The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences by George E. Marcus; Michael M. J. Fischer

1The Museum of Science and Industry (hereafter the Museum) opened at Manchester’s Castlefield site in 1983. Significantly, its city centre location, and its situation in Castlefield, the first English urban heritage park, suggested that the Museum offered potential for exploring the role of heritage in urban economic regeneration. Moreover, as the Museum also claimed to be a ‘place of fun and fascination, with working exhibits bringing the past vividly to life’ (Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester nd: 4), it appeared to be a site whose approach to visitors was characterized by a shift away from traditional museum practices and towards a more democratizing style. Wigan Pier (hereafter the Pier) was opened in 1985, and is an important example of attempts by local authorities to use tourism and tourist sites to transform an area’s image. Furthermore, the Pier with its use of live performances, simulacra, and tangible reconstructions appeared to epitomize many of the recent developments in the heritage industry. The research design was based on a comparative case-study method of inquiry. 2 The data derived from this study have led me to challenge the view, frequently to be found in museum literature, that visitors to such sites are passive, uncritical consumers of ‘heritage’. Rather, as I argue here, the heritage consumption process is characterized by complexity and diversity in respect of visitors’ faculties. The findings reported in this article show how a form of reminiscence is practised at the sites, a reminiscence that is informed by performativity (Kershaw 1994). I argue that performance and performativity are key social practices at such sites, and that the relationship between visitors and the sites is based as much on emotion and imagination as it is on cognition. Moreover, this emotional and imaginary relationship is engendered by the physicality of the process of consumption. My findings also confirm recent developments in audience research and particularly those associated with the work of Nicholas Abercombie and Brian Longhurst who identify an emergent paradigm of spectacle and performance (Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998). These sociologists suggest that contemporary society is characteristically performative and that there has been a spectaclization of place and person, in the sense that people themselves become the spectacle. They argue that the distance between audiences and performers has diminished; people perform and they see others as performers, they perform for an audience yet they are also members of a range of audiences. 3 Thus, the visitor research which is reported in this article is underpinned by two key arguments. First, visitor research needs to take account of new directions in the sociology of audiences which suggest that in contemporary western societies people are both cultural consumers and producers. Secondly, as a growing body of research (Campbell 1987, Bagnall 1996, Abercrombie and Longhurst 1998) suggests, the emotions and the imagination are key dimensions of this aspect of contemporary audience activity. In this article I also suggest that this ability to perform is related to the cultural literacy and competency of the visitors; that omnivorousness with respect to cultural consumption provides visitors with a range of resources with which to perform. However, I highlight the key role of memory, life histories, and personal and family narratives in enabling visitors to relate the consumption experience to a range of experienced and imagined worlds. The experience

/pdf/performance-and-performativity-at-heritage-sites-2nvnc7ke9z.pdf

Performance and performativity at heritage sites

This paper examines the ways in which the history curriculum in UK schools has been subject to contestation in recent years and considers the implications of the impact of postmodernism — particularly consumption — upon history teaching. It explores the relationship between ‘official history’taught in schools and the ‘unofficial histories’which influence children in the community, in the media and through the heritage industry. It argues that the powerful images gained outside the ‘official’environment have profound implications for the ways in which children are influenced and socialized, which may cause schools to reconceptualize the way history is taught. In particular, it considers the implications of Giroux’s (1992) concept of a ‘order pedagogy’for history teaching.

History Teaching, Nationhood and the State: A Study in Educational Politics

Introduction 1. Towards a Typology: the changing roles of Art Museums 2. Cultural History Museums and the making of Citizens and Communities 3. National Museums in between Regionalism, Nationalism and Imperialism, 1750 - 1914 4. Post-imperial Nations: new states, new borders and new unions 1914-2010 5. Conflicted Histories: museums, nations, empires, religions 6. National Museums and National Symbols: searching for the 'symbolic regimes' of Europe Conclusion: The National Museum as a Cultural Constitution

/pdf/national-museums-and-nation-building-in-europe-1750-2010-2i29k1h660.pdf

National Museums and Nation-building in Europe 1750-2010 : Mobilization and legitimacy, continuity and change

The paper discusses the ‘western’ museum practices of representing culture within a dominant visual metaphor as an inherently political act which separates those who view the exhibit from those who are on display. The act of viewing is related to the acts of ordering, defining and representing according to the categories of the ‘viewing’ culture, and serves to deny shared space and time occupied by the representing and represented cultures, a process related to the anthropological construction of ethnographic distance in ethnographic texts. Two recent Canadian exhibitions which attempt to use irony to subvert traditional exhibit practices are analysed: Into the Heart of Africa and Fluffs and Feathers. Into the Heart of Africa attempted to mount a postmodern critique of colonial collecting practices, but its one-sided use of irony reproduced, for many visitors, the colonial relations of power that made it possible for one group to dominate another. The narrative structure of the exhibit was predicated on a relation of difference. Fluffs and Feathers, on the other hand, directly challenged the white visitor's power to view and define native peoples, by dialogically inviting visitors to try on alternate subject positions that help to fracture essentialist notions of self and culture. Thus irony, a risky trope, can lead to very different results in museum exhibitions depending on who it is aimed at and who does the aiming.

Henrietta Riegel

Papers

Into the Heart of Irony: Ethnographic Exhibitions and the Politics of Difference