While museums have had a rather obscure existence in most societies on the African continent, in Europe and North America museums have been instrumental in mediating knowledge about Africa. Despite recent critiques of museums that deal with international heritage for perpetuating static and stratified relationships between peoples and cultures, museums continue to be relevant as focal points for knowledge and enchantment.
The contributions to this volume attempt to understand the persistent allure of museums in terms of their ability to engage people in signifying processes through the simultaneous use of science and magic. Exploring Carol Duncan's influential work on art museums as venues of public rituals creating ‘ideal citizens’, the introduction by Bouquet and Porto notes how Duncan's approach fails to account for the agency of museum visitors and workers. The following chapters, involving case studies from diverse museums and heritage sites in Europe and Africa, employ ethnography to capture the complex and sometimes contradictory interplay between actors involved in creating and consuming exhibitions.
Apart from the overarching theoretical discussion, the book includes four chapters of direct concern to Africanist readers. Following the assumption that museums are ritual sites, the authors view exhibitions as employing a number of narrative strategies which tend to confirm (and more rarely subvert) received ideas about the nature of the world.Wieczorkiewicz examines such narrative strategies in connection with the popular practice of exhibiting Egyptian mummies in European museums. Her chapter shows how narrative conventions like ‘ghost’ and ‘detective’ stories contribute to detaching ‘us’ from ‘their’ (exotic) ways of handling death. At the same time, creating intimate encounters with mummies may induce reflection regarding the universal dilemma of death. Ultimately, such stories are thus only nominally about Egypt.
In contrast, the purpose of the Royal Museum of Central Africa (RMCA), established in Tervuren in the early twentieth century, was not contemplation of the human condition, but a strategy of enhancing the reputation of Belgium's colonial endeavours. Science and the magic of exhibitions were used as tools to establish and uphold the moral and cultural superiority of Europeans vis-à-vis the Congolese. Barbara Saunders's chapter on the RMCA is a powerful reminder of the great difficulties facing ethnographic museums in transcending their colonial heritage. Saunders argues that despite recent efforts put into self-reflection and exhibitions explicitly attempting to critique colonial epistemology, the architecture and permanent art of Tervuren work against such reappraisal and instil in visitors a colonial ‘Congo-vision’. Although her analysis is convincing, Saunders does not engage with the editors' ambition to delve into the constitution of visitor agency and how such agency relates to curatorial strategies.
The chapter by Wastiau takes off where Saunders ends – in an account of the groundbreaking exhibition at RMCA, ExItCongoMuseum, for which Wastiau was one of the curators. A prominent part of his analysis is made up of the fiercely hostile responses by regular visitors to the exhibition's unconventional display of treasured ‘masterpieces’. The reactions were provoked by the curator deliberately drawing attention to the different meanings, including that of war trophies obtained by violent means, attached to the revered objects over time. Through framing techniques, the conventional meanings – the ‘Congo-vision’ in Saunders's parlance – that characterized the museum ritual were destabilized. Together with interventions by contemporary artists (some of Congolese origin) the exhibit constituted a forceful challenge to the temporal distance between Belgium and Congo that Tervuren arguably still manufactures.
Reflection on the denial of (what Fabian has called) coevalness is present in many of the contributions, but takes its most concrete form in Fairweather's chapter about a local missionary/cultural museum in northern Namibia. Here, the community volunteers were telling visitors how their society became modern and connected to the global arena through the establishment of a Finnish mission. The visiting tourists on the other hand ignored such proof of a common history with their hosts; rather they were ‘in search of an encounter with the exotic’ thus expecting to meet the ‘authentic’ culture of ‘African village life’.
This is a fine book, its individual chapters competently probing the notion of ‘museum as ritual site’ from a range of different perspectives and in various types of heritage institutions. However, despite the critique of Duncan's disregard of agency, several of the chapters are thin on ethnography and surprisingly text-oriented. But the discussion has wide implications because of its theoretical engagement with institutions and corporations involved with entertainment and education, and their increasingly central role for negotiations about society, identity and history. These organizations rely on ritualized public practices to create meaning through enchantment and subjective experiences. As this volume shows, some of the formative concepts of anthropology and African studies, like magic, religion and ritual, can be useful heuristic devices to address such phenomena.
