Page 135 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Since its founding in 1989, the NMAI has set out to involve Native
American communities. Staff consult tribal elders and religious leaders regard-
ing the return and burial of remains in the collection, the loan of regalia back
to communities for the purposes of dances and celebrations, and the repatri-
ation or display of sacred objects. The museum initiated ‘traditional care
practices’, such as the Crow practice of smudging sacred objects with sage
during a full moon. Staff members themselves initiated the implementation
of these care practices in the museum, and encourage Indian people to share
their knowledge of how to care for the objects. One of the problems with
integrating these practices, however, is that they sometimes conflict with con-
ventional museum practices, such as ‘professional care standards’ (Rosoff
2003: 75–6). Nevertheless the museum tries to accommodate diverse beliefs
and cultural practices, and these include the recognition that ‘objects are alive
and must be handled with respect’ and respect for taboos on displaying or
storing men’s and women’s objects and excluding women from touching certain
objects.
Despite revealing a real concern with repairing the museum’s colonial past,
and making good its relationship with first peoples, such well-meant attempts
are politically problematic. For one thing, Native American cultures are seen
almost wholly in terms of religion and tradition, despite the fact that the
museum holds plenty of everyday and non-ceremonial objects too. This is a
conservative definition of culture, yet it is accompanied by a relativism which
attempts to seamlessly integrate incompatible belief systems and practices (of
Western culture and of different Native American cultures). The assumption of
coherent and unified tribal identities, and the emphasis on religion and cere-
mony, reproduces the social hierarchies within these communities, particularly
those based on gender. The museum risks reproducing old anthropological
notions of ‘traditional’ or ‘primitive’ cultures as unchanging, static and ahistor-
ical – as existing outside modernity. Such an approach could reinforce a view of
indigenous cultures as always purposeful and dominated by rituals of great
significance. In other words, it disallows the possibility that certain practices and
objects can be cultural but not hugely meaningful, that rituals can sometimes be
arbitrary.
Western notions of authenticity pervade some new museum approaches to
their non-Western, and especially their indigenous, collections. While accepting
that ‘objects are alive’, they disallow them a social life, as if the years in the
museum can be wiped out with the introduction of ‘traditional care practices’,
increased respect for objects and their reintroduction into the practices and
ceremonies of their previous owners. This gives the museum more authenticity
too, and increases the aura and ahistoricity of the objects. Since the object
remains a museum object, and as such is recontextualized, the incorporation of