Page 137 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

PUBLIC || 121

including Durham, who continue to reject the sovereignty of that nation,
the demand for repatriation continues to serve an important political function:
All this century, American Indians have gone to court for the right to exist
separately from the United States. That litigation is ongoing and the writ-
ten laws are on the Indian side. If the Smithsonian, just as it is making its
final consolidation, must be the first to concede to any sort of American
Indian autonomy, its function as the imperial collection is diminished in a
central area of its project.
(Durham 1993: 204)
The question is whether the NMAI constitutes a ‘return’ of the collections or
an extension of the Smithsonian’s collecting practices. In other words, are the
concessions it makes to American Indian autonomy sufficient to count as
repatriation, or is this another version of the tendency of in situ displays to
expand the boundaries of the object? Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett describes
the art of the ethnographic object as ‘an art of excision’, involving ‘surgical’
questions: ‘Where do we make the cut?’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 18–20). Is
the Smithsonian simply engaged in making the ‘cut’ in a different place by
incorporating present day Native American culture into the museum?

Mirroring the museum

I began this book with a discussion of how the museum turns ‘things’ into
museum objects. In the first chapter, I discussed some of the connections
between that and the wider changes in the relations between people and things
in an era of capitalist commodity production. Here I will argue that there is a
sexual politics at stake in the value attached to certain collecting practices,
tastes, and relationships to objects. In the modern period, homosexuality and
femininity become associated with an over-identification with matter. Gendered
and sexual identities are invested in relationships with certain kinds of material
things, and in relation to the museum.
Hierarchies of taste and value are established along gendered lines. This is
one of the insights of feminist art historians who questioned the absence of art
by women in the canon of art and in art museums. Writing in the 1970s, Linda
Nochlin and Germaine Greer pointed to the enormous obstacles for women
artists including their historical exclusion from formal training and education,
and the lack of information about female role models (Greer 1979; Nochlin
1991). In 1981, Griselda Pollock and Roszika Parker addressed the question of
what might constitute greatness in art, and challenged the aesthetic criteria
against which women’s art was judged and found wanting. They emphasized