agency is only one instance of this theme. As we have already seen, agency is a driving theme in discussions about objects as well as visitors. In terms of understanding the function of museums as public institutions, however, there are a further two discussions that we could bring together under this theme. The first is Kylie Message’s arguments concerning the significance of curatorial agency in shaping the agenda of contemporary museums. The second is the agency of source communities discussed by Howard Morphy.
In a context that often conflates an understanding of museums as governmental institutions with the idea that they answer to the needs of the state, it is often too easy to have a simplistic instrumentalist view of museums and the conditions under which their staff operate. As Message shows (Chapter 13), there is in fact a considerable space for curators to exercise agency and determine institutional paths. The relationship between agency and the role of museums in the public sphere as a consequence of specific museum methods, however, also becomes an opportunity for Message to speak back to theory, in one example of how museums “can be good to think with” (Bennett, Chapter 1). In this case, she uses an example of curatorial agency at the National Museum of American History in collecting the material culture of the civil rights movement in the United States during its formative period to argue that museums can make a contribution to social activism theory. This is because they offer, she argues, a methodology for engaging with activists, one based on participant observation and direct involvement, which is able to account for cultural factors in the rise of protest movements, thereby making a significant potential contribution to social activism theory. The chapter simultaneously analyzes the contribution made by museum practitioners to the public sphere and the need to understand the ways in which affect, emotion, and memory are integral to understanding not only social relations but the ways in which these might be embodied in representations of those relations, such as exhibitions.
Howard Morphy’s chapter (18) is concerned with thinking through how a closer analysis of museum methods might be useful in theorizing disciplines–in this case that of museum anthropology. Morphy’s interest is in how such a closer analysis can reveal a more complex understanding of the ways in which museums operate as contact zones in colonial contexts. He is particularly concerned with challenging the dominant framework in which indigenous peoples are not regarded as having had much agency in their relations with colonial collectors. As he puts it, while one of the remarkable shifts, particularly in settler societies such as Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, is the remarkable flowering of positive relations between museums and sources communities, we tend to overemphasize past practices as leaving no room for agency on the part of indigenous communities at all. In his chapter, Morphy demonstrates that, even at the height of colonialist practices, there were those who sought a closer relationship and recognized indigenous agency. Recognizing and accepting this history, Morphy argues, is an essential step toward opening up the ethnology museum to present-day indigenous communities who would otherwise assume that these institutions are closed to them.4 It is also an essential step in recognizing the contribution of museum anthropology to anthropology itself–namely the practice of fieldwork and the idea of a well-documented collection–an aim that required collaboration with source communities. He advances his arguments through a historical approach–the engagement of the Yolngu People in northeast Arnhem Land, Australia, with collectors in the 1920s and 1930s.
There is one final contribution that shows us the contribution of museum methods to another discipline–that of art practice and its theorization. In a chapter (23) organized as a conversation between two artists, Lyndell Brown and Charles Green, and a theorist, museologist, curator, and art historian, Amelia Barikin, we get an insight into how particular art curatorial practices are taken as the starting point for an artistic practice that aims to provide a space for the enactment of memory. The specific method in question is that of the atlas, which is taken as a metaphor for one way of producing a memory effect that is common to both museum and artistic practice. What emerges is a revealing analysis of the ways in which particular forms of art practice converge with the memory effects of memorializing museums. Only in this case, what the artists wanted to achieve was a form of memory practice that interrupted the present in order to get away from a celebratory and rhetorically empty form of commemoration–an aim they achieved by avoiding action shots and photographing instead a landscape empty of people, evoking a sense of the interminable waiting that is also part of war and points not only to its desolation but also the global infrastructure behind it–the military base in the desert, the helicopter approaching. When laid out like an atlas, or an archive, the images jostle with each other for attention, working as a “counter-museum” and resisting narrative fixity.
There is undoubtedly much more that could be said about the contributions of our authors, either individually or across groups of them, as well as many more narratives that could be teased out as themes. It should, however, be clear from the above attempt to instill some degree of order and pull out what appears to us a particularly interesting conjunctural moment in which tendencies first identified in the second wave of museum studies are now in full flower. The field of museums provides an expanded field of vision for those of us interested in following particular theoretical debates, but it does so precisely because this field is constituted through a series of methodological practices that have and continue to be key to the ways in which disciplines are shaped, public space is understood and produced, subjectivities are shaped, and relations between peoples are enabled. If there was ever any doubt as to the contributions of museums to the formation of culture or their relevance to innovation in both theory and disciplinary practices, we hope our collection goes a long way to demonstrating the value of thinking otherwise.
Notes
1 1 According to George Marcus (2006, 175), “the fascination with ethnography exhibited by disciplines and an interdisciplinary movement that are fundamentally text-oriented and rely on reading as a research practice derives from an anxiety about lack of connec-tion–empirical and experiential–with the social realities to which their analyses refer.”
2 2 For example, see American Association of Museums (1984); Mithlo (2004); Simpson (1996); Clifford (1997); Ames (2000); Kreps (2003); Peers and Brown (2003). Also see lii Introduction: Museum Theory policy documents which outline appropriate approaches for researchers, e.g., Museum Ethnographers Group (2003), and the guidelines and protocols relating to the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) legislation (at http://www.nps.gov/nagpra/, accessed October 1, 2014).
3 3 Chen’s experience and scholarship were formed through participation in the Taiwanese democracy movement and analysis of cognate events such as the Korean June Democratic Uprising of 1987, the Tiananmen Square movement in China, and People’s Power in the Philippines. An interesting parallel can be drawn between Thomas and Chen on the grounds that in 2010, the same year Thomas published his thoughts on the “museum as method,” Chen published a high profile Duke University Press book called Asia as Method (2010).
4 4 The terms “ethnology,” “ethnography,” and “anthropology” have a long and complicated history which Howard Morphy summarized thus (email comm. to Witcomb, May 13, 2013): “In European anthropology ethnology was for a long time a synonym for anthropology as the study of living societies and their material worlds. Anthropology is a more encompassing term and included biological anthropology, archaeology, linguistics as well as social and cultural anthropology. In Britain the term anthropology tended to replace ethnology in the latter part of the 19th century. Ethnology almost ceased to be used except in the limited case of museum anthropology. In the USA ethnology began to separate itself off from cultural anthropology in some people’s minds because its focus was largely on the descriptive data of the societies being researched–collections of material culture became for a while more associated with the term ethnology than with social and cultural anthropology, reflecting a division that merged between anthropologists associated with the Bureau of American Ethnology (which primarily studied
