The Museum Time Machine

Putting Cultures on Display

Robert Lumley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9781138147898
• eBook ISBN: 9781134986965
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Museum Administration
• Index: Business

A provocative contribution to the current debate on museums, this collection of essays contains contributions from France, Britain, Australia, the USA and Canada.

Part 1

The Landscape of Nostalgia

1

Heritage and ‘the Conserver Society’: The French Case

Philippe Hoyau

Translated by Chris Turner

Out of politeness the nobleman inspected their museum. He repeated: ‘Charming. Very good!’ all the while tapping his lips with the knob of his cane. For his own part, he thanked them for saving these remains of the Middle Ages, age of religious faith and knightly loyalty. He liked progress, and would, like them, have given himself up to these interesting studies, but politics, the local council, farming, a whole whirlwind of activity kept him from it.

‘In any case, after you, there would only be the gleanings; because you will have taken all the curiosities in the départment.’

‘Without conceit, that’s what we think’, said Pécuchet.

(Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard and Pécuchet)

‘The past, there’s our enemy. Humanity would be no worse off if we burned down all the libraries and museums: in fact such an act would bring it nothing but profit and glory’, railed Jules Vallès against the ‘religion’ of the old. He went on to say, ‘There is a whole clan of little men with their diplomas and distinctions of rank beavering away to keep up this cult of things which though magnificent in their own day are merely ridiculous and an encumbrance in ours’.¹ This would certainly have put the cat among the pigeons in the rue Valois,² when plans were being laid to propel us, by means of ‘Heritage Year’ into a new cult of the past, albeit a very different one from that denounced by Vallès. This new project in fact represents not so much a desire to preserve and celebrate a ‘monumental’, academic past as an attempt to promote new values on the basis of a thoroughly transformed conception of tradition and the national heritage.

The Great Inventory

Let us begin by rehearsing the facts. In November 1979 at the Arc-et-Senans salt-works, the then Minister of Culture, J.-P.Lecat, inaugrated ‘Heritage Year’ at a children’s tea-party. A year earlier a Heritage Directorate had been set up at the Ministry of Culture and a Commission for the Ethnological Heritage had been formed, comprising civil servants and the leading lights of French ethnology. Shortly after this, Giscard d’Estaing laid down the terms of reference for the projected Museum of the Nineteenth Century, which was to be a ‘pantheon’ of modern and industrial art. In March 1980 an exhibition opened with the title ‘Building in the Older Parts of Town’. Then came the announcement of the full Heritage Year programme, which turned out to be a real curiosity shop, ranging from the restoration of Vauban’s fortifications to the creation of a museum of agricultural machinery, from the fostering of ‘heritage awareness’ in schools to the Monet exhibition, from the promotion of regional ethnology to collecting family photos. ‘The notion of heritage has been expanded’, observed the minister. ‘The national heritage is no longer merely a matter of cold stones or of exhibits kept under glass in museum cabinets. It now includes the village wash-house, the little country church, local songs and forms of speech, crafts and skills.’³

The Commission for the Ethnological Heritage goes even further; it includes in the notion of ‘Heritage’ the specific modes of material existence and of the social organization of groups (both past and in process of formation), representations of the world, together, more generally, with the elements on which the unity of every social group is based, such as institutions, material and non-material goods, works virtual or actual, and so on. The Commission also argues that efforts must be directed towards the collection of all written or oral records, correspondence, files, written reminiscences, notebooks, and diaries and, moreover, that new ‘objects’ of study must be constituted, such as urban social and cultural forms, the economy and legal framework of pre-capitalist exchange, forms of popular knowledge collected and studied in the light of ethnobotany, ethnozoology, ethnolinguistics, ecology, and ‘natural’ medicine. Some of these projects start this year (and a ‘File on the ethnological heritage’ is already being assembled). They include studies of myth and cultural identity in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais coalfield, of life on the narrow boats on the canals of the Midi (focusing on work, on the boats both as ‘tools’ and as centres of family life, on demography, and on the formation of group identity), popular memory of the First World War, the constitution of a sound archive in Aubrac and in Aquitaine, an ethnological and cinematic record of life in an urban area and a village in the Bouches-du-Rhône, preservation and study of the world of Lyon weavers (in the Croix-Rousse quarter), the creation of ecomuseums (local and regional museums of ‘ways of life’ and work) of which there are already some thirty in Brittany, the constitution of oral archives of the Jewish community in Alsace, saving and promoting awareness of Brittany’s sea-faring heritage, oral tradition in the Parisis, the Pays de France, and Vexin, an inventory of the first cinemas in the Ile de France area, a conference and exhibition on ‘gardens lost and re-found’ in the Languedoc, and, in the context of rural preservation, a study of a representative village in each of the fifteen districts of Haute Normandie.

The inventory of an ‘industrial heritage’ may seem novel and surprising, and yet industrial archaeology already has both its ‘enthusiasts’ and its experts;⁴ for some years now it has spurred a new breed of archaeologists of factory-production to venture into the backyards of the industrial Nord dèpartement, along canal banks and into deserted factories. ‘Just as a château or an old urban quarter are part of our cultural heritage’, argues one of them, ‘so the industrial plants of past centuries also have historic value for us today’.⁵ This is the ‘infrastructure’ taking its revenge. By being assimilated into the nation’s heritage, material production once again finds its place in the cultural landscape: efforts are made then to prevent the destruction of factories, industrial archaeology sight-seeing tours are organized, and children are initiated into the mysteries of hydraulic pumps.⁶ At the same time, Bertrand Gille, our foremost historian of technology, calls on the heads of industry to preserve their companies’ archives and worn-out machinery.

Curiously then, dead labour is restaged, with the violence done to the producers and the environment spirited away in a search for lived experience and past forms of social life. And if manufacturing architecture still exudes an atmosphere of suffering rather than one of harmony, it is none the less valid as testimony to an order which is ‘real’ because it once existed. As a result, once the notion of ‘heritage’ has been cut free from its attachment to beauty, anything can be part of it, from miners’ cottages or public wash-houses to the halls of Versailles, so long as it is historical evidence. But it is, in fact, from the sheer extent of the inventory that this truth effect—and our identification with it—is sought. At the same time, though the introduction into the realm of ‘conservation’ of patois and popular knowledge on the one hand, and of technology, industrial architecture, and machinery on the other, forces a serious rethink upon the world of ‘muscology’, its main effect is to offer much greater scope than before for the implementation of policies for the management, preservation, and valorization of the historical past.

The Health of the Community

The eclecticism of the programme, and the themes it mobilizes, in fact inflect these policies towards the ‘plural’. ‘Heritage Year’ is a perfect reflection of this. Through these choices and the way they fit together, an imaginary object, the Past, seems to take shape. It forms around three major models: the family (the dwelling, rituals and customs, cooking and domestic production, and so on), conviviality (community life, festivals, production, and so on), and spirit of place (linguistic usage and patois, architecture, representations, techniques, cultural identity, ecology, and so on). Without prejudging the inherent interest of these themes, the evident investment in them both at the levels of scholarship and policy seems to us to produce several types of effects. We shall look at each of these in turn.

First, in so far as history and historical awareness is concerned, they allow the questioning and self-questioning history of concepts and criticism to be replaced by the illusion of colour, the magic of diversity, the detail of inventories, and an ecstatic contemplation of the Unchanging. At the same time, by combining these various models one with another, and moving from the local to the general, it becomes possible to build up a fictive totality called the Past. History is absorbed by and cancelled out in ethnology, while the elements of what we may call ‘open’ history—conflicts, interests, resistance, illusions, specific sequences of events—fade into the unchanging landscape and become fixed in a temporality which is one of repetition.⁷ The pacified, neutralized ‘past’, divested of its residual burden of uncertainty may then be offered up for us collectively to identify with it. In our view, this seems to form the substance of the new discourse ‘from above’ (and not only from above) on history in France, in which the nation’s greatness is seen as residing not so much in the magnificence of its Art as in the exquisite variety of its popular skills and the indestructible nature of its forms of social life, which have endured through so many social upheavals.

Second, this new orientation towards ‘conservation’ has given birth to a new discipline, ‘ethnohistory’. Roughly speaking, its specific concern is with investigations of ‘ways of life’ and relations of production and representation both past and present, as they can be observed in a particular milieu or micro-milieu. As a fieldwork-based discipline, it is attentive to the minor, the everyday, and the trivial and it has taken as its horizon the life of the community or locality. It seems indeed to be not so much a specific branch of knowledge as a conjunction of different and yet convergent methods and sensibilities drawn from disciplines as diverse as anthropology geography, and the history of technology. Thus for example archaeology seeks to become more ‘diversified’, focused ‘not simply on monuments, but on daily life, agrarian structures and indeed everything which makes up the substratum of a civilisation’.⁸ Moreover the development of ethnohistory marks a redeployment of French ethnology, which, we are told, has been too long kept apart (by the burden of a colonial past) from its real source of inspiration which is the metropolis, where the archaic and the modern co-exist in a particularly rich blend. But its major achievement could prove to be that of adjusting ethnological and historical research to the ‘ideological’ imperatives of the day, and particularly of rationalizing nostalgia by providing it with ‘real’ content. Moreover, by giving new value to what were formerly regarded as ‘minor’ forms of knowledge and objects that were previously scorned, ethnohistory affirms its spirit of openness and can therefore hope to have a very wide audience.

Third, the circulation of these widely accepted models allows a cultural consensus to emerge around the kind of stable values that modernity has failed to instill. But has perpetuity yet produced its response to the ‘crisis’ (which is, as so many are fond of telling us, ideological and political)? The Report of the Working Party on the Ethnological Heritage stresses that

There is a very great public interest today in the original elements which went to make up French society in the distant past. At the regional or local level, this interest is being translated into a wide range of initiatives and a high level of vigorous social demands. It goes together with an increased desire on the part of citizens to gain control over how their own lives are organized and how the institutions with which they are most closely involved are run; they are seeking to acquire that control through increased participation in community activities. Lastly, it reveals a consciousness of problems of identity in which a preserved or re-found sense of difference plays a central role, a role that extends right into the organization of daily life as it is lived today.

Further on in the same document, we read:

In the last ten years or so, we have once again seen the emergence both in the countryside and the towns, in our larger cities and our new towns, and among the latest immigrant communities as well as in traditional areas, of a wide variety of groups which are becoming crucibles of new forms of social life and ethnic identifications, and of new cultural developments and mixes.

For his part, Georges-Henri Rivière, who has just received the ‘National Heritage Prize’, declares: ‘People should take an interest. They should realize that these things (in the “minor” heritage) belong to them. This is what I call giving people back their identity, their local identity’.⁹ Writing of the notion of ‘community’, in which, as they see it, ‘ideally spatial unity, social unity and cultural coherence’ should coincide, Daniel Fabre and Jacques Lacroix, have observed that in spite of ‘the suspicion with which it is regarded by sociologists and politicians, the term evokes a potent image at the crossroads of history and Utopia’¹⁰

From this point of view, nostalgia can now be seen as a prescriptive and prospective matter and ‘Heritage Year’ ushers in the age of its expanded reproduction. What is involved here is not so much the grand old dream of the ‘good society’ or a ‘benign order’, as an opportunity to renew the public’s commitment to the political sphere and give fresh stimulus to local and regional allegiances; the leaders of a certain ‘soft’ socialism are already working towards this goal,¹¹ as are the uncritical advocates of a decentralized, self-governing, even ‘ecological’ society, which will somehow take over ‘from below’ at the end of the ‘crisis’. Moreover, the report quoted above puts the emphasis on the solidarity linking ‘benign’ policies to ethnohistory and the preservation of the popular heritage:

This desire to take control of their own history reflects an evergrowing desire to participate in the management of their neighbourhood communities. In this regard, reforms tending to increase the responsibility of local collectivities will give an important boost to an ethnology policy.

In a certain sense, then, geography fills in where history seems to have no answers: as evidence of this, we need only think of all those people —‘intellectuals’ and others—who, being unable to propose new values in the disenchanted post-1968 world, have turned instead to a religion of ‘roots’ and ‘neighbourhood’. Yet, in subsuming politics in human relations, the warm unity of the Community and ‘collective life’, they have cut themselves off from that kind of history which can actually be made.

Cultural Mobilization

With the ‘minor heritage’ rescued from oblivion, and with popular tradition now released from its subservience to Tradition’ and recognized as being positively in the public interest, everybody can be enlisted in the cause:

Heritage Year aims to be more than a mere collection of events. It is seeking to create a state of mind, to modify behaviour and ways of thinking…the measure of its success will be the extent to which it can create new interest among the general public to put their time, imagination, energy and money into the creatio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• The Landscape of Nostalgia
• Museums in a Changing World
• Sociology of the Museum Public
• Index