these healing processes, reversing colonial removals that disrupted the normal transgenerational transmission of cultural traditions. Working together, museums and source community members have pooled their expertise to develop more adequate understandings of historical collections. More accurate displays help museums by improving public interpretation and Indigenous community members by removing barriers to self-recognition as theorized by Charles Taylor (1992). One of the earliest examples of this process occurred in 1991 at the American Museum of Natural History during research for the exhibition Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch when elders recounted narratives associated with masks that had been in the museum for almost a century but had never been correctly identified (Jonaitis 1991). This research restored knowledge of the dance and its masks to community members so that they could create it anew in their community.
Similarly, other research collaborations have made it possible for Indigenous people to again make traditional clothing whose designs and patterns had long gone out of use.23 In Chapter 12, Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown discuss a collaboration between the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Blackfoot of Alberta, Canada which combined joint research, photo elicitation, and the travels of people and museum collections in order to restore the communities’ connection to their historic war shirts. In other projects, museums have contributed to Indigenous language recovery by digitizing wax cylinder recordings to support language recovery and the repertoires of contemporary dance groups. The Smithsonian’s (2014) institution-wide Recovering Voices project has devoted resources to research on and support for endangered languages worldwide and will also produce an exhibition to heighten public awareness. Lissant Bolton’s chapter (10) analyzes the impact of the Indigenous cultural research and revival program established by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in the Pacific where local community members were trained to document the histories and practices in their areas. Many museums have also recognized that some of the things in their care are culturally sensitive and have agreed to store and care for them – and sometimes remove them from display – in accordance with the practices of the source communities. Such projects are designed not only to support cultural recovery but also to educate non-Indigenous publics about histories of oppression that have not been adequately narrated. On the other hand, as Nicholas Thomas suggests in Chapter 11, museums also need to recognize that not all communities attach cultural value to objects and artifacts, or indeed to heritage and history, and that these reservations should be acknowledged even though they may not fit in with the museum’s agenda.
Globalization has speeded up the transnational movements of peoples as refugees and immigrants, both legal and illegal. As diasporic communities establish themselves in new countries, they have often been regarded with suspicion and resentment as economic competitors and, through old racial stereotypes, as unwelcome representatives of alien cultures. The traditional function of the museum in transtemporal and transcultural processes of translation and interpretation has made them natural sites for projects of familiarization and the deconstruction of stereotypes. New roles for ethnographic museums including proactive exhibits that address contemporary migration have been developed and shown by a consortium of European national ethnographic museums in Rome, Paris, Brussels, and Vienna,24 with funding from the European Community. At Rome’s Pigorini Museum, for example, the exhibit S/oggetti migranti: dietro le cose le persone/people behind things established a shared historical connection between colonial museum collections and members of highly marginalized Moroccan, sub-Saharan African, Chinese, and other migrant communities. As the catalog states:
These projects aim at the sharing of experiences and practices that add value to the collections and promote cultural diversity. They are driven by the awareness that, in the light of new demands for information created by the widespread presence of the representatives of many cultures in a contemporary world traversed by global fluxes that are challenging the physiognomy of Europe, ethnographic museums are being called on to renew their mission and propose new opportunities for interpreting and deriving benefit from anthropological heritage. This has allowed fruitful partnerships and opportunities for exchange of experiences that resulted from scientific workshops and exhibit events, planned with museum directors, curators and employees of partner institutions. (Munapé 2012, 9).
In this volume, contributions by Mieke Bal and by Terry Kurgan, Alexander Opper, and Tegan Bristow explore the social agency of exhibitionary projects involving film and interactive electronic media in mediating experiences of diasporic and migrant populations in eastern Europe and South Africa. Whereas in the early twentieth century the typical museum of modernity saw its role as assimilating newcomers to Western culture, today many museums are discovering a new and activist potential to mediate cultural frictions that arise in processes of globalization and immigration.
Museum experiments
As we have noted, there is a clear overlap between the strategies museums have been developing to advocate for social justice and the culture of experimentation discussed in the third group of essays. The more a museum commits itself to social agency as a central mandate rather than a potential that comes into play only occasionally, the more it will seek new ways to achieve this goal. Some areas of ongoing innovation are not, of course, new – museums have long consciously sought new styles of exhibition and architectural design, and embraced new technologies that could help them fulfill their core mandates to preserve, display, educate, and entertain. Early twenty-first-century exhibitions present us with a spectrum of examples which combine the spectatorial and the experiential in different ratios. Many of the most venerable art museums – Florence’s Uffizi, Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie, New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art – remain primarily spectatorial, although they may offer longer explanatory labels and innovative educational programs. At the other end of the spectrum is the Dennis Severs House in Spitalfields, London, where the visitor enters an eighteenth-century domestic environment which works on the historical imagination through sensory perceptions of light and shadow, smell and sound. Most of the exhibitions discussed in this volume fall somewhere in between these two ends of the spectrum, and many have sought to draw on new media to enrich and deepen the visitor’s experience. In summarizing a number of experimental exhibitions created in recent years, Basu and Macdonald write that, “rather than making complex realities more vividly simple … the issue has more often been how to engage with complexity, how to create a context that will open up a space for conversation and debate, above all how to enlist audiences as co-experimenters, willing to try for themselves” (2007, 16).
In the sphere of history museums, those devoted to the Holocaust exhibit a particularly wide range of approaches to design. At one end of the spectrum is the minimalist design of the museum at Berlin’s Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe discussed by Sybille Quack in Chapter 1. The deep stillness and contemplative and somber mood it instills in visitors contrasts strongly with the guided tour taken by visitors at the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles, which ends in a recreated Nazi gas chamber and requires them to make an active choice on exiting to walk either through a doorway labeled “prejudiced” or one labeled “not prejudiced.” Both anthropology and art museums have increasingly turned to contemporary artists for techniques to disrupt conventional narratives and modes of display.25 In some instances these interventions are essentially charged with doing the work of reinterpreting the museum’s collections. This happened quite literally in 2011 when the £24 million refurbishment of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum’s (RAMM) displays opened in Exeter, England. As a way of invoking the colonial relations underpinning their collection of eighteenth-century silverware, the museum simply copied an intervention made famous by Fred Wilson in his installation Mining the Museum, originally created as a critical commentary on the collection of the Maryland Historical Society in 1992 where Wilson had installed slave shackles in the display of silverware. Artists have often gone further to produce a more critical curatorial voice than the museum staff responsible for a museum’s permanent galleries. In other instances, as noted earlier in our discussion of the placement of Sokari
