74

The Politics of Exhibiting Culture:

Legacies and Possibilities
Shelley Ruth Butler
Decolonizing the Museum?
In her essay "Telling, Showing, Showing OfF
Mieke Bal notes, with regard to the American Mu-
seum of Natural History, that the "museum is a
product of colonialism in a postcolonial era"
(1992:561). She goes on to consider whether it is
possible for the museum to shift from being a nine-
teenth-century colonial project to a late twenti-
eth-century educational one. This question is valid
for mainstream museums generally, and it is one
that this essay explores in relation to two controver-
sial, reflexive exhibitionsInto the Heart of Africa,
which showed at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1989
and 1990, and Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan His-
tory and Material Culture, which showed at the
South African National Gallery in 1996. Curated re-
spectively by anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo and
artist Pippa Skotnes, these exhibits offer insight
into the potential and inherent problems connected
with critical, reflexive museology*s efforts to decolo-
nize museums.
I conducted fieldwork in Cape Town from Sep-
tember 1997 to June 1998, focusing on museums
and their relationship to post-apartheid spatial and
cultural politics. Miscast was still very much in the
air during this time, especially amongst cultural
workers who were one of the main constituencies of
my research. Having done previous research on Into
the Heart of Africa in Toronto (see Butler 1999), Mis-
cast became a segue for me, linking past and present
research sites. In the case of both shows, a white cu-
rator attempted to re-present colonial and modernist
practices of exhibiting culture and objectification in
a critical light; and in both cases, the exhibits gener-
ated multiple and complex responses, while touch-
ing upon sensitive issues concerning the re-telling of
traumatic histories in the settler societies of Canada
and South Africa. As well, the exhibits became occa-
sions for broader discussions about citizenship,
power relations, and identity politics in multicul-
tural and postcolonial cities.
In this paper, I consider these two exhibitions,
and responses that they engendered, in relation to a
problematic dichotomy that exists in museum liter-
ature between critical and optimistic perspectives
on exhibiting culture. Briefly, critical museology as-
sociates museums with a politics of domination, es-
pecially with regard to questions of how the West
exhibits non-western cultures. It focuses on mu-
seum practices of collecting, classifying, and dis-
playing material culture. In contrast, optimistic
accounts of exhibiting culture focus on the role of
museums in public education and in facilitating
conversation between diverse and multi-cultural
citizens. The first section of this paper explores this
dichotomy and suggests that critical museology fo-
cuses on the politics of vision, while optimistic ac-
counts of museums depend upon a rhetoric of voice,
calling for museums to become sites for dialogue
and debate. With reference to Into the Heart of Af-
rica and Miscast, as well as to other related
exhibitionary sites, I then offer examples of
curating, performing, and viewing culture that add
nuance to these ideas regarding the politics of vision
and the possibilities of dialogue. On the one hand, I
explore how the politics of vision in contemporary
museums potentially involve much more than
objectification and distancing. Museum visitors
view culture from many different subject-positions,
opening up the possibility of many ways of looking
at, and engaging with, exhibits. As well, the popu-
larity of cultural performances in museums further
complicates notions of objectification.
In developing these ideas about vision, I am in-
spired by the spirit of critical analysis that informs
Edward Snow's article, "Theorizing the Male Gaze:
Some Problems" (1989). Snow suggests that theo-
ries of masculine vision which focus on such issues
Museum Anthropology 23(3):74-92. Copyright 2000 American Anthropological Association.
75
1. "For Crown and Empire," installation from Into the Heart of Africa. Photo courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.
as voyeurism, objectification, and scopophilia may
be too persuasive for their own good. In stressing
the power of the male gaze, theory risks becoming
an "unwitting agent of the forces of surveillance it
wishes to oppose" (Snow 1989:31). In response to
this dilemma, Snow proposes a strategy of interpre-
tation that focuses on the "fugitive elements" of vi-
sion (1989:31). Without denying the power of
contemporary theory on the male gaze, Snow
changes focus slightly; through a detailed study of
Velaquez's The Rokeby Venus, he shows how this
painting need not be reduced to a story of male
objectification of women. Rather, Snow traces other
possible trajectories of power, pleasure, and self-
hood that are suggested by the Rokeby Venus's am-
biguous gaze. In a similar vein, I think it important
to consider the museum as a postcolonial space with
diverse looking relations.
I also explore how ideals of dialogue interact
with broader institutional and societal contradic-
tions, as when democratizing initiatives co-exist
with processes of exclusion and marginalization
based upon class and race (see Bhabha 1992:208,
Goldberg 1993:4-6). Following this. I suggest that
calls for the inclusion of new voices in museum ex-
hibits may be overly optimistic, simplistic, and too
detached from intricate power relations involved in
institutional projects of decolonization and democ-
ratization. Finally, this essay does not promise an
easy or exact way to trace the politics of transform-
ing establishment museums, but it will, I hope, re-
veal some of the texture and complexities involved.
Silence and Conversation: Museum Theories
In her narrative entitled Looking for Living-
stone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991), African Cana-
dian writer Marlene Nourbese Philipan
important critic ofInto the Heart of Africaimag-
ines a woman travelling alone in Africa, who con-
fronts colonial inscriptions on the landscape and
upon the peoples themselves. The woman enters a
"Museum of Silence," which houses the ''many and
76 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3
2. "Africa Room" installation from Into the Heart of Af-
rica. Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.
varied silences of different peoples" (Philip
1991:57). She recognizes the cultural artifacts on
display, and challenges the curators to return them
to their rightful owners. But the curators dismiss
her claim:
They told me the silences were best kept there
where they could be labeled, annotated, dated,
catalogued"in such and such a year, this piece
of silence was taken from the." You could fill in
any name you wantedwhen and how it was all
the same. It was all there in carefully regulated,
climate-controlled rooms. (1991:57)
To reinforce their point, the curators remind
Nourbese Philip's narrator that this museum is
one of the world's wonders and a site to be proud of
(1991:57). Nourbese Philip's evocation of museums
strongly conveys issues relevant to contemporary
critical museology. Consider, for example, the way
in which Nourbese Philip's themes of alienation and
appropriation are central to Jane Tompkins's analy-
sis of museums. Writing about the Buffalo Bill
Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, Tompkins
notes:
We go and look at the objects in the glass cases
and at the paintings on the wall, as if by stand-
ing there we could absorb into ourselves some of
the energy that flowed through the bodies of the
live things represented...A museum. ..caters to
the urge to absorb the life of another into one's
own life. ..museums are a form of cannibalism
made safe for polite society. (1990:533)
Tompkins's images are echoed by Michael
Ames, who names his collection of reflexive essays
on museums, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes
(1992). Cannibal Tours is also an allusion to Dennis
O'Rourke's (1987) film of the same title, which docu-
ments the seemingly insatiable appetite for "the
primitive" of European and American tourists who
travel by boat to villages in Papua, New Guinea.
1
Remarkable in this film are the images of tourists
aggressively photographing, filming, recording,
and documenting their encounters with "the na-
tives." It is easy to imagine the personal museums
that these tourists will create at home; perhaps
they are the mass market version of the private col-
lections owned by European royalty prior to the
emergence of public museums in the eighteenth and
nineteenth century (see Ames 1992).
None of these representations of museums and
collecting is complimentary to a cultural institution
that, until a decade ago, enjoyed great prestige and
authority. Rather, museums are increasingly de-
picted as sterile, highly controlled spaces. More-
over, the image of the collector as cannibal puts
notions of the refined connoisseur and of the de-
tached scientist in a surreal and ironic light. It is
this spirit of questioning and self-examination that
informs the field of critical reflexive museology, as
well as exhibits such as Into the Heart of Africa and
Miscast.
2
Within these depictions of museums as silent,
and silencing, it is hard to imagine a space for con-
versationpolite or otherwise. Yet, there is another
voice in museum literature that clearly wants to
talk. It is expressed, for instance, in the claim that
the museum can be a "meeting ground of cultures"
(Pierson Jones 1995:262). Similarly, Cannizzo ex-
presses a hope that museums can become a "bridge
for intercultural communication" (1990:97), and
other commentators note that museums have the
77
3. Diorama in the South African Museum, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of the South African Museum.
"raw materials" for addressing contemporary is-
sues related to multiculturalism and transcultural
processes (Apter 1995, Demissie 1995). This opti-
mistic perspective on museums is evident in discus-
sions concerning such issues as community
consultation, sharing curatorial authority, the de-
mocratization of museums, and the promotion of re-
spect for other cultures. In contrast to the
epistemological focus of critical museology, this
work is oriented toward refashioning museums in
order to make them more accessible, relevant, and
accountable to broader constituencies.
3
A premise
of this work is that museums are sites where defini-
tions of culture and identity are articulated and as-
serted (Karp 1992). Moreover, museums are
associated with prestige and statusthey confer
value on particular notions of heritage, history, art,
and taste (Ames 1992, Clifford 1991). Thus, commu-
nities are often deeply concerned with the way in
which they are, or are not, represented by muse-
ums. These issues regarding the politics of repre-
sentation become particularly intense in the
context of contemporary multicultural and
postcolonial societies.
While different in focus, these two perspectives
on museums often overlap in the realm of curatorial
practice. This is clear, for instance, in the curatorial
approaches and goals of both Cannizzo and
Skotnes. While Cannizzo is engaged with critical,
reflexive museology, she also presents herself as a
populist who wants to make elitist museums such
as the Royal Ontario Museum accessible to a broad
78 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3
4. View of the main room ofMiscast, featuring resin body casts as well as text by Greg Dening. South African National
Gallery, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Pippa Skotnes.
audience (see Butler 1999:16-19). Similarly,
Skotnes conceived of Miscast foremost as a critique
of western practices of exhibiting the Khoisan, and
of the complicity of these practices with colonialism
and genocide. But she also used Miscast to attempt
to create interest in the "aesthetic and human
value" of Khoisan material culture (Skotnes
1997:10). The ways in which these various goals in-
teracted with each other, and with broader power
relations and cultural politics, becomes clear below.
Post-Colonial Curatorship: The Development
of Two Exhibitions
In Into the Heart of Africa, curator Jeanne
Cannizzo approached the objects in the ROM's Afri-
can collection as an expression "not only of the world
view of those who chose to make and use them, but
also of those who chose to collect and exhibit them"
(Cannizzo 1991:151). Thus, Into the Heart of Africa
dealt extensively with colonial collecting and vari-
ous ways in which Africa has been represented and
appropriated by others. The exhibit design included
vaguely ironic displays of imperial icons, such as a
Canadian officer's pith helmet and a Union Jack
flag, as well as archival images of European con-
quest (fig. 1). There were also re-creations of a Victo-
rian parlor displaying African artifacts, and of a
"Missionary Room" that included a lantern slide
show entitled "In Livingstone's Footsteps." The ef-
fect of these curatorial strategies was to immerse
visitors in imperial and missionary ideology. These
displays dominated the exhibition, and overshad-
owed a strangely uninhabited diorama of a tradi-
tional-looking Ovimbundu compound, and a final,
stunning "Africa Room," where masks, textiles, an-
cestral figures, and musical instruments were dis-
played in the style of an art gallery (fig. 2). Also less
memorable than the exhibit's colonial images was a
small gallery of contemporary photographs of Af-
rica. This was an attempt by Cannizzo to address
5. Main room of Miscast. South African National Gallery, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Pippa Skotnes.
the fact that museums and galleries rarely ac-
knowledge the contemporary, heterogeneous cul-
tural and political lives of Africans.
Reminiscent of Susan Vogel's ground-breaking
exhibit Art/Artifact, which showed at the Center
for African Art in New York in 1988, Into the Heart of
Africa's emphasis upon the contingency and artifice
of exhibiting culture contrasts with the ideology of
transparent representation that dominates natural
history and anthropological museums. Following a
key insight of reflexive museology, Into the Heart of
Africa demonstrated that exhibits are never neu-
tral, and that they are informed by the cultural, his-
torical, institutional, and political contexts of the
people who make them (Lavine and Karp 1991).
Miscast followed a similar curatorial strategy
by offering a critique ofwestern practices of exhibit-
ing the Khoisan. Specifically, Miscast responded to
the famous "Bushman" diorama located at the
South African Museum in Cape Town (fig. 3).
4
This
natural history museum is located in the old
colonial precinct of the city, near the South African
Cultural History Museum, Parliament, and the
South African National Gallery (where Miscast
showed). The diorama depicts a nineteenth-century
encampment of hunter-gatherers, and is con-
structed by using plaster casts made in the early
1900s in Cape Town. Aesthetically, the display
evokes a sense of both life and death. Its realism
makes the people depicted seem very present; on
the other hand, the display is eerily quiet and still,
just wax after all. Since this is a natural history mu-
seum, the diorama is situated alongside exhibits of
fossils, skeletons of dinosaurs and whales, and ani-
mal and plant specimens. Implicitly, the exhibit re-
inforces popular stereotypes of "the primitive" as
being prehistoric and unchanging, and as being
linked to animality and nature, as opposed to cul-
ture and history. As Skotnes explains, the diorama
represents Bushmen as "cast out of time. out of poli-
80 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3
tics and out of historymiscast" (1996:16). This
museological representation of the Khoisan is
linked to European travel wri ti ng that
"deterritorializes" indigenous peoples, by repre-
senting them as having no significant economic,
historical and cultural relationships with their
landscape (see Pratt 1992:51). In contrast, Euro-
pean and settler history is housed in the Cultural
History Museum, which immediately suggests in-
clusion in the body politic.
5
Skotnes conceptualized Miscast as an exhibit
that would present relational histories. As she
writes, Miscast
is not, strictly speaking, about "Bushmen". The
exhibition is a critical and visual exploration of
the term "Bushman" and the various relation-
ships that gave rise to it. These relationships
were conducted on many levels, between
strangers and indigenes, between colonists and
resistance fighters, between researchers and
their objects, and, more rarely, between individ-
uals whose mutual respect for each other
brought about mutual understanding. (Skotnes
1996:17)
To evoke these relationships, Skotnes created a
provocative installation that included displays of
casts of body parts of Khoisan mounted on pedes-
tals, which suggested a disarticulated, dismem-
bered version of a realist diorama. Surrounding the
installation were fragments of the following text by
Greg Dening, printed in bold letters:
There is no Native past without the Stranger,
no Stranger without the Native ... Nor can any-
one speak just for the one, just for the other.
There is no escape from the politics of our
knowledge, but that politics is not in the past.
That politics is in the present (figs. 4 and 5).
6
As with Into the Heart of Africa, Miscast dis-
played in a prominent fashion artifacts and images
of colonial control and violence. Picture a stack of ri-
fles, photos of colonial brutality, images of naked
native bodies on public display, boxes representing
colonial archives with labels such as "Human Re-
mains. Not Suitable for Display," and displays of
medical and scientific instruments used to measure
and codify racial difference. As counterpoints to
these evocations of forms of colonial violence, there
was a series of cases displaying historical examples
of Khoisan material culture. The cases were named
after individual Khoisan men and women, and after
scholar Lucy Lloyd who, during the mid-nineteenth
century, recorded Khoisan voices in a remarkable
archive. A second resource room included copies of
Khoisan rock paintings, contemporary photo-
graphs of the Khoisan by Paul Weinberg, as well as
a vinyl floor covered in a montage of photographs,
documents, and newspaper clippings related to the
colonization and exhibition of the Khoisan (fig. 6).
Cameras and mirrors were also included, in a fur-
ther effort to make viewers feel self-conscious, and
even complicit, in the histories represented
(Skotnes 1997:15).
A major goal for Skotnes was to bring her con-
cerns about genocide against the Khoisan into the
public consciousness. She is correct, I think, in not-
ing that the aura of innocence that surrounds the
Bushman diorama at the South Africa Museum ef-
fectively erases this history. As Skotnes states, the
diorama offers a "seductive image of primitive inno-
cence [that] has made it possible, even excusable,
for the public and the government to never have to
confront the crueler, harsher realities that exist be-
yond its horizon" (1997:19).
Skotnes also wanted to challenge the tradi-
tional division that exists between museum collec-
tions accessible only to researchers and curators,
and what is presented to the public; her goal was to
place the archive and the storeroom in the public do-
main. This raised sensitive issues since, included in
museum collections in Europe and Africa are hu-
man remains such as heads of Khoisan, and casts
and photographs of male and female genitals. In
fact, Skotnes did not receive permission to display
the heads. And despite concerns about the public
display of representations of nudity raised by peo-
ple interested in her project, Skotnes chose to pro-
ceed with this aspect of Miscast. Finally, Skotnes
notes her interest in attracting diverse viewers to
Miscast, and in generating interest in the "aesthetic
and human value" (1997:10) inherent in Bushmen
artifacts.
While I have called Into the Heart of Africa and
Miscast postcolonial in order to stress the way in
which both exhibitions responded to colonial lega-
cies, it is important to note that each was also influ-
enced by theories of representation associated with
postmodernism. In the case ofInto the Heart of Af-
rica, Cannizzo's use of quotation ntarks to highlight
suspect words such as "dark continent" and "spoils
of war" mirrored postmodernism's culture of reflex-
ivity that can be characterized as a "complicitous
81
6. The second room of Miscast. South African National Gallery, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Pippa Skotnes.
critique" (Hutcheon 1989:2). In re-presenting colo-
nial vocabularies and images, Cannizzo's goal was
to challenge them, but she may also have reinforced
their authority. Visitors read the exhibit in differ-
ent ways, and much depended upon their points of
view and subject-positions. I return to this below. In
a similar vein, Skotnes' re-presentation of images of
Khoisan nudity was contentious, and provoked sup-
portive, oppositional, and ambivalent responses. It
is by paying attention to these kinds of divergent
readings of each exhibition that theories of the poli-
tics of vision can become more nuanced, and enable
an exploration of identity politics that are at once
personal and political.
Exhibiting, Performing, and Viewing
Culture: Other Politics and Poetics
Responses to Into the Heart of Africa and to Mis-
cast cannot be characterized as a debate between
two monolithic sides. Nor did responses follow obvi-
ous racial or political lines. This heterogeneity sug-
gests the complexity involved in producing critical
exhibitions in mainstream establishment muse-
ums and galleries.
Both Into the Heart of Africa and Miscast re-
ceived many positive reviews by visitors and critics
who gained an awareness of forms of colonial domi-
nation. For instance, in Toronto, journalist Christo-
pher Hume wrote: "More than any show I can recall,
82 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3
this one dealt openly and honestly with the 'cultural
arrogance'these are the words used in the dis-
playof our well-intentioned but misguided ances-
tors" (1990). And in Cape Town, archeologist Paul
Lane describes how in viewing Miscast, he experi-
enced the "recontextualization of [his] professional
'culture,' and all the mixed emotions of pain, disbe-
lief and denial that can accompany an encounter
with another's view of one's identity" (1996:5).
These comments suggest that white spectators
need not necessarily reproduce dominant looking
relations. In fact, Lane is probably an "ideal" viewer
of Miscast. As Patricia Davison, Assistant Director
of the South African Museum explains, the goal of
Miscast was to "set up a dialogue, as it were, with
the diorama" (1996:11). In this case, we see how "di-
alogues" in museum spaces may be interior ones,
generated by the "inner speech that accompanies
[gallery] spectatorship" (Burgin in Bhabha and
Burgin 1994:455). This is not surprising when we
consider that museums are generally hushed
spaces, where one is as likely to hear the echo of foot-
steps as the echo of other voices.
However, many viewers of both Into the Heart of
Africa and Miscast, missed the curators' critical in-
tentions. For instance, while visiting Into the Heart
of Africa, I was intrigued by the way in which two el-
derly (white) women responded to the reconstruc-
tion of the Victorian sitting room that featured a
prominent display of African weapons. While
Cannizzo sought to communicate something about
the life histories or trajectories of the weapons,
these women were admiring and identifying with
the Victorian furniture. This is a form of "imperial-
ist nostalgia," in which warm sentiment for an ele-
gant era masks relations of domination (Rosaldo
1989).
Significantly, this problem is also evident at Co-
lonial Williamsburg, a vast living-history museum
that reconstructs the capital of Virginia during the
eighteenth century. Since the late 1970s, Colonial
Williamsburg has engaged in efforts to include pre-
viously excluded histories of women, working
classes, and African-Americans in its narratives
and presentations of the past. However, Eric Gable
and Richard Handler note how one satisfied visitor
reports that what she most enjoys at the site is the
service, such as when a waiter unobtrusively helps
her put sugar in her coffee. In other words, it is a
"black waiter's silent skill"not revisionist public
historythat makes the site special for this visitor
(Gable and Handler 1996:573).
These anecdotes suggest that viewers will be
viewers, interpreting exhibitions as they please. Is
there a point to critical curating and pedagogy if
this is the case? My response is yes, for I think it use-
ful to acknowledge that curating, like teaching,
should never be an authoritative exercise that im-
poses views on others. It is also important to recog-
nize that curating, like teaching, is never
value-free, and some critical approaches (whether
in the classroom or the museum) are more compel-
ling and stronger than others. Stronger exhibits
will have more impact on visitors; but, in any exhibi-
tion, curators cannot expect to receive uniform re-
sponses. Audiences are heterogeneous, and
spectatorship is both individual and highly contex-
tual.
A number of visitors to Miscast also appeared to
miss Skotnes' reflexive agenda. In particular, some
viewers longed for a traditional diorama-style ex-
hibit that would depict the Khoisan as pristine
hunter-gatherers. For example, one woman stated
that she wanted to see "bushmen in their natural
environment" (Robins 1996). She would perhaps
agree with the visitor in Toronto who thanked the
Royal Ontario Museum for a lovely show on "primi-
tive Africa" (Crean 1991:26). Why do so many peo-
ple desire images of an "authentic" Africa, which is
understood as being pristine and "natural"? First,
these expectations reflect, I think, the enduring
presence of colonial stereotypes and primitivist
tropes in public visual culture. Think of films such
as The Gods Must Be Crazy> fashion shows that
bring "the tribal" to Fifth Avenue, and Benetton bill-
boards hovering over cityscapes. It is also not sur-
prising that audiences would expect such images in
exhibitions given that museums are typically
thought of as institutions that represent different
cultural worlds in an authoritative and celebratory
manner. In the case of classic ethnographic dis-
plays, the diorama has a special appeal since it ap-
pears to offer visitors unmediated access to another
"slice of life" i nserted into the museum
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:20). The museum di-
orama constructs static representations of cultural
difference in a very powerful (and even compelling)
way. Consider the "confession" of African art histo-
rian Sidney Kasfir with regard to the diorama at the
South African Museum:
83
Like mannequins from some fashion show of an
ideal South African past, they are both sumptu-
ous in their beads, textiles, baskets, and weap-
ons, and truly timeless. Utterly ahistorical and
fictionalized, yes, but this is the kind of image
everyone (including their present-day descen-
dants, the museum-going public, the govern-
ment, and this author) frankly loves. (1997:8)
I will return to this important point about the
relationship of descendants of the Khoisan to the di-
orama and to Miscast below. First, I want to further
consider the visual and dialogic politics of the di-
orama.
In his paper The World as Exhibition," Timo-
thy Mitchell describes Orientalist Sylvestre de
Sacy*s desire to establish a splendid museum where
"students would be able to feel transported as if by
enchantment into the midst of, say, a Mongolian
tribe or of the Chinese race, whichever he might
have made the object of his studies" (Mitchell
1989:220). De Sacy*s writings reveal an important
paradox in the process of objectification. On the one
hand, the Westerner views the other from close
proximity. But at the same time, a distance is con-
structedthe other is fixed as a silent object of the
scholar's studies. It is this distance that allows mu-
seum visitors to view others from a voyeuristic, au-
thoritative, and privileged position of power. The
viewer sees, but is not seen.
An extreme example of thi s process of
objectification is the practice of exhibiting people,
which was a common spectacle at nineteenth and
early twentieth-century exhibitions. A famous case
is that of Saartje Baartman, a Khoi woman who was
exhibited in England and France during the early
1800s, and who became known as the Hottentot Ve-
nus. Naturalists, pathologists, travellers, and pop-
ular and aristocratic audiences were fascinated by
Baartman's protruding buttocks, which were inter-
preted as empirical proof of the non-unity of man-
kind, as well as an indication of the hypersexuality
of women (Gilman 1985:85-9). When she died in
1815, Baartman became the object of pathologist
Georges Cuvier's anatomical studies and, until re-
cently, was displayed at the Muse*e de l'Homme in
Paris, reduced to a collection of sexual parts.
Baartman's story illustrates Ludmilla Jordanova's
point that wax body molds were often sexualized,
despite claims that the figures offered an unmedi-
ated "scientific" vision of the other (1989:34).
Audience desires to encounter "the primitive*
are most directly exploited by safaris, where visi-
tors pay to view "traditional" cultures in "natural
settings" (Little 1991). At Kagga Kamma Park in
South Africa, a "meeting ground" is created, where
San sit in a semi-circle and "visit" with the tourists.
This encounter is highly mediated by the resident
anthropologist, but tourists leave with the feeling of
having been honored guests of the San (Buntman
1996:277). Similarly, at Mayers Ranch in Kenya, it
is clear that the white owners who curate the site
are strict gatekeepers who, for instance, would not
allow anthropologists to see the Maasi (see Bruner
and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994:462). The lines be-
tween coercion and consent are difficult to untangle
at these exhibitionary sites where indigenous peo-
ples'livelihood is derived from serving the desires of
tourists. Given the broad unequal power relations
of these situations, I am reminded of the refrain
that haunts Suzan Lori-Parks's play about Saartje
Baartman, entitled Venus (1996). As her life as an
exhibit takes form, Saartje continually asks the en-
trepreneurs and doctors who control her destiny the
question: "Do I have a choice?" She never receives
an answer.
In fact, residents from Kagga Kamma came to
the opening of Miscast in traditional dress, creating
the sort of photo-op the media loves. The Johannes-
burg Mail and Guardian showed a photo of a
Khoisan woman from Kagga Kamma standing with
her son on the floor montage, while two other visi-
tors speak in the background; the caption reads,
"Crossing paths: The exhibition provides a meeting
place" (Roussouw 1996). This caption reveals the
Utopian ideals of dialogue discussed above.
The Mail and Guardian photo is reminiscent of
an anecdote offered by Fred Myers in his descrip-
tion of the experience of two Australian Aboriginal
painters, Michael Nelson and Billy Stockman, who
spent two days constructing a sandpainting at the
Asia Society Gallery in New York in 1988. While
Myers's account of the sandpainting performance
stresses the way in which the artists found the expe-
rience empowering, there were moments when the
Aboriginal men were turned into "exotic sign vehi-
cles," such as when the New York Times photogra-
pher "shot" them with their faces painted, standing
outside a zoo and interacting with frightened chil-
dren (1994:688).
Museums, too, are quick to use exotic images for
the sake of advertising. As they compete with other
84 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3
exhibitionary sites for audiences, and with educa-
tion systems for public funding, many museums are
becoming hybrid institutions, and crossing the for-
merly separate domains of public education, shop-
ping, tourism, and entertainment.
7
These tensions
are evident, for instance, in the way in which Into
the Heart of Africa was advertised. The promotional
image was a picture of an unnamed female dancer
from Zaire, photographed by a Canadian mission-
ary sometime before 1930. The woman's face is
painted white on one side, and her expression is poi-
gnant. She looks "traditional," in the sense that she
wears a grass skirt and beads, and her body has
scarification marks. A cropped version of this image
was sent as a postcard to Equinox readers, with the
following "handwritten" invitation, to come to the
ROM:
Have you ever wondered what it must have
been like to explore unknown Africa over 100
years ago? Find outtake a journey INTO THE
HEART OF AFRICA, a special exhibition at the
Royal Ontario Museum from November 16,
1989 to July 29, 1990, highlighting the collec-
tions made by Canadian military men and mis-
sionaries.
As you travel INTO THE HEART OF AFRICA,
you'll visit a village compound, hear traditional
African music and follow "In Livingstone's Foot-
steps" with a narrated lantern-show.
I hope you'll join us for INTO THE HEART OF
AFRICAa celebration of the vitality of Af-
rica's many peoples and cultures!
Sincerely,
Dr. Jeanne Cannizzo
Curator
It goes without saying that the Africa being ad-
vertised here is untouched by colonial and
post-colonial politics. Rather, this invitation mim-
ics the rhetoric of safari brochures that present Af-
rica as a mysterious destination, waiting to be
discovered.
This tendency for museums and the media to
highlight the exotic undermines the idea of muse-
ums as being spaces for critical engagement and di-
alogue. In his article "The Third Space," Homi
Bhabha describes how the "sign of the 'cultured' or
the 'civilized' attitude is the ability to appreciate
cultures as a kind of musde imaginaire; as though
one should be able to collect and appreciate them"
(1992:208). But, as Bhabha shows, this focus on
cultural diversity occurs in lieu of a recognition of
histories of dispossession, difference, and domina-
tion. In a similar vein, Catherine Lutz and Jane Col-
lins (1993:59-61) show how "timeless" values of
universalism and humanism inform the popular
travel magazine National Geographic, which might
be seen as a portable museum.
Ironically, many critics of Into the Heart of Af-
rica appeared to reject Cannizzo's reflexive strategy
and demand a celebratory exhibition about Africa.
This was especially evident in the discourse of the
Coalition for the Truth About Africa (CFTA), a
group of protestors ofInto the Heart of Africa made
up largely of African Canadians. Expressing his dis-
appointment with the exhibit, Ras Rico, a founder of
the CFTA, told me that "Cannizzo did not even get
close to the heart of Africa." The following excerpt
from a pamphlet produced by the CFTA offers in-
sight into the gap between Cannizzo's curatorial in-
tentions and the expectations of a number of
visitors to the ROM:
The ROM is currently presenting an exhibit en-
titled "Into the Heart of Africa." An exhibit,
which according to the ROM, is a portrayal of
African history. Yet the exhibit represents a
clear and concise attempt to mislead the public
and to further tarnish the image of Africa and
African people.
The entire world, museums, curators, et al.
have become aware of the immense contribu-
tions made by Africa, and by people of African
heritage to humanity. These gifts have been
made from the dawn of time in every area of cre-
ativityin the art of action and in the sphere of
thought. These contributions have continued
even under situations of the gravest duress
which Africa, and people of African descent
have experienced in the last five hundred years.
Without any doubt, the ROM must be aware of
these experiences and contributions of Africa,
and Africans. How then, can the ROM carry
such trite and condescending texts as found
within this exhibit?
It is hardly surprising that many members of
the CFTA expected a different kind of exhibition
than Cannizzo offered, for promotion of Into the
Heart of Africa undermined its reflexive approach
to exhibiting culture. The invitation discussed
above, as well as brochures for Into the Heart ofAf-
85
rica, placed as much emphasis on the promise of dis-
covering the vitality of African cultures as on the
exhibit's historical consideration of colonialism and
collecting. Yet, as noted earlier, the exhibition was
largely an exploration of, and immersion in, colonial
culture.
It is not clear exactly how much control
Cannizzo had over aspects of Into the Heart of Africa
related to its promotion. But Cannizzo defended the
promotional image, stating that it was "not the
more predictable *warrior' or 'chief of the popular
mind, nor an image of a starving or destitute refu-
gee most familiar from television news coverage of
recurrent famines in Africa" (1991:152). This state-
ment reveals Cannizzo's intellectual and ethical
concern with stereotypes and the misrepresenta-
tion of Africa. However, her awareness of the sym-
bolic violence of stereotypes of Africans seems
limited, for she does not recognize the gendered po-
litical implications of the exotic photo used to pro-
mote her exhibition. This point is related to a
broader one, which is simply that Cannizzo did not
always appreciate the way in which aspects of her
exhibit reproduced colonial objectification (see But-
ler 1999:39-40).
None of this was helped by the fact that
Cannizzo and the ROM made very little effort to
seek advice, ideas, and feedback from members of
the African Canadian community and other people
who might be considered to be stakeholders in an
exhibit like Into the Heart of Africa. In fact, it was
only after a tense reception for leaders of the black
community that the ROM made any effort to listen
to feedback from community critics. The ROM then
acted in a rather bureaucratic fashion and hired
Woods Gordon Management Consultants to orga-
nize focus groups to discuss the exhibit brochure
and the marketing of the exhibit. In the end, the
ROM succeeded only in creating a consultation pro-
cess that felt like eleventh-hour damage control.
This reaction suggests that a consultation process
can easily be perceived, or used, as a disciplinary
tool. In this sense, strategies of community consul-
tation and sharing curatorial authority can be com-
plicated in practice, and shift easily toward a
politics of containment and paternalism.
Critics of exhibitions may also refuse inclusion,
refusing to be brought into the fold. Consider, for in-
stance, the case of Miscast. While Miscast did not
provoke a sustained controversy in the way that
Into the Heart of Africa did, there was a forum mark-
ing the opening of the exhibition. It generated dis-
cussion between Skotnes and participants and, sig-
nificantly, between different groups of people who,
in the post-apartheid era, identify themselves as de-
scendants of South Africa's indigenous peoples.
Yvette Abrahams, a Ph.D. student in History at the
University of Cape Town and a member of the
IHurikamma Cultural Movement, describes her ex-
perience of the event:
My people had left little for me to say, so all I
wanted to do was to ask Skotnes to remove the
casts. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard
her begin to enumerate reasons why she could
not. Instead she offered to add the recording of our
protests to the exhibition. I could not believe what
Skotnes had just said. Our deepest emotions were
to be turned into instant art. The response to our
attempt at empowerment was to immediately
disempower us by, yet again, making us part of
the objects on exhibit. (Abrahams 1996:15)
Interestingly, Abrahams did, up to a certain
point, sympathize with Skotnes. As Abrahams ex-
plains, "Let me cross the bridge for a moment. As an
academic I strongly resent any attempt to get me to
change my finished work. I could see Skotnes' point
of view" (1996:15). This comment suggests the com-
plexity and contextual nature of individual
spectatorship. This predicament is well described
by Dorinne Kondo who, in her ethnography
Crafting Selves, suggests that "conflicts, ambigu-
ities, and multiplicities in interpretation, are not
simply associated with different positionings in so-
ciety...but exist within a 'single' self (1990:45).
Abrahams's ultimate concern was with her
sense that Miscast victimized the Khoisan. The dis-
play of casts, nudity, and images of colonial humilia-
tion were deeply sensitive issues for descendants of
the Khoisan, reinforcing feelings of shame and dis-
honor. Consider the following statement issued by
the people of Schmidtsdrift, Namibia:
Showing these naked bodies is a very, very bad
thing. You get many women from other tribes
who also look like that. Why should they have
shown our bodies without respect? Do they not
know that it is like insulting us if they do that?
8
Abrahams situated these concerns in the con-
text of broader power relations. Writing about the
process of producing academic work, Abrahams
noted that
86 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3
many people, from examiners to readers to edi-
tors, do in fact intervene to change one's work.
Not coincidentally, those people are almost
overwhelmingly white. Myself, I must allow
such interventions to weigh less with me than
the responses to my work of my research sub-
jects. Not coincidentally those people are all Af-
rican. In short, the finished work of any
academic is all about power. (1996:16)
Indeed, some critics of Miscast viewed it as an
academic exercise, too detached from community
concerns. Rustum Kozain, a student in the Depart-
ment of English at the University of Cape Town
called Miscasfs display of photographs of scholars
involved with the Khoisan a "faddish lip service to
post-modern notions of self-aware representations"
(1996:14). Kozain then wondered whether Skotnes'
"ironisation of representation could have been polit-
ically i nteresti ng and not fashion-driven"
(1996:14). This raises the larger point about
whether Miscast was a strong critical exhibition, a
question to which I will return below.
Protestors' readings of Into the Heart of Africa
were also highly contextual, and more nuanced
than media representations of the exhibit's contro-
versy would have us believe. Many members of the
CFTA did understand and appreciate Cannizzo's
critical intentions. However an intellectual under-
standing ofInto the Heart of Africa did not diminish
the hurt many people experienced in viewing the ex-
hibit. For instance, a local curator who was margin-
ally associated with the CFTA stated that she found
the exhibit to be both successful and "visually horri-
fying." Another woman made a distinction between
academic interests and public responsibilities, not-
ing her concern that a child might not understand
reflexive aspects of Into the Heart of Africa. She de-
scribed to me how a child might experience the ex-
hibit's Military Hall:
People are more influenced by visual images, you
know. So when you enter the museum and you
see Lord Beresford piercing the heart of a Zulu
soldier, and then beside it another picture of
Zulu soldiers and these soldiers are described as
wild savages, or something like thatthat's
what frustrated me. And in the same chamber
you see a map titled "Darkest Africa," in quotes
of course. Well I'd say that when a ten-year-old
child goes into "Darkest Africa"it's supposed to
be ironic, you know because it's in quotesbut it
doesn't work, it has failed. Because what that
does, all those images and pictures and maps, is
just to reinforce in people the old stereotype of
Africa the wild, savage place.
Finally, Into the Heart of Africa and Miscast of-
fended many people whom curators Cannizzo and
Skotnes surely hoped would be receptive to their ex-
hibitions. This can be traced, I think, to the fact that
both Cannizzo and Skotnes seemed to implicitly
conceive of their audience as being white. As has
been discussed, a major goal for both curators was to
offer visitors a critical education about colonialism.
Thus, a brochure for Into the Heart of Africa invited
viewers to explore a "turbulent but little-known pe-
riod in history when Canada participated in Brit-
ain's efforts to colonize and convert African
nations." However, as Marlene Nourbese Philip
points out, many African Canadians experience co-
lonialism and its legacies in a "painfully intimate
way" (1991). It is not a subject distant from every-
day concerns and experiences.
A similar logic can be seen in Skotnes' perspec-
tive on her exhibition. As mentioned earlier, the act
of walking over a floor covered with colonial images
of the Khoisan was intended to create a sense of
complicity amongst museum visitors. But surely a
curator could not expect descendants of the Khoisan
to respond to the installation in this way. As mem-
bers of the IHurikamma Cultural Movement stated:
"the exhibition is obviously aimed at white people.
We do not need to be reminded of the humiliation we
have suffered, nor do we need to travel to the Na-
tional Gallery to discover it." Skotnes was in fact
aware of the sensitivity of displaying nudity, but she
states that she never heard any "unequivocal argu-
ments as to why some things were acceptable for
display and others not" (1997:10). In this sense
Skotnes defended her curatorial authority and ar-
tistic freedom.
One potentially problematic aspect of Miscast
was Skotnes' strong identification with Lucy
Lloyd's humanist project. This was evident in the
design of the exhibition, especially in terms of its
points of emphasis. For example, the case dedicated
to Lucy Lloyd was larger than the twelve others
dedicated to individual Khoisan. In this way,
Skotnes presented Lloyd as a heroic figure, leaving
unexamined other questions relating to the politics
of white scholars who work within contexts of un-
equal power relations. Moreover, in a subtle and
87
personal fashion, Skotnes used Christian iconogra-
phy to evoke a sense of the Khoisan and Lloyd as
partaking in a last supper. As she explains, the col-
lection of thirteen cases was intended to evoke a
"symbolic last supper in which individuals have
been sacrificed in the interests of pervasive displays
of a collective racial type" (Skotnes 1997:12).
Skotnes did include more critical interpreta-
tions of Christianity's role in Africa; for instance, a
grey brick structure at the centre of the main room
was meant to evoke "fort, jail and tomb as well as a
church" (Skotnes 1997: 12). However, I agree with
Shannon Jackson and Steven Robins (forthcoming),
who suggest that Skotnes' identification with
Lloyd's humanitarianism undermines an exhibit
whose intent is to critique colonialism and related
cultural institutions such as the Church. In any
case, this Christian subtext to Miscast was largely
unnoticed by visitors, or, if it was remarked upon, it
was not seen as problematic. This may be related to
the fact that many people who were previously clas-
sified "coloured" by the apartheid government, and
who identified with Miscast's story, are deeply
Christian. In any case, and to Skotnes' credit, her
response to criticism was not nearly as defensive as
that of Cannizzo and the ROM (see Butler 1999).
It is also important to note that responses from
communities that have a stake in particular exhib-
its are often as diverse as the communities them-
selves. Responses to Miscast were also often
ambivalent and contradictory. Consider the follow-
ing statement presented by the people of
Schmidtsdrift, Namibia:
To show these things here is just as bad as the
people who did those things long ago. It is con-
tinuing the bad thing...We are not angry with
the people who are showing us these things, but
with the people who have done it to us.
Perhaps the most important aspect of this
statement followed: "The bad thing is, this is still
happening to some of our people, even today."
This comment draws attention to the way in
which the l egacy of col oni al i sm informs
post-apartheid South Africa in profound ways. De-
scendants of the Khoisan are severely impoverished
and marginalized, and cultural claims to land are
just beginning to emerge as these people organize to
reclaim their indigenous roots. (Their predicament
is further complicated by their role in the South Af-
rican Defense Forces during the apartheid era.) In
fact many descendants of the Khoisan appreciated
the visibility that Miscast gave to their struggle. As
Hunter Sixpence of the Kuru Development Fund in
Botswana said with regard to the exhibition,
Although we are shocked and it is painful, we
think it is good that people should see it. It
strengthens our young people to stand up. This
should never happen again.
For some groups from the Southern African re-
gion, the opening of Miscast provided an opportu-
nity to create new political networks and to make
public statements about their concerns. For in-
stance, a representative of the group from Kagga
Kamma stated:
We are very grateful to those who provided this
opportunity for the Bushmen from different
places to meet each other. We appreciate it. We
wish to preserve our language and would like to
meet these people again.
We would greatly appreciate a piece of land
where we can bring up our children in their tra-
dition. Kagga Kamma is the place where we
earn a living, and it is not our home.
This statement is interesting for the way in
which it reveals something of the parameters of
these peoples' relationship with Kagga Kamma,
where they live and perform for tourists, doing what
they call "Bushmen work" (Whyte 1985:34). Signifi-
cantly, people from Kagga Kamma also express a
desire to establish an independent tourist venture
which likely will still present images of the
Bushmen as traditional and close to nature (Whyte
1985:52). The point is to gain control over such cul-
tural productions and performances, and over the
money that flows from them.
The Kagga Kamma example raises a broader
point, which is that independent projects of
self-exhibition can present opportunities to critique
and shift dominant looking relations in powerful
ways. Consider, for example, Ojibwe artist Rebecca
Belmore's protest against The Spirit Sings: Artistic
Traditions of Canada's First Peoples, a major ex-
hibit that showed at the Glenbow Museum in Cal-
gary during the 1988 Winter Olympic Games.
Boycotts of this exhibit focused on the fact that it
was sponsored by Shell Canada, a major drilling
presence in an area where the Lubicon Lake Cree
continue to negotiate land rights.
88 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3
As the Olympic torch was carried through
Thunder Bay, Ontario, Belmore sat silently inside a
large frame, which was labelled "Artifact #67 IB
1988" (#67 IB is the Ontario Liquor Control Board's
product number for a brand of inexpensive wine)
(Fisher 1993/94:31). In this way, Belmore used ex-
hibiting conventions to point to the irony of cele-
brating native heritage while ignoring the
contemporary dispossession of native peoples. Her
strategy is relevant to Johannes Fabian's idea that
the "refusal of coevalness" can be an "act of libera-
tion" (1983:154). By framing herself as an artifact,
Belmore creates a position of autonomy which is
premised not on dialogue, but rather upon a "refusal
of coevalness." Silence and separation become
strategies for condemning mainstream society's ig-
norance of the social and economic conditions of con-
temporary native peoples.
A particularly strong appropriation of western
traditions of colonial collecting is offered by perfor-
mance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-
Pena in their piece entitled Two Undiscovered
Amerindians, which travelled to museums in Chi-
cago, New York, London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and
Sydney in 1992. The performance was staged as a
counter-commemoration to Columbus Quincente-
nary Celebrations, and was a part of a broad coun-
ter-cultural event called The Year of the White Bear. A
video, The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey,
by Coco Fusco and Paul Heredia, documents Two Un-
discovered Amerindians. In the performance, Fusco
and Gomez-Pena are displayed in a cage as a special
exhibit of natives who have just been discovered and
captured by Westerners. They speak an unknown
language and the style of their clothing and accesso-
ries might be described as postmodern native (pic-
ture "tribal" motifs jumbled with TV, sunglasses, and
a laptop computer). The parody of western practices
of collecting and classifying others proved to be both
a success and a failure. A surprising number of visi-
tors took the exhibit seriously and reacted in a vari-
ety of ways, ranging from condescension and
amusement to outrage, hurt, and shame. Thus, the
performance may have pushed some visitors to think
critically about the cruelty of objectifying others. But
for some, the parody was missed, and dominant look-
ing relations were reproduced (Mannheim in Behar
and Mannheim 1995:126). This mixed outcome is
suggestive of both the enduring force of colonial look-
ing relations, and the small cracks that can be
opened to destabilize them.
Even conventional exhibitions of cultural dif-
ference may have more diverse effects than theories
of objectification, exploitation, and commodifica-
tion recognize. Consider, for instance, Fred Myers's
description of the experiences of Aboriginal paint-
ers Michael Nelson and Billy Stockman, mentioned
earlier, during their painting demonstration at Asia
Society Gallery. Their performance was linked to an
exhibition entitled Dreamings: The Art of Aborigi-
nal Australia. The painters sat on a raised stage
where, after brief introductions by anthropologist
Chris Anderson and the director of performances at
the gallery, they spent the afternoon painting.
Some 700 visitors watched the artists during
the two-day period. The sandpainting ritual was
adapted for the gallery in various ways; for exam-
ple, the artists worked in silence, even though in
their home community the event is social and in-
volves plenty of casual talking. Myers notes that
one visitor complained that the performers were
spatially separated from the audience, and that
questions were answered by anthropologists rather
than by the artists, who did not speak. The visitor
felt that the event was "like a diorama" (Myers
1994:687). Clearly, the visitor feared that the Ab-
original artists were being rendered passive, like so
many artifacts behind glass.
9
But this was not the
case. In fact, Nelson and Stockman asked the an-
thropologists to answer the audience's questions.
Moreover, Myers shows that the artists viewed the
cultural event as personally empowering, as well as
an opportunity to communicate aspects of their cul-
tural identity to a broad audience.
In this situation, the audience's gaze was expe-
rienced not as subjection, but as "authentication"
(Myers 1994:694). Thus, performance can offer the
opportunity to gain cultural recognition by becom-
ing visible on a prestigious stage. Protests outside
museums have the similar effect of making visible
(and audible) concerns of minority and
marginalized communities. Here, vision becomes a
medium of engagement, rather than one of
objectification. We begin, too, to recognize agency in
the context of inequality. Protests outside of muse-
ums can also be thought of in this light; weekly dem-
onstrations against Into the Heart of Africa and the
ROM certainly brought issues such as police brutal-
ity and marginalization of blacks in Canadian cul-
tural institutions into the public domain.
Even in sites that cater to nostalgia for em-
piresuch as Mayers Ranch in Kenyavisitors
89
may experience unexpected ideological and emo-
tional tensions. At Mayers Ranch, visitors describe
watching Maassai dance performances which they
find "provocative and erotic" (Bruner and
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994:452). Particularly in
the case of cultural performances, the "dialectic of
the mutual gaze" (Jay 1994:11) cannot be ignored.
There are subtle forms of engagement between cul-
tural producers and consumers that outwit a poli-
tics of objectification, as well as simple notions of
dialogue. But these forms of engagement are often
domesticated. In nineteenth- century England, for
example, the fascination shown by the bourgeois for
slums and sanitation was seen to be "unsafe." As a
remedy for the "ambivalence of the gaze," physical
contact with the poor was increasingly regulated
(Stallybrass and White 1986:135). Traditional mu-
seums also regulate touch, but this does not mean
that visitors are untouched by their experiences.
The experience of viewing other worlds risks voy-
eurism, but other responses such as a deep regard
for other aesthetic forms and life ways, and pure
wonder, may also be experienced (Greenblatt
1991:53, Jay 1994:140, Lutz and Collins 1993:260).
Perhaps this is one reason why so many of us con-
tinue to enjoy museums.
Yet there is always room for improvement.
Based on Into the Heart of Africa and Miscast, I
would argue that there is a role for reflexive, critical
exhibits in transforming mainstream museums.
But I wonder how each exhibit discussed here may
have been different had the curators worked with a
sense of a broader constituency. For audiences are
diverse, and once this becomes a deeper part of cura-
tors' and academics' conscience, exhibitions that
provide a wider range of reflexive, critical, and
ironic moments can be developed. Perhaps there are
very different waysincluding new aesthetics and
exhibition strategiesto go about deconstructing
dominant museums. Surely, the experience of view-
ing critical, reflexive exhibitions should not be
alienating for people who have personal and politi-
cal ties with the histories of objectification and ex-
clusion carried out by the very institutions we seek
to transform.
Acknowledgments
My research in South Africa in 1997-98 was
funded by the Social Science and Humanities Re-
search Council of Canada (SSHRCC), the Royal In-
stitute of Anthropology in Great Britain and Ire-
land, and York University. Research in Toronto in
1992 was funded by an Ontario Graduate Scholar-
ship and by York University. I am grateful to Ken-
neth Little, Margaret Rodman, Daniel Yon, and
Norman Rawin for their involvement in discus-
sions as I developed this paper. I also thank the re-
viewers of this paper for their advice and thorough
engagement with my work.
Notes
1. My use of quotation marks around words like "the
primitive'' is intended to signal that these terms are
problematic or highly charged, and cannot be taken for
granted.
2. It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss in de-
tail the development of critical reflexive museology.
The field is growing rapidly and key contributors in-
clude: Michael Ames (1992), Tony Bennett (1995),
James Clifford (1988), Richard Handler and Eric Ga-
ble (1997), Ludmilla Jordonova (1989), Ivan Karp and
Steven Lavine (1992), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
(1998), Timothy Mitchell (1989), George Stocking
(1985), and Susan Vogel (1989). Among this group are
curators, anthropologists, and culture critics whose
work addresses issues such as the links between col-
lecting and imperialism, political implications of dif-
ferent exhibition styles, intersections of the logic of
visualism and positivism, and the role of museums as
disciplinary spaces.
3. Significant contributors to this body of literature in-
clude: Michael Ames (1992), Duncan Cameron (1971),
Stephen Greenblatt (1991), Jane Pierson Jones
(1995), Ivan Karp, Steven Lavine and Christine
Mullen Kreamer (1992), and Stephen Weil (1990). It is
not unusual for authors who offer strong critiques of
the politics of exhibiting culture to also call for muse-
ums to become sites for public dialogue and debate.
For example, following his critique of the political ra-
tionality of museums, Tony Bennett calls for them to
become sites for the "enunciation of plural and differ-
entiated statements" (1995:104). It is also increas-
ingly common for exhibition proposals and museum
policy statements to address concerns related to de-
mocratization and multiculturalism.
4. There is a tricky language problem here. Originally
Pippa Skotnes wanted to name her exhibition "Mis-
cast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen"
(which is the title of the exhibit's catalogue). The
South African National Gallery was unwilling to use
the term Bushmen in the exhibition title since it has
historically carried pejorative connotations for many
people in the Western Cape who were classified as "col-
oured" during the apartheid era. Some activists and
academics have revived the term Bushmen, linking it
positively to the quest for land and cultural rights, and
to post-colonial scholarship that critiques past anthro-
pological representations. I use the term Khoisan, but
also refer to "the Bushman diorama" at the South Afri-
can Museum, since this is how it is popularly known.
90 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 23 NUMBER 3
5. David Theo Goldberg also mentions this South African
example of "racial knowledge" in his book, Racist Cul-
ture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning
(1993:160). For a discussion of similar issues in rela-
tion to the National Museum of American History and
the National Museum of Natural History in Washing-
ton, see Michael Blakey (1990).
6. This text is quoted from Mr. Bligh's Bad Language:
Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, by Greg
Dening(1992).
7. For a discussion of these tensions within museums see
Richard Handler and Eric Gable (1997).
8. I would like to thank the South African National Gal-
lery for providing me with copies of public statements
made by various groups in response to Miscast.
9. This occurred at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto
in 1995, when a curator who was introducing a concert
of Indian music referred to the musicians on stage as
"artifacts" (Sun 1995).
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