Page 38 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

22 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

should not be questioned. Curiosity collecting was associated with superficiality,
effeminacy and deviant sexual practices (King 1994; see Chapter 4, section 4 for
more on this). In Britain, curiosities were trivialized as ‘knick-knacks’, a term
which linked them also with castration through the word ‘knackered’. The fact
that curiosity collections included the grotesque and the monstrous was used to
justify the representation of their owners as equally grotesque and monstrous
(King 1994; Daston and Park 1998).
The changing fortunes of the concept of curiosity were linked to the competing
claims to legitimacy made by different social classes. The attacks and moral
rebukes that curiosity and curiosities invited were part of the bourgeois
challenge to the dominance of the landed aristocracy. However, curiosity and
curious things were also a threat to the nascent modern society, with its
emphasis on order and classification, and everything (and everyone) in their
place. Curious things were always singular objects (notwithstanding the fashion
which dictated that every cabinet ought to have certain highly-prized objects).
As the catalogues of curiosity cabinets indicate, many of the most popular
curiosities were hybrids, anomalies or ‘freaks’. Collections included two-headed
foetuses (animal and human), objects from miraculous events (such as rains of
toads) and miniscule carvings on fruit stones.
The term ‘curiosity’ would regularly be used to designate objects that were
otherwise indefinable. This would not necessarily be a judgmental designa-
tion. For instance, in the late eighteenth century, explorers in the south Pacific
were still commonly using the word to describe local artefacts. Nicholas Thomas
(1991), in his study of material culture and the south Pacific, suggests that the
term enabled them to acknowledge how different something was, and express
an interest in it, without passing judgement. Captain Cook could describe a
Tongan coconut-fibre apron or a Marquesan head ornament as ‘curious’, and in
this way draw attention to their significance without saying how they were
significant. Thomas attributes this reluctance at least partly to the lack of
‘established anthropological discourse’ about material culture. While there was
an interest in artefacts in the 1770s, there was ‘no developed language’ through
which their relevance could be understood (Thomas 1991: 131). Another way of
looking at this, and without necessarily disputing Thomas’s diagnosis, is that
in Cook’s journeys, at the beginning of the museum age, we still can trace
the pleasure in the curious as that which is ‘outside intelligibility’ (Swanson
2000: 32).
Indeed, curiosity collections may be understood as an attempt to manage the
unintelligibility of the strange and exotic, and the emotions such things aroused.
In his study of European responses to the New World, Stephen Greenblatt
(1991a) discusses the belief that an encounter with radically different natural
and cultural worlds would produce sensations of wonder that could ‘dispossess’