Page 39 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Europeans of their secure sense of self. Wonder is paralysing, ‘dissolving’ the
self and allowing an absorption in, and identification with, the exotic. Excessive
wonder prevented the assimilation of the marvellous into a moral framework
and placed one in danger of ‘going native’ – of overidentifying with that which
one was supposed to be dominating (Greenblatt 1991a: 20, 135). The curiosity
market grew out of the so-called ‘Age of Exploration’ beginning with the
European arrival in the Americas at the end of the fifteenth century. My argu-
ment is that while wonder threatened the colonial project and the self-identity
of Europeans, the curiosity market took the paralysis out of wonder by trans-
forming it into acquisitiveness. The curiosity cabinet allowed the assimilation
of the extraordinary into a framework in which it made sense, without taking
away its extraordinary quality.
When Burke describes curiosity as restless and the curious appetite as
insatiable, he pinpointed an aspect of curiosity that curiosity-collecting both
addressed and contained. This restlessness of curiosity is to do with the singu-
lar pleasure it offers of unseating or unsettling one’s self (Swanson 2000: 32–3).
Once the curious object becomes familiar, it loses this pleasurable quality; one
must consume again to repeat the experience. This pleasurable aspect of
curiosity is something like the loss of self described above. The enjoyment that the
wealthy curiosity collectors got from their collections may have included some-
thing of this. But by the late eighteenth century the pleasurable and profitable
aspects of collecting had become more widely available. Nicholas Thomas cites
Captain Cook’s Journals on the way in which the people of Tonga parodied the
sailors ‘passion’ for novelty:

It was astonishing to see with what eagerness everyone [the sailors] catched
at every thing they saw, it even went so far as to become the ridicule of the
Natives by offering pieces of sticks stones and what not to exchange, one
waggish Boy took a piece of human excrement on a stick and hild it out to
every one of our people he met with.
(Cook’s Journals cited in Thomas 1991: 128)
Another explorer, Johann Reinhold Forster, complained,
How difficult it must be for a Man like me, sent out on purpose by
Government to collect Natural Curiosities, to get these things from the
Natives in the Isles, as every Sailor whatsoever buys vast Quantities of
Shells, birds, fish, etc. so that the things get dearer & scarcer than one
would believe.
(Forster, cited in Thomas 1991: 140)
Cook and Forster draw a sharp distinction between their own (legitimate)
interest in curiosities and the indiscriminate, ignorant and commercially-driven