Museums, Prejudice and the Reframing of Difference

Richard Sandell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781134209750
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

How, if it all, do museums shape the ways in which society understands difference?

In recent decades there has been growing international interest amongst practitioners, academics and policy makers in the role that museums might play in confronting prejudice and promoting human rights and cross-cultural understanding. Museums in many parts of the world are increasingly concerned to construct exhibitions which represent, in more equitable ways, the culturally pluralist societies within which they operate, accommodating and
engaging with differences on the basis of gender, race, ethnicity, class, religion, disability, sexuality and so on.
Despite the ubiquity of these trends, there is nevertheless limited understanding of the social effects, and attendant
political consequences, of these purposive representational strategies.

Richard Sandell combines interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives with in-depth empirical investigation to address a number of timely questions. How do audiences engage with and respond to exhibitions designed to contest, subvert and reconfigure prejudiced conceptions of social groups? To what extent can museums be understood to shape, not simply reflect, normative understandings of difference, acceptability and tolerance? What are the challenges for museums which attempt to engage audiences in debating morally charged and contested contemporary social issues and how might these be addressed? Sandell argues that museums frame, inform and enable the conversations which audiences and society more broadly have about difference and highlights the moral and political challenges, opportunities and responsibilities which accompany these constitutive qualities.

1
MUSEUMS AND THE GOOD
SOCIETY

At the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Glasgow, Scotland, visitors find works of art, inspired by diverse religious beliefs, sharing a gallery space and presented alongside each other in ways designed to suggest their equal importance and value. Objects linked to the six most practised world religions – Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism and Sikhism – are displayed in ways which aim to highlight the commonalities between faiths as well as to show what is unique about each. Visitors are invited to share their reactions to the exhibitions and their views on the museum with others through written comments displayed within the galleries. These approaches to display are shaped by the museum’s founding social purpose – to promote mutual understanding and respect between people of different faiths and of no faith (O’Neill 1994).

At the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, visitors follow a prescribed route through the house and into the Secret Annex where the Frank family hid during the Second World War, learning more about the historical events surrounding the writing of the diaries that have become so widely known. Following their tour of the house, many of the museum’s approximately one million visitors each year are surprised to encounter an exhibition exploring contemporary social situations in which human rights come into conflict. Visitors are encouraged to form and share their own opinions on such wide-ranging topics as homophobic hate crime, the controversial lyrics of rap artist Eminem, representations of disabled people in advertising and the rights of individuals and political groups to express their racist views. Although designed to encourage debate and to elicit audience responses in relation to challenging issues of prejudice and discrimination, the exhibition is nevertheless underpinned by, and aims to engender support for, the concept of equal human rights for all.

Although the purposive approaches to display embodied within exhibitions at the Anne Frank House and the St Mungo Museum are, in some ways, distinctive and experimental, they are nevertheless illustrative of much broader shifts in museological thinking and practice that have been taking place and which have become influential in shaping international museum rhetoric and policy. In recent years, museums have become increasingly confident in proclaiming their value as agents of social change and, in particular, articulating their capacity to promote cross-cultural understanding, to tackle prejudice and intolerance and to foster respect for difference. This confidence is reflected in both the mission statements of individual, socially purposive museums and in more broadly-framed policy and advocacy documents that articulate generic claims regarding the value of museums.

A relatively small, but growing, number of ‘specialist’ museums, whose primary purposes and rationales are concerned with combating prejudice and promoting human rights, have received increasing attention within the museum world. These include, for example, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the Japanese American National Museum and the Museum of Tolerance in the United States, the District Six Museum and Constitution Hill in South Africa, as well as the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art in Scotland and the Anne Frank House in Holland. An ambitious new project, currently in planning – the Canadian Museum for Human Rights – claims it will be the largest centre for education around human rights in the world.¹

Concern for these issues has not been confined solely to these, in some ways specialised, museums with explicitly social missions. The idea that museums of all kinds contribute, in varied ways, towards the creation of a less prejudiced society is increasingly reflected in the rhetoric from international museum agencies, professional associations and governments. The following statements, from the International Council of Museums, the American Association of Museums and the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport, are illustrative of the ways in which the roles, purposes and value of museums are increasingly being articulated:

Museums have unique potential for addressing and fostering cultural understanding in interdisciplinary ways.

(International Council of Museums 2005)²

Museums perform their most fruitful public service by providing an educational experience in the broadest sense: by fostering the ability to live in a pluralistic society and to contribute to the resolution of the challenges we face as global citizens … Museums can no longer confine themselves simply to preservation, scholarship, and exhibition independent of the social context in which they exist. They must recognize that the public dimension of museums leads them to perform the public service of education – a term that in its broadest sense includes exploration, study, observation, critical thinking, contemplation, and dialogue.

(American Association of Museums 1992: 6–8)

[M]useums can help visitors reflect on their place in the world, their identity, their differences and similarities … Museums can provide a tolerant space where difficult contemporary issues can be explored in safety and in the spirit of debate.

(Department for Culture, Media and Sport 2005: 11)

Although, as these statements suggest, contemporary conceptions of museums focus on their potential to operate as agents of positive (libera-tory, empowering, inclusive) social change, sociological critiques of the ways museums function in society (especially, though not exclusively, drawing on historical examples) have often highlighted their tendency to represent cultures in hierarchical ways with oppressive and excluding consequences.

Wide-ranging studies – variously arguing from theory, from history and more rarely from empirical audience research – have attempted to show that museums of all kinds, including science museums that have made some of the strongest claims to objectivity, do not constitute ‘neutral sheltering places for objects’ (Duncan 1995: 1) but rather that they generate ideological effects by constructing and communicating a particular vision of society. For example, they have operated as instruments for the exercise of power and have been used to assert the legitimacy of the dominance of one group over others (Bennett 1988; Hooper-Greenhill 2000). They have functioned to engender feelings of belonging and worth in some and, in others, a sense of inferiority and exclusion. The museum’s power to privilege particular forms of knowledge and to naturalise highly particularised sets of values has been deployed to invent and maintain national identities (Evans 1999; Macdonald 2003). By assembling objects and arranging them in ways that communicate specific messages, museums have been understood to privilege and promulgate certain ways of viewing and relating to difference, and to occlude or silence others (Macdonald 1998; Karp and Kratz 2000; Sandell 2005).

The particular discourses of difference that museums construct are socially, historically and culturally situated. They are informed by dominant social values and beliefs which become written into, concretised and rendered visible within exhibition narratives. Tony Bennett (1998, 2003), for example, has argued that public museums in the nineteenth century – though often created by individuals, liberal in inclination, who believed their work would contribute to a greater social good – were purposefully designed to highlight distinctions between groups in ways which reinforced and reproduced inequitable power relations. This approach is perhaps most clearly illustrated in typological methods of display, prevalent in nineteenth-century museums, which arranged objects in hierarchically structured ways intended to ‘construct an evolutionary ordering of the relations between peoples’ (2003: 6). These displays were intended to communicate racialised understandings of difference and to suggest the superiority – moral, cultural and technological – of Western over non-Western peoples (Bennett 1988, Macdonald 2003).

Although critiques which highlight the museum’s role in depicting cultures in pernicious ways (with injurious consequences) have been very influen-tial in museum studies, they have nevertheless been criticised for focusing on production and neglecting processes of consumption (Mason 2006). Exhibitions may be constructed in ways that are intended to communicate particular understandings of difference, but limited consideration has been given to the ways in which visitors might engage with them. Audiences have often been disregarded or imagined as passive recipients of intended messages (ibid.).

This neglect of audiences and processes of reception is similarly evident in contemporary conceptions of the museum as a force for positive social change. Despite the increasingly insistent, confident and ubiquitous rhetoric, there remains both a paucity of empirical evidence and a lack of theoretical interrogation with which to inform and substantiate the claims that museums are making, and those being made on their behalf. Through a syncretic approach, combining in-depth field research with theoretical perspectives from a range of disciplines, this book seeks to enhance understanding of the agency of museums by investigating audience responses to exhibitions purposefully designed to ‘combat prejudice’. I use this phrase to encompass efforts to enhance cross-cultural understanding and respect, to promote issues of equality, tolerance and human rights and to challenge negatively stereotypical representations of oppressed groups. For the most part, the arguments I shall develop are neither focused on specific social groups nor on particular manifestations of prejudice but are concerned, rather more broadly, with the museum’s potential to (re)frame, enable and inform society’s conversations³ about difference.

My analysis focuses on the ways in which audiences engage with exhibitions where attempts have been made to ‘write in’ messages designed to promote equality and combat prejudice. What discourses or ‘interpretative repertoires’ (Potter and Wetherell 1987) are stimulated amongst visitors by the exhibition encounter? What cues, interpretive props or other factors within the museum’s control might potentially influence the visitor’s process of meaning-construction and how might these be deployed to combat prejudice? What role might audience perceptions of the museum’s cultural authority play in influencing readings of exhibitions? In addressing these questions, I aim to develop a set of concepts which offer a way of understanding and describing, and a means of interrogating, the social agency of museums.

This first chapter outlines some of the key debates, tensions and challenges that are inherent within this project and outlines the critical framework through which my research questions are addressed. I set out the aims and objectives of the primary research which underpins the arguments developed throughout the book and introduce the methodological approach I deployed to investigate the role of museums in the combating of prejudice. The issues and topics I touch upon here are threaded throughout the book and are discussed in greater depth in subsequent chapters. They are, however, introduced here to establish a rationale and context for the approach I have taken.

Museums and the good society

Recent decades have seen a radical reassessment of museums’ roles, purposes and responsibilities. No longer primarily inwardly focused on the stewardship of their collections, museums are increasingly expected to direct their attention towards the needs of their visitors and communities through the provision of a range of educational and other services (Weil 1999). More recently, there has been a growing interest in the potential for museums to function as agents of social change, deploying their collections and other resources to contribute, in varied ways, towards a more just and equitable society (Sandell 1998, Sandell 2002a, Janes and Conarty 2005). Museums, then, have been required to develop new goals that respond to local and global social concerns, to articulate and justify their value in social terms, to demonstrate and measure their impact and to develop new working practices to reflect these trends.

A review of recent museum literature highlights the diverse ways in which individual museums, shaped by their own local contexts, have responded to this widespread reorientation of museum functions and purposes. Viv Szekeres (2002), for example, offers an account of public programmes at the Migration Museum in Adelaide, Australia, intended to challenge racism experienced by local communities. Ruth Abram (2005) describes initiatives at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York designed to give support to newly arrived immigrants to the city including the provision of English classes and development of a resource guide. Jocelyn Dodd (2002) discusses a series of initiatives at Nottingham Museums, England, which sought to tackle health inequalities in the region, including projects concerned with HIV and AIDS and high rates of teenage pregnancy. Lois Silverman (2002) describes projects in Bloomington, Indiana, which have explored the therapeutic use of museums through collaborative initiatives with a range of social service client groups. As these examples demonstrate, individual museums, responding to local contexts and imperatives, have engaged with social concerns and sought to address inequalities in varied ways. However, the refashioning of museums as organisations with the capacity to contribute towards a less prejudiced society – one in which cultural differences are affirmed, nurtured and celebrated – has been more or less universal (Bennett 2005).

Several factors have contributed to this reorientation of role and purpose and the widespread conception of museums as agencies with the potential to promote cross-cultural understanding and respect. These include the growing global influence of human rights discourses; the changing demographic composition of many Western societies; the ‘new social movements’ of the last fifty years that have led to a proliferation of previously marginalised voices; heightened international interest in multiculturalism, cultural diversity and an approach to the politics of difference which rejects assimilationist policies in favour of those which affirm cultural and ethnic differences; and the introduction of increased demands for accountability, in much of the Western industrialized world, that have increasingly required publicly funded institutions to demonstrate their value to society (Scott 2002). In some contexts, imperatives for the reshaping of museum roles and responsibilities have been galvanised by government policies, formulated at both national and local levels. In the UK, for example, the influence of government policy has been especially pronounced. In 2000 the Department for Culture, Media and Sport issued its policy guidance on publicly funded museums, galleries and archives in England making explicit the government’s expectations that the cultural sector should play a part in the combating of social exclusion (DCMS 2000). At the same time, government policy in Scotland called for museums, alongside and in partnership with wide-ranging public and voluntary agencies, to play an active role in contributing to a social justice agenda (Scottish Museums Council 2000). The formulation of policies that have required museums to contribute to broader social objectives of government has frequently generated fierce debates around the instrumentalisation...