Museums and the Politics of Nationalism

Christopher B. Steiner

1would like to begin my discussion of these essayson the relationship between museums and na-tionalism by invoking a poem entitled The LargeWomen in the National Museum written by Canadianpoet Robert Barsky (1991) on a visit to Hungary in19881:

We are followed, incessantly, by those who watchover the history of Middle Europe. They have nostory to tellor if they have, refuse to recount it to us;their story seems to be repressed behind the ropes,where we are asked to stand and surveybut notto touch.To observe the petrified objects, the faded mapsor gilded crowns, demands imagination;to stand around and over the relic that sits in thechairbefore us demands a sense of humour.That hardened woman, sitting on the hard-woodchairprotects with dignity and attentivenessbut also ruthlessness and pridea past represented by golden, jewel-studdedcrowns,

robes of leather, masks of stoneand diamond-encrusted religious icons.We stare into the past, searching for an object-world,and find instead the forbidden ancestors of thisgrouchy old woman.

This poem, it seems to me, captures one of thecentral contradictions in national museums: namely,the tremendous distance which can be felt between

the symbols of national representation and the na-tionals who are supposedly being represented. "Thehardened woman sitting on the hard-wood chair"(that is to say, the guard monitoring the halls of thenational museum) protects with ambivalence andtrepidation a heritage that is largely alien to herpersonal experiencethe jewel-studded crowns anddiamond-encrusted icons were salvaged from some-body's past but almost surely not from her own.

In an insightful review essay on "Nationalism andAnthropology," Brackette Williams (1989) has sug-gested that ethnicity, race, gender, and class are allimplicated in the projects and policies of nation-build-ing along different axes in the homogenizing processbasic to the modern nation-state's form of rule. In thecase of the Hungarian National Museum, it is class(and perhaps also gender) which serves as an idiomof disjuncture between the people and the state. Inmany of the essays presented in this special themeissue of Museum Anthropology, it is ethnicity (andperhaps also race) which plays a divisive and con-tested role in the symbolic constitution of the nationalmuseum.

In Africa, as both Agbenyega Adedze and EnidSchildkrout demonstrate, ethnic groups lumped to-gether by the unanticipated consequences of Europe'sscramble for the continent in the late nineteenthcentury, are either over-represented or under-repre-sented in museum display (but almost always misrep-resented) depending on the particular circumstancesand ambitions of the current ruling party in the na-tion-state.

This last point on the classification of ethnicity inthe national museums brings me to a more generalargument on museums, nationalism, and the ordering

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MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2

or structuring of culture. Museums of anthropologywere born out of a need or desire to create order outof the material debris of culture contact swept intoEurope from the far-corners of the earth in the Age ofDiscovery. In the late nineteenth century, Pitt-Riversdealt his hand in the classification of artifacts at theethnographic museum at Oxfordinsisting that ob-jects could be classified according to genera and spe-cies like so many specimens from the natural world.In the early twentieth century, Franz Boas shuffled thecards anew and dealt his hand in the arrangement ofobjects at the American Museum of Natural Historyaccording to criteria of culture history and ethnicprovenance. Changing views in social theory de-manded radical changes in the sequencing and juxta-position of material culture in museum exhibits. Likeanthropology, nation-states are also in the business ofclassification. And, as in social theory, the conditionsof social hierarchy and power structures of hegemonyalso change through time. The ordering and reorder-ing of objects and representations in national muse-ums can serve to legitimate or "naturalize" any givenconfiguration of political authority.

The divisiveness of ethnicity and class within thenation-state and museum representations can also befelt through the disjunctures and contestations withina single cultural or ethnic grouping. Nancy MarieMithlo demonstrates very clearly in her essay thatcontests of identity are fought not only between self-representations and outside representations but moreinterestingly there is disagreement within the groupitself about the nature and content of self-images andnational identity.

Benedict Anderson (1983) notes that all communi-ties and polities have an imagined dimension whichmanifests itself in self-representation. Nation-states,as Clifford Geertz would have it for ritual, need onoccasion to represent themselves to themselves. Ofcourse, who is counted in the category "themselves"is always a problematic and keenly contested issue.But nation-states, on occasion, also need to representthemselves to others. As Susan Bean suggests, mount-ing an exhibition of Bhutanese textiles in Salem, Mas-sachusetts legitimizes the national identity andiconography of Bhutan not only in the eyes of its ownpeople, within its own territorial boundaries, but alsoin the eyes of the worldwithin the political, eco-nomic, and social networks of the modern worldsystem. Richard Grinker's study of the DemilitarizedZone which separates North and South Korea raisesanother fascinating permutation in the puzzle of

representations. In this case it is the United Statesmilitary which guides South Korea's imaging of theNorth Korean enemy. The DMZ is a site of repre-sentation intended for outsiders, but in the collectiveunconscious of South Korea the DMZ plays a criticalrole in defining the nation by contrasting itself to acarefully constructed Other.

Tradition and modernityA major theme running through all of these essays

is the relationship between tradition and modernityin the constitution of national symbolism and con-sciousness. Some of the most recent books on nation-alism, such as Ernest Gellner's Nations and Na-tionalism (1983) and Benedict Anderson's ImaginedCommunities (1983) emphasize the modernity of na-tionalism as both an idea and institution. Yet, most ofthese essays point to inherent tensions between tradi-tion and modernity in the representation of the na-tion-state in museums. Rubie Watson and TamaraHamlish, in particular, throw into doubt the receivedwisdom that nationalism is a functional requirementof secularizing societies. Museum representations inChina blur the conventional distinction between thesacred and the profane, between the enchanted andthe disenchanted, between the temple and the mu-seum. In the case of China, the objects contained inthe national museum from which the modern nation-state drew authority and power were the same ob-jectswith magical and cosmological propertiesfrom which the traditional ruling power drew itslegitimacy and political force. In a related paradox,Susan Bean also notes that the Bhutanese who visitthe national museum in Bhutan worship the imagesof saints and deities which are displayed in the galleryof the national museum. The point is, therefore, thatthe transition from artifact into artfrom object ofreligious veneration to object of aesthetic contempla-tionis not always acknowledged universally at thesame moment in time; it is a process that is at oncereversible and incomplete.

A second point on the relationship between mod-ernity and tradition in the museum and the nation-state has to do with a museum's or an exhibition'sorientation in timewith its structuring of what Jo-hannes Fabian (1983) calls allochronism. Does thenation-state draw authority and power from the rec-reation or, as Agbenyega Adedze put it, the inventionof a glorious past? Or does the state project its imageinto the future? Tamara Hamlish points to the Chinesecelebration of a "generic" past; Mithlo points to the

MUSEUMS AND NATIONALISM 5

representation of a "fictionalized" past; while Watsonpoints to the fact that "for many Chinese, identity wasto be sought not in China's pastin its grand culturaltraditionsbut in its future."

In many cases, it seems to me, the glorification ofpast and futureor what may be called "forward-looking" versus "backward-looking" regimes of repre-sentationoften co-exist, complement, and evencontradict one another in the nationalist agenda ofstate museums. One need look no further than theUnited States nation's capital to witness the NationalMuseum of American History positioned diagonallyacross the Mall from the National Museum of Air andSpace. In some rare, but fascinating cases, the stateuses representations of history not to glorify its heri-tage by association with the past but rather throughrepudiation of its own past. The best examples ofthese representations seem to come from Germanyeither in the national monuments and memorials tothe Holocaust, or in the just announced plans for theconstruction of a theme park in former East Berlinwhich would re-enact the conditions of life undercommunisma kind of Disney fantasyland only pro-jected in reverse.

Nationalism and transnationalismAnther major theme which emerges as an issue that

is germane to all of these essays is the relationshipbetween nationalism and transnationalism and itsrelevance to museums. In a recent issue of Daedalusdevoted to the topic of nationalism, anthropologistKatherine Verdery (1993) draws attention to the dif-ficulty of defining and maintaining national bounda-ries in light of international market, migrations, andmass-medias. She writes: The increased flow of capi-taland of populations, in its wake, producing themuch commented phenomenon of transnational-ismcalled into question in an unprecedented wayall those arbitrary, taken-for-granted nation-stateboundaries" (1993:44).

Enid Schildkrout in this issue describes not onlythe permeating stench of deep-fried global capitalismin Namibiafrom the Golden Arches of McDonald'sto one of the "Colonel's" more distant fast-food out-posts of the KFCbut also shows how the Namibianstate has borrowed Bennetton's "United Colors" ad-vertizing campaign to represent itself to itself as wellas to outsiders. In the swirl of transglobal communi-cation, a Western representation of the Other be-comes appropriated as the Other's representation of

itself. Parenthetically, this also parallels, of course,Nancy Mithlo's point about the Chiricahua's accep-tance of a past selected and constructed by others.

Additionally, the impact of transnationalism onnational museums relates to the economics of themodern world system and, in particular, the interna-tional art market. The question in this regard is: Donational treasures in a national museum becomemore potent and viable as their economic value in-creases and their investment appraisal matures? Arethe multi-million dollar bronze treasures from theancient kingdom of Benin worth more today in thepolitical currency of Nigerian nationalism than theywere worth at the turn of the century or even at themoment of Nigerian independence in the 1960s whenthey were worth only a fraction of their current mone-tary value? Do icons representing religious spiritsbecome further activated and symbolically height-ened when they are conjoined with the spirit of capi-talism?

Nationalism and the trope of inventionOne final theme that deserves to be raised in the

context of museums and nationalism concerns therelationship between objects and the invention ofmeaning(s). Enid Schildkrout ends her paper by re-marking that "the objects in museums remain rootedin particular histories and cultures and are not aseasily rewritten as are peoples' memories.11 In recentyears, a small industry has emerged in publicationsdealing with invented phenomena. There is, for ex-ample, the Invention of Tradition, The Invention ofAfrica, The Invention of Ethnicity, The Invention ofModernity, The Invention of Reality, and so on. Thetopic of nationalism has not been immune to thisepistemological bent toward the study of inventionsand modes of inventing. Indeed, Benedict Anderson'sImagined Communities (1983) is largely about theinvention of national boundaries and its relationshipto the invention of national identity. Are there, how-ever, limits on the imaginationi.e., boundaries be-yond which invention is not possible or likely tooccur? Is there something uniquely unmalleableabout material artifactsas opposed to memory, forexample, whose malleability is limited only by thehuman imagination? To be sure, interpretations ofartifacts can range widely through the spectrum ofthe possible, yet at some point it seems to me, inter-pretation is bounded by the physical constraints of theobject itself.

Although the volume of literature on nationalism

6 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 19 NUMBER 2

is an overwhelming mass, taxing its readers andswamping the computer-based databases throughwhich citation searches are run, I would contend thatthe study of nationalism in the context of museumsremains a largely untapped area of study,2 and offersa special vantage point for understanding the logicand process of nation-buildinga unique perspectivewhich is otherwise overlooked by studies of national-ism in other domains.

Notes

1. All but one of the essays published in this issue of MuseumAnthropology were originally prepared for a session thatI organized at the annual meeting of the American An-thropological Association held in Washington, D.C. inNovember 1993. Papers that were read for the panel, butdo not appear in this issue of the journal are: RaymondD. Fogelson's "Exhibiting Nationalism at the 1904 St.Louis World's Fair," Shelly Errington's "Fantasized Com-munities: The Case of Beautiful Indonesia in MiniaturePark," Sally Price's "Executing Museums" (published asPrice and Price 1995), and a discussion of the papers byIrene J. Winter. The essay by Roy Richard Grinker wassolicited for this issue after the conference.

2. Although the study of museums and nationalism is notyet fully developed, a working bibliography already ex-istsee, for example, Coombes 1988; Mitchell 1989;Duncan 1990; Art in America 1991; Wallis 1991; Anag-nost 1993; Kaplan 1994; Papadakis 1994; Ehrentraut1995.The few pages that Benedict Anderson devotes to muse-ums in his much-cited book Imagined Communities helpus little in formulating a discourse on museums andnationalism. Anderson examines the museum with thevery precise aim of understanding the "totalizing classi-ficatory grid" of the colonial enterprise (1983:184), andin so doing links the role of the museum to that of thecensus and the map.

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CHRISTOPHER STEINER is currently a Getty Scholar atthe J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Art andthe Humanities in Santa Monica, CA. Since 1994, hehas served as Editor of Museum Anthropology.