The Future of Indigenous Museums

New York : Berghahn Books , 2007 . A broad consensus about the essential universality of museological behavior—of collection or retrieval, display and conservation—is now matched by a growing awareness of the astonishing diversity of these practices beyond the narrow confines of Western conceptions of the museum. Like historicities and visualities, these variable museologies are culturally nuanced and often more locally or regionally than globally inflected. This is not to suggest—in some overreaction to earlier stereotypes of indigenous museums as poor imitations of Western models—that indigenous museologies and their materialization as museums have been hermetically sealed from global developments. Much as the traces of indigenous agency inform Western representations, and Western practices find expression in indigenous representations, Western and indigenous museologies are thoroughly imbricated. The contributions to this edited collection seek to transcend some of these simple oppositions. Building on an earlier volume that surveyed regional institutions (Museums and Cultural Centers in the Pacific, S. M. Eoe and P. Swadling, eds., Papua New Guinea National Museum, 1991), this collection of 14 essays brings the insights and perspectives of the “new museology” to bear on the narrower Southwest Pacific region (principally Melanesia and Australia). As Christina Kreps notes in a stimulating final reflection, the Pacific currently lies at the cutting edge of developments in cultural heritage theory, particularly through the elaboration of concepts of intangible heritage. The limited materiality of Pacific forms of cultural heritage may point to intangibility as a universal if neglected property of cultural heritage—and thus a challenge for global museological practice. For anyone with an interest either in cultural heritage and museology, or in the politics of indigenous representation, this volume straddles an important intersection. It also speaks to the highly topical field of indigenous historicity and the engagement of indigenous communities with the place of their own heritage in a globalized cultural economy. In a thoughtful introduction, editor Nick Stanley distinguishes between the approaches to indigenous museology that emphasize either the influence of exogenous inspiration or a more balanced exchange between Western and indigenous ideas about cultural heritage, matching the two-way traffic in materials. Stanley proposes a third avenue, in which indigenous agency is privileged and to which he wants to recruit the notion of the indigenous museum as a “genuine autochthonous museum.” The concept of indigenous museums in Oceania stems from the seminal essay by Sidney Moko Mead (Museum 1983:98–101), who mapped what he regarded as a number of distinctive criteria that marked them out from Western museums (“hospitals for art”): known “publics,” usually relatively small in scale and restricted by category; a different manner of contemplation of the museum's contents; a privileged role for oral traditions in exegesis; and a focus on the transmission of traditions rather than display and conservation. What the various contributions to this volume document is a wide spectrum of possible forms for indigenous museums, and a corresponding range of degrees of success. Stanley, following Lissant Bolton, emphasizes the additional element of “contemporaneity” in indigenous museums—their particular attention to the present salience of the cultural past. Yet his further distinction between museums, as containers for artifacts, and cultural centers, as locations for economic opportunity and the performance of local identity, is open to question. A number of the case studies in the volume, including Diane Losche's take on the Tjibaou Cultural Center in New Caledonia, the study of the Torres Strait Islands' Gab Titui Cultural Center by Anita Herle, Jude Philp, and Leilani Bin Juda, and Christin Kocher Schmid's account of the construction of the Teptep cultural center in Papua New Guinea's Finisterre Mountains, clearly locate the initial development of indigenous museums within a context of quite specific local political agendas and struggles. One of the real strengths of the collection is the long-term engagement of most of the authors with their host communities, and their capacity to situate these museums within broader forms and modes of knowledge transmission. Sean Kingston's essay on the “indigenous museological behaviour” of Lak speakers in New Britain neatly demonstrates the way in which heritage is processed with one eye firmly set on the future, albeit through the “absent museum” of the tubuan, in which the material traces of cultural performance such as masks are systematically destroyed in order to enable further social and cultural reproduction. What emerges from the volume as a whole is an image of indigenous museums that departs in several significant ways from the prescriptions of the introduction. It is not merely the problematic resonance of the category “indigenous,” which Kreps correctly identifies as unstable for all but the broadest comparative purposes (let alone the challenge of identifying any institution as both “genuine” and “autochthonous”). The fact that many indigenous museums have their origins in colonial institutions or through the agency of nonindigenous actors does not disqualify them, as Kreps notes, but the necessary rider is that the presence of indigenous staff or leadership does not automatically guarantee that a museum is essentially an indigenous project (as any visitor to the Provincial Museum in Indonesia's Papua Province can attest). Kingston observes that the term indigenous museum is itself contradictory, in that the function of external display central to a museum presumes an audience for whom the collection is either culturally or temporally “foreign.” The critical issue of agency or autonomy in the constitution and direction of individual institutions surfaces repeatedly as the central problem for indigenous museums. When Rob Welsch, with great enthusiasm, tracks down a “truly indigenous cultural centre” in Papua New Guinea's Enga Province, there is some ambiguity in his account between the notion of authentic indigeneity as an attraction for a prospective (and presumably nonlocal) public, and indigeneity as a measure of the degree of local representational autonomy or control. This push toward increasingly localized control over heritage is signalled in the chapter by Lawrence Foana'ota on the mounting pressure for cultural decentralization in the Solomon Islands, where political responsibility for culture has been passed, like a hot yam, among no fewer than 20 ministries since 1972. Tate LeFevre offers an engaging account of Lifou Islanders in New Caledonia mobilizing to closely manage the projection of their own cultural identity, locally to visiting cruise ships and internationally at festivals, through the Troupe de Wetr dance group. Eric Venbrux also tackles the subtle interplay of indigenous agency and external influence in his history of the evolution of Australia's Tiwi Islands as a “museumscape,” molded both from within and without by the commercial pressures and opportunities of cultural tourism. Curiously, the editor's study of the Catholic Crosier Mission's Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress in Indonesian Papua is perhaps the least convincing case for an indigenous museum in the volume, given the political limits on the rights of Asmat people to articulate and pursue their own agendas. For many of its critics, the museum's annual Asmat Arts Festival functions principally as a performance of authentication for foreign collectors and dealers. The most commonly cited instance of a successful indigenous museum in the Pacific is Vanuatu's National Museum and Cultural Center, or VKS, and given the strong undercurrent of interest throughout the volume in the question of success, Lissant Bolton's chapter (one of a series of recent papers by her on the VKS) is instructive. A succession of dynamic directors and staff, both foreign and indigenous, and particularly strong connections to rural centers and communities through a very active program of volunteer male and female fieldworkers, have provided a platform for collaboration with external institutions and researchers in which VKS objectives remain central. Elsewhere, museums with more limited local agendas and horizons, such as the Gogodala cultural centers in Papua New Guinea's western province described by Alison Dundon, have struggled to survive, sometimes with just a single visitor over a year. As with other projects of modernity, enthusiasm appears to wane once the immediate goal of opening a center is achieved, and the result then fails to deliver on impossible promises. Kreps identifies Pacific museums as the most likely sites for the development of the “post-museum” or “future-museum,” in which community interests and heritage conventions are more closely integrated with institutional policy. While this is plausible for those museums or centers that are confidently and appropriately grounded in local concerns, it may be that the “post-museum” will take the form of new museological networks rather than novel sites, reflecting the priority of conversation over conservation at indigenous museums, and the ever-expanding scope of those conversations. Perhaps the success of an indigenous museum is best gauged by the extent to which it is regarded simultaneously as indigenous by outsiders, and as a portal to the outside by its indigenous constituents

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