tool.
There will be other objections to the application of prosopopoeia in this museum context, of course. Critique made of the personalization or humanization of objects elsewhere (e.g., Loumpet-Galitzine 2011) might also be leveled here. In her assessment (which focuses particularly on the Musée du Quai Branly), Loumpet-Galitzine identifies several objections to this process in the Musée du Quai Branly project. The first is her tracing of a trajectory within it that originates in the nonmuseological discourse of collectors and dealers and transforms anthropological insights into a different kind of narrative, which she argues “offers no new serious consideration of the peoples whose cultures are represented in the Museum. Thus constructed, the discourse is closed by its own dialectics” (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 153). Second, she argues that the museum’s exhibitions’ use of “humanized” objects does not aestheticize the artifacts’ producers or the other more generally, but rather transfers “human qualities to the object,” in so doing making it embody “the humanity of the Other” and depersonalize “the real human being in its favour” (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 154). I do not disagree that this particular museum appears to offer or indeed enable few new considerations, but it is unfortunate that the implication here is that such innovations, even in the case of ethnographic objects, might only be both provided and derived from anthropologists and curators. What of any new assessments that might form in the mind of museum visitors, including those from the immigrant communities to whom Loumpet-Galitzine understandably turns in other ways in her discussion? Of course, any of these sorts of new considerations of displayed objects and the peoples associated with them would be shaped dynamically and unpredictably in the course of the moments of object–person interaction on which I have focused in this chapter; moreover, they would most likely be ephemeral and may well be ambivalent and problematic in various factual, sensual, and possibly ethical ways (see below). They would not have the interpretive authority and weight, or documentation and publication, of the expert, research-based insights of anthropologists or museum representations. But does that mean that the moments in which object and visitor seem to connect, and the powerful affective responses that can result, are unimportant? Certainly museums need to avoid giving inappropriate impressions, such as the evolutionist sense that the objects being viewed are “primitive” even if the societies whence they originate are no longer thus (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 154), or the idea that there is only one meaning applicable to an artifact (and the Musée du Quai Branly, for example, has been criticized for doing both; e.g., Clifford 2007; Price 2007; Loumpet-Galitzine 2011). Rather, opening up immediate, and multiple, interactions with objects as far as possible empowers both visitor and object alike. In conceptualizing such engagements, prosopopoeia has its applicability as the attribution to objects of a point of view: metaphorical, but nonetheless a technique for trying to see things from the inside, a potent reversal of perspective (Holmes [1985] 2005) to take forward our understandings of the effects and potentials of objects.
Seeing no perspective other than the meaning-filled, human-centered one whence we see the world perpetuates the distancing of the other – cultural, temporal, material – embodied in and represented by the objects on which we gaze. This distancing is also achieved through the “cultural bias towards vision” (Fabian 1983, 106). Sight clearly dominates both the technology of the museum display and the metaphor of the two-way colonial gaze; nonetheless, “gaze” here operates as a complex, and in practice multisensorial, set of processes. In a material world in which people, themselves physical three-dimensional entities, interact with things, the importance of our bodily performances and memories of the handling and performativity of objects in situations where handling has been possible, are still important in museum engagements where it is not. We combine such remembered and imagined sensations with what we can see of the material qualities of the thing before us. Gazing at a picture hanging on a gallery wall or at a carved wooden bowl in a glass display case, attention momentarily held by the material form, colors, composition, scale, and impact of what I see, my eyes also taking in information that allows me to intuit texture, density, weight, and thickness, I simultaneously objectify the thing before me and am vulnerable to it and its effects on me. Its impacts on my sensibilities are real – if it were not there or if it were something else, my responses would be different. No matter what the influence of my own preconceptions and background, it too has both individuality and effect. These effects will indeed be strongly filtered by my own characteristics – the lens through which I see – but I alone do not determine what happens in that encounter; the object’s characteristics too are fundamental to the outcome. The object’s materiality and my sensibility, then, together can create powerful, albeit culturally, historically, and personally constituted, effects.
These effects can work against the distancing between the visitor and the other represented by and embodied in museum objects, through powerful moments of connection, empathy, and recognition. However, they can also, especially when powerful responses are negative ones, work to enhance the sense of distance. This potentiality of the object and the museum encounter thus raises ethical dimensions too. Is it, for example, appropriate to facilitate the possibility of unencumbered, powerful, moving encounters with objects if the visitor’s interior reflections, which may later become externalized into voiced opinions or even actions, are factually wrong, politically unacceptable, or morally reprehensible? Indeed, more often the museum may be seeking not to bring about these sorts of encounters at all but instead to inform people, only to find that visitors’ responses to the objects and apparent misreadings of the exhibition undo all the effort put into the interpretation. Bouttiaux, for example, writing of her curation of Persona, an exhibition of Côte d’Ivoire Guro region masks at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium) in 2009, described her concern and techniques to convey both that objects used in the past are still functioning in daily and ritual life today and that the cultures whence those objects come are not unchanging. However, she concluded that despite working hard to demonstrate both and in the process to deconstruct a number of “clichés … the visitor’s gaze manages to nullify such efforts” (Bouttiaux 2012, 36). Her experience rested partly on visitors’ tendency to watch the in-exhibition contemporary films of the masks in action – prior to their collection – in dance performances in Guro, and their failure to pay much if any attention to the actual masks on display. Bouttiaux had provided such films as an attempt at contextualization, yet ultimately felt that their inability to provide the full sensory experience of being present at the dance, combined with the fact that most visitors did not connect each displayed mask with the film that depicted it in action, rendered the films as other, as distant, and as out of time as the masks themselves, from the museum-goers’ perspectives. She refers to the sensory remove between the museum and the originating context, and describes the masks as “so decontextualized or “deadened” from being behind glass that they are not even recognizable” (Bouttiaux 2012, 37, 39).
On one level, perhaps this is an inevitable result of the museum effect: the processes of collection, taxonomy, and display that museumize something, removing it from its original setting and isolating it as evidence and/or representation of that world, also separate it from its entanglement with quotidian life, from the ubiquitous, humdrum materiality of existence in which we tend not to think much about a separation between “subjects and objects” or to reflect too often on “the meanings of things.” Museumizing things has this separating effect whether we like it or not, and however the details of the process are done. This occurs in different ways in both Bouttiaux’s Persona exhibition and in the Musée du Quai Branly, for example. It does so, too, in each of the four approaches to ethnographic objects outlined by Sally Price: whether detaching objects from their pasts and displaying them as “masterpieces of world art,” privileging “the perspectives of members of the represented cultures and their descendants,” concentrating on colonial histories and disciplines and “the circumstances in which collections were formed,” or treating the represented cultures as untouched “vignettes of a pre-contact past” (2007, 170–171), there is no escaping the simple fact that the things are now in a museum and – even in Price’s second option – disengaged from the full machinations of everyday social life for which they were originally produced.
Yet, on another level, precisely because encounters between persons and things are – or can be – so different once something becomes a part of this
