ABSTRACT

The following conversation took place during the Critical Heritage Studies conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, on 6 June 2012. The initial idea and topic was suggested by Kylie Message, the session was chaired by Conal McCarthy, and the recording was transcribed by Jennifer Walklate and edited by Conal McCarthy and Jennifer Walklate.

Chair:

Conal McCarthy, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Participants, in initial order of speech:

Rhiannon Mason, Newcastle University, UK

Christopher Whitehead, Newcastle University, UK

Jakob Ingemann Parby, PhD, Fellow, Roskilde University, Denmark; Curator, Museum of Copenhagen, Denmark

André Cicalo, Postdoctoral Researcher, desiguALdades Research Network, Freie Universität, Berlin, Germany

Philipp Schorch, Research Fellow, Cultural Heritage Centre for Asia and the Pacific (CHCAP), Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia

Leslie Witz, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Pablo Alonso Gonzalez, PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge, UK; Researcher, University of León, Spain

Naomi Roux, PhD Candidate, Birkbeck College, University of London, UK

Eva Ambos, PhD Candidate, Cluster of Excellence, “Asia and Europe in a Global Context”, South Asia Institute, University of Heidelberg, Germany

Respondent:

Ciraj Rassool, University of the Western Cape, South Africa

Question:

How, in an increasingly transnational and global world are the challenges of nation and diversity being squared with ideas about local and community identity? How are the tensions around these themes being articulated by museums, heritage, and cultural policy?

544 McCarthy:

In 2009, Ciraj and I went to a conference in Prato, Italy, called National Museums in a Transnational Age. There were people from all over the world talking about national museums, national identity, and nationalism. The very title seemed to imply that national museums were an anachronism in a transnational world and that they would naturally disappear, along with other elements of the nineteenth-century nation-state, in the face of the Internet, global trade, and multiculturalism. What struck me was that, despite the postnation thesis and the grim prognosis for the national museum, if anything, nations, national identity, and national museums were not only persisting and surviving, but in fact flourishing.

In the Pacific, there are lots of relatively new national museums, in New Zealand, Australia, Canada, New Caledonia, which are very much institutions forging a sense of national identity, both settler identity and indigenous identity. They have been referred to as ‘civic laboratories’ where ‘experiments in culture’ are carried out (Healy and Witcomb 2006). Whether it is called postcolonial or decolonizing these nations are facing the challenges of their colonial legacy and also dealing with contemporary issues. But as Kylie Message pointed out in her book New Museums and the Making of Culture (Message 2006), the newness of these museums often effaces the past and the tensions and complexities of the national past are oft en not shown. So this is a very fruitful area of debate where there’s been a lot of writing, but it seems a good time now to really take stock of where the thinking is going.

Certainly at this conference on critical heritage studies there’s been a lot of discussion about new tools, new theories, and new methodologies for looking at museums and heritage, and for thinking about these kinds of issues. I’ve heard a lot about moving beyond representation to object-centered philosophy, Latourian sociology, and a whole range of other ideas, which may equip us to analyze these questions related to museums, globalization, and identity in more complex ways.

Mason:

I’m similarly very interested in this postnational thesis and where it has some traction and where I think it doesn’t. I will just say that when I was thinking about this last night, it occurred to me that I have to start with the fact that the UK is a multinational unitary state. Great Britain is the state that is the umbrella at the top level, but underneath that we have, obviously, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, and England. So really what you see when you’re thinking about nation is actually a renewed interest in pursuing articulations of the nation, particularly in Scotland and Wales, which I’m more familiar with than Northern Ireland since political devolution. So ‘nation’ hasn’t gone away in any sense; it’s got stronger as a frame of reference. In the UK we’ve got a referendum on Scottish independence scheduled for 2014, which would be a huge thing for the UK in terms of reconfiguring political relationships. In the UK then I would say that the national paradigm is still strong in museums.

As for diversity and transnational identities, in thinking through these issues brought up by the migration of different populations to the UK I think you could say that this pattern has been treated as a core-plus model—we’ve got these nations within the UK and then we’re going to add these others onto it. I would say that that’s being reflected in museums and their approaches. For a long while what I was seeing in museums was a ‘main narrative’ and integrated into it were these different groups, which we identify by ‘ethnicities’—the Chinese in Liverpool, the Pakistanis in London, and so on. But talking to people in city museums—and of course there’s a big difference between a city museum somewhere like London, which is a world city, and a city museum perhaps in the northeast of England, where nonwhite populations are very small—you can see parallels where they’re saying this kind of core-plus, this adding on of ethnicities, 545leads us into what I’m coming to think of as an identity trap; that you can never satisfy. You know, you always miss out someone: the Kurdish group or the Irish trannies in Liverpool, or some community who, once they see the representation couched in a particular way, a bounded identity group, understandably feel that they have been missed out.

There seems to be a bit of dissatisfaction with that and an intent to do it in different ways and I was just thinking through a couple of these. One would be to integrate stories of different diversities throughout the narrative. For example, if you’re telling a story of Liverpool you run the community stories through it and you pick certain ones that are emblematic of a significant story but you don’t pick them all in terms of a politics of recognition. Another approach is more issues based, looking at issues that can be seen across communities. Another one you can see is this idea of belonging to the city. What does it mean to be a Londoner? Chris and I have been traveling a bit and I think we can see this in other museums. In Amsterdam, what does it mean to be an Amsterdamer? What about a Copenhagener, a Berliner? That kind of place-based frame of reference seems to be another strong impetus.

There are lots of pros and cons. Talking to curators in museums where these approaches have been tried, it seems that oft en some communities will say: ‘You’ve missed us out! Where are we?’ There is an interesting question there. Are people so used to seeing displays framed in this way that they’re at a loss to read them in a new frame?

Whitehead:

What I want to talk about is a particular transnational experience: what ‘nation’, ‘diversity’, ‘local communities’, ‘local identities’ do in relation to that transnational experience of migration. I’m talking from the European Union perspective, in relation to the European Commission-funded MeLa project that Rhiannon and I are working on. Migration is obviously not a new transnational process and one of my colleagues, Iain Chambers, holds that it is actually a central experience of modernity. But I think that it’s inflected in quite specific ways in contemporary discourses in relation to issues of inclusion within, and exclusion from, and movement to and through, geopolitical entities like nations, or multinational affiliations like the European Union, not to mention the bordering of entities like this.

Migrants can be seen as a heterogeneous group of people ranging from refugees to economic migrants to the transnational rich. They can be relatively invisible like the Australians in London, and they can interact very little with the host culture really—if there can ever be said to be only one host culture. The very rich and privileged and the very poor and disadvantaged can end up living in quite different kinds of gated communities and their presence can go largely unnoticed or it can cause complex tensions. So what then does migration actually do to the nation and to communities and localities? Obviously this can be thought of in relation both to emigration and immigration, which each have different problematics.

Emigration can constitute a forced displacement or a brain drain, whereas immigration can be seen on the one hand as bringing vitality, skilled labor, and new cultural capital to a locality or it can be seen by some as an alien threat to entrenched local values, a drain on the economy, and risk to monocultural and monoethnic communities. Thinking about emigration, it’s rarely represented in Europe as a historical phenomenon; for example, at the Deutsches Auswandererhaus Bremerhaven or the Emigration Museum in Genoa, where there’s a focus on early twentieth-century and mid-twentieth-century emigration, to the Americas for example. One of the notable findings of our MeLa research has been a lack of relationality between representations of immigrant groups in Western Europe and the ‘homelands’ from which they come. So in the Netherlands and Germany there are various representations of Turkish migrant groups and experiences, but if you go to Turkish museums there is no account of Turkish emigration 546to Western Europe, even though there are some three million people of Turkish origin living in Germany alone.

Now with immigration, in the context of Western European museums, for example, this is a locus for very complex representations, bearing as much on the identity of the so-called receiving state as on the individual migrant whose experience is narrated—it’s usually an individual who stands for the plurality of migrant experiences and also for new pluralities within society. In terms of themes we see stories of positive assimilation above all. So, for example, in the Amsterdam Museum we see stories of integration, assimilation, and adoption, adoption both of the people by the place and adoption of the place by the people. We see historicized stories of struggle where particular groups have struggled to integrate. An example is the Turkish community in Amsterdam, a historicized story that ends in the 1980s with the closing of the shipyards, where many of the Turks were guest workers. We see topics like leaving the homeland, the migration itself, the actual sense of the travel, and the new home, and these create different sorts of emphases within the actual representations. We also see the idea of the museum as a corrective or reforming instrument in the sense suggested by Tony Bennett. For example, at the immigration museum in Genoa we see videos of migrants explaining the hardships that they undergo on their way to Italy and we see curators, with whom you can have a virtual dialogue, actually reworking people’s assumptions about the disadvantages of hosting migrants, such as overturning the idea that migrants take jobs away from Italians. In general, the immigrant experience is one that ruptures the fixity of the local, bringing into focus questions of diversity, tolerance, and notions of communities as groups of people who are known to each other, and with shared ideals, bringing into focus issues of hybridization and resistance to that hybridization. Migration catalyzes extreme nationalisms sometimes, but it also fuels the cosmopolitan dream. It makes local places themselves transnational, and requires a form of reflexive recognition in the museum that historicizes it in the now and grasps problematics relating to its politics and its persistence, and the mythologies that surround migration as a transnational practice.

Parby:

In my work as a museum professional and a historian I think this topic of migration and diversity we are discussing is one of the greatest challenges to European societies, particularly societies like Denmark, which has a self-image of being very homogeneous. The easy way to go is to say, ‘Now we have these added communities’, as you describe them, Rhiannon, and then we probably recognize them or try to integrate them. We construct this quite heightened and clear dichotomy between the core nation and the rest of the communities in the nation, even in the second or third generation, so that these identities are imposed upon the newcomers for quite some time. The other issue is that, rather than postnationalizing the nation or denaturalizing notions of national identity, you find that a lot of the discourse on migration actually formulates and reformulates what Danishness is—a very strong claiming of particular positions. You could argue that the experience of migration reinforces and allows the reclamation of national identity as a really bounded and clearly formed identity.

If we move from this general discussion to a more specific perspective, what can museums do about this situation? What is their role in all this? In the Danish national scene I would say that the approach of most museums has been multiculturalist; museums have strived to show newcomers that as museums they really accept them, respect them, and want to include them. Oft en, however, that creates the problem of Othering, because you direct specific projects to the Turkish community or to the Somali community or whatever. I think there’s a lot of staging and compartmentalization in this approach, which does not really promote integration or cohesion in society, but rather petrifies a discourse into cultural heritage. One of the ways to move 547beyond that is to situate and historicize national identity constructions in order to show that they are part of a distinct development. Stable national or ethnic identities (those that have always been there or are going to be there forever) do not exist. On the contrary, they are continually constructed and reconstructed through human interactions. As a historian, I operate by applying these theories of the postnational to the period before the nation-state, investigating how [other kinds of] transnational and cosmopolitan loyalties informed the relationship between individuals and groups in that era.

Because I work in a city museum another strategy is to look at a unit that’s not the nation. The history of the city reveals a certain fluidity—you never have a sort of bounded, sedentary state of living, because transition and the constant influx and outflux of citizens has historically been the norm rather than the exception. It’s been really helpful in my own work to think about migration and identity in this way. But obviously such an approach may have drawbacks in that perhaps you seem to dissolve ethnicities as particular identities. Even though you can criticize, and claim that ‘postnational identities are better’ or that that idea has greater potential in creating meaningful communities in today’s societies, museums cannot altogether dismiss the individuals and groups still attached to national and ethnic affiliations. What the museum can do, however, is stimulate reflexivity about it.

Cicalo:

My research topic is about the construction of slave heritage in Brazil, so I am not talking about migrants as such, but forced migrants who have been brought into the nation. But although they were and are considered part of the nation, there has been a lack of recognition of people like the Afro-Brazilian and the indigenous community. So although there is not a problem of recognizing individuals and groups depending on whether they were migrant or not, there is a problem regarding the position that those migrants occupied in the construction of the national narrative. Now this situation is changing quite a lot through affirmative action, which is actually an effect of globalization, along with other things like multiculturalism, the World Conference against Racism in Durban in 2001, and the favorable position of UNESCO for the promotion of slave heritage. As a result, a new perspective is emerging toward slave heritage. My research is in Rio de Janeiro, where there is currently a huge debate about the building of a slave memorial and the development of an urban itinerary tracing and signposting places that are relevant to Afro-Brazilian history and culture in the port area of Rio de Janeiro, a part of the city that received millions of slaves during the trafficking period. Where previously elements of the history of slavery were completely absent in the city center, this subchapter of Brazilian history is coming out again through a social movement that is starting to organize and explore how to reconfigure the state and the nation with respect to its Afro-Brazilian identity. My ethnography of this process deals with the reconstruction of national identity not just in terms of rhetorically recognizing the nation as the historical sum of different and separate groups, but also in ways that actively confer more value to each one of these groups, questioning what place they occupy in the nation, and giving them their rightful place in the national culture as well as in society.

Schorch:

Both Christopher and André touched on two really important issues, and those are history and experience. Chris alluded to the fact that migration is not just a contemporary but a modern phenomenon, and, as we clearly see in the case of Brazil, actually a premodern phenomenon. My research sits at the intersection between globalization, museums, and meaning. Appadurai and Breckenridge (1999) said once, “Museums are good to think with.” For me they are places 548and spaces to understand globalization and how the actual meanings of globalization are performed and constituted. In order to do that one needs to pay attention to the fact that globalization is not a modern or contemporary invention; it is just a historical process that now gains different manifestations, especially through travel and technology. Southern Spain has always had influences from northern Africa and Islam, the Silk Route has always connected different worlds. A lot of sociological perspectives that dominate the literature don’t pay sufficient attention to this longer historical context.

On that note, let us get back to the Pacific. Polynesian people migrated through the South Pacific well before any modern understanding of migration. In Australia the debate about migration relates mainly to policy and ideology after the Second World War, whereas British settlement in settler colonies is not seen as migration. It should also be remembered that nationality as a concept does not have purchase in all societies and that identity is understood in many complex ways across the world. For instance, the Maori in New Zealand have always performed multiple identities. They refer to Hawaiki (the homeland), to iwi (tribe), whanau (family), and different forms of identity in real-life situations. It’s not so much an either/or separation, or tension, either national or local. It has been performed on a both/and level over centuries.

Museum studies as a field actually offers us tools to better understand those processes and shed light on them, and thereby create better-informed theories and policies, rather than constructing another dichotomous vocabulary or grammar of identity. The concept of place and space is very useful for my own research because, on the one hand, like any identity, it links a spatial concept to a physical place, and on the other, it always embodies a discursive space. Museums have always depended upon the travel of objects and of people. The objects in museums have been moved over centuries from one place to another, and if one considers the experience of the people who visit museums then there is the same shifting perspective. So although there might be a break, like in the ‘New Museology’, as Kylie’s book points out (Message 2006), this newness covers up a historical dimension.

In that sense there’s no such thing as a purely national museum or place if one considers that museums do not just embody meaning, but produce and construct it. To articulate and further this, I’m trying to work with ideas like methodological cosmopolitanism, which Ulrich Beck (2006) came up with. To achieve that distinction it is important to take into account the national or the local because you are dealing with a building, a specific place that gains meaning in those very particular settings. However, it is always linked to the discursive dynamics of an interconnected world and that has always been the case—it’s just heightened now through travel and technology. To sum it up, the global always gains meaning in the local, and the local is always embedded in the global. Museums offer a perfect place to understand this.

Witz:

It is very interesting to listen to these discussions, but I’m not sure whether we can skirt around issues of ethnicity, identity, and diversity in the same sorts of ways in a postcolonial climate, especially when one of the major features of the apartheid state in South Africa was to reclaim diversity—you had to belong to an ethnic identity. One of the major aims of the postapartheid state was to do away with this notion of ethnicity and diversity in some ways, to reclaim a nation that does away with these borders. The museum sector in South Africa has flourished since the end of apartheid, but frankly I don’t know why this is the case. I can see why people want to reclaim histories and all that sort of thing, but what does the museum do? Not many people visit museums. They don’t make any money and don’t really create jobs. So I’m still struggling with what, as an institution, the museum does as opposed to a book or school or something like that—it’s a very important question.

549But out of nearly all of these museums, whether the older type or the newer museums, there’s only one that will claim an ethnicity, and that is the Berlin Jewish Museum. The rest all make claims around communities or nation or some national narrative—so you have the Robben Island story, there’s Freedom Park, there’s District Six. It’s very interesting to see the ways in which community has been claimed in those instances, more as a locality and a memory in some ways.

I’m involved in a museum called the Lwandle Migrant Labour Museum, which is about forced labor and apartheid, about people coming to Cape Town and living in hostel-type compound accommodation. Really the museum is a museum that should not be there. It’s a sort of independent initiative of one or two people, but it is there and it’s got government recognition recently. The point is: what sort of history do we put in there? I’m chair of the board of this museum and it’s interesting that the narrative we employ is a narrative that relates to the historiography of the 1980s and the social history movements, you know, ‘history from below’. That becomes a national story in some ways; so, crudely put, we try and find little bits that fit into the national story of migrant labor in South Africa. We create a local past out of a national past.

I want to finish with two more points in connection with this migrant labor museum. The first is tourism, which we haven’t spoken much about. What imperatives are created in the tourist context of South Africa, where ethnicity is proclaimed and people come to South Africa to see ‘tribes’ in action? One of the major pressures on this museum was to make it a ‘tribal’ place, almost like a cultural village, rather than as a social history place. What do the tourists want? Do they want to see Lwandle as a form of cultural village?

The second thing is about xenophobia. The community I am talking about has a history of migrant labor, and in more recent years people from all over Africa are living in Lwandle: there are Somalis, Nigerians, people from Zimbabwe, Malawi, and elsewhere coming to live there. Now the museum has to deal with this situation. There are people who are xenophobic. They say, ‘Who are these people? They should not be here.’ So the museum has to somehow talk about this xenophobia and relate it to the story of a migrant labor past under apartheid that it has focused on. Yet for many residents of Lwandle there seems to be a disconnection—the present xenophobia is disconnected from the area’s history of oppression through migrant labor.

Gonzalez:

My research focuses on local museums in Spain in a really peripheral, marginal area, and in Cuba I look at national stories—which in some cases overlap with Brazilian national stories. I’m going to try to frame a bigger picture, rather than just stick to my research. Basically I consider the Spanish case to be somewhat unique, because Spain is always going in different directions than the rest of Europe. I would argue the Hispanic world and the Anglo world are very different, with different traditions, ethnologies, and epistemologies.

In Spain we have this French idea of a museum, which is bureaucratic and quite different to the Anglo tradition of museum management and interpretation. Museum directors are always people from the world of culture and work within a broader framework. All of this explains why identity politics is not fundamentally important. Spain, Italy, and Greece are essentially emigrant countries, and consider themselves to be so. In the 1990s and 2000s, Spain received six to seven million immigrants, more than anywhere in the world, more even than the United States. However, there was never an identity politics associated with this phenomenon. No one ever spoke of multiculturalism, or integration, because we think of ourselves as immigrants.

550So what are museums doing in Spain? Identity politics is professed at a traditional regional level. This is because of the new reorganization of the state after the Franco regime fell, which divided the country into regions; so we have Catalonia, the Basque region, Galicia, and so on. Some regions considered themselves to be nations within the nation, so they used museums to construct these national stories. Then there are older regions that consider themselves to be historic areas, and they also are engaged in this building of their stories through museums. But this precedent of building identity happens at all levels in Spain. We also have provinces. My province, León, has its own museum that somewhat legitimates the struggle to gain independence from the autonomous region of Castile-León.

So it is clear that everyone is trying to create a different identity without looking at what’s going on in the world, which makes us quite provincial in terms of museum management, I suppose. This can be clearly seen in the local places and marginal areas where, say in the case study I presented here at the conference yesterday, there is a small village, Val de San Lorenzo, where half of the population emigrated to South America, Buenos Aires, Cuba, Mexico. But they don’t talk about the immigration that comes in today, so how can they talk about emigration when they don’t consider that topic to be the stuff of museums? Museums are places where beautiful objects are displayed and that’s how they are mainly regarded in Spain. However, we also have quite postmodern stuff, like, you know, the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao or in Valencia, because in Spain tourism is about 15 percent of the GDP.

It seems to me that we have to consider museums within new theoretical frameworks. It is useful to talk about ‘assemblages’ of museums, cultural industries, cultural offers. In Barcelona, for example, there is a national history museum that counters museum narratives at the Spanish national level, but at the same time comes into an assemblage with museums from all over the world. It all comes together to create an offer to the tourist that is not only ideological, but that is also productive of businesses and many other things.

It’s important to connect Spain with South America in many cases because UNESCO meetings have workshops in which people from Spain meet with people from South America, make common programs, and share experiences. In Cuba, Mexico, and other Latin American countries there is a mixture of Spanish-style museums, stemming from the local politics of the newborn states of the nineteenth century. Many people consider that nationalism began in South America. These museums, like the National Museum in Mexico City, legitimate the modern nation in the Aztec world. But this is a process of inclusion through exclusion, because in reality these communities are excluded, so what they are basing their identities on is an abstract idea of the Aztec, without really engaging with these contemporary marginalized communities. However, in South America you get a lot of projects that engage with local politics, and indigenous communities, so there is this complex relationship going on in both directions.

Roux:

Like Leslie, I work in the context of South African heritage and museums, and I would agree that perhaps we do have a different take on ideas of nationhood, ‘multiculturalism’, and diversity because of that history. An example that comes to mind from my own research is quite a small, very locally based community museum in Port Elizabeth in the Eastern Cape, called the South End Museum, which deals with a similar kind of narrative to that of the District Six Museum in Cape Town. It commemorates a neighborhood in Port Elizabeth, quite a cosmopolitan, diverse, mixed community that was ripped apart when people were separated by race into different parts of city in the 1960s under the Group Areas Act. The approach the museum’s management has taken in the exhibitions has been to represent South End’s diversity via a series of separate 551narratives and exhibitions that are culturally defined: so, for example, there’s a display about the Chinese ‘community’ of South End, a separate one on the Cape Malay ‘community’, and one on the Indian ‘community’.

This is arguably problematic, because of course these all fall into the same kind of categorizations that were used by the apartheid state in order to disperse people. But the museum’s management sees this approach as the best way to represent South End as a ‘melting pot’, or as a space where diverse cultures existed alongside each other. I think in the South African museum context, given the history of how ideas of culture and ethnicity have been used, addressing questions of ‘multiculturalism’ requires one to quite directly confront these complications and the baggage that comes with ideas of nationhood, ethnicity, and culture. Something that’s also worth thinking about is the question of audience, which is related to the question of tourism, whether international, local, or national. That’s something worth bringing into the discussion—the fact that a museum and an exhibition is addressed to someone. Is the museum addressing ‘the nation’, or is it addressing foreign visitors, or domestic tourists? Who is the public who is meant to be consuming this material, and what does that mean for the way that ideas about culture and ethnicity are being approached?

Ambos:

I’m an anthropologist and my research is not directly related to museums, but I study Sri Lankan healing traditions, which are put on a national stage as ‘heritage’. These healing traditions were ‘museumized’ in the sense of being considered to be in need of revitalization and preservation, which entails a kind of freezing of these practices. I would like to pick up on what Philipp said with the intersection of different scales—the national, the global, and the local, for instance. I think it is very important we acknowledge this intersection to avoid the trap of creating new binaries or dichotomies. My research is concerned with how the translation from the local scale to the national scale works, what the shift from a local village healing ritual to a ‘national heritage’ means. I am looking where the ruptures occur in this process and where the translation breaks down, because this translation can never be smooth.

There’s another topic that came up in several of the statements, namely, the acknowledgment that when we talk about globalization, transnationalism, and so on, we have to speak of winners and losers. For some groups these processes mean the opening of borders, crossing and transcending of boundaries, and increased mobility, but for others this implies confinement. The low-caste performers I study are not necessarily profiting or taking advantage of their local practices as they’re elevated onto the national stage, but rather they are kind of confined in a corset of tradition, confined by notions of nationalism, of ‘pure’ Sinhalese Buddhist culture in the Sri Lankan context.

Another important aspect, which was mentioned by Jakob, points to the danger of abandoning the notion of ethnicity. As an anthropologist, I look at globalization from a locally anchored perspective. For people in Sri Lanka, ethnicity plays a vital role, because it is a lived reality. It is dangerous to deconstruct everything as that [reality] plays a very important role in negotiations of identity in these local contexts. And yet at the same time I want to suggest that this increased cultural exchange in the context of globalization has the paradoxical effect of increasing or enhancing the essentialization of identity, of trying to pin down identities and closing ethnic boundaries.

When I speak about heritage, that heritage is very much a normative discourse—a normative discourse in the sense that it imposes a very strict corset on a very plural and multiple articulation of reality. In the Sri Lankan context I found a shift in cultural policy from an emphasis on multiculturalism to transculturality. Transculturality in a double sense: the sense of transcending 552culture, that is, how a nation-state presents itself as something naturally grown, something acultural or culture neutral, something based on equal rights, democracy, and so on; and in the second sense transculturality as an engulfing of the Other, other heritages, other cultures, by a dominant nationalist ideology. What you have in Sri Lanka, especially after the official end of the civil war in May 2009, is, for example, a redefinition of Tamil Hindu religious practices and elements as Sinhalese Buddhist heritage, or their assimilation within it. This kind of heritage politics is expressed in a museumization of cultural practices, an objectification of culture that always leads to asymmetrical power relations in which some groups become more visible and others remain invisible within the nation-state. Therefore, we have to think of heritage and museums as something performative that allow us to talk about contestations and dynamics, but on the other hand we also should acknowledge the normative aspects that cultural policy and heritage discourse bring with them.

Rassool:

This has been an absolutely fascinating discussion. Let me start with Conal’s point of departure, and go back to our discussions at the Prato conference about museums in a transnational world and the possibilities of museums beyond the nation. That conference was also about the relationship between museums and historians and about the place of the discipline of history in the museum. Let me first give you my conclusion. We are living at a very interesting, complicated time in the world, characterized by such unevenness, such extraordinary change, in which we are witnessing the end of the museum as we know it. It’s not just the end of the national museum; it’s the end of the collecting museum. The authority of the museum as the collecting institution is called into question in a postcolonial world.

That argument does not arise in every society, because, as we are witnessing the end of the museum as we know it, we are still seeing the persistence of the national museum. Here, the contests over immigration and immigrant communities, and attempts to understand processes of globalization, are precisely some of the different ways in which the modern nineteenth-century museum tries to reproduce itself. All of the instruments of the modern museum through the international institutions that service the museum and heritage sector, the ethical frameworks, and definitions and committees of ICOM and so forth, all service the existing relationships within and between museums.

I’m speaking from the vantage point of being intimately involved right at the moment in the return of human remains from Austria to South Africa. In the middle of the negotiations, the key question was the authority of Austrian institutions to continue to hold these collections. Quite frankly, the deeper epistemic questions underlying these seeming transactions over individuated things are fundamental questions about the future of the museum. Because while the museum is the institution of the discipline of history, it is also the institution of a classificatory system in which the world was divided into societies of people with history and people without history. When you have postcolonial nations emerging and claiming to be nations they do that through the discipline of history and that calls into question the authority of older colonial disciplines.

Now we have many different kinds of institutions that are emerging that are calling themselves museums. In the District Six Museum in Cape Town we work with Museu do Maré in Rio de Janeiro and we’ve had a couple of exchanges. We participated in an IBRAM [Brazilian Museums Association] conference in Belém de Pará where we engaged in discussions about the ways in which ecomuseums, community museums, cultural centers, heritage projects, keeping places are precisely not about the collection. The museums are about something else, and it might be about a different way of telling a history of something. Those of us who are studying 553these processes examine it through engaged forms of historical practice outside the academy. Leslie Witz and I and our colleagues have begun to refer to this as the ‘practice of public history’. The other important museum forms that are emerging that might call itself ‘museum’ and that might call itself ‘heritage’ and that might call itself ‘memory project’ merge postconflict healing and transitional justice processes through which museums become places of historical narration. I don’t know if they’re postmuseums, if they are ‘new museologies’, or if they are museums beyond the collection. But the one thing that is becoming certain is that the future of the museum lies precisely in the source community relationship. This future lies in their transactions and in the connections between museum institutions in one society and communities and people in other societies.

Rethinking the relationship of the museum and the community is necessary because the nineteenth-century museum was not only about the nation, not only about particular modern disciplines and disciplinary institutions; it was also about the formation of citizens. So immigration and all of that are locked into the processes of citizen formation as regulation. Immigration museums tell the story of the extension of the boundaries of the citizenry, and how you come to know who you are through your national story, and who gets named as an immigrant and who does not get named as an immigrant. Really everyone’s an immigrant when it comes down to it. But we are living at a time of tension. If the museum does not engage with that debate, then the museum has no future as an institution.

McCarthy:

Now we’re able to open the conversation up. I’ll kick off by mentioning another part of the world where these debates are echoed. Rhiannon and I were at a conference six weeks ago in Athens that was exploring how European national museums can create social cohesion within the EU: the Eunamus project. The Europeans at the conference were really struck by the fascinating presentations from Asia—which are not so well represented in museum studies. In Singapore the National Museum and Asian Civilization Museum present an idealized picture of the polyglot racialist state, with Malays and Chinese and Indians coming together in national harmony. As we learned here at this conference from the stream on China, there are nine thousand museums in the PRC now, and a new museum opens every day—the newly reopened National Museum in Beijing is now the largest museum in the world! These museums are very much about the majority Han Chinese civilization, which makes up 85 percent of the population, rather than the eighty or so minorities around the country. In northeast Asia, impressive new museums are symbols of the modern industrialized state. Taiwan, for example, where I lived for a while, boasts huge museum buildings that are obviously symbols of nationhood. But there are more people outside flying their kites on the lawn than inside.

Different parts of the world have really different situations, and scholarly perspectives have been limited to a few countries and writers have generalized about many things—settler colonies, for example. The literature on postcolonialism, nationalism, and museums oft en comes from places like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, but the settler indigenous relations in new nation-states are not typical of other parts of the world. The other important thing for me, I think, which came out of our conversation, was the historical dimension mentioned by several of the people here. One of the problems with the scholarship on museums at the moment is modernity. Everyone talks about modernity, which is supposedly everywhere and nowhere, which is everything and nothing. So many things are ascribed to it and yet we can see premodern entities going right through this late modern period we are living in.

For example, in the Pacific a lot of Polynesian people think of themselves in all sorts of different kinds of ways. In nineteenth-century New Zealand, which became part of the British 554Empire, settlers saw themselves as British and only later as New Zealanders, whereas a lot of Maori people saw themselves as ‘brown Britains’, because of the Aryanism that was a feature of the British Empire in the colonial period. At the same time they saw themselves as Maori, but in a number of ways simultaneously: there were subtribes, and increasingly tribes (itself, some argue, a colonial invention), but also a pantribal sense of indigenous nationalism, different to the kind of settler nationalism that appeared in the late twentieth century. This is a much more complex mix than is suggested by postcolonial theory today, which looks at contemporary society with its nationalism and identity politics, and tends to back-project that onto the past when those things didn’t really exist.

Schorch:

To me it feels as if scholarship in general comes up with new categories like ‘modern’ or ‘postcolonial’ museums, imposing something that has been constructed in the present on a process or situation in the past. So all of a sudden we talk here at this conference about affect and emotions and so forth but it’s just another intellectual abstract construction to make sense of something that has always been a unified whole. If you consider the human experience in all its complexity, people have always managed multiple identities just as we do all the time. You’ve got to focus on holistic complexity rather than dichotomous vocabulary.

At the same time we can definitely point out similarities: colonial migration, forced removal, in Australia there is the example of the ‘Stolen Generation’. So there are always similarities and differences that allow us to communicate with the Other by creating this common sphere that is possible among human beings. Again it’s not a monolithic understanding of a supposedly national framework—you have a difference within and you have the similarities between different states. What Conal said about modernity is likewise with ‘hegemony’, ‘discourse’, ‘capitalism’, ‘state’—these categories are used as if they are self-enclosed totalities working at the bottom of society, whereas they are inherently contested terrains. Scholarship should open up the moments and processes when they are contested and really interrogate the complexity, rather than taking it as a self-evident point of departure.

Mason:

Yes—rather than looking at polarities and dichotomies, trying to see how the local and global are always interconnected shows how they are produced through the museum space. But I wanted to just pick up on this idea you were talking about Philipp, this looking back at the longer history of migration in museums, because it’s exactly what they tell you, isn’t it, when you go there and look at them: it’s all about that, if you get past the ways it has been compartmentalized. But I don’t think in the UK that that kind of cultural historians’ understanding of the long trajectory of globalization is reflected in the way museum policy operates, because diversity is bracketed off as a post-Second World War thing, which is really problematic in the national narratives that circulate.

I started off looking at Wales, and you only have to scratch the surface of the history of South Wales, an industrialized area in the late nineteenth century, and you discover that it is full of stories of migration. But those stories were forgotten, they were pushed away in the processes of nationalism that sought to tell a unified story. Now I’m thinking about the longer history of migration that opens up the possibility of deconstructing the national narrative as it exists in Europe, and I still think there is a very important job to be done there because that isn’t the way that the public discourses frame it. But on the other hand I suppose there is the problem that if you say we’re all migrants, we have always been migrants, how do we do that on the one hand, but not downplay the very different experiences, the very structural inequalities for certain 555groups. I mean, look at the history of slavery—the migration that we’re talking about there is radically different from what I’m talking about in an industrial area of Britain.

So I guess there are different political strategies in museums: one is about taking the core story and deconstructing that and the things that can flow from it and the possibilities it can open up for debates around citizenship and who belongs and so on; and the other is the kind of ‘politics of recognition’ that I think still has important things to do in certain places, because it still offers people a place to speak from and it draws attention to perhaps what is different and makes a very powerful political statement.

I’ll just end by coming back to your question Leslie. You asked why are people interested in museums? What do they do that books don’t do? It’s tied into what I was just saying; people recognize them as an opportunity to make a move or a statement in the public sphere. In a sense, the question of who visits is a different part of the equation and it is very, very important. Who are migration museums for? Are they for migrants? Are they for the nonmigrant? Are they insulting for nonmigrants? Different political things are tied into these questions of the moves that are made in the public sphere in a national narrative, and these relate absolutely to these questions of who can be a citizen, who does the state acknowledge as a citizen, and do the different communities want to see themselves as citizens?

Parby:

I’d like to pick up on that one, specifically from a policy perspective. You need to realize how much political involvement and even self-censorship is at work in the museum sector, compared to, I guess, many intellectual traditions and different ways of critiquing modernity, which have really been common since the 1960s. There seems to be an apparent lack of the same critique in many museum and heritage practices, which leads to academic criticism. But what I often find is that, particularly with an issue that is so politically debated like migration, that any new initiatives are subject to a lot of political attention from the outside, but also create self-censorship among the people involved in doing them within the institutions. I think that’s one of the main reasons why you oft en end up finding museums just reconstructing the nation in new ways and trying to pull in new groups within this unit of the national narrative.

The classification of cultures in museums is another important reason why museums have such a hard time trying to employ more relational ideas about identities or portray people and nations as constructed and negotiated. It is a complicated process to move in this direction, when a lot of the objects contained in most museums are collected and described in a way that is oft en closely connected to and embedded in the national narrative. It takes a lot of institutional and individual transformation to move beyond that mode of thinking.

Ambos:

Well, I’d like to comment on what Philipp said about the nation-state being contested and subverted. What I encountered in my research when I visited the homes of these performers, is that they have their own private family museums—their living rooms are backed with photos, newspaper articles, postcards, souvenirs. This material is ordered in a certain way, chronologically and in other ways. We should acknowledge what we might call these ‘subaltern’ articulations of the idea of the museum, of preserving something.

Cicalo:

Usually when we go to museums we think of a narrative. There is a narrative in the museum, even when the museum wants to be inclusive, a narrative about inclusion. I’m thinking maybe 556the museum could be much more interesting if it was self-critical. I don’t know if this is possible, but it would be a real challenge to have a museum where there is self-reflection about what this representation means and that conveys this kind of debate that we’re having today, showing different opinions, different narratives.

Witz:

But I still don’t understand this response to the notion of the museum as a public sphere. Why that institution? I mean a movie can do exactly that, can’t it? What is the specific institutional role the museum has performed that makes it different?

Mason:

It’s a truth claim …

Witz:

Yes, ok, it’s a truth claim, but movies have also got truth claims, books have got truth claims—lots of things have got truth claims. But Ciraj has put on the table ‘The End of the Museum’. I wonder if you are really talking about the destruction of that institution and its very foundational concepts of presenting facts and artifacts.

McCarthy:

You know you’re doing Jakob out of a job (laughter).

Mason:

One thing that interests me is in this question about whether the museum as we have known it is moving into new territory. Could we look beyond the museum for a moment and just look at other things, like film, like television, literature, and so on, and expand our horizons a bit? Sometimes in museum studies we treat museums so independently, but of course people visit and engage with culture across a spectrum. The reason I think broadcasting, particularly TV, is interesting is that’s it’s a platform for different views, it’s a political space. On the BBC you hear all sorts of political views that the BBC is not necessarily supporting, but there’s some interesting questions there about authorship, about who is speaking, the debates you can have in a civil society, which might be interesting to play out against the museum, because I think a lot of these debates are about the voice with which the museum is speaking in a multicultural society.

Whitehead:

Moving on from the issues of the self-reflective museum, the end of the museum, and the issue of truth claims, I think one of the issues here is about the ostensible authorlessness of the traditional museum, if you like, and this is how its truth claim works in a sense. There is generally no name of the curator/writer under the label, not in the same way as there is with the director of a film or the author of a book. That authorlessness, a bit like with maps in some way, works to present a ‘reality’ that can’t be questioned easily because there appears to be no one to question. The issue of self-reflection is a very interesting one. But then, of course, the issue is how to reconcile that with existing display technologies and existing expectations on the part of visitors about what they expect really, about the different codes of display and information delivery that we work with.

Then there’s also another issue about conflict and how to frame that. If you get into a topic like migration you can historicize migration flow and hybridity in the deep past, or even in the 557relatively recent but still closed past, relatively easily. But to historicize contemporary migration is difficult because it’s such a matter of contention and conflict and difference of opinion. How do you actually do that? That also bears upon issues of neutrality and pluralism within the museum. Does a museum pretend to a morally neutral role? Can it continue to do so? Is that part of the end of a museum as we know it? Or does the museum have to take a position and propose a certain kind of pluralism, a certain kind of hybridization, as something to which society should aspire? What happens when you talk about admitting oppositional voices into the museum? In our project we’ve been looking recently at migration displays in museums in different countries where far-right political parties drop off leaflets that counteract or countermand the positive representations of immigration as a social good as seen in the museums. What do we do with those voices and how do we marshal them, how do we police that particular debate?

The last thing is the question of who museum representations are for. Is the museum the right place for a migrant to represent her- or himself, or to recognize themselves? Outside the Museum of Migration on the docks in Genoa are dozens of migrants selling goods on the pathways. The migrant community is very visible outside the museum rather than within it, so there is this disjunction between who we are speaking about and who we are speaking to. And this is also connected to this issue of the museum as a representation of globalization, as an outward gesture not as an inward one. So the museum, different from the film and the book, is a matter of international relations. It’s a claiming of a geopolitical identity. What is different about the museum in this sense is its emblematism in this context.

Gonzalez:

Now I want to make some general claims about the analysis of museums and society that reflect my difficulty in this conference. I feel that our tools are already too outdated to deal with museums, because we are working within a postmodern frame in which there are really quick and internally complex assemblages and politics of things, museums, and political economy. And yet we keep on thinking as if museums are public institutions within public experiences and have a massive stake in dialogue and truth. But they are not. The museum cannot help with this, because there are always people, psychological authors, who are going to invest desire and money to push some strands forward—by that I mean nationalism, money, tourism, work, and so on.

It’s still important to discuss the concepts of scale—global, regional, and local—because even my local museum in my city is connected to global flows. But I really don’t think it’s interesting any more to talk about, or to compare, ‘national’ and ‘local’ museums, because they are engaging in the same flows. The main thing is what they are doing specifically, in specific places. In Spain, 99 percent of museums are not national museums. Are they local museums, regional museums, or widespread museums? There’s no barrier, totally the contrary. Obviously we look, first, at the national museum because it provides us with that narration we can deconstruct and criticize. But museums don’t care about that, they are constructing and deconstructing something new all the time, and we are already lagging behind them. There’s all these people constantly investing time, energy, identity, and money and creating symbolic capital and new identities, just as you said, Leslie.

Lastly, it’s important not to split economy from culture because in our countries, the countries that have a lot of their GDP percentage in tourism, we cannot afford to create narrations, as in Britain or Sweden, that are a representational view of our identity, of making a claim. Rather, our identities are the by-product of these complex networks and assemblages. Art, tourism, and so on are our by-products, and we cannot only deal with the by-products, but 558must analyze what’s going with that identity to be constructed. So I think our analytical tools should grow from discourse and deconstruction to an analysis of what’s going on behind and what spreads about in this 98, 99 percent that we are leaving behind.

Rassool:

As I’ve been listening to the second round of discussion, what comes out most powerfully is that we should stop using museum as a noun, and that we should start thinking about museum as a verb. We are living in a time of multiple, contested museumifications and museumizations, in which identities are continuing to be rendered as a museum display, through tourist gazes and the reproduction of cultural images that are limited. South Africa continues to be seen as animal and tribal as a tourist destination, which poses severe limitations on its capacity to be democratic and postracial, as if its Africanness is forever ethnic. And so the kinds of museum institutions that emerge around Cultural Villagization represent one of the contested museumifications. At the same time, some of the important processes of museumification involve taking issue, in quite an activist way, with those kinds of images and framings, in which museums become social projects of intervention about the way we understand the world. If we try to understand the processes of museumification and museumization at the center of what we are doing, understanding the knowledge transactions through which the museum project occurs, then every process of museumification involves a set of knowledge relations in which expertise is wielded, in which community knowledge is appropriated, in which authenticity is claimed. We need to really take the idea of the museum as verb in much the same way that it is better to think of identification as a verb as opposed to identity. Then we have more interesting ways of understanding the processes that are unfolding so we can continue to intervene in those processes.

Whitehead:

But is it a passive or an active verb?

[With lots of laughter, the conversation came to an end.]