Museum ethnography 1

Contemporary theoretical perspectives view the meanings of objects and, in the present context, the indices of ‘otherness’, as promiscuous, and transformative. Meaning is dependent not only on its specific historical or geographical fields of usage but also on the shifts in the ownership of objects between private collectors and public institutions. Objects, however, have both an iconic and a material symbolic value which are redolent with past meanings and associations that are never totally disclaimed. This sedimentary symbolic valency always guarantees an object’s potentiality, latent or actual, to create unexpected or unintentional associations either through engendering relations between signifiers or between signifiers and signifieds. ² Despite such a proclivity, it has become customary to see museum collections as having been established and exhibited to demonstrate only one principal coherent paradigmatic position. ³ In comparing collections to narratives, Mieke Bal reminds us that the relationship between the beginning, middle and end follows no single logical compulsion. ⁴ The rationalisation of a collection may occur only after its formation, and then be projected back to provide a gloss that seeks to coherently incorporate and legitimate the early period of its origin. The writing of the defining catalogue provides another particularly cogent and common example of the exercise of the rationalising power of the retrospective discourse. Clearly, the motivations of collectors have become too singularly rationalised. ⁵ The contemporary tendency to subordinate the significance of objects to illustrations of texts encourages the assumption that objects bear no more than the determining imprint of a dominant social classification like evolutionism or diffusionism. Structure and system are identified at the expense of the singularities of events and the creative intervention of individuals.