Book reviews

Tony Bennett, Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004, Routledge,

London and New York) 233 pp., $30.95 USD (ISBN: 0-415-24747-0)

In reading Tony Bennett’s Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004),

it is hard to believe that less than a decade ago this profession was lamenting the “blanket of

critical silence” and lack of “any rigorous form of critical analysis” for museums or museum

history. Now we seem awash in it as both academics and museum practitioners have rushed in to

fill the intellectual void. Museums, especially natural history museums, are the last of the

Victorian modernist institutions to be deconstructed by post-structuralist theory. Bennett, in both

his previous volume, The Birth of the Museum, and in this more recent book, attempts to do just

that, consorting with the usual post-modern theoretical suspects, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour,

and Pierre Bourdieu. As he states,

“.my interest (is) in how these three national contexts (Britain, Australia and the United

States) provide a set of contrapuntal perspectives on the relationships between post-

Darwinian developments in the historical sciences, the functioning of evolutionary

museums as a new kind of memory machine, the changing practices and priorities of

liberal forms of government, and the quite different connections that were forged between

between the historical sciences and practices of government in colonial relationships

between occupying and indigenous populations.” (p. 2).

Even for a determined reviewer, this is a daunting quote to discover on only the second page

into this work. However, it does adumbrate both the breadth of Bennett’s ambition and the

convoluted literary style he will use in pursuing his analytical ends.

The “pasts beyond memory” of the title are those deep-time pre-historic geological,

biological, and cultural pasts unearthed by the historical sciences throughout the 19th century

and then represented to the public through the exhibits and programs of “evolutionary

museums”. Indeed the theoretical and methodological synthesis of archeology, paleontology,

geology, and anthropology was the incubator for these evolutionary museums. The particular

way these sciences read and represented the past through the close examination of the thing itself

distinguished them from the prior readings of the past that were based on literary and oral

traditions. For Bennett, this new tangible, concrete, temporal narrative for both cultural and

natural development was simultaneously a scientific and social discourse. Scientifically, the

naming, classifying, and ordering protocols of the historical sciences generated a progressive,

accumulative, incrementally developing past with no radical or revolutionary leaps. Using the

core concepts of type and sequence, the deep past was represented in evolutionary museums as

treeing upward from simple to complex; from the primitive to the civilized. In Bennett’s view,

this evolutionary scientific discourse spawned the “archeological self”; a stratified self with

lingering remnants of the wild and primitive other folded within the civilized self. It is here that

the social discourse appropriates the concepts and practices of evolutionary science and its

Museum Management and Curatorship 20 (2005) 365–371

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“memory-machine” museums, linking these scientific concepts and practices to new social

strategies for cultural governance, both within the “changing practices and priorities of liberal

forms of government” and within the “practices of government in colonial relationships between

occupying and indigenous populations.”

The theoretical framework Bennett deploys to approach these questions of the changing role

and power relationships between liberal and colonial governmental practices and citizens in the

late 19th century is Michel Foucault’s concept of “governmentality”. With this concept in tow,

Bennett analyses the ways in which “distinctive relations of power are constituted in and by the

exercise of specific forms of knowledge and expertise, and on the ways in which these give rise

to specific mechanisms, techniques, technologies for shaping thought, feelings, perceptions, and

behavior” (p. 5). This look at the details and particularities of specific disciplinary practices

relocates power in the traditional analytical critique of museums. Most deconstructive analyses

of museums look behind museum policy and practice for the lurking power relationships to be

unmasked as the hidden legitimators of existing power structures and social relationships. The

“analytics of government” in Bennett’s framework looks at and within those mundane

institutional practices for the overt forms of power embedded there. In other words, Bennett

wishes to do for museums what Michel Foucault did for asylums and prisons. To do this, Bennett

takes a close look at the links between the economic and social goals of new liberalism in both

western and colonial contexts and the ideas and practices of evolutionary museums.

A key concept for the new liberalism at the end of the 19th century (versus the laissez faire

liberalism of the first half of the century) was the increased role and engagement of the

government in shaping the social lives and aspirations of citizens. For Bennett, the evolutionary

museum’s representation of the past as progressive and cumulative, along with the concepts of

the mastery over nature, the repression of the primitive both within the civilized self and within

the colonial other, and the legitimating and naturalizing of racial and cultural hierarchies,

directly served the political and economic goals of new liberalism. In addition, these

representations in evolutionary museums were part of a matrix of public culture that served to

justify and legitimate colonial policy and governmental practice. Other goals of the new

liberalism that Bennett links to evolutionary museum practice included the empowering of the

creative individual, the education of the working classes, the progressive self-improvement of

the individual at all class levels, and the disciplining and control of the body. Having established

both the theoretical framework and the historical link between new liberalism and the concepts

and practices of evolutionary museums, Bennett proceeds to historicize and localize this

connection by looking at museum case studies from Britain, Australia, and the United States

(with a brief foray into Germany for contrast).

This trip to the museum archive allows Bennett the theoretical opportunity to explore the role

of willful individual agents in shaping and being shaped by the dominating ideas of the time.

Whether Goode and Mason at the Smithsonian, Osburn and Boas at the American Museum of

Natural History, or Krefft and McCoy in Australia, Bennett demonstrates that museums exist in a

broad and unavoidably complex discursive environment. In this, he avoids the reductionist

temptation of positing power relations and ideology to be unidirectional, hidden behind, and

unavoidably structuring both museum practices and practitioners.

The strength and weakness of this book are identical. The breadth, scope, and complexity of

its intention allow it to generate innumerable connections and penetrations between the 19th

century museum and its social–cultural context. Each page bristles with un-followed leads and

relationships, suggesting apt pathways for students of museum history and practice to follow.

This is also the book’s frustration. The convoluted bricolage of theory and detailed archival

Book reviews / Museum Management and Curatorship 20 (2005) 365–371 367

anecdotes lack coherence and center. In a footnote early in the introduction, Bennett notes “the

sheer futility of attempts to account for the relations between museums and their visitors which

do not account for the way in which the subjectivities and capacities of those visitors are

conceived and, in part, shaped by the broader discursive environment in which museums

operate.” This is exactly what is wanting in this text. Bennett admits he takes the programmer’s

point of view. It is the stated intentions of museologists or political reformers that are presented

with no attempt to chart the actual impacts of those intentions on visitor-citizens. A more

rigorous and less selective visit to the archive would have unearthed this missing half of the

equation, especially the impacts and reactions of the colonized people to their representations in

evolutionary museums.

Still, we must be careful what we wish for. Tony Bennett is that critical theorist we longed for

a decade ago. He is on the theory-building side of the academy and museum studies. It may be up

to practioners to plumb the archive and test those theories with particular data. In the end, this

book does the service of moving museums from the intellectual margins and placing them more

centrally in the discourse of the human sciences. Museums can now take their proud place with

their institutional, genealogical kin: asylums, prisons, and churches. After 35 years in this

profession, I am totally comfortable with these relatives.

Robert Sullivan*

Associate Director Public Programs

Smithsonian Institution, 10th and Constitution Aves,

Washington, DC 20560, USA

E-mail address: sullivan@si.edu

* Tel.: C1 202 633 1203.

doi:10.1016/j.musmancur.2005.09.001

David Chittenden, Graham Farmelo and Bruce V. Lewenstein, editors. Creating

connections: Museums and the public understanding of current research (2004,

AltaMira Press) (400 pages; $35.00 USD; ISBN: 0-7591-0476-X)

In September 2003, a 4-day conference entitled “Museums, Media and the Public

Understanding of Research” was hosted by the Science Museum of Minnesota with the

financial support from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The goal of the conference was

to increase the capacity of science centres and museums to offer current science and research in

their institutions. Conference organizers were looking for about 60 participants who met the

following criteria:

† Be emerging leaders or established practitioners, who are currently involved in or initiating

efforts in presenting current research and science within museums, through media

organizations, or over the Internet.

† Able to commit reasonable pre-conference time to prepare for active involvement in the

conference and post-conference time to help disseminate conference findings.