Curating time

Many of the chapters in this book engage with issues of time and temporality, either explicitly or indirectly. The linear or progressive time implied by the neologism ‘curatopia’ can and should be productively critiqued, not least in terms that recognise the infolded and paradoxical nature of the present—or ‘presence’—in everyday life. What we understand phenomenologically, through immediate perception, may return later to haunt us and the objects around us as a folding-over of time. The curator deciding what to collect for the future, how to interpret it in the present, and what it meant in its originary past, is also curating time—an intractable but dynamic project.

Curating the uncommons: taking care of difference in museums

Current ontological critiques point to how discourses of diversity like multiculturalism help domesticate difference by making it fit into pre-determined categories, such as those we are accustomed to thinking of as cultures. These ways of conceiving relations within and between groups of people—common to anthropology and museums, as well as to liberal democratic regimes of governance—assert that differences between peoples are relatively superficial in that our cultures overlay a fundamental and universal sameness. Museums showcasing cultural artefacts have thus helped domesticate difference by promoting world-making visions of (natural) unity in (cultural) diversity. Yet some artefacts exceed the categories designed to contain them; they oblige thought and handling beyond the usual requirements of curatorial practice. This chapter considers the challenges of ‘curating the uncommons’ in relation to work carried out by and with the Māori tribal arts management group Toi Hauiti and their ancestor figure, Paikea, at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

Joining the club: a Tongan ‘akau in New England

This chapter examines the place of Oceanic clubs in New England collections. During the nineteenth century, they occupied an equivocal position in the New England mental repertory as indices of savage sophistication, and as souvenirs of colonial childhood or travel. Focusing on a Tongan ‘akau tau in the collection of the Chatham Historical Society on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, this chapter traces what can be known of its history as a highly regarded prestige gift item among New Englanders from the middle of the nineteenth century until its entry into the museum. As a thing that an early owner could alienate legitimately, its presence in Chatham is not unethical, yet it nonetheless imposes stewardship responsibilities—consultation with the originating community—that such a small institution is poorly placed to meet. This requires understanding and patience rather than disapprobation.

Thinking and working through difference: remaking the ethnographic museum in the global contemporary

This ambitious chapter draws on a range of voices to examine what the ethnographic museum is and what it can be for the benefit of diverse audiences around the world. Taking their 2013 publication, Museum and Communities: Curators, Collections: Collaborations as a starting point, the authors critically consider their own work internationally, for example with ICOM (The International Council of Museums) and ICOM Namibia, as well as at everyday level with local communities, such as youth groups in Europe. Against increasing fear of difference, and movements to the right in world politics, they foreground the values of human rights, artist collaborations and the development of feminist pedagogy in museum work. Theoretically, the chapter unpacks the notions of the ‘human’, the ‘cosmopolitan’ and the inextricable relation between theory and practice that can underpin collaborative activities in museums of ethnography/world culture today.

Concerning curatorial practice in ethnological museums: an epistemology of postcolonial debates

Based on our experience as editors of a debate on ethnographic museums in a German journal, we analyse the conditions and limits of the current debate on the ‘decolonisation’ of ethnographic museums in the German-speaking context. Strictly speaking, the German debate lags behind a bit in relation to the Anglophone debate, but in the face of the re-organisation of the Berlin ethnographic museum as ‘Humboldt-Forum’ it provides crucial insights into the epistemology of unfolding postcolonial debates. We diagnose certain pitfalls of this discussion, e.g. a tendency towards antagonisms and dichotomisation, an overemphasis on the topic of representation and on deconstructionist approaches, an underestimation of anthropology’s critical and self-reflexive potential and too narrow a focus on ethnographic collections. From our point of view, decolonisation must be a joint effort of all kinds of museum types - ethnographic museums, art museums and (natural) history museums as well as city museums, a museum genre being discussed with increased intensity these days. As a consequence, we suggest a more thorough reflection upon the positionality of speakers, but also upon the format, genre and media that facilitate or impede mutual understanding. Secondly, a multi-disciplinary effort to decolonise museum modes of collecting, ordering, interpreting and displaying is needed, i.e. an effort, which cross-cuts different museum types and genres. Thirdly, curators working towards this direction will inevitably have to deal with the problems of disciplinary boundary work and the underlying institutional and cultural-political logics. They eventually will have to work in cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional ways, in order to reassemble disparate collections and critically interrogate notions of ‘communities’ as entities with clear-cut boundaries. After all, in an environment of debate, an exhibition cannot any longer be understood as a means of conveying and popularising knowledge, but rather as a way of making an argument in 3D.

Baroque modernity, critique and Indigenous epistemologies in museum representations of the Andes and Amazonia

This chapter examines the politics, aspirations and antagonisms that grew out of the curatorial process underlying the exhibition, The Potosi Principle (Madrid 2010, Berlin 2011, La Paz 2011), and compare them to other Andean exhibitions including Bolivian Worlds (London 1987) and Luminescence: The Silver of Peru (Vancouver 2012, Toronto 2013). The chapter questions the category of contemporary art and examines its avowed potential as radical critique and the claims that it and other exhibition strategies have marginalised indigenous epistemologies and obfuscated historical agency. The implications of this conflict between western and indigenous curators and curatorial collectives on the right of self-expression and the freedom of interpretation and critique; associated ethical conundrums and the viability of epistemological pluralism will be clearly articulated as problems requiring serious museological attention.

Walking the fine line: From Samoa with Love? at the Museum Fünf Kontinente, Munich

This chapter explores the conceptual planning, organisation, and reception of the exhibition From Samoa with Love? Samoan Travellers in Germany, 1895-1911 at the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich, 2014. It does so by taking into consideration competing obligations among the Samoan descendants and community, the responses of mainstream museum visitors in Munich with no prior knowledge of fa’a Samoa (the Samoan way), and the expectations of the Bavarian Government, who strictly controlled costs but wanted large audiences. Museums are not as free to create, or as powerful, as is often assumed by outsiders and critics. Being the curator responsible for this exhibition meant juggling positions, demands, and interests in a setting affected by Samoan perspectives and claims, German audiences’ pre-knowledge and viewing habits, structural constraints imposed by the Bavarian museum administration system, and even the Foreign Office and diplomatic agendas. For the curator, trying to meet these contradictory demands and reconciling them with her own academic and ethical ideas of curatorship indeed meant walking a fine line.

What not to collect? Post-connoisseurial dystopia and the profusion of things

A key – some might even say _the _key – curatorial role is to decide what to collect. What, that is, should be preserved for the future? In this essay, we present ethnographic research with curators of contemporary everyday life. As we show, these curators struggle with a profusion of things, stories and information that could potentially be collected. Moreover, they widely report the struggle to be intensifying. Exploring their perceptions and what these mean in practice in their work, we argue that while neo-liberal and especially austerity politics has an important role in intensifying their sense of anxiety, their experience cannot be reduced to this. On the contrary, their intimation of dystopia is as much a function of other – in some ways utopian – aspirations and politics, as well as of a relativisation of value. These all contribute to transforming the nature of curatorship more widely.

Collecting, curating and exhibiting cross-cultural material histories in a post-settler society

This chapter considers social history in a post-colonial contest. It specifically examines how the history of the majority culture in a post-settler society has and might be curated. Using Aotearoa New Zealand as its case study, it considers the figure of the Pakeha (non-indigenous) curator in relation to, and also in contrast with, indigenous collections and displays. What does a history curator look like in a post-settler society? Does the history curator continue the mutual asymmetry that has characterised relations and curatorial endeavours? Or is there a way to recognise cross-cultural material histories? In considering the development of history, and specifically social history, it suggests that a more useful concept is material history, rather than historical material cultures studies. The rest of the chapter ranges across a broad range of material history, including fashion and clothing, and design, to consider how contemporary museums deal with everyday life and its material aspects in museums, which are still to a large extent focussed on discrete objects and forms of material culture, and which carry the burden of the historical development of their collections into a post-settler world.

ćəsnaɁəm, the City before the City: exhibiting pre-Indigenous belonging in Vancouver

ćəsnaɁəm, the city before the city is a boundary-breaking exhibition that has successfully challenged the museum world to revisit who is the curator and who is the audience. This chapter provides an indigenous-framed insight into kin accountability as (re)presented to the museum world from the local tribal/aboriginal community perspective of Musqueam. The exhibition was simultaneously displayed in three venues of the Vancouver city region, each providing multiple perspectives of the original inhabitants of a village named c̓əsnaʔəm more than 5000 years old. While the central city venue at the Museum of Vancouver was high-tech and pitched to an international museum visitor, the Museum of Anthropology exhibit was uniquely ephemeral, transient and aimed at shifting preconceived perceptions of what it means to be a modern aboriginal raised in a city established on thousands of years of unbroken occupation. The most challenging of the three exhibits was to be found in the Musqueam village Culture Centre. In this instance the art and treasures were displayed in a manner that required elders to provide interpretation and the audience is their own. Three exhibits, three boundary breaking contact zones, one people, Musqueam.