Page 136 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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these practices could even be seen as an extension of in situ display techniques,
which attempt to reconstruct the original context of the object within the
museum’s walls. In the U’mista Cultural Centre, as Clifford (1997) describes it,
the emphasis is rather different: the potlatch objects are displayed to evoke the
1921 potlatch, and the text that accompanies them describes the events and
relationships that surrounded it. The potlatch is not simply represented as the
original, authentic context for the objects, but as an historical turning point in
which the objects were key actors.
By privileging original meanings and acts of attention, the museum can
end up with a renewed authority over its audience, establishing a very
didactic relation to them. It would seem to suggest that only certain acts of
attention are valid, and that these forms of attention are only available to
some people. Jenkins argues that the NMAI promotes the ideas that ‘know-
ledge and truth reside in identity’ and in its policy of having only Native
Americans as the curators ‘advances the idea of impenetrable differences
between fixed identities’ (2005). The combination of fixed notions of identity
and culture defined in terms of tradition and conformity to collective norms
and ideals can actually be quite an oppressive one. Didier Maleuvre (1999)
argues this, and defends an idea of culture as a space for liberation from
oppressive tradition. Instead of turning culture into ‘a static essence or
blood-and-soil substance’, the museum ought to ‘debunk the sacrosanct aura
of culture which it is partly responsible for establishing’ (Maleuvre 1999:
110–2).
The artist and writer Jimmie Durham has interrogated in his work the
ways in which white Americans appropriate Indian culture as cultural heritage,
and the political consequences of the assumption that First Nations are more
‘authentic’. After the Smithsonian took over the Heye’s Foundation collection, he
participated with other American Indians in a panel to discuss the repatriation
of the collection:

A man asked us what we would do, for example, with the thousands
of pairs of beaded moccasins. We had no real answer. What could one
do with thousands of pairs of beaded moccasins? The Smithsonian is,
perversely, a perfect place for them. It is the ultimate official collection.
(Durham 1993: 201)
Durham recognizes that repatriation of the moccasins is not practical, yet he
also sees the role of the ‘official collection’ in the nation state. The Smithsonian
is the United States’ foremost collecting institution, and as such plays a
significant role in the representation of the nation to itself, and specifically
in the United States’ self-definition as a nation which is able to incorporate
and assimilate other cultures. From the perspective of those Native Americans,