are not generally put into vitrines or behind ropes for the edification and improvement of viewers. In that external, quotidian realm things are not always particularly thought about at all, and instead are used and interacted with all the time, as much a part of the life one lives and the sphere wherein one dwells, as one is oneself. People and objects alike move about, physically and metaphorically, all involved in the formation and continuation of myriad relationships, together constituting a social life of things as well as persons in the sense now so familiarly articulated by Appadurai (1986), Kopytoff (1986), and others. The daily processes by which we engage with and live through, indeed in some cases almost become one with (e.g., Merleau-Ponty 1962; Malafouris 2012), the material constituents of our world are habitually performed with relatively little unease or conscious awareness on our part. Exceptions, of course, occur when things fail to work properly or when certain objects – such as gifts from people who are special to us, or things that we value because of their antiquity or association with particular individuals – become disruptive or take on values and meanings that cause us to stop and contemplate, even momentarily. But in the course of my everyday activities most of the time I do not stop to think about my relationship with the clothes I am wearing (other than, perhaps, glancing in the mirror when I dress) or the chair on which I sit or the keyboard with which I type, or where the boundaries between the surfaces of my body and of those things – backside and chair, torso and sweater, fingertips and keyboard – actually lie. The same can be said for most other things in my daily life: cooking utensils, kitchen and bathroom appliances, my car, my phone, and so on; I do not experience these things “as aggregates of natural physical mass, but rather as a range of functions or effects that we rely upon” (Harman 2002, 18; emphasis original). Even special objects from which I may derive particular pleasure or which otherwise have notable significance for me, such as my wedding ring or treasured possessions of now lost loved ones, are things whose relationships to me, while I certainly do sometimes think about them, I rarely stop to reflect on at length.
The continually shifting material world of our everyday lives is thus one with which we are habitually familiar rather than something we have to confront or try to understand in daily life. That does not render it simple to explain from social science or humanities perspectives, as any walk around a university library will indicate. Nonetheless, the way in which we relate, or struggle to relate, to things in museums is quite different, and to enter such an institution is to journey to another kind of realm entirely. Perhaps for all of us, and particularly for those unfamiliar with its codes, to pass through the museum’s doors is to cross an ocean to a distant world that can seem very strange indeed in comparison to the one the traveler has left behind. This is not so much about the content of displays – though, of course, certain exhibitions may show artifacts that are in themselves wondrous and unfamiliar – but about the technology of the place, removing things (whatever they may be) from their ordinary contexts and apparently rendering them the object of the visitor’s gaze. The point here is not whether or how museums de- or recontextualize and thus change the meanings of the objects they display (see Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). Rather, my emphasis is on the relative position of displayed object and viewing subject, and on the fact that the latter seems to gaze on the former. Gaze, in this context as in others, “implies more than to look at – it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze” (Schroeder 1998, 208; emphasis added).
In a museum there does, at first sight at least, appear to be such a relationship of power. The item on show seems passive in any engagement with a viewer (the gazer); the two cannot normally interact as fully or equally as they would in a different setting, and the visitor performs as an active participant making a “discovery.” The participant who is “at home” (in the sense of always remaining in the place that the other party is only visiting), the museum object, is apparently rendered effectively weaker than the incomer from the distant world outside.
In this the museum encounter is analogous to the colonial encounter, at least as far as it initially appeared to colonials traveling from metropole to periphery: the traveler from afar (the museum visitor) comes to a wondrous place full of strange and amazing objects, where things are done very differently and all is unfamiliar; yet, although she is a visitor, out of her comfort zone and far from home, it is still her way of seeing that apparently comes to dominate the engagements between herself and the dwellers (the objects) in this foreign land (the museum). (Though, as we shall see later in the chapter, studies of colonial contexts have demonstrated, importantly, that the relationships and influences involved were in actuality rather more complex, subtle, and multidirectional; e.g., Thomas 1991). From the colonialist’s point of view, the place traveled to and the things encountered there seem exotic, curious, and remote from their own domain. This new world itself thus becomes constructed, in the colonialist’s mind, as remote and strange, an imagined place constrained within physical boundaries, as Ardener describes for the process of colonization around the world:
for Europe, “remote areas” … have had a different conceptual geography … “remote” was actually compounded of “imaginary” as well as “real” places … imagined … yet … located eventually in limited and specific places. (1987, 40)
This imagined, remote, exotic quality is, however, very much the view of the outsider, the colonizer (we shall return to this later).
In this colonial encounter analogy, I am making no pejorative or ethical statement about the role or actions of the museum visitor. At the same time, I intend no removal of moral context from, or simplification of, the social and historical complexities and legacies of actual colonial structures and practices – of which museums, of course, were and remain a component. A considerable literature addresses both the colonial context of museums in the past (e.g., Coombes 1994; Bennett 2004), and its ongoing impacts – including in relation to museums as what may actually be very imbalanced “contact zones” (e.g., Clifford 1997; Harrison 1997; Luke 2006; Lynch and Alberti 2010; Boast 2011). These issues of museums and colonial history, and of museums, difference, and colonial legacies today, are important subjects but not the topic of this chapter; colonialism here is a metaphor applied specifically to thinking through person–thing encounters.
The metaphor centers in particular on encounters between individual colonizers (administrators, travelers, missionaries, etc.) and inhabitants of the colony; it is not concerned with the wider engagement between the colonial center or administration and the colony. It could nonetheless, perhaps, be objected that, because the museum is not their original home, the things in the museum are not properly analogous with dwellers in a colonized territory. Yet, earlier notions of “pristine” precolonial societies and landscapes are now understood to have been myth (e.g., Sluyter 2001). Furthermore, in the museum there is a commonality, a solidarity, between all those things, sensed by any stranger who enters the place where they now reside: they are all there, all appearing to be stilled and rendered mute and passive by being so, unable to resist being looked at but at least massed in their presence, as they stay while visitors come and go. Museums and visitors alike expect them to represent people, communities, and stories, somehow to carry or be associated with meanings; but as physical things they are apparently just there, theoretically solid, three-dimensional presences and colored, dull, or shining, textural surfaces. Yet their full physicality remains tantalizingly out of complete experiential reach and unable to provide diverse sensory stimuli, confined as they are behind glass, rope, or a “Please Do Not Touch” sign. As Fabian puts it:
Even in a modern museum that does without vitrines, who, with rare exceptions, is allowed to touch or smell these objects? … exhibits of objects actually frustrate our bodily desire to explore their materiality. … It is as if just enough materiality were preserved for artefacts to make them count. (2004, 54)
Encounters with things in museums thus appear to be dominated by the visitor’s gaze alone. It is the visitor who, on entering a gallery and being confronted by an entire domain of newly unfamiliar things, seems free to determine which way to walk around the space, which artifacts
