were s
freshments to visitors. The experience, however, proved to be his def
Tulsi Ram did not endure it for long. Within three weeks, on May 24
arrested for vagrancy once more, but this time the letter from the W
police court expressed a startling change: "He now states he is willing to
to India if sent there.... I have no doubt you know the case. He is the ol
who wishes to see the Queen."36
Thankful that Tulsi Ram had consented to leave London, the India
agreed instantly to pay the cost of his return. The arrangements were

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 515

June 24. On June 25, Mr. Phillips of the West Ham police wrote th
little trouble" Tulsi Ram was "induced to return." "I went down to the Albert Dock
yesterday afternoon to see him off on board the British India S.S. Goorkha," he
wrote: "I saw the captain of the boat who promised to deal kindly with the old
man ... [E]nclosed I send the bill [of 18 pounds] for his passage."37 At the Home
Office an exception was made, and a memo recommended that it reimburse
Phillips for Tulsi Ram's fare: "I think a short draft should be prepared thanking
Mr. Phillips," it suggested; "the departure of this native is a great relief."38
Incredibly, Tulsi Ram wrote another petition before leaving London that
ensures him the final word in my narrative and preserves his resistance in
the historical record. His petition, which remains on file in the India Office
records, states,

The petition of your humble servant Tulsi Ram ... is that your worship's obedient
servant is neither a rogue, a vagabond or a criminal of any sort, nor is he a mono-
maniac of any description whatever.
That ever since your worship's servant has set his foot in this city he has
been treated like a common criminal ... for what crime he knows not. This cruel
injustice has not only added to his sufferings but has defiled him in a religious sense.
... I prayeth that your worship's humble servant may no longer be treated as a crim-
inal or a madman but that he may be protected as a poor stranger in this strange land.
Your Worship's Most Humble and Obedient Servant, Tulsi Ram Morn.39

Epilogue: Native Journeys, Cosmopolitan Tales

Tulsi Ram's journey to London is a rich and polyphonic account that is si-
multaneously many things. It is a tale of persistence by a subaltern figure
against the authority of urban and imperial officials; it is an expression of a co-
lonial subject's claims to a citizenship that he is uniformly denied; it is a narra-
tive of power and modern urban space; it is the story of a "poor stranger in this
strange land." At the center of the problem presented by the petitioner class, or
by "destitutes in London" more generally, was the undesirable visibility of par-
ticular bodies (colonized, racialized, and poor) within the urban space of the
imperial city. In this way, Tulsi Ram's transgressions threatened the bounda-
ries of public space: both the geographic distance between "home" and "colony"
that was painstakingly maintained by the British in power and the socially di-
vided space of urban London with its starkly mapped inequalities and separa-
tions. The exaggerated notion of the petitioner class, conceived of as a collec-
tive of Indians who at any time might rush the grounds of Windsor Castle with
their petitions, reveals the anxieties of colonial officials whose careers were
given to the maintenance of such boundaries.
The Colonial and Indian Exhibition was an elaborate fiction that staged it-
self through yet another fiction: the fiction that nation and colony were brought
into a maternalized union by Queen Victoria's jubilee. According to this narra-
tive, the monarch symbolized the top of a social order that brought all British
and colonial subjects into a single hierarchy. Victoria was cast as the matriarch
of the nation, the mother of empire, and an emblem for the superiority of the
British race. And yet, although the image of the monarch became more "splendid,

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516 CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY

public and popular," as David Cannadine observes (1983), her actua

tion in political life declined. Tulsi Ram rejected the terms of the
demanded in fact that her symbolism be realized. He was a desper
had gone from being a property owner to a landless villager, who
by the impossible mission of regaining the status he had lost. Th
judicial structure had not helped him but, rather, had repeatedly
verdict against him was not altogether surprising, given that its
monly reflected the interests of the dominant landowning class (
But Tulsi Ram sought justice from the personal body of the queen
from the anonymous body of colonial law. And this, accordin
authorities, was not an appropriate public image of Queen Victori
jubilee year.
Tulsi Ram thus was not granted a space in the spectacle of empire at
Windsor Castle, even while Mukharji and the inmates from the Agra Jail were
assimilated into this extended performance. The manner in which the different
parties participated in the pageantry reflected their different relationships to
the imperial nation. The upper-class, upper-caste Bengali Mukharji saw his
stake in Victoria's "specially kind look" for the indigenous elite who pledged
their allegiance to her presence and power. The prisoners, on the other hand,
were by definition denied such a status as colonial subjects. For all of the men,
however, the living display would rigidly inscribe their participation in public
life, transforming them into ethnic commodities and rendering their bodies
available for European consumption. For Tulsi Ram, determined "to die rather
than return" to his country, being placed on view in such a way proved to be a
more powerful form of containment and punishment than anything experi-
enced in London's East End and resulted in his return to India. Yet Mukharji's
tactic of reversing the gaze onto the "natives of Europe" and Bakshiram's refusal
"to look about him at all" suggest that the physical gestures, complaints, and
petitions of the native leave the processes of objectification at best incomplete.
Anthropologists have much to gain from focusing on incomplete pro-
cesses of cultural representation, for they can instruct us in our attempts to re-
think anthropology's relationship to its object of study. First, to focus on in-
complete processes of objectification is to acknowledge the structures of
defiance and the forms of conscious intervention on the part of historical actors
who exist in relation to dominant strategies of representation and who operate
at the level of everyday life. In other words, the "living display" reminds us
that anthropological subjects are also living beings whose movements, desires,
motives, and tactics in highly charged ideological landscapes have never been
adequately contained by anthropology's representational forms. Second, to fo-
cus on a "failed" exhibit-like the Liberty's Indian village display-is to rec-
ognize the impact of popular, commercial, or "low" cultural practices on the
history of anthropological production, an influence that anthropology has too
often ignored. This interlinked history, as Micaela di Leonardo has forcefully
argued (1998), has had far-reaching ideological consequences, and it has been
responsible for an enduring discourse of "exotics at home" in contemporary

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 LIVING ETHNOLOGICAL EXHIBITS 517

North America. Finally, to focus on incomplete processes of objectif

confront, from yet another perspective, the conditions of possibility
sistence of tropes like "native," "villager," or "indigenous artisan" th
to mark authenticity and difference in spite of the challenges to the
by historical actors.
Tulsi Ram, the unfortunate villager who becomes visible in the
of the imperial city, traveled a great deal, even if he was denied th
social distinctions of travel. His life thus challenges the assumption
lack cosmopolitan histories or that indigenous mobilities are exclus
In fact, the experiences of the men and women in the living display
uneven nature of the history of modern travel and the nation-stat
which such journeys are defined. They represent the cosmopolitan
have remained invisible in our histories and ethnographies. They ar
tive routes through imperial topographies of power. And together t
complex entanglement of modernity's urban, national, and imperia

Notes

Acknowledgments. A version of this article was first presented at the 1998 annual
American Anthropological Association meetings in Philadelphia in a session entitled
"Rethinking Visual Culture." I am grateful to Colleen Ballerino Cohen for inviting me
to participate in the session and to the discussants, Faye Ginsburg and Brenda Bright, for
their engagement with my work. Since then, the article also has benefited from feedback
by interdisciplinary audiences at the Yale Center for British Art, the Museum of Anthro-
pology at the University of British Columbia, and the Center for South and Southeast
Asian Studies at the University of Michigan. Thanks also go to Antoinette Burton, Steve
Caton, Aamir Mufti, Debbie Poole, Rayna Rapp, and the members of the Victorian Stud-
ies Discussion Group at the University of Michigan for their helpful responses to various
earlier drafts. Figures 1 and 2 were found in the holdings of the Vassar College library;
Figures 3 and 4, in those of the University of Michigan library. I thank the libraries of
both institutions for their aid with the figures. The research for this article was made pos-
sible by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
the Vassar College Faculty Research Fund, and the New School for Social Research.
1. For a review of this body of work, see Mathur 2000.
2. Letter from Curzon to Lord Hamilton, August 27, 1902, quoted in Visram
1986:175.
3. See Dutta 1998 and Swallow 1998 for additional accounts of the exhibition.
4. See also Davis 1994.

5. On the history of British sexual fascination with nautch dancers, see Sul
6. Letter from Nanda Lal Ghosh to J. A. Godley, Home Office, February
no. 274, India Office Library and Records, Public and Judicial Papers (IOLR
7. Report from Henry S. King and Company, Official Agents to the Ro
mission, January 5, 1887, in Royal Commission 1887:283-290.
8. The portion of their so-called wages left with the district magistrates in
likely the "security deposit" required by any European bringing an Indian t
Below I discuss the security deposit system and its role in preventing Indian em
to Britain.

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 Introduction
PETER VERGO

What is museology? A simple definition might be that it is the study of

museums, their history and underlying philosophy, the various ways in
which they have, in the course of time, been established and developed,
their avowed or unspoken aims and policies, their educative or political
or social role. More broadly conceived, such a study might also embrace
the bewildering variety of audiences - visitors, scholars, art lovers, chil-
dren - at whom the efforts of museum staff are supposedly directed, as
well as related topics such as the legal duties and responsibilities placed
upon (or incurred by) museums, perhaps even some thought as to their
future. Seen in this light, museology might appear at first sight a subject
so specialised as to concern only museum professionals, who by virtue
of their occupation are more or less obliged to take an interest in it. In
reality, since museums are almost, if not quite as old as civilisation itself,
and since the plethora of present-day museums embraces virtually every
field of human endeavour - not just art, or craft, or science, but enter-
tainment, agriculture, rural life, childhood, fisheries, antiquities, auto-
mobiles: the list is endless - it is a field of enquiry so broad as to be a
matter of concern to almost everybody.
Museums, in the sense in which the word is today commonly under-
stood, are of course a relatively recent phenomenon. The foundation of
the great publicly funded (and publicly accessible) institutions such as
the British Museum or the Louvre goes back no more than a couple- of
hundred years, to the latter part of the eighteenth century. But in origin,
museums date back at least to classical times, if not beyond. The origin
of the museum is often traced back to the Ptolemaic mouseion at Alexan-
dria, which was (whatever else it may have been) first and foremost a
study collection with library attached, a repository of knowledge, a place
of scholars and philosophers and historians. 1 In Renaissance Europe,
those whose power and wealth permitted them to engage in such pursuits
looked beyond the boundaries of the city-state, beyond Europe itself, in
2 PETER VERGO

their quest for dominion over nature and their fellow man. An essential
part of that quest, as the princes and statesmen of the time realised
perfectly well, was to attain a more complete understanding of both
man and the world. The collections they amassed - not merely of art,
but of artefacts, antiquities, scientific instruments, minerals, fossils,
human and animal remains, objects of every conceivable kind - the
studiolos and cabinets of curiosities which have recently become objects
of considerable interest to historians, and which were museums avant
la lettre, served not merely the baser function of the display of wealth
or power or privilege, but also as places of study. This notion of the
dual function of collections as places of study and places of display was
inherited, both as a justification and as a dilemma, by the earliest public
museums. Overlaid with the more recent sense of an obligation that
museums should not merely display their treasures to the curious and
make their collections accessible to those desirous of knowledge, but
also actively engage in mass education, the dilemma is complicated still
further today by the entrepreneurial notion of museums as places of
public diversion. Paul Greenhalgh's essay in the present volume makes
clear what uneasy bedfellows instruction and entertainment are, and
have always been, both within and outside the context of museums.
But museums are of course far more than just places of study, or
education, or entertainment. The very act of collecting has a political or
ideological or aesthetic dimension which cannot be overlooked. According
to what criteria are works of art judged to be beautiful, or even histori-
cally significant? What makes certain objects, rather than others, 'worth'
preserving for posterity? When our museums acquire (or refuse to give
back) objects or artefacts specific to cultures other than our own, how
does the 'value' we place upon such objects differ from that assigned to
them by the culture, the people or the tribe from whom they have been
taken, and for whom they may have a quite specific religious or ritual
or even therapeutic connotation? In the acquisition of material, of what-
ever kind, let alone in putting that material on public display or making
it publicly accessible, museums make certain choices determined by
judgements as to value, significance or monetary worth, judgements
which may derive in part from the system of values peculiar to the
institution itself, but which in a more profound sense are also rooted in
our education, our upbringing, our prejudices. Whether we like it or
not, every acquisition (and indeed disposal), every juxtaposition or ar-
rangement of an object or work of art, together with other objects or
works of art, within the context of a temporary exhibition or museum
 Introduction 3

display means placing a certain construction upon history, be it the-

history of the distant or more recent past, of our own culture or someone
else's, of mankind in general or a particular aspect of human endeavour.
Beyond the captions, the information panels,' the accompanying
catalogue, the press handout, there is a subtext comprising innumerable
diverse, often contradictory strands, woven from the wishes and ambi-
tions, the intellectual or political or social or educational aspirations and
preconceptions of the museum director, the curator, the scholar, the
designer, the sponsor - to say nothing of the society, the political or
social or educational system which nurtured all these people and in so
doing left its stamp upon them. Such considerations, rather than, say,
the administration of museums, their methods and techniques of conser-
vation, their financial well-being, their success or neglect in the eyes of
the public, are the subject matter of the new museology.
Museology is, in any case, a relatively new discipline. Not until long
after the foundation of the first museums did anyone think of them as
a phenomenon worthy of study; and it is more recently still that mus-
eology in the extended sense outlined above has come to be recognised
as a field of enquiry in its own right. If the reader is prepared to concede
that there exists, as the title of this volume implies, not merely such a
subject as museology, but a number of possible museologies, including
a 'new' (and therefore presumably also an 'old') museology, what then
is a definition of the 'new' museology? At the simplest level, I would
define it as a state of widespread dissatisfaction with the 'old' museology,
both within and outside the museum profession; and though the reader
may object that such a definition is not merely negative, but circular, I
would retort that what is wrong with the 'old' museology is that it is
too much about museum methods, and too little about the purposes of
museums; that museology has in the past only infrequently been seen,
if it has been seen at all, as a theoretical or humanistic discipline, and
that the kinds of questions raised above have been all too rarely articu-
lated, let alone discussed. Contemplating the history and development
of the museum profession - and, in this country at least, its present sorry
plighr' - the comparison that springs irresistibly to mind is with the
coelacanth, that remarkable creature whose brain, in the course of its
development from embryo to adult, shrinks in relation to its size, so that
in the end it occupies only a fraction of the space available to it. Unless
a radical re-examination of the role of museums within society - by
which I do not mean measuring their 'success' merely in terms of criteria
such as more money and more visitors - takes place, museums in this
4 PETER VERGO

country, and possibly elsewhere, may likewise find themselves dubbed

'living fossils'. 3
However pressing the need for such a re-examination may be, the
present volume does not attempt to offer any comprehensive account of
the entire field of museum-related activities. It was not our aim to achieve
a balanced spread of topics; rather, we addressed those topics that we
felt urgently needed addressing. The reader will look in vain for coverage
of subjects such as museum administration, conservation techniques,
registration methods, or corporate sponsorship; essays on such matters
are to be found in adequate, if not yet plentiful, supply elsewhere in the
growing literature on museology. We also took cognisance of some of
the most recent 'alternative' literature, which likewise adopts a critical
stance vis-a-vis the 'old' museology, such as Robert Lumley's excellent
anthology The Museum Time Machine, which in part examines the
various constructions which museum display inevitably places not merely
upon history, but upon such things as gender, race, and class" and Brian
Durrans's forthcoming book, Making Exhibitions of Ourselves, which
considers among other subjects the fascinating question of the public
display of (usually subject) peoples.' Once again, such topics are here,
in the main, conspicuous by their absence. Nor is the present volume
intended to do justice to museum theory and practice outside the United
Kingdom. Though almost every essay refers in one way or another to
developments abroad, and two in particular - by Philip Wright and
Stephen Bann - give more extended consideration to museums in the
United States and in Australia respectively, the various essays are written
essentially from a British perspective. Ex Africa semper aliquid novi;
and while innovations elsewhere may hold important lessons for museum
practice in this country, in our view it is here, in Britain, as the twentieth
century draws to its uneasy close, that the problems, the issues and the
controversies are to be found in their most acute form.
The essays included in this volume are not written from a single
viewpoint, nor even from a single point of departure: they are as different
in approach, in emphasis, in style of writing as the personalities and
interests of their authors. It was never my intention as editor to invite
a 'representative' selection of museum professionals to write about a
'comprehensive' list of museum-related topics. Instead, I asked a small
number of colleagues - friends, rather, by now - to write on subjects
about which I knew they felt passionately. If the volume as a whole
appears to the reader or critic 'unrepresentative', not comprehensive
enough, lacking in cohesion, then the fault is entirely mine, though I have
 Introduction 5

to say that if these things are faults, then they are deliberate ones. If,
despite the fact that the contributors consulted neither with myself nor
with each other before putting pen to paper, their various essays seem,
on the other hand, to betray a certain, if not coherence, then at least
unanimity of spirit, it is perhaps because of the strength of shared con-
victions, a common concern with the health; indeed" the survival of the
profession in which so many of us are engaged. I salute them for their
courage in raising issues that are often passed over in silence, for uttering
thoughts often considered to be better left unspoken, and I am grateful
to them for their selflessness in putting aside other equally urgent tasks
in order to contribute to this volume.
PETER VERGO
December 1988
 I

Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings

CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

The original intention behind the establishment of museums was that

they should remove artefacts from their current context of ownership
and use, from their circulation in the world of private property, and
insert them into a new environment which would provide them with a
different meaning. The essential feature of museums - and what differen-
tiates them from the many extensive private collections which preceded
them - was, first, that the meanings which were attributed to the artefacts
were held to be not arbitrary; and, second, that the collections should
be open and accessible to at least a portion of the public, who were
expected to obtain some form of educational benefit from the experience.
This is evident in the historical trajectory which led to the formation of
museums in England.
In the seventeenth century there was a complex spectrum of collections
which might be open to the public, as, for example, the collections of
John Tradescant the elder at Lambeth, which could be visited on payment
of a fee; but the essential characteristic of Tradescant's collection, and
why it is better described in its original terminology as 'The Ark' than
as a museum, was its personal nature and that its accumulation was
owing to a single individual who retained the power and freedom to
alter the nature of the display.' It was not until the collection had been
inherited by Elias Ashmole and donated to the University of Oxford that
it took on the name of 'museum' in recognition of its nature as a public
foundation rather than a personal collection. This is made clear in the
wording of the original regulations of the museum dated 21 June 1686:

Because the knowledge of Nature is very necessarie to humaine life, health, &
the conveniences thereof, & because that knowledge cannot be soe well &
usefully attairi'd, except the history of Nature be knowne & considered; and
to this [end], is requisite the inspection of Particulars, especially those as are
extraordinary in their Fabrick, or usefull in Medicine, or applyed to Manufacture
or Trade. 1
 Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings 7

Knowledge was to be promoted through the study of three-dimensional

artefacts for the benefit of the public in a collection which was expected
to be established in perpetuity. The first usage of the word 'museum' in
its sense not just of an antique institution dedicated to the study of the
Muses, but as a modern institution which might contribute to the ad-
vancement of learning, is recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary as
being in 1683, when Elias Ashmole's collection was referred to in the
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society as a 'Musaeum'r'
This process of transformation from a private collection into a public
institution is equally evident in the foundation of the British Museum,
the most important institution in dominating the public consciousness
of what a museum is. The collections of the British Museum originated
in the massive and diverse private collections of Sir Hans Sloane, which
were housed first in Great Russell Street and subsequently in Cheyne
Walk. There they were accessible to interested members of the public
and were arranged with an attempt at systematic classification and
taxonomic order. On 29 July 1749, Sloane made his will bequeathing
the collections to the public on payment of £20,000 to his family. As
Horace Walpole wrote to Sir Horace Mann on 14 February 1753:
You will scarce guess how I employ my time; chiefly at present in the guardianship
of embryos and cockleshells. Sir Hans Sloane is dead, and has made me one of
the trustees to his museum, which is to be offered for twenty thousand pounds
to the King, the Parliament, the royal academies of Petersburg, Berlin, Paris and
Madrid. He valued it at fourscore thousand, and so would anybody who loves
hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese!"

Yet, in spite of this attitude of mind, the collections were in due course
purchased by Parliament and were installed for the benefit of the public
in Montagu House in Bloomsbury. Once again, the proper designation
of the collection as a museum came ~t the point when it was acquired
on behalf of the public and when it was assumed that the collection
would not subsequently be in any way dispersed. The collection remained
essentially the same in the way that it was ordered, but its status and
meaning were adjusted in terms of a degree of public ownership and a
sense of perpetuity. It had become a museum. As the act of incorporation
stated, it was intended 'not only for the inspection and entertainment
of the learned and the curious, but for the general use and benefit of
the public', even though the Trustees immediately instituted a system of
fees which effectively restricted the nature of the public which could
obtain admittance.
By the second half of the nineteenth century, the tendencies which had
8 CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

been evident in the first foundation of museums were generally accepted

and effectively promoted by the Government. These tendencies may be
reduced to four principal characteristics which cluster round the defi-
nition of a museum: the first is that the collections on display should in
someway contribute to the advancement of knowledge through study
of them; the second, which is closely related, is that the collections should
not be arbitrarily arranged, but should be organised according to some
systematic and recognisable scheme of classification; the third is that
they should be owned and administered not by a private individual, but
by more than one person on behalf of the public; the fourth is that they
should be reasonably accessible to the public, if necessary by special
arrangement and on payment of a fee.
This mixture of meanings provided a powerful degree of idealism in
the boom time in the establishment of museums in the second half of
the nineteenth century. This idealism is clearly evident, for example, in
the origins of the South Kensington Museum. The museum was not
established for the purposes of a limited or restricted scholarship, let
alone for the development of specialist connoisseurship in the field of
the applied arts, but with a broad instrumental and utilitarian purpose
that it might be conducive towards the education of public taste in order
to promote a better understanding of the role of design in British manu-
factures.' As Henry Cole wrote in his first report to the Department of
Practical Art:
The Museum is intended to be used, and to the utmost extent consistent with
the preservation of the articles; and not only used physically, but to be taken
about and lectured upon. For my own part, I venture to think that unless
museums and galleries are made subservient to purposes of education, they
dwindle into very sleepy and useless institutions."
The extent to which this original intention was fulfilled is made clear
in Moncure Conway's Travels in South Kensington, published in 1882.
Conway came from Virginia. He had been brought up on the banks of
the Rappahannock river, trained as a lawyer, became for a short time
a Methodist minister, abandoned this for Cambridge, Massachusetts,
where he made friends with Emerson, Thoreau and Longfellow, then
came to England where he met Leslie Stephen, Carlyle, Dickens, John
Stuart Mill and Rossetti, before becoming a minister at South Place,
Finsbury, and building a house in Bedford Park. Travels in South Ken-
sington illustrates very clearly the sense of intellectual interest which
surrounded the formation of the South Kensington Museum, because of
the capacity of artefacts systematically organised to demonstrate aspects
 Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings 9

of cultural difference and change. Some of this interest is faintly repellent,

clearly demonstrating a form of intellectual imperialism, annexing colo-
nial territory into a uniform system of laws of social development; but
what is impressive is that, at this stage in the museum's development,
objects were not viewed purely for their own sake as fragments from a
shattered historical universe, but rather as possible indicators, as
metonyms, for comparative study. As Conway wrote, the visitor will
'find at every step that he is really exploring in this gallery of pots and
dishes strata marked all over with the vestiges of human and ethnical
development'i ' He reminded his readers, 'This institution, it is important
to remember, did not grow out of any desire to heap curiosities together
or to make any popular display; it grew out of a desire for industrial
art culture." It had over a million visitors a year.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the high idealism and the
academic intentions which lay behind the foundation of museums are
in danger of being forgotten. One of the most insistent problems that
museums face is precisely the idea that artefacts can be, and should be,
divorced from their original context of ownership and use, and redis-
played in a different context of meaning, which is regarded as having a
superior authority. Central to this belief in the superior authority of
museums is the idea that they will provide a safe and neutral environment
in which artefacts will be removed from the day-to-day transactions
which lead to the transformation and decay of their physical appearance.
Museums are assumed to operate outside the zone in which artefacts
change in ownership and epistemological meaning. Yet anyone who has
attended closely to the movement of artefacts in a museum will know
that the assumption that, in a museum, artefacts are somehow static,
safe, and out of the territory in which their meaning and use can be
transformed, is demonstrably false. The process whereby the meaning
of artefacts can be transformed through their history within a museum
can be illustrated by three case studies of the. ~ay artefacts have been
treated in the Victoria and Albert Museum.
These three case studies are not intended to be representative; rather
the opposite. They concern artefacts which are, in some way, particularly
problematic, which do not fit easily into an otherwise ostensibly neutral
environment, and which hit a boundary of consciousness in our under-
standing of the nature and purpose of museums. By exploring the prob-
lems posed by these case studies, it is possible to throw light on the
broader issues of methods of display and interpretation.
10 CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

The first of the artefacts to be considered is the Saxon god, Thuner,

which recently arrived in the British sculpture gallery. It is worth- prefixing
the discussion by stating unequivocally that this is a good example of
the public benefits of museums. The statue was one of a group of Saxon
deities commissioned by Lord Cobham from the Flemish sculptor J. M.
Rysbrack for the eighteenth century gardens at Stowe. It was sold from
Stowe in 1921 and then lost to scholarly and public view. It turned up
in the gardens of an obscure prep school in Hampshire, where it was
reputedly used as a cricket stump, and was sent to Phillips to be auctioned
in 1985. It was then acquired by the V & A with help from the National
Arts Collections Fund and placed in its present prominent position,
looking angry and uncomfortable amongst the serried ranks of portrait
busts. Had it not been acquired by the museum, there is every likelihood
that it would have been sold to a private collector, probably abroad,
and so, once again, would have disappeared, known only to specialists
and to the circle of friends and acquaintances of whoever was fortunate
enough to acquire it."
There is a question here about how one weighs up the relative merits
of private possession and public ownership, which in this case seems
reasonably straightforward, but would become less so if, as happens,
the work was confined to a store. But a more significant problem is the
way that the sculpture sits so uncomfortably in its surroundings. This
was emphasised when the statue was first displayed by the fact that it
was placed on the makeshift wooden stretcher which had been used to
transport it, thereby signalling its recent arrival, as if it was only making
a temporary public appearance. It has now been given a more permanent
wooden plinth, while a higher one is constructed comparable to the one
on which it was displayed at Stowe; but it still looks out of place.
There are several ways of trying to explain the apparent awkwardness
of the statue in its surroundings. The first is to say that it belongs to a
different genre from the other works nearby: it was made to be seen
from a distance in a garden and so is carved more crudely and vigorously.
The second might be to introduce an argument of quality and suggest
that it is a great work by a sculptor who was attempting to establish a
public reputation in a piece which was bound to be seen by large numbers
of the eighteenth century aristocracy, whereas many of the other works
on display are more private busts by sculptors who did not necessarily
have the same abilities as Rysbrack. Neither of these arguments is satisfac-
tory. Part of the reason why the Rysbrack statue stands out so conspicuously
is that it has not yet been sent to be conserved and still retains the covering
 Mu seum s, Art efacts, and Meanin gs

]. M . Rysbr ack, the Saxon god Thun er (V & A AI O-I 98S), in Ga llery 50
o f the Victo ria and Albert M useum.

of lichen which it acquired durin g its long sojourn in the garden s of

Stowe and the Hampshir e pr ep scho ol. In among st the clean and polished
portr ait busts and the rath er academic display, it still retain s vestiges of
its life in, and passage throu gh, the outside world. It has not yet been
accommodated and absorbed by its mu seum environm ent.
This case study pro vides an indic ation of the chang ing status of the
artefact as it travelled thr ough its histor y from the time when it wa s first
commi ssioned , mo st prob ably as a monument to its owner's ant iquarian
learnin g, with possible politi cal innu end oes, by reference to the freedom
of the Saxon state in contras t to Walpole 's England; th rough the later
eighteenth cent ury, when it was seen and admired by visitors to Stowe
in relati on to its original land scape sett ing; through the ninet eenth and
12 CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

early twentieth century when it was gradually forgotten and lost signifi-
cance; a brief moment of commodity value when it appeared in the
Stowe sale and then a long era of neglect when it served as a prep school
cricket stump; sudden press interest in the statue as a lost work of art,
in danger of being exported; an attempt by the Georgian Group to block
its sale on the grounds that it was a garden fixture; the attention of a
national museum when the prestige of individual curators and the pur-
chasing power of a particular department come into play. At each point
the statue is subjected to multiple readings: as a commodity, as an early
work by Rysbrack, as a representation of an obscure Saxon deity, as
private or as public property, as a fine old bearded man who is growing
lichen.
The literature of the transformation of goods as they travel through
a life-cycle suggests that once artefacts appear in museums they enter a
safe and neutral ground, outside the arena where they are subjected to
multiple pressures of meaning. to This is not true; on the contrary,
museums present all sorts of different territories for display, with the
result that the complexities of epistemological reading continue. Arguments
about artefacts tend to be conducted in strictly binary terms: are they
in public or private possession? are they what they pretend to be? are
they good or bad? In fact, the museum itself frequently changes and
adjusts the status of artefacts in its collections, by the way they are
presented and displayed, and it is important to be aware that museums
are not neutral territory.
The second artefact to be considered as a case study is a doorway.
The problem with" this doorway is, more or less, exactly the opposite
from that of the Rysbrack statue; it is an artefact which, although equally
prominently on display, has essentially been lost to view from both
public and scholarly attention. It is the doorway which has been adopted
as the logo for V & A Enterprises, the company which Sir Roy Strong
has promised will turn the V & A into the Laura Ashley of the 1990S.11
The current label states boldly that it is a

DOORWAY
ENGLISH: About 1680

As is the way with museum labels, this conceals a complex history. As

might be suspected from its size, it was not in fact a doorway, but an
entrance archway into a long forecourt, which led off Mark Lane in the
City of London to No. 33 Mark Lane, a grand, three-storey, brick house
 Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings 13

An archway from 33 Mark Lane (V & A II 22-r884 ), in Gallery 49 of

the Victoria and Albert Museum.

of the late seventeenth century, with good quality wood-carving on the

staircase inside as well as in the archway. In 1884, the house had become
offices for an assortment of shippers, merchants and solicitors and, in
that year, was presented to the museum by a Major Pery Standish.
The art referee who reported on the acquisition of the Mark Lane
archway by what was then known as the South Kensington Museum
was John Hungerford Pollen, a significant figure in the early history of
the museum. 12 He had been educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford,
where, like so many of his generation , he had come under the influence
of the high church Oxford Movement . Following ordination, he con-
verted to Rome and then practised as a decorative artist in a flat, pseudo-
medieval idiom . In 1863 he was appointed an Assistant Keeper of the
South Kensington Museum, for which he wrote several descriptive
catalogues - on enamels, on furniture and woodwork , on architecture
and monumental sculpture - as well as contributing to the art periodicals
of the day, resigning his appointment in 1877 to become private secretary
to the Marquis of Ripon. The fact that he was in favour of the acquisition
of the Mark Lane doorway suggests something of its late nineteenth-
 CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

century appeal. While based in South Kensington, Pollen had been in-
volved with the so-called School of Art Wood-carving in Exhibition
Road; he was interested in the revival of decorative wood-carving and,
like many of his generation, he greatly admired the rich ornament by
anonymous wood-carvers of the generation of Grinling Gibbons. So, the
Mark Lane archway entered the collections alongside many other
exhibits, in order to demonstrate the qualities and characteristics of a
particular school of woodwork, and it seems to have been exhibited,
although there is little evidence of how and where it was displayed, in
the North Court of the museum.':'
The history of woodwork in the V & A is an example of the way a
museum can assemble a collection for good and legitimate reasons and
then forget what those reasons were, or, alternatively, change its ideology
and move in a different direction, leaving a portion of its holdings
stranded and forgotten. An attempt was made some time in the 1970S
to reinject vitality into the woodwork holdings in a display at the far
end of the gallery which is now the V & A shop. This display, the
so-called Furniture and Woodwork Study Collection, was a curiously
miscellaneous, but attractive and fascinating, assembly of bits of
exploded upholstery, different types of wood, and a random group of
doorways. It was swept away by V & A Enterprises and now the door-
ways only survive as bricolage in the shop refurbishment, employed as
suitable architectural backdrops to the current preoccupation of the
museum with commerce and merchandise.
The Mark Lane doorway is a further example of the process whereby
a museum can shift and adjust the meaning of an artefact from being a
surviving fragment of late seventeenth century London, a fine example
of carved woodwork, to becoming a shop fitting and a company logo
- in other words, the exact reverse of the trajectory artefacts are supposed
to follow on entering a museum, where their history is intended to be
conserved, not lost.
The third exhibit to be considered as a case study is not so much an
artefact, except in the loosest sense of the term, as a room. It is the
Clifford's Inn Room, a panelled late seventeenth century interior which
was acquired by the museum at auction in 1903. It is exceptionally well
documented, in that it is known that the first occupant of the room was
a lawyer called John Penh allow, who, in 1674, was admitted to chambers
which were pulled down in 1686 and reconstructed. Two years later, it
was recorded that he had spent a considerable sum of money 'in rebuild-
ing the same chamber'. According to the slim blue guidebook which was
 Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings 15

issued in 1914 on the Clifford's Inn Room:

The panelled room from Clifford's Inn offers an excellent illustration of the
principles of architectural design, which by the rime of Charles II had been
universally adopted. Symmetry and balance were demanded as important factors
in the plan, and comparative proportions were arrived at by a logical sysrem
of calculation, which contrasts with the more haphazard methods of earlier
periods. In this room ornamental details are arranged with due regard to balance,
and the floral carvings on the chimneypieces and doors, although elaborate in
design and execution, avoid the over-realistic treatment which is usually as-
sociated with the school of Grinling Gibbons.!" .

So, like the Mark Lane archway, the Clifford's Inn Room was felt to be
a particularly fine example of late seventeenth century artisan joinery;
it was believed that it would give the museum visitor a sense of the
architectural scale and proportions of the period, in order to set contem-
porary domestic artefacts in an appropriate visual context.
There used to be a great vogue for period rooms, not only in the
V & A but elsewhere, as anyone who has visited the great rnuseurns of
the east coast of America will know: in New York, Boston and Philadel-
phia there are whole sequences of them, torn out of their original set-
tings.!' At the V & A, the period rooms were an essential feature of the
new set of galleries which was set up by Leigh Ashton after the Second
World War to demonstrate in a clear, didactic way the main aspects of
chronological change in the applied arts and how different types of
artefact of a particular period interrelate both visually and stylistically.
More recently, as with the Mark Lane archway, hard times have hit the
period rooms in the V & A and, indeed, the whole sequence of British
galleries. In the rnid-ro ros, plans were drawn up for the redisplay of these
galleries in a way which was deliberately intended to be extremely minimal,
partly because of the lack of availability of funds to attempt anything more
ambitious, partly because of the inability of the government Property Ser-
vices Agency at the time to produce and, more especially, to maintain
anything which was technically sophisticated, and partly because it was
believed that a severely minimal form of architectural display would allow
the artefacts to be seen without extraneous visual interference. After the
first set of galleries was opened it was felt that this form of display was
not just neutral but aggressively bleak, and plans for continuing the sequence
were shelved. The Clifford's Inn Room lies wrapped up in an empty gallery,
posing the problem as to how it should be redisplayed.
There are at least four main arguments against the display of period
roorns.l'' The first is the argument of priority in the allocation of available
16 CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

Th e Clifford 's Inn Room (V & A 10 29- 18 84) , in Galler y 56 ot

the Victori a and Albert Mu seum.

space. It is thought that, when there are so many artefacts which are
not on display, it is not sensible to use up a large amount of space with
a single gigantic artefact, especially if it is judged to be, on its own, of
no particular historical significance (which, so far as the V & A is
concerned , means that it is not associated with a known designer) . The
second argument against the display of period rooms concerns the struc-
ture of the building as an historic artefact in its own right. Now that Sir
Aston Webb is regarded as a great and important Edwardian architect,
it is believed that the architectural interiors of a building by him should
be treated with due respect and that an attempt should be made to allow
the overall proportions of the rooms to be seen independently of the
displays they contain; this means, in effect, that they cannot be made
to contain smaller rooms of a completel y different historical period . The
third argument against the display of period rooms concerns authenticity.
Since the Clifford's Inn Room was acquired by the museum without any
of its original furn ishings, to put in appropriate furniture, even if it were
of the right historical period, is held to be inauthent ic, a form of make-
believe which might be legitimate for a museum of social histor y but not
 Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings 17

for a museum of art and design, which regards the authenticity of artefacts
as paramount. The fourth argument against period rooms is concerned
with audience. It is assumed that, as there are over a million members
of the National Trust and less than a million annual visitors to the
V & A, visitors will have a reasonably good knowledge of the historical
and architectural context for which artefacts on display were originally
made; and that the museum itself owns three houses of different historical
periods which show artefacts in an appropriate setting, so that visual
context should not be a priority of the South Kensington galleries.
None of these questions concerning the use and display of period
rooms are simple and straightforward. In considering them, one gets
close to some of the central theoretical problems and dilemmas which
currently confront not just the V & A, but other museums as well.
The first issue is: how does one establish relative priorities in the
display of artefacts? In the case of the display of period rooms, since a
careful historical reconstruction of the original appearance of the interior
from contemporary inventories would permit the creation of a complete
mise en scene which would enable the visitor to visualise the way artefacts
worked and were used in their original environment, then this is worth
the sacrifice of several display cases. But there is a larger issue at stake,
which is the question of authority and of who makes such decisions and
on what criteria. One of the things that is uncomfortable about the way
a state-run museum operates is that it maintains a belief in anonymous
authority. Instead of viewing the display of a gallery for what it is, a set
of complex decisions about a number of alternative methods of represen-
tation, there is an idea that the procedure must be suppressed: labels,
for example, tend to state straightforward information which pertains
only to the artefact on its own, not to its place in the gallery; visitors
are not encouraged to view the gallery as an arbitrary construction; the
type of design which is currently in favour, at least at the V & A, is of
a highly aestheticised late modernism, the architectural style which is
most inclined to reduce the element of ephemerality and theatricality in
display; and the design of galleries is thought to be a problem independent
of the way that artefacts are viewed and understood by visitors, whereas,
of course, the environment conditions and codifies the visitor's expecta-
tions.
The second issue about period rooms is closely related and concerns
precisely the inter-relationship and relative importance of the environ-
ment and of what is on display. This is not a problem which is in any
sense confined to museums which have inherited buildings that are of
18 CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

independent historical importance. It applies just as much to new

museums, particularly if - as is increasingly the pattern - they are designed
by internationally important architects and, as in the National Gallery
extension, are the result of huge public competitions. Since all the surveys
of the patterns of museum visiting demonstrate that visitors spend ex-
tremely little time inspecting any of the contents, except in the museum
shop, it is arguable that the overall environment is of greater importance
than what is actually displayed. This is not as straightforward an issue
as museum curators are likely to think. I certainly do not visit botanical
gardens, which I like and enjoy, for the plants which are on display, in
which I have very little interest. Where the Aston Webb interiors are
concerned, it is a question of design; but there is and ought to be a
symbiotic relationship between a building and its contents, which needs
to be recognised and articulated.
The third issue concerns authenticity. This whole matter is highly
problematic since the notion of authenticity, the idea of the True Cross,
lies at the heart of all museum activity. Museum visitors are probably
much more sophisticated than is generally recognised in comprehending
the boundary between what is being represented as real and what is
being shown as convenient fiction; but this is a difficult borderline and
the most effectively displayed period rooms are those at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington, where there is no pretence that the display
is anything other than a carefully contrived illusion. It becomes a question
of the demarcation of effective boundaries and of permitting variety in
the nature and style of display.
The fourth issue concerns the question of the audience and what
expectations and knowledge they bring. In the case of period rooms,
this is a relatively straightforward matter. The experiences of visiting
historic houses and visiting museums are, and should be, completely
different. It is never possible, in visiting historic houses, to see and
compare the features of rooms of different historical periods in strict
sequence. Period rooms in museums can be laboratories for experimental
display in a way that historic houses cannot. But the larger question of
who the audience is, and what their expectations are, is not easy to
answer. The traditional perception of the audience in rnuseurns was, on
the one hand, of a small elite of people who were considered to have a
supposedly 'real' interest in what was on display - that is, in the V & A,
a band of scholars, connoisseurs and collectors - and, on the other hand,
everyone else - an undifferentiated, so-called general public. This is
clearly a difficult and sensitive area which needs much deeper analysis
 Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings

in terms of post-war class formation; but it is evident in other media,

especially television, that there is a mass audience for what used to be
regarded as minority interests, which might possibly adjust museums'
perception of their role. The implications of this are that a populist
display need not be, in fact, should not be, patronising in its conception
of audience response.
These three case studies of the way artefacts have travelled through
their life in the Victoria and Albert Museum pose a series of problems
as to the way in which artefacts should be treated in museums generally.
Wherever one turns in discussing the display of artefacts in a museum
there is a problem of epistemology, of how artefacts are perceived and
represented by the museum curator, and of how they are perceived and
understood by the museum visitor. It becomes clear that this is a highly
fluid and complex activity, which is not susceptible to straightforward
definition: that visitors bring a multiplicity of different attitudes and
expectations and experiences to the reading of an artefact, so that their
comprehension of it is individualised; that curators equally have a par-
ticular and personal representation of historical and aesthetic signifi-
cance; that artefacts do not exist in a space of their own, transmitting
meaning to the spectator, but, on the contrary, are susceptible to a
multiform construction of meaning which is dependent on the design,
the context of other objects, the visual and historical representation, the
whole environment; that artefacts can change their meaning not just
over the years as different historiographical and institutional currents
pick them out and transform their significance, but from day to day as
different people view them and subject them to their own interpretation.

The idea that artefacts have a complex presence which is subject to

multiple interpretation has important implications for the way museums
think about and present themselves. Most museums are still structured
according to late nineteenth century ideals of rigid taxonomies and clas-
sification, whereby it was believed that artefacts could be laid out in a
consistent, unitary and linear way. Meanwhile, intellectual ideas have
moved away from a belief in a single overriding theoretical system to-
wards a much more conscious sense of the role of the reader or the
spectator in interpretation. How, it should be asked, should museums
restructure their activities to relate more closely to a changed epis-
temological environment? The idea that objects are not neutral, but
complex and subject to changing meaning, should compel museums to
adjust their activities in three important areas.
20 CHARLES SAUMAREZ SMITH

The first area in which museums should reconsider their position is

conservation. Much conservation, although certainly not all, is based
upon the premise that the artist's original vision of an artefact represents
the most true and authentic appearance of that artefact, as if artists and
makers were not themselves aware that they were launching an object
into a long and complex journey in which it might be changed in both
physical appearance and in meaning. The life-cycle of an artefact is its
most important property. It is a species of contemporary arrogance which
regards it as possible to reverse the process of history and return the
artefact's appearance to exactly how it was when it popped out of its
maker's hands.
The second area in which museums need to consider more carefully
the epistemological status of artefacts is that of display. What is required
is a greater reflexive consciousness about the variety of methods of
display which are available and of the fact that each of these display
methods has a degree, but only a limited degree, of legitimacy. There is
a spectrum of strategies for the presentation of artefacts ranging from
the most abstract, whereby the artefact is displayed without any reference
to its original context in time and space, to the most supposedly realistic,
whereby there is an attempt to reconstruct a semblance of its original
setting. It is important that museums acknowledge that all these strategies
of display are necessarily artificial and that the museum visitor be made
to realise that display is only a trick which can itself be independently
enjoyed as a system of theatrical artifice. The best museum displays are
often those which are most evidently self-conscious, heightening the
spectator's awareness of the means of representation, involving the spec-
tator in the process of display. 17 These ideas can be formulated into a
set of requirements: that there should be a mixed style of presentation;
that there should be a degree of audience involvement in the methods
of display; that there should be an awareness of the amount of artificiality
in methods of display; and that there should be an awareness of different,
but equally legitimate, methods of interpretation.
The third area in which museums need to reconsider their position is
in the nature and purpose of museum scholarship. Museum scholarship
has traditionally been reticent in its methods of interpretation. It has
been assumed to be adequate to assemble as much information as possible
which appears to pertain directly to the original circumstances of an
object's production without much investigation of the nature of the
relationship between the artefact and its life-cycle. As a result, museum
scholarship has steadily drifted out of the mainstream of research in the
 Museums, Artefacts, and Meanings 21

humanities into a methodological backwater governed by empiricism.

Yet there is a current tendency within the social sciences to look anew
at the type of evidence which artefacts might provide about social rela-
tions.l" It is important that museums acknowledge and embrace these
developments and permit themselves to be active centres of investigation
into the nature of the relationship between the individual and the physical
environment. As Levi-Strauss has written:
The museographer enters into close contact with the objects: a spirit of humility
is inculcated in him by all the small tasks (unpacking, cleaning, maintenance,
etc.) he has to perform. He develops a keen sense of the concrete through the
classification, identification, and analysis of the objects in the various collections.
He establishes indirect contact with the native environment by means of tools
and comes to know this environment and the ways in which to handle it correctly:
Texture, form, and, in many cases, smell, repeatedly experienced, make him
instinctively familiar with distant forms of life and activities. Finally, he acquires
for the various externalizations of human genius that respect which cannot fail
to be inspired in him by the constant appeals to his taste, intellect, and knowledge
made by apparently insignificant objects;"

If this text were retranslated so as to avoid the implication that all

museum workers are male, then it provides an adequate agenda for the
establishment of a new museology, one which is always conscious of,
and always exploring, the nature of the relationship between social sys-
tems and the physical, three-dimensional environment, and always aware
of the ethnography of representation.
1
Museums and community

Museums, in the broadest sense, are institutions which

hold their possessions in trust for humankind and for the
future welfare of the [human] race. Their value is in direct
proportion to the service they render the emotional
and intellectual life of the people. The life of a museum
worker . . . is essentially one of service.1

The word "museum" has had a variety of meanings through the centuries.
In classical times it signified a temple dedicated to the Muses; nine young
goddesses who watched over the welfare of the epic, music, love poetry,
oratory, history, tragedy, comedy, the dance, and astronomy. History notes that
the first organized museum was founded at Alexandria, Egypt in about the third
century BC by Ptolemy Soter. It was destroyed during civil disturbances
600 years later. The museum had some objects, but it was primarily a
university or philosophical community and philosophy in those days referred to
all knowledge. 2 It was an institute of advanced study, supported by the state,
with many prominent scholars in residence. Euclid headed the mathematics
departments and Archimedes was on the faculty.
Following this early museum (mouseion) that focused on education, there was
a long period of museological dormancy. Although objects of various kinds
were gathered in many parts of the known world, most were either hoard
collections accumulated for the monetary value of the objects or collections of
curiosities gathered for their uniqueness. 3 In neither case was the primary
motive human enlightenment.
The next period of museum development is associated with the Renaissance.
The changes in collecting at that time, beginning in the fourteenth century and
continuing through the sixteenth century, paralleled the advancements in the
fine arts and science. It was a time of great change that sawT a revision of world
thinking to stress the importance of the role of intuitive knowledge and
individual experience in the process of knowing. The focus shifted from a
societal-centric to a human-centered universe. In many ways the circumstances

3
Museum role and responsibility

were similar to that of today. The change today is from human-centered to

global. In any case, the possibilities are so great and the directions so diverse,
that although meaningful conclusions may be anticipated, the way of achieving
them is confusing.
In the fifteenth century, Florence was the center of intellectual growth that
supported the best of the arts and sciences. It was in this city that the word
"museum" was first used to describe the collection of the Medici at the time of
Lorenzo the Magnificent. 4 The systematic and scientific methodology to the
understanding of humankind and nature had evolved by the sixteenth century,
and museums as institutions of enlightenment had re-emerged.
In the 200 years between the Medici Gallery and the "public" museum of today
there were a number of intermediate steps. The Ashmolean at Oxford in
England is considered one of the first public museums of note. It opened in
1683. The British Museum, founded in 1753, admitted only a few selected
individuals daily.5 The Louvre was open to the public on a limited basis, but it
was the French Revolution, in 1789, that made it a truly public facility.
The development of public museums was a gradual process. The concept of
private collections being made available to the public is generally considered to
be a European concept of museum evolution. In the United States, collection
growth and public availability tended to go hand-in-hand. This process is
exemplified by the museum established by the Charleston Library Society
of South Carolina beginning in 1773. This museum promoted the concept of
public service and education from the beginning, an attribute generally assigned
to the museums of the US.

"The people's museum should be much more than a house

full of specimens in glass cases. It should be a house full of
ideas, arranged with the strictest attention to system."
(Attributed to George Brown Goode) 6

Probably the first museum art exhibit in the United States was held in the
Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1807. The Institute established two years
earlier, was organized to serve as both an art school and exhibition gallery. The
featured paintings, at that first exhibit, were Shakespearean scenes by Benjamin
West, and other exhibit pieces including a group of plaster casts made from
statues in the Louvre. As many of the casts were of nude figures, one day
each week was reserved for viewing by ladies, in order to spare them the
embarrassment of having to look at the revealing statuary in the company of men.
From Charles Willson Peak's museological and entrepreneurial activities in
Philadelphia beginning in 1785 to the establishing of the national museum
in 1846, by an act of the US Senate, museum development in the US was a
public affair. In the instructions left by James Smithson, the English donor who
funded the museum that became the Smithsonian Institution, he described his
intention to fund "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men."

4
 Museums and community

Joseph Henry, first Secretary of the Smithsonian, took the statement as written
and began an effort toward research long before the United States had a
graduate school in its professional institutions. 7 His plan came into operation
eighteen years before a Ph.D. was awarded in the United States. Joseph Henry
created a place that fostered research and publication with scholars either
in residence or scattered about in a loose working relationship. In the museum,
scholars could conduct research and exchange ideas with reference to tangible
objects.
In the middle years of the twentieth century there were a number of external
factors affecting the museum community. Funding was one factor. The cost of
maintaining the collections, hiring qualified staff, and providing for the public
began to increase beyond the assistance provided by affluent families or special
interest groups. Another factor was television. Rare objects and distant lands
were projected into individual homes. The need to visit the museum diminished.
To these primary agents of change were added improved printing techniques
that produced books with quality reproductions, and a more mobile society.
All these conditions were addressed by a single response - broaden the visitor
base. The plan was to attract people to the museums that had not previously
been museum-goers. By involving the public in the general well-being of
the museum, visitorship and local support increased. There was a discernible
movement among museums to address the perceived needs of the communities
in which museums were located. For the most part, this effort was, and
continues to be, in the form of audience confirmation and reassurance. The
museum role is to interpret the familiar, or at least, the already known though
not totally understood cultural, historical, and scientific ideas about the
constituency. In this way the museum adds to and clarifies the cultural and
intellectual prowess of the audience.
Using visitor evaluation as a base, some changes were carefully planned, others
were formulated to address assumed needs or opportunities. Exhibitions, for
the most part, became more gender, racial, ethnic, and idea inclusive. Museums
reacted to their constituency and at the same time came to realize that they
(museums) had a viable product to share with their audience - education. This
level of museum activities currently exists, to a greater or lesser degree, in most
parts of the world.
To prosper, museums must be clear about what they propose to do. Things must
be understood before they can be interpreted. The recognition of cultural
pluralism has served as the basis for collections, exhibitions, and new museums.
The museum community has reacted to the constituency need by providing a
forum to document and demonstrate diversity. However, globalization, world-
wide economic and cultural interaction requires future thinking rather than
response to existing conditions. The museum community has the means to pro-
vide leadership for tomorrow as well as documentation of today and yesterday.
Many communities have established museums as centers for learning and
information to tell about the past and address current topics. Due, in part,
Museum role and responsibility

to the many changes in the world order - political, social, cultural, and
environmental - museums have an expanded role in human society. This
situation has caused museums to rethink and redefine concepts that were
thought to be permanent. Some have called the current condition a new
paradigm within museology.8 Others describe this situation as a shift
from object-centered to community-centered institutions. 9 In reality,
object/community and use/preservation are not contradictory but
complementary. They are interdependent ideas - two halves of one whole. The
old paradigm viewed from both sides. If there is a new paradigm it is most
likely the one already described, the shift from homocentric to tellurian
thinking,

"Involve representatives of various communities and

diverse cultural groups in the research and documentation
process relative to their cultural experience in order to
broaden the range of perspectives and deepen the under-
standing of museums' holdings."10

The concept of "public service" has changed dramatically for museums and
museum workers. The changing attitudes and practices of museums reflected
the audience being served. In the earliest museums, the collections were private
and the audience carefully screened. As the "cabinet of curiosities" idea grew,
the public was allowed to enter but only under strict supervision. Exhibitions
were prepared for "the good of the visitor," providing information determined
by the museum staff to be important to the visiting public. Eventually museum
workers came to realize the importance of the visitor and developed exhibitions
and programs to address their interests. Many museum activities attempt to
explain and justify extant conditions rather than guiding society to find ways
of addressing the critical needs of the present.
Museums have a basic role as educational institutions. The saga of the earth
through time is told by the objects preserved in the collections of museums. It
is a fascinating story told with authentic specimens and artifacts. At the same
time, it is important to remember that museums are not ends unto themselves.
To accomplish their mission, they must provide pleasure and excitement as well
as information and education.
As part of the attitude of public service, museums have proliferated. Museums
were formed around special collections to reflect the interests and beliefs of the
communities in which they were founded. At the same time the fundamental
role of museums began to change. Collections were, and continue to be
the heart of museums. However, collections and the collecting process have
been reoriented to give substance and purpose to a range of new museums. In
this environment of change, traditional attitudes toward research, service, and
education have found new means of expression.

6
 Museums and community

Public Reactive

Public
Allowed

Figure 1.1 Museum types based on audience served

Objects communicate far beyond the walls of the museum in which they are
housed. They influence the appreciation and appearance of objects of everyday
use, and the level of respect and understanding for the personal and collective
natural and cultural heritage of a people or nation.
Information and materials are being gathered to form new collections and
museums that will give a redefined perspective to historic people, events, and
even the environment. Many of these new museums do not fit the accepted
description as places that collect, preserve, and study objects and specimens.
Eco-museums, site museums, and non-collection galleries fall into this
category. Preservation of historic buildings in the original setting can endow the
structure with greater meaning. This is also true of archaeological excavations.
The excavation becomes a working museum for research, interpretation, and
education.

7
Museum role and responsibility

1 Art
Centers

Decorative Arts
u. Folk Art [

Ethnology
Furniture Art

Anthropology

Heritage
Centers
History
Paleontology

Military
Geology |
i Science
Transportation

-| Industry u, Technology r

Science
Centers

Figure 1.2 Museum proliferation

Of particular importance to the public are museums as community resources.

Eco-museums "were designed to preserve economic viability and included
facilities to document the areas' histories and for community meetings." 11 These
neighborhood museums gained popularity in the 1960s as agents of change that
linked education, culture, and community development. The eco-museum
concept goes beyond the traditional "museum" idea of collecting objects to
establishing conditions for communities to learn about themselves. It builds on
the foundation of the community's collective memory and extends to the
documentation of physical sites, traditional ceremonies, and social relationships.

"an ecomuseum recognizes the importance of culture in

the development of self-identity and its role in helping a
community adjust to rapid change. The ecomuseum thus
becomes a tool for the economic, social, and political
growth and development of the society from which it
springs."12

8
 Museums and community

Museums can only be of service if they are used. They will be used only if
people know about them, and only if attention is given to the interpretation of the
objects in terms that the visitors can understand. Good museums attract, enter-
tain, and arouse curiosity which leads to questioning and thus promotes learning.
The future for museums requires a greater focus on leadership (guidance) and
education rather than management and explanation. To be effective, public
programs will be proactive and provide direction for the future rather than
selective interpretation of past events and activities.
When considering the idea of public service, museums have come to
acknowledge the fact that the visiting audience has a variety of cultural or leisure-
time opportunities. They may choose a concert, theater, and cinemas, or recre-
ational activities, amusement parks, and sporting events, or they may decide to
stay home to read a book, visit with friends, or watch television. While the possi-
bilities seem definable on a local or immediate basis - consider the international
or world constituency. The real challenge to museum workers is to have a broad
view of global issues and to determine what can be done to make a difference.
They must also consider how to make those issues available to the visitor.
As part of the ongoing responsibility of museums, outreach has acquired new
meaning. To develop new audiences and provide greater services information
must be gained on how people learn and the effective means of communication
in a museum setting. "In"-reach is the counterpart of any outreach program.
Museum staff require training, leadership, and planning to develop and
implement a meaningful outreach program.

"Museums have not realized their full potential as

educational institutions. Despite a long-standing and
serious commitment to their function as institutions of
informal learning, there is a troublesome gap between
reality and potential that must be addressed by policy
makers in education and museums."13

Community perception is often a key element in attracting a particular

audience to an exhibition or program. Marketing is the commercial
word associated with the idea of attracting a group of people to a product,
event, or program. Special attention must be given to nurturing both
the impression and reality of public involvement in museum programs,
events, and exhibitions.
The perception of an individual museum is the composite of many ideas.
Visitors, supporters, the community-at-large, and even the staff present and
foster an image of what a museum is and can be. Outreach and perception
are opposite ends of the same action. Positive outreach normally generates a
positive perception of a museum. Staff that are informed, well-trained, and
treated with respect give a positive image of the institution.

9
Museum role and responsibility

Volunteers

Community <<- - > Board

Public Education Collections

General Public

Figure 1.3 Outreach and perception of museums

As part of the outreach process the museum can inform the public of the
activities associated with collection care, research, and exhibition preparation.
For years, museums have perpetuated the concept of reserve and under-
statement when addressing the inner workings of the institution. Few members
of the general public have had the opportunity to view the museum from
the other side of the exhibition - the working side. Museums must take the
initiative in shaping the public perception and perpetuating the image of
institutions essential to social and civilized well-being.

"Museums represent certainty in uncertain times.'

The close ties that exist between the development of a society and the
institutions of culture that represent that society are well documented. That
societies evolve at different rates is a factor that impacts both the number and
quality of the institutions comprising the cultural section. Progress has been

10
 Museums and community

made toward full utilization of museums as institutions of learning and social

developments. However, most museums have a long way to go to meet their
full potential as:

"a non-profitmaking, permanent institution in the service

of society and of its development, and open to the public,
which acquires, conserves, researches, communicates, and
exhibits, for the purposes of study, education and enjoy-
ment, material evidence of man and his environment."15

Notes
1. American Association of Museums (1925) Code of Ethics for Museum Workers,
Washington, DC: American Association of Museums.
2. Burcaw, G. E. (1975) Introduction to Museum Work, 2nd edn 1983, Nashville, Tenn.:
American Association for State and Local History, p. 17.
3. Wittlin, A. S. (1970) Museums: In Search of a Usable Future, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
4. Thompson, J. M. A. (ed.) (1984) Manual of Curat orship, London: Butterworth Ltd.
5. ibid.: p. 13.
6. Alexander, E. (1983) Museum Masters, Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for
State and Local History, p. 289.
7. ibid.
8. Sola, T. (1987) "The Concept and Nature of Museology," Museums, Paris: UNESCO,
Vol. 39, No. 153, pp. 45-59.
9. van Mensch, P. (1988) "Museology and Museums," ICOM News, Paris: UNESCO,
Vol, 4 1 , No. 3, pp. 5-10.
10. Pittman, B., et al. (1991) Excellence and Equity, Washington, DC: American
Association of Museums, p. 19.
11. Fuller, N. (1992) "The Museum as a Vehicle for Community Empowerment: The
Ak-Chin Indian Community Ecomuseum Project," in I. Karp, C. Kreamer and S.
Lavine (eds), Museums and Communities, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution
Press, p. 329.
12. ibid.: p. 328.
13. Bloom, J. and Powell, E. (eds) (1984) Museums for a New Century, Washington, DC:
American Association of Museums, p. 28.
14. Bloom, J. et al. (1984) "The Growing Museum Movement," Museum News, pp.
18-25.
15. International Council of Museums (1989) "Definitions," Code of Professional Ethics,
Paris: ICOM, section 1.2. "Museum," p. 23.

Suggested reading
Adams, G. D. (1983) Museum Public Relations, Vol. 2, AASLH Management Series,
Nashville, Tenn.: American Association for State and Local History.
Burcaw, G. E. (1975) Introduction to Museum Work, 2nd edn 1983, Nashville, Tenn.:
American Association for State and Local History.

11