The politics of exhibiting cultures: legacies and possibilities

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The Politics of Exhibiting Culture: Legacies and Possibilities Shelley Ruth Butler Decolonizing the Museum?

In her essay "Telling, Showing, Showing OfF Mieke Bal notes, with regard to the American Museum of Natural History, that the "museum is a product of colonialism in a postcolonial era" (1992:561). She goes on to consider whether it is possible for the museum to shift from being a nineteenth-century colonial project to a late twentieth-century educational one. This question is valid for mainstream museums generally, and it is one that this essay explores in relation to two controversial, reflexive exhibitions—Into the Heart ofAfrica, which showed at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1989 and 1990, and Miscast: Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture, which showed at the

South African National Gallery in 1996. Curated respectively by anthropologist Jeanne Cannizzo and artist Pippa Skotnes, these exhibits offer insight into the potential and inherent problems connected with critical, reflexive museology*s efforts to decolonize museums.

I conducted fieldwork in Cape Town from September 1997 to June 1998, focusing on museums and their relationship to post-apartheid spatial and cultural politics. Miscast was still very much in the air during this time, especially amongst cultural workers who were one of the main constituencies of my research. Having done previous research on Into the Heart of Africa in Toronto (see Butler 1999), Miscast became a segue for me, linking past and present research sites. In the case of both shows, a white curator attempted to re-present colonial and modernist practices of exhibiting culture and objectification in a critical light; and in both cases, the exhibits generated multiple and complex responses, while touching upon sensitive issues concerning the re-telling of traumatic histories in the settler societies of Canada and South Africa. As well, the exhibits became occasions for broader discussions about citizenship,

power relations, and identity politics in multicultural and postcolonial cities.

In this paper, I consider these two exhibitions, and responses that they engendered, in relation to a problematic dichotomy that exists in museum literature between critical and optimistic perspectives on exhibiting culture. Briefly, critical museology associates museums with a politics of domination, especially with regard to questions of how the West exhibits non-western cultures. It focuses on museum practices of collecting, classifying, and displaying material culture. In contrast, optimistic accounts of exhibiting culture focus on the role of museums in public education and in facilitating conversation between diverse and multi-cultural citizens. The first section of this paper explores this dichotomy and suggests that critical museology focuses on the politics of vision, while optimistic accounts of museums depend upon a rhetoric of voice, calling for museums to become sites for dialogue and debate. With reference to Into the Heart ofAfrica and Miscast, as well as to other related exhibitionary sites, I then offer examples of curating, performing, and viewing culture that add nuance to these ideas regarding the politics ofvision and the possibilities of dialogue. On the one hand, I explore how the politics of vision in contemporary museums potentially involve much more than objectification and distancing. Museum visitors view culture from many different subject-positions, opening up the possibility of many ways of looking at, and engaging with, exhibits. As well, the popularity of cultural performances in museums further complicates notions of objectification.

In developing these ideas about vision, I am inspired by the spirit of critical analysis that informs Edward Snow's article, "Theorizing the Male Gaze: Some Problems" (1989). Snow suggests that theories of masculine vision which focus on such issues

Museum Anthropology 23(3):74-92. Copyright Š2000 American Anthropological Association.

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1. "For Crown and Empire," installation from Into the Heart ofAfrica. Photo courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

as voyeurism, objectification, and scopophilia may be too persuasive for their own good. In stressing the power of the male gaze, theory risks becoming an "unwitting agent of the forces of surveillance it wishes to oppose" (Snow 1989:31). In response to this dilemma, Snow proposes a strategy of interpretation that focuses on the "fugitive elements" of vision (1989:31). Without denying the power of contemporary theory on the male gaze, Snow changes focus slightly; through a detailed study of Velaquez's The Rokeby Venus, he shows how this painting need not be reduced to a story of male objectification of women. Rather, Snow traces other possible trajectories of power, pleasure, and selfhood that are suggested by the Rokeby Venus's ambiguous gaze. In a similar vein, I think it important to consider the museum as a postcolonial space with diverse looking relations.

I also explore how ideals of dialogue interact with broader institutional and societal contradictions, as when democratizing initiatives co-exist

with processes of exclusion and marginalization based upon class and race (see Bhabha 1992:208, Goldberg 1993:4-6). Following this. I suggest that calls for the inclusion of new voices in museum exhibits may be overly optimistic, simplistic, and too detached from intricate power relations involved in institutional projects of decolonization and democratization. Finally, this essay does not promise an easy or exact way to trace the politics of transforming establishment museums, but it will, I hope, reveal some of the texture and complexities involved.

Silence and Conversation: Museum Theories In her narrative entitled Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991), African Canadian writer Marlene Nourbese Philip—an important critic ofInto the Heart of Africa—imagines a woman travelling alone in Africa, who confronts colonial inscriptions on the landscape and upon the peoples themselves. The woman enters a "Museum of Silence," which houses the ''many and

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sis of museums. Writing about the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, Tompkins notes: We go and look at the objects in the glass cases and at the paintings on the wall, as if by standing there we could absorb into ourselves some of the energy that flowed through the bodies of the live things represented...A museum. ..caters to the urge to absorb the life of another into one's own life. ..museums are a form of cannibalism made safe for polite society. (1990:533)

2. "Africa Room" installation from Into the Heart of Africa. Courtesy of the Royal Ontario Museum.

varied silences of different peoples" (Philip 1991:57). She recognizes the cultural artifacts on display, and challenges the curators to return them to their rightful owners. But the curators dismiss her claim: They told me the silences were best kept there where they could be labeled, annotated, dated, catalogued—"in such and such a year, this piece of silence was taken from the." You could fill in any name you wanted—when and how it was all the same. It was all there in carefully regulated, climate-controlled rooms. (1991:57) To reinforce their point, the curators remind Nourbese Philip's narrator that this museum is one of the world's wonders and a site to be proud of (1991:57). Nourbese Philip's evocation of museums strongly conveys issues relevant to contemporary critical museology. Consider, for example, the way in which Nourbese Philip's themes of alienation and appropriation are central to Jane Tompkins's analy-

Tompkins's images are echoed by Michael Ames, who names his collection of reflexive essays on museums, Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes (1992). Cannibal Tours is also an allusion to Dennis O'Rourke's (1987) film of the same title, which documents the seemingly insatiable appetite for "the primitive" of European and American tourists who travel by boat to villages in Papua, New Guinea.1 Remarkable in this film are the images of tourists aggressively photographing, filming, recording, and documenting their encounters with "the natives." It is easy to imagine the personal museums that these tourists will create at home; perhaps they are the mass market version of the private collections owned by European royalty prior to the emergence of public museums in the eighteenth and nineteenth century (see Ames 1992).

None of these representations of museums and collecting is complimentary to a cultural institution that, until a decade ago, enjoyed great prestige and authority. Rather, museums are increasingly depicted as sterile, highly controlled spaces. Moreover, the image of the collector as cannibal puts notions of the refined connoisseur and of the detached scientist in a surreal and ironic light. It is this spirit of questioning and self-examination that informs the field of critical reflexive museology, as well as exhibits such as Into the Heart ofAfrica and Miscast.2

Within these depictions of museums as silent, and silencing, it is hard to imagine a space for conversation—polite or otherwise. Yet, there is another voice in museum literature that clearly wants to talk. It is expressed, for instance, in the claim that the museum can be a "meeting ground of cultures" (Pierson Jones 1995:262). Similarly, Cannizzo expresses a hope that museums can become a "bridge for intercultural communication" (1990:97), and other commentators note that museums have the

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3. Diorama in the South African Museum, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of the South African Museum.

"raw materials" for addressing contemporary issues related to multiculturalism and transcultural processes (Apter 1995, Demissie 1995). This optimistic perspective on museums is evident in discussions concerning such issues as community consultation, sharing curatorial authority, the democratization of museums, and the promotion of respect for other cultures. In contrast to the epistemological focus of critical museology, this work is oriented toward refashioning museums in order to make them more accessible, relevant, and accountable to broader constituencies.3 A premise of this work is that museums are sites where definitions of culture and identity are articulated and asserted (Karp 1992). Moreover, museums are associated with prestige and status—they confer

value on particular notions of heritage, history, art, and taste (Ames 1992, Clifford 1991). Thus, communities are often deeply concerned with the way in which they are, or are not, represented by museums. These issues regarding the politics of representation become particularly intense in the context of contemporary multicultural and postcolonial societies.

While different in focus, these two perspectives on museums often overlap in the realm of curatorial practice. This is clear, for instance, in the curatorial approaches and goals of both Cannizzo and Skotnes. While Cannizzo is engaged with critical, reflexive museology, she also presents herself as a populist who wants to make elitist museums such as the Royal Ontario Museum accessible to a broad

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4. View of the main room ofMiscast, featuring resin body casts as well as text by Greg Dening. South African National Gallery, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Pippa Skotnes.

audience (see Butler 1999:16-19). Similarly, Skotnes conceived of Miscast foremost as a critique of western practices of exhibiting the Khoisan, and of the complicity of these practices with colonialism and genocide. But she also used Miscast to attempt to create interest in the "aesthetic and human value" of Khoisan material culture (Skotnes 1997:10). The ways in which these various goals interacted with each other, and with broader power relations and cultural politics, becomes clear below.

Post-Colonial Curatorship: The Development of Two Exhibitions In Into the Heart of Africa, curator Jeanne Cannizzo approached the objects in the ROM's African collection as an expression "not only of the world view of those who chose to make and use them, but also of those who chose to collect and exhibit them" (Cannizzo 1991:151). Thus, Into the Heart ofAfrica dealt extensively with colonial collecting and vari-

ous ways in which Africa has been represented and appropriated by others. The exhibit design included vaguely ironic displays of imperial icons, such as a Canadian officer's pith helmet and a Union Jack flag, as well as archival images of European conquest (fig. 1). There were also re-creations of a Victorian parlor displaying African artifacts, and of a "Missionary Room" that included a lantern slide show entitled "In Livingstone's Footsteps." The effect of these curatorial strategies was to immerse visitors in imperial and missionary ideology. These displays dominated the exhibition, and overshadowed a strangely uninhabited diorama of a traditional-looking Ovimbundu compound, and a final, stunning "Africa Room," where masks, textiles, ancestral figures, and musical instruments were displayed in the style of an art gallery (fig. 2). Also less memorable than the exhibit's colonial images was a small gallery of contemporary photographs of Africa. This was an attempt by Cannizzo to address

5. Main room of Miscast. South African National Gallery, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Pippa Skotnes.

the fact that museums and galleries rarely acknowledge the contemporary, heterogeneous cultural and political lives of Africans.

Reminiscent of Susan Vogel's ground-breaking exhibit Art/Artifact, which showed at the Center for African Art in New York in 1988, Into the Heart of Africa's emphasis upon the contingency and artifice of exhibiting culture contrasts with the ideology of transparent representation that dominates natural history and anthropological museums. Following a key insight of reflexive museology, Into the Heart of Africa demonstrated that exhibits are never neutral, and that they are informed by the cultural, historical, institutional, and political contexts of the people who make them (Lavine and Karp 1991).

Miscast followed a similar curatorial strategy by offering a critique ofwestern practices of exhibiting the Khoisan. Specifically, Miscast responded to the famous "Bushman" diorama located at the South African Museum in Cape Town (fig. 3).4 This

natural history museum is located in the old colonial precinct of the city, near the South African Cultural History Museum, Parliament, and the South African National Gallery (where Miscast showed). The diorama depicts a nineteenth-century encampment of hunter-gatherers, and is constructed by using plaster casts made in the early 1900s in Cape Town. Aesthetically, the display evokes a sense of both life and death. Its realism makes the people depicted seem very present; on the other hand, the display is eerily quiet and still, just wax after all. Since this is a natural history museum, the diorama is situated alongside exhibits of fossils, skeletons of dinosaurs and whales, and animal and plant specimens. Implicitly, the exhibit reinforces popular stereotypes of "the primitive" as being prehistoric and unchanging, and as being linked to animality and nature, as opposed to culture and history. As Skotnes explains, the diorama represents Bushmen as "cast out of time. out of poli-

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tics and out of history—miscast" (1996:16). This museological representation of the Khoisan is linked to European travel writing that "deterritorializes" indigenous peoples, by representing them as having no significant economic, historical and cultural relationships with their landscape (see Pratt 1992:51). In contrast, European and settler history is housed in the Cultural History Museum, which immediately suggests inclusion in the body politic.5 Skotnes conceptualized Miscast as an exhibit that would present relational histories. As she writes, Miscast is not, strictly speaking, about "Bushmen". The exhibition is a critical and visual exploration of the term "Bushman" and the various relationships that gave rise to it. These relationships were conducted on many levels, between strangers and indigenes, between colonists and resistance fighters, between researchers and their objects, and, more rarely, between individuals whose mutual respect for each other brought about mutual understanding. (Skotnes 1996:17) To evoke these relationships, Skotnes created a provocative installation that included displays of casts of body parts of Khoisan mounted on pedestals, which suggested a disarticulated, dismembered version of a realist diorama. Surrounding the installation were fragments of the following text by Greg Dening, printed in bold letters: There is no Native past without the Stranger, no Stranger without the Native ... Nor can anyone speak just for the one, just for the other.

There is no escape from the politics of our knowledge, but that politics is not in the past.

That politics is in the present (figs. 4 and 5).6 As with Into the Heart of Africa, Miscast displayed in a prominent fashion artifacts and images of colonial control and violence. Picture a stack of rifles, photos of colonial brutality, images of naked native bodies on public display, boxes representing colonial archives with labels such as "Human Remains. Not Suitable for Display," and displays of medical and scientific instruments used to measure and codify racial difference. As counterpoints to these evocations of forms of colonial violence, there was a series of cases displaying historical examples of Khoisan material culture. The cases were named after individual Khoisan men and women, and after

scholar Lucy Lloyd who, during the mid-nineteenth century, recorded Khoisan voices in a remarkable archive. A second resource room included copies of Khoisan rock paintings, contemporary photographs of the Khoisan by Paul Weinberg, as well as a vinyl floor covered in a montage of photographs, documents, and newspaper clippings related to the colonization and exhibition of the Khoisan (fig. 6).

Cameras and mirrors were also included, in a further effort to make viewers feel self-conscious, and even complicit, in the histories represented (Skotnes 1997:15).

A major goal for Skotnes was to bring her concerns about genocide against the Khoisan into the public consciousness. She is correct, I think, in noting that the aura of innocence that surrounds the Bushman diorama at the South Africa Museum effectively erases this history. As Skotnes states, the diorama offers a "seductive image of primitive innocence [that] has made it possible, even excusable, for the public and the government to never have to confront the crueler, harsher realities that exist beyond its horizon" (1997:19).

Skotnes also wanted to challenge the traditional division that exists between museum collections accessible only to researchers and curators, and what is presented to the public; her goal was to place the archive and the storeroom in the public domain. This raised sensitive issues since, included in museum collections in Europe and Africa are human remains such as heads of Khoisan, and casts and photographs of male and female genitals. In fact, Skotnes did not receive permission to display the heads. And despite concerns about the public display of representations of nudity raised by people interested in her project, Skotnes chose to proceed with this aspect of Miscast. Finally, Skotnes notes her interest in attracting diverse viewers to Miscast, and in generating interest in the "aesthetic and human value" (1997:10) inherent in Bushmen artifacts.

While I have called Into the Heart ofAfrica and Miscast postcolonial in order to stress the way in which both exhibitions responded to colonial legacies, it is important to note that each was also influenced by theories of representation associated with postmodernism. In the case ofInto the Heart ofAfrica, Cannizzo's use of quotation ntarks to highlight suspect words such as "dark continent" and "spoils of war" mirrored postmodernism's culture of reflexivity that can be characterized as a "complicitous

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6. The second room of Miscast. South African National Gallery, Cape Town. Photo courtesy of Pippa Skotnes.

critique" (Hutcheon 1989:2). In re-presenting colonial vocabularies and images, Cannizzo's goal was to challenge them, but she may also have reinforced their authority. Visitors read the exhibit in different ways, and much depended upon their points of view and subject-positions. I return to this below. In a similar vein, Skotnes' re-presentation of images of Khoisan nudity was contentious, and provoked supportive, oppositional, and ambivalent responses. It is by paying attention to these kinds of divergent readings of each exhibition that theories of the politics of vision can become more nuanced, and enable an exploration of identity politics that are at once personal and political.

Exhibiting, Performing, and Viewing Culture: Other Politics and Poetics Responses to Into the Heart of Africa and to Miscast cannot be characterized as a debate between two monolithic sides. Nor did responses follow obvious racial or political lines. This heterogeneity suggests the complexity involved in producing critical exhibitions in mainstream establishment museums and galleries.

Both Into the Heart of Africa and Miscast received many positive reviews by visitors and critics who gained an awareness of forms of colonial domination. For instance, in Toronto, journalist Christopher Hume wrote: "More than any show I can recall,

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this one dealt openly and honestly with the 'cultural arrogance'—these are the words used in the display—of our well-intentioned but misguided ancestors" (1990). And in Cape Town, archeologist Paul Lane describes how in viewing Miscast, he experienced the "recontextualization of [his] professional 'culture,' and all the mixed emotions of pain, disbelief and denial that can accompany an encounter with another's view of one's identity" (1996:5).

These comments suggest that white spectators need not necessarily reproduce dominant looking relations. In fact, Lane is probably an "ideal" viewer of Miscast. As Patricia Davison, Assistant Director of the South African Museum explains, the goal of Miscast was to "set up a dialogue, as it were, with the diorama" (1996:11). In this case, we see how "dialogues" in museum spaces may be interior ones, generated by the "inner speech that accompanies [gallery] spectatorship" (Burgin in Bhabha and Burgin 1994:455). This is not surprising when we consider that museums are generally hushed spaces, where one is as likely to hear the echo of footsteps as the echo of other voices.

However, many viewers of both Into the Heart of Africa and Miscast, missed the curators' critical intentions. For instance, while visiting Into the Heart of Africa, I was intrigued by the way in which two elderly (white) women responded to the reconstruction of the Victorian sitting room that featured a prominent display of African weapons. While Cannizzo sought to communicate something about the life histories or trajectories of the weapons, these women were admiring and identifying with the Victorian furniture. This is a form of "imperialist nostalgia," in which warm sentiment for an elegant era masks relations of domination (Rosaldo 1989).

Significantly, this problem is also evident at Colonial Williamsburg, a vast living-history museum that reconstructs the capital of Virginia during the eighteenth century. Since the late 1970s, Colonial Williamsburg has engaged in efforts to include previously excluded histories of women, working classes, and African-Americans in its narratives and presentations of the past. However, Eric Gable and Richard Handler note how one satisfied visitor reports that what she most enjoys at the site is the service, such as when a waiter unobtrusively helps her put sugar in her coffee. In other words, it is a "black waiter's silent skill"—not revisionist public

history—that makes the site special for this visitor (Gable and Handler 1996:573).

These anecdotes suggest that viewers will be viewers, interpreting exhibitions as they please. Is there a point to critical curating and pedagogy if this is the case? My response is yes, for I think it useful to acknowledge that curating, like teaching, should never be an authoritative exercise that imposes views on others. It is also important to recognize that curating, like teaching, is never value-free, and some critical approaches (whether in the classroom or the museum) are more compelling and stronger than others. Stronger exhibits will have more impact on visitors; but, in any exhibition, curators cannot expect to receive uniform responses. Audiences are heterogeneous, and spectatorship is both individual and highly contextual.

A number of visitors to Miscast also appeared to miss Skotnes' reflexive agenda. In particular, some viewers longed for a traditional diorama-style exhibit that would depict the Khoisan as pristine hunter-gatherers. For example, one woman stated that she wanted to see "bushmen in their natural environment" (Robins 1996). She would perhaps agree with the visitor in Toronto who thanked the Royal Ontario Museum for a lovely show on "primitive Africa" (Crean 1991:26). Why do so many people desire images of an "authentic" Africa, which is understood as being pristine and "natural"? First, these expectations reflect, I think, the enduring presence of colonial stereotypes and primitivist tropes in public visual culture. Think of films such as The Gods Must Be Crazy> fashion shows that bring "the tribal" to Fifth Avenue, and Benetton billboards hovering over cityscapes. It is also not surprising that audiences would expect such images in exhibitions given that museums are typically thought of as institutions that represent different cultural worlds in an authoritative and celebratory manner. In the case of classic ethnographic displays, the diorama has a special appeal since it appears to offer visitors unmediated access to another "slice of life" inserted into the museum (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998:20). The museum diorama constructs static representations of cultural difference in a very powerful (and even compelling) way. Consider the "confession" of African art historian Sidney Kasfir with regard to the diorama at the South African Museum:

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Like mannequins from some fashion show of an ideal South African past, they are both sumptuous in their beads, textiles, baskets, and weapons, and truly timeless. Utterly ahistorical and fictionalized, yes, but this is the kind of image everyone (including their present-day descendants, the museum-going public, the government, and this author) frankly loves. (1997:8) I will return to this important point about the relationship of descendants of the Khoisan to the diorama and to Miscast below. First, I want to further consider the visual and dialogic politics of the diorama.

In his paper The World as Exhibition," Timothy Mitchell describes Orientalist Sylvestre de Sacy*s desire to establish a splendid museum where "students would be able to feel transported as if by enchantment into the midst of, say, a Mongolian tribe or of the Chinese race, whichever he might have made the object of his studies" (Mitchell 1989:220). De Sacy*s writings reveal an important paradox in the process of objectification. On the one hand, the Westerner views the other from close proximity. But at the same time, a distance is constructed—the other is fixed as a silent object of the scholar's studies. It is this distance that allows museum visitors to view others from a voyeuristic, authoritative, and privileged position of power. The viewer sees, but is not seen.

An extreme example of this process of objectification is the practice of exhibiting people, which was a common spectacle at nineteenth and early twentieth-century exhibitions. A famous case is that of Saartje Baartman, a Khoi woman who was exhibited in England and France during the early 1800s, and who became known as the Hottentot Venus. Naturalists, pathologists, travellers, and popular and aristocratic audiences were fascinated by Baartman's protruding buttocks, which were interpreted as empirical proof of the non-unity of mankind, as well as an indication of the hypersexuality of women (Gilman 1985:85-9). When she died in 1815, Baartman became the object of pathologist Georges Cuvier's anatomical studies and, until recently, was displayed at the Muse*e de l'Homme in Paris, reduced to a collection of sexual parts.

Baartman's story illustrates Ludmilla Jordanova's point that wax body molds were often sexualized, despite claims that the figures offered an unmediated "scientific" vision of the other (1989:34).

Audience desires to encounter "the primitive* are most directly exploited by safaris, where visitors pay to view "traditional" cultures in "natural settings" (Little 1991). At Kagga Kamma Park in South Africa, a "meeting ground" is created, where San sit in a semi-circle and "visit" with the tourists.

This encounter is highly mediated by the resident anthropologist, but tourists leave with the feeling of having been honored guests of the San (Buntman 1996:277). Similarly, at Mayers Ranch in Kenya, it is clear that the white owners who curate the site are strict gatekeepers who, for instance, would not allow anthropologists to see the Maasi (see Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994:462). The lines between coercion and consent are difficult to untangle at these exhibitionary sites where indigenous peoples'livelihood is derived from serving the desires of tourists. Given the broad unequal power relations of these situations, I am reminded of the refrain that haunts Suzan Lori-Parks's play about Saartje Baartman, entitled Venus (1996). As her life as an exhibit takes form, Saartje continually asks the entrepreneurs and doctors who control her destiny the question: "Do I have a choice?" She never receives an answer.

In fact, residents from Kagga Kamma came to the opening of Miscast in traditional dress, creating the sort of photo-op the media loves. The Johannesburg Mail and Guardian showed a photo of a Khoisan woman from Kagga Kamma standing with her son on the floor montage, while two other visitors speak in the background; the caption reads, "Crossing paths: The exhibition provides a meeting place" (Roussouw 1996). This caption reveals the Utopian ideals of dialogue discussed above.

The Mail and Guardian photo is reminiscent of an anecdote offered by Fred Myers in his description of the experience of two Australian Aboriginal painters, Michael Nelson and Billy Stockman, who spent two days constructing a sandpainting at the Asia Society Gallery in New York in 1988. While Myers's account of the sandpainting performance stresses the way in which the artists found the experience empowering, there were moments when the Aboriginal men were turned into "exotic sign vehicles," such as when the New York Times photographer "shot" them with their faces painted, standing outside a zoo and interacting with frightened children (1994:688).

Museums, too, are quick to use exotic images for the sake of advertising. As they compete with other

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exhibitionary sites for audiences, and with education systems for public funding, many museums are becoming hybrid institutions, and crossing the formerly separate domains of public education, shopping, tourism, and entertainment.7 These tensions are evident, for instance, in the way in which Into the Heart of Africa was advertised. The promotional image was a picture of an unnamed female dancer from Zaire, photographed by a Canadian missionary sometime before 1930. The woman's face is painted white on one side, and her expression is poignant. She looks "traditional," in the sense that she wears a grass skirt and beads, and her body has scarification marks. A cropped version of this image was sent as a postcard to Equinox readers, with the following "handwritten" invitation, to come to the ROM: Have you ever wondered what it must have been like to explore unknown Africa over 100 years ago? Find out—take a journey INTO THE HEART OF AFRICA, a special exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum from November 16, 1989 to July 29, 1990, highlighting the collections made by Canadian military men and missionaries.

As you travel INTO THE HEART OF AFRICA, you'll visit a village compound, hear traditional African music and follow "In Livingstone's Footsteps" with a narrated lantern-show.

I hope you'll join us for INTO THE HEART OF AFRICA—a celebration of the vitality of Africa's many peoples and cultures!

Sincerely, Dr. Jeanne Cannizzo Curator It goes without saying that the Africa being advertised here is untouched by colonial and post-colonial politics. Rather, this invitation mimics the rhetoric of safari brochures that present Africa as a mysterious destination, waiting to be discovered.

This tendency for museums and the media to highlight the exotic undermines the idea of museums as being spaces for critical engagement and dialogue. In his article "The Third Space," Homi Bhabha describes how the "sign of the 'cultured' or the 'civilized' attitude is the ability to appreciate cultures as a kind of musde imaginaire; as though one should be able to collect and appreciate them"

(1992:208). But, as Bhabha shows, this focus on cultural diversity occurs in lieu of a recognition of histories of dispossession, difference, and domination. In a similar vein, Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins (1993:59-61) show how "timeless" values of universalism and humanism inform the popular travel magazine National Geographic, which might be seen as a portable museum.

Ironically, many critics of Into the Heart of Africa appeared to reject Cannizzo's reflexive strategy and demand a celebratory exhibition about Africa.

This was especially evident in the discourse of the Coalition for the Truth About Africa (CFTA), a group of protestors ofInto the Heart of Africa made up largely of African Canadians. Expressing his disappointment with the exhibit, Ras Rico, a founder of the CFTA, told me that "Cannizzo did not even get close to the heart of Africa." The following excerpt from a pamphlet produced by the CFTA offers insight into the gap between Cannizzo's curatorial intentions and the expectations of a number of visitors to the ROM: The ROM is currently presenting an exhibit entitled "Into the Heart of Africa." An exhibit, which according to the ROM, is a portrayal of African history. Yet the exhibit represents a clear and concise attempt to mislead the public and to further tarnish the image of Africa and African people.

The entire world, museums, curators, et al. have become aware of the immense contributions made by Africa, and by people of African heritage to humanity. These gifts have been made from the dawn of time in every area of creativity—in the art of action and in the sphere of thought. These contributions have continued even under situations of the gravest duress which Africa, and people of African descent have experienced in the last five hundred years.

Without any doubt, the ROM must be aware of these experiences and contributions of Africa, and Africans. How then, can the ROM carry such trite and condescending texts as found within this exhibit?

It is hardly surprising that many members of the CFTA expected a different kind of exhibition than Cannizzo offered, for promotion of Into the Heart of Africa undermined its reflexive approach to exhibiting culture. The invitation discussed above, as well as brochures for Into the Heart ofAf-

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rica, placed as much emphasis on the promise of discovering the vitality of African cultures as on the exhibit's historical consideration of colonialism and collecting. Yet, as noted earlier, the exhibition was largely an exploration of, and immersion in, colonial culture.

It is not clear exactly how much control Cannizzo had over aspects ofInto the Heart of Africa related to its promotion. But Cannizzo defended the promotional image, stating that it was "not the more predictable *warrior' or 'chief of the popular mind, nor an image of a starving or destitute refugee most familiar from television news coverage of recurrent famines in Africa" (1991:152). This statement reveals Cannizzo's intellectual and ethical concern with stereotypes and the misrepresentation of Africa. However, her awareness of the symbolic violence of stereotypes of Africans seems limited, for she does not recognize the gendered political implications of the exotic photo used to promote her exhibition. This point is related to a broader one, which is simply that Cannizzo did not always appreciate the way in which aspects of her exhibit reproduced colonial objectification (see Butler 1999:39-40).

None of this was helped by the fact that Cannizzo and the ROM made very little effort to seek advice, ideas, and feedback from members of the African Canadian community and other people who might be considered to be stakeholders in an exhibit like Into the Heart of Africa. In fact, it was only after a tense reception for leaders of the black community that the ROM made any effort to listen to feedback from community critics. The ROM then acted in a rather bureaucratic fashion and hired Woods Gordon Management Consultants to organize focus groups to discuss the exhibit brochure and the marketing of the exhibit. In the end, the ROM succeeded only in creating a consultation process that felt like eleventh-hour damage control.

This reaction suggests that a consultation process can easily be perceived, or used, as a disciplinary tool. In this sense, strategies of community consultation and sharing curatorial authority can be complicated in practice, and shift easily toward a politics of containment and paternalism.

Critics of exhibitions may also refuse inclusion, refusing to be brought into the fold. Consider, for instance, the case of Miscast. While Miscast did not provoke a sustained controversy in the way that Into the Heart of Africa did, there was a forum mark-

ing the opening of the exhibition. It generated discussion between Skotnes and participants and, significantly, between different groups of people who, in the post-apartheid era, identify themselves as descendants of South Africa's indigenous peoples.

Yvette Abrahams, a Ph.D. student in History at the University of Cape Town and a member of the IHurikamma Cultural Movement, describes her experience of the event: My people had left little for me to say, so all I wanted to do was to ask Skotnes to remove the casts. I could hardly believe my ears when I heard her begin to enumerate reasons why she could not. Instead she offered to add the recording of our protests to the exhibition. I could not believe what Skotnes had just said. Our deepest emotions were to be turned into instant art. The response to our attempt at empowerment was to immediately disempower us by, yet again, making us part of the objects on exhibit. (Abrahams 1996:15) Interestingly, Abrahams did, up to a certain point, sympathize with Skotnes. As Abrahams explains, "Let me cross the bridge for a moment. As an academic I strongly resent any attempt to get me to change my finished work. I could see Skotnes' point of view" (1996:15). This comment suggests the complexity and contextual nature of individual spectatorship. This predicament is well described

by Dorinne Kondo who, in her ethnography Crafting Selves, suggests that "conflicts, ambiguities, and multiplicities in interpretation, are not simply associated with different positionings in society...but exist within a 'single' self (1990:45).

Abrahams's ultimate concern was with her sense that Miscast victimized the Khoisan. The display of casts, nudity, and images of colonial humiliation were deeply sensitive issues for descendants of the Khoisan, reinforcing feelings of shame and dishonor. Consider the following statement issued by the people of Schmidtsdrift, Namibia: Showing these naked bodies is a very, very bad thing. You get many women from other tribes who also look like that. Why should they have shown our bodies without respect? Do they not know that it is like insulting us if they do that?8 Abrahams situated these concerns in the context of broader power relations. Writing about the process of producing academic work, Abrahams noted that

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many people, from examiners to readers to editors, do in fact intervene to change one's work.

Not coincidentally, those people are almost overwhelmingly white. Myself, I must allow such interventions to weigh less with me than the responses to my work of my research subjects. Not coincidentally those people are all African. In short, the finished work of any academic is all about power. (1996:16) Indeed, some critics of Miscast viewed it as an academic exercise, too detached from community concerns. Rustum Kozain, a student in the Department of English at the University of Cape Town called Miscasfs display of photographs of scholars involved with the Khoisan a "faddish lip service to post-modern notions of self-aware representations" (1996:14). Kozain then wondered whether Skotnes' "ironisation of representation could have been politically interesting and not fashion-driven" (1996:14). This raises the larger point about whether Miscast was a strong critical exhibition, a question to which I will return below.

Protestors' readings of Into the Heart of Africa were also highly contextual, and more nuanced than media representations of the exhibit's controversy would have us believe. Many members of the CFTA did understand and appreciate Cannizzo's critical intentions. However an intellectual understanding ofInto the Heart of Africa did not diminish the hurt many people experienced in viewing the exhibit. For instance, a local curator who was marginally associated with the CFTA stated that she found the exhibit to be both successful and "visually horrifying." Another woman made a distinction between academic interests and public responsibilities, noting her concern that a child might not understand reflexive aspects of Into the Heart ofAfrica. She described to me how a child might experience the exhibit's Military Hall: People are more influenced by visual images, you know. So when you enter the museum and you see Lord Beresford piercing the heart of a Zulu soldier, and then beside it another picture of Zulu soldiers and these soldiers are described as wild savages, or something like that—that's what frustrated me. And in the same chamber you see a map titled "Darkest Africa," in quotes of course. Well I'd say that when a ten-year-old child goes into "Darkest Africa"—it's supposed to be ironic, you know because it's in quotes—but it

doesn't work, it has failed. Because what that does, all those images and pictures and maps, is just to reinforce in people the old stereotype of Africa the wild, savage place.

Finally, Into the Heart ofAfrica and Miscast offended many people whom curators Cannizzo and Skotnes surely hoped would be receptive to their exhibitions. This can be traced, I think, to the fact that both Cannizzo and Skotnes seemed to implicitly conceive of their audience as being white. As has been discussed, a major goal for both curators was to offer visitors a critical education about colonialism.

Thus, a brochure for Into the Heart ofAfrica invited viewers to explore a "turbulent but little-known period in history when Canada participated in Britain's efforts to colonize and convert African nations." However, as Marlene Nourbese Philip points out, many African Canadians experience colonialism and its legacies in a "painfully intimate way" (1991). It is not a subject distant from everyday concerns and experiences.

A similar logic can be seen in Skotnes' perspective on her exhibition. As mentioned earlier, the act of walking over afloorcovered with colonial images of the Khoisan was intended to create a sense of complicity amongst museum visitors. But surely a curator could not expect descendants of the Khoisan to respond to the installation in this way. As members of the IHurikamma Cultural Movement stated: "the exhibition is obviously aimed at white people.

We do not need to be reminded of the humiliation we have suffered, nor do we need to travel to the National Gallery to discover it." Skotnes was in fact aware of the sensitivity of displaying nudity, but she states that she never heard any "unequivocal arguments as to why some things were acceptable for display and others not" (1997:10). In this sense Skotnes defended her curatorial authority and artistic freedom.

One potentially problematic aspect of Miscast was Skotnes' strong identification with Lucy Lloyd's humanist project. This was evident in the design of the exhibition, especially in terms of its points of emphasis. For example, the case dedicated to Lucy Lloyd was larger than the twelve others dedicated to individual Khoisan. In this way, Skotnes presented Lloyd as a heroic figure, leaving unexamined other questions relating to the politics of white scholars who work within contexts of unequal power relations. Moreover, in a subtle and

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personal fashion, Skotnes used Christian iconography to evoke a sense of the Khoisan and Lloyd as partaking in a last supper. As she explains, the collection of thirteen cases was intended to evoke a "symbolic last supper in which individuals have been sacrificed in the interests of pervasive displays of a collective racial type" (Skotnes 1997:12).

Skotnes did include more critical interpretations of Christianity's role in Africa; for instance, a grey brick structure at the centre of the main room was meant to evoke "fort, jail and tomb as well as a church" (Skotnes 1997: 12). However, I agree with Shannon Jackson and Steven Robins (forthcoming), who suggest that Skotnes' identification with Lloyd's humanitarianism undermines an exhibit whose intent is to critique colonialism and related cultural institutions such as the Church. In any case, this Christian subtext to Miscast was largely unnoticed by visitors, or, if it was remarked upon, it was not seen as problematic. This may be related to the fact that many people who were previously classified "coloured" by the apartheid government, and who identified with Miscast's story, are deeply Christian. In any case, and to Skotnes' credit, her response to criticism was not nearly as defensive as that of Cannizzo and the ROM (see Butler 1999).

It is also important to note that responses from communities that have a stake in particular exhibits are often as diverse as the communities themselves. Responses to Miscast were also often ambivalent and contradictory. Consider the following statement presented by the people of Schmidtsdrift, Namibia: To show these things here is just as bad as the people who did those things long ago. It is continuing the bad thing...We are not angry with the people who are showing us these things, but with the people who have done it to us.

Perhaps the most important aspect of this statement followed: "The bad thing is, this is still happening to some of our people, even today."

This comment draws attention to the way in which the legacy of colonialism informs post-apartheid South Africa in profound ways. Descendants of the Khoisan are severely impoverished and marginalized, and cultural claims to land are just beginning to emerge as these people organize to reclaim their indigenous roots. (Their predicament is further complicated by their role in the South African Defense Forces during the apartheid era.) In

fact many descendants of the Khoisan appreciated the visibility that Miscast gave to their struggle. As Hunter Sixpence of the Kuru Development Fund in Botswana said with regard to the exhibition, Although we are shocked and it is painful, we think it is good that people should see it. It strengthens our young people to stand up. This should never happen again.

For some groups from the Southern African region, the opening of Miscast provided an opportunity to create new political networks and to make public statements about their concerns. For instance, a representative of the group from Kagga Kamma stated: We are very grateful to those who provided this opportunity for the Bushmen from different places to meet each other. We appreciate it. We wish to preserve our language and would like to meet these people again.

We would greatly appreciate a piece of land where we can bring up our children in their tradition. Kagga Kamma is the place where we earn a living, and it is not our home.

This statement is interesting for the way in which it reveals something of the parameters of these peoples' relationship with Kagga Kamma, where they live and perform for tourists, doing what they call "Bushmen work" (Whyte 1985:34). Significantly, people from Kagga Kamma also express a desire to establish an independent tourist venture which likely will still present images of the Bushmen as traditional and close to nature (Whyte 1985:52). The point is to gain control over such cultural productions and performances, and over the money that flows from them.

The Kagga Kamma example raises a broader point, which is that independent projects of self-exhibition can present opportunities to critique and shift dominant looking relations in powerful ways. Consider, for example, Ojibwe artist Rebecca Belmore's protest against The Spirit Sings: Artistic Traditions of Canada's First Peoples, a major exhibit that showed at the Glenbow Museum in Calgary during the 1988 Winter Olympic Games.

Boycotts of this exhibit focused on the fact that it was sponsored by Shell Canada, a major drilling presence in an area where the Lubicon Lake Cree continue to negotiate land rights.

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As the Olympic torch was carried through Thunder Bay, Ontario, Belmore sat silently inside a large frame, which was labelled "Artifact #67 IB 1988" (#67 IB is the Ontario Liquor Control Board's product number for a brand of inexpensive wine) (Fisher 1993/94:31). In this way, Belmore used exhibiting conventions to point to the irony of celebrating native heritage while ignoring the contemporary dispossession of native peoples. Her strategy is relevant to Johannes Fabian's idea that the "refusal of coevalness" can be an "act of liberation" (1983:154). By framing herself as an artifact, Belmore creates a position of autonomy which is premised not on dialogue, but rather upon a "refusal of coevalness." Silence and separation become strategies for condemning mainstream society's ignorance of the social and economic conditions of contemporary native peoples.

A particularly strong appropriation of western traditions of colonial collecting is offered by performance artists Coco Fusco and Guillermo GomezPena in their piece entitled Two Undiscovered Amerindians, which travelled to museums in Chicago, New York, London, Madrid, Buenos Aires, and Sydney in 1992. The performance was staged as a counter-commemoration to Columbus Quincentenary Celebrations, and was a part of a broad counter-cultural event called The Year ofthe White Bear. A video, The Couple in the Cage: A Guatinaui Odyssey,

by Coco Fusco and Paul Heredia, documents Two Undiscovered Amerindians. In the performance, Fusco and Gomez-Pena are displayed in a cage as a special exhibit of natives who have just been discovered and captured by Westerners. They speak an unknown language and the style of their clothing and accessories might be described as postmodern native (picture "tribal" motifs jumbled with TV, sunglasses, and a laptop computer). The parody of western practices of collecting and classifying others proved to be both a success and a failure. A surprising number of visitors took the exhibit seriously and reacted in a variety of ways, ranging from condescension and amusement to outrage, hurt, and shame. Thus, the performance may have pushed some visitors to think critically about the cruelty of objectifying others. But for some, the parody was missed, and dominant looking relations were reproduced (Mannheim in Behar and Mannheim 1995:126). This mixed outcome is suggestive of both the enduring force of colonial looking relations, and the small cracks that can be opened to destabilize them.

Even conventional exhibitions of cultural difference may have more diverse effects than theories of objectification, exploitation, and commodification recognize. Consider, for instance, Fred Myers's description of the experiences of Aboriginal painters Michael Nelson and Billy Stockman, mentioned earlier, during their painting demonstration at Asia Society Gallery. Their performance was linked to an exhibition entitled Dreamings: The Art of Aboriginal Australia. The painters sat on a raised stage where, after brief introductions by anthropologist Chris Anderson and the director of performances at the gallery, they spent the afternoon painting.

Some 700 visitors watched the artists during the two-day period. The sandpainting ritual was adapted for the gallery in various ways; for example, the artists worked in silence, even though in their home community the event is social and involves plenty of casual talking. Myers notes that one visitor complained that the performers were spatially separated from the audience, and that questions were answered by anthropologists rather than by the artists, who did not speak. The visitor felt that the event was "like a diorama" (Myers 1994:687). Clearly, the visitor feared that the Aboriginal artists were being rendered passive, like so many artifacts behind glass.9 But this was not the case. In fact, Nelson and Stockman asked the anthropologists to answer the audience's questions.

Moreover, Myers shows that the artists viewed the cultural event as personally empowering, as well as an opportunity to communicate aspects of their cultural identity to a broad audience.

In this situation, the audience's gaze was experienced not as subjection, but as "authentication" (Myers 1994:694). Thus, performance can offer the opportunity to gain cultural recognition by becoming visible on a prestigious stage. Protests outside museums have the similar effect of making visible (and audible) concerns of minority and marginalized communities. Here, vision becomes a medium of engagement, rather than one of objectification. We begin, too, to recognize agency in the context of inequality. Protests outside of museums can also be thought of in this light; weekly demonstrations against Into the Heart of Africa and the ROM certainly brought issues such as police brutality and marginalization of blacks in Canadian cultural institutions into the public domain.

Even in sites that cater to nostalgia for empire—such as Mayers Ranch in Kenya—visitors

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may experience unexpected ideological and emotional tensions. At Mayers Ranch, visitors describe watching Maassai dance performances which they find "provocative and erotic" (Bruner and Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1994:452). Particularly in the case of cultural performances, the "dialectic of the mutual gaze" (Jay 1994:11) cannot be ignored.

There are subtle forms of engagement between cultural producers and consumers that outwit a politics of objectification, as well as simple notions of dialogue. But these forms of engagement are often domesticated. In nineteenth- century England, for example, the fascination shown by the bourgeois for slums and sanitation was seen to be "unsafe." As a remedy for the "ambivalence of the gaze," physical contact with the poor was increasingly regulated (Stallybrass and White 1986:135). Traditional museums also regulate touch, but this does not mean that visitors are untouched by their experiences.

The experience of viewing other worlds risks voyeurism, but other responses such as a deep regard for other aesthetic forms and life ways, and pure wonder, may also be experienced (Greenblatt 1991:53, Jay 1994:140, Lutz and Collins 1993:260).

Perhaps this is one reason why so many of us continue to enjoy museums.

Yet there is always room for improvement.

Based on Into the Heart of Africa and Miscast, I would argue that there is a role for reflexive, critical exhibits in transforming mainstream museums.

But I wonder how each exhibit discussed here may have been different had the curators worked with a sense of a broader constituency. For audiences are diverse, and once this becomes a deeper part of curators' and academics' conscience, exhibitions that provide a wider range of reflexive, critical, and ironic moments can be developed. Perhaps there are very different ways—including new aesthetics and exhibition strategies—to go about deconstructing dominant museums. Surely, the experience of viewing critical, reflexive exhibitions should not be alienating for people who have personal and political ties with the histories of objectification and exclusion carried out by the very institutions we seek to transform.

Acknowledgments

My research in South Africa in 1997-98 was funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC), the Royal In-

stitute of Anthropology in Great Britain and Ireland, and York University. Research in Toronto in 1992 was funded by an Ontario Graduate Scholarship and by York University. I am grateful to Kenneth Little, Margaret Rodman, Daniel Yon, and Norman Rawin for their involvement in discussions as I developed this paper. I also thank the reviewers of this paper for their advice and thorough engagement with my work.

Notes 1.

2.

My use of quotation marks around words like "the primitive'' is intended to signal that these terms are problematic or highly charged, and cannot be taken for granted.

It is not within the scope of this paper to discuss in detail the development of critical reflexive museology.

The field is growing rapidly and key contributors include: Michael Ames (1992), Tony Bennett (1995), James Clifford (1988), Richard Handler and Eric Gable (1997), Ludmilla Jordonova (1989), Ivan Karp and Steven Lavine (1992), Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998), Timothy Mitchell (1989), George Stocking (1985), and Susan Vogel (1989). Among this group are curators, anthropologists, and culture critics whose work addresses issues such as the links between collecting and imperialism, political implications of different exhibition styles, intersections of the logic of visualism and positivism, and the role of museums as disciplinary spaces.

3.

Significant contributors to this body of literature include: Michael Ames (1992), Duncan Cameron (1971), Stephen Greenblatt (1991), Jane Pierson Jones (1995), Ivan Karp, Steven Lavine and Christine Mullen Kreamer (1992), and Stephen Weil (1990). It is not unusual for authors who offer strong critiques of the politics of exhibiting culture to also call for museums to become sites for public dialogue and debate.

For example, following his critique of the political rationality of museums, Tony Bennett calls for them to become sites for the "enunciation of plural and differentiated statements" (1995:104). It is also increasingly common for exhibition proposals and museum policy statements to address concerns related to democratization and multiculturalism.

4.

There is a tricky language problem here. Originally Pippa Skotnes wanted to name her exhibition "Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen" (which is the title of the exhibit's catalogue). The South African National Gallery was unwilling to use the term Bushmen in the exhibition title since it has historically carried pejorative connotations for many people in the Western Cape who were classified as "coloured" during the apartheid era. Some activists and academics have revived the term Bushmen, linking it positively to the quest for land and cultural rights, and to post-colonial scholarship that critiques past anthropological representations. I use the term Khoisan, but also refer to "the Bushman diorama" at the South African Museum, since this is how it is popularly known.

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5.

6.

7.

8.

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David Theo Goldberg also mentions this South African example of "racial knowledge" in his book, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (1993:160). For a discussion of similar issues in relation to the National Museum of American History and the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, see Michael Blakey (1990).

This text is quoted from Mr. Bligh's Bad Language: Passion, Power and Theatre on the Bounty, by Greg Dening(1992).

For a discussion of these tensions within museums see Richard Handler and Eric Gable (1997).

I would like to thank the South African National Gallery for providing me with copies of public statements made by various groups in response to Miscast.

This occurred at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto in 1995, when a curator who was introducing a concert of Indian music referred to the musicians on stage as "artifacts" (Sun 1995).

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Shelley Ruth Butler is the author o\'Contested Representations: Revisiting Into the Heart of Africa (1999).

Her doctoral research at York University focuses on museum and public culture in post-apartheid South Africa.