Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe

Peoples, Places and Identities

Christopher Whitehead, Susannah Eckersley, Katherine Lloyd, Rhiannon Mason

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317092674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Museum Studies

The imperatives surrounding museum representations of place have shifted from the late eighteenth century to today. The political significance of place itself has changed and continues to change at all scales, from local, civic, regional to national and supranational. At the same time, changes in population flows, migration patterns and demographic movement now underscore both cultural and political practice, be it in the accommodation of 'diversity' in cultural and social policy, scholarly explorations of hybridity or in state immigration controls. This book investigates the historical and contemporary relationships between museums, places and identities. It brings together contributions from international scholars, academics, practitioners from museums and public institutions, policymakers, and representatives of associations and migrant communities to explore all these issues.

Chapter 1
Place, Identity and Migration and European Museums

Christopher Whitehead, Rhiannon Mason, Susannah Eckersley and Katherine Lloyd

Introduction

One major contention of this book and of the research that we have undertaken for the MeLa project is that place is a fundamental epistemological structure and referent within museums. This initial chapter draws on our research into European museum representations of place as well as providing an initial sense of some of the qualitative research into staff and visitor perspectives. The chapter is in three parts. We will offer some theoretical resources for understanding place within museums: (1) as a force within identity work; (2) as something inextricably connected with temporality; and (3) as an entity made manifest in material objects in museums. We also discuss the scales of place representations, from global to local and ‘multi-geographical’, involving a discussion of the nature of historical representation in museums and the significance of place for the construction of history more generally. This corresponds loosely to the thematic structuring of our research in clusters, including ‘Placing the Nation’, ‘European Cities and their Others’ and ‘Peoples, Borders, Movements’, articulating different ways of representing place and place identities in museums. Finally, we make suggestions for rethinking contemporary museum practice, with particular regard to issues around migration and its discursive configuration relative to ideas such as multiculturalism, exchange, solidarity and belonging.

We hope that this will offer some suggestions for strategies to reposition place within the museum as an organizational force. Through this force, migration and related issues such as ideas of belonging, disadvantage and prejudice can be presented as historicized phenomena that involve antagonisms to be faced in the present. At the same time, the repositioning of place means that the inevitable political agency of the museum can be both problematized and reflexively mobilized to engage with socio-political debates, tensions and possibilities. We acknowledge that place has already been used as an organizing theme for exhibitions in some museum genres (e.g. city or neighbourhood museums and migration museums) and in some countries with a well-recognized history of migration like Australia. However, we believe that there is scope to extend this theme to different kinds of museums and to museums operating in the European context and that a more thorough reflection on its representational potential can stimulate museum strategies that address and intervene constructively in social realities.

Part 1: Place, Time, Identity

Museum collections are drawn together from specific places (sometimes plural, and sometimes outwith and far from the geographical location of the museum). Displays represent places explicitly or implicitly: from the morphological and environmental interests of museums of natural history; the colonizing and differencing impulse of the early ethnographic museum; the territorial surveying of the archaeological museum (often based on where – in which places – objects in the collection were found); and the geographies of the history museum, where places are often recognized not as mere backdrops to events but rather as inextricably bound up with them. Even the public art museum, which may be seen as an attempt to present materials (art works) as transcending the places of their origin and use, has nearly always mobilized place as a primary means of classification and as an explanation for differences between and evolutionary trajectories within bodies of material (the travels of artists and their influence upon others). More direct examples could be mentioned, such as: the open-air folk museum, where places are reconstructed, physically re-membered or invented; the city museum; the ecomuseum, where the place and the museum are inseparable, although such places may calcify or assume a mythical or fictional aspect as a result of their museumification; and the migration museum, charting people’s journeys from, through and to places. At the extreme end of the representational spectrum we locate the so-called ‘universal museum’ that purports to represent the world (in its historical-relational complexity) to the world, thereby, according to some (e.g. O’Neill 2004) justifying its international holdings and seeking escape from the moral, financial and practical binds associated with wholesale repatriation claims.

Place, in short, is an organizing force in museums and provides the sense or focus (or both) of museum representations. However, where human history is concerned we need to think of place not as an isolated force or referent. Rather, it is so bound up with human existence that it forms a historicized place–people–culture complex in the sense developed by Sharon Macdonald (although the complex that interests her is ‘memory–heritage–identity’), where a ‘complex’ consists of ‘non-exhaustive patterned combinations and relationships’ and complexes themselves gain autonomous meanings, effects and possibilities for ‘going on’ (2013: 5). It is the representations of this complex in different political contexts with which we are concerned, most particularly because this complex has the capacity to do some work in relation to identities: to be brought to bear upon them, and to implicate, perpetuate and construct them. This identity work¹ occurs in two ways.

Firstly, museum representations may confer identity characteristics upon the inhabitants of places: Macdonald, for example, identifies how the Museum of Skye uses objects of local production to testify to local resourcefulness and independence from the ‘outside’ (2013: 155); while the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh commissioned ‘One Nation, Five Million Voices’ in 2008 for its permanent gallery Scotland: A Changing Nation. This is a ‘talking heads’ film of Scots and other inhabitants of Scotland discussing Scottish character traits: hospitable, tolerant, welcoming, friendly, down-to-earth, gregarious, hard-working, truthful, ‘rough (in a good way)’, community-oriented and so on. The film is complex: it is both a representation of people’s impressions, beliefs and experiences pertaining to identity and at the same time a means of orchestrating individual voices into an institutional conferral of identity. While most of the traits mentioned are complementary and thus tending to a shared or unitary place identity, some contradictory traits are offered – the Scots are presented by some as ‘dour’ and ‘pessimistic’, and by another as ‘the happiest people you’ll ever meet’, pointing to the discrepant nature of such generalizations and allowing for the destabilization of identities – a theme to which we will return towards the end of this chapter.

It is rare in museum and heritage representations to encounter explicit explanations for how such shared character traits came to be and how they are connected to place, although we see in the example of the Museum of Skye that an isolated place may be connected to people’s resourcefulness and independent spirit, just as the need to subsist in a rugged landscape may be connected to the hardiness of its inhabitants; Trinca, for example, discusses the ‘recurring nationalist impulse to contrive a stoic bush type as classically Australian’ (2007: 99). But the precise logics of place identities – for example the ways in which place might determine identity – are often unclear. Are place identities seen as innate, singular to ‘natives’ and unshareable with others, thus enabling ideologies with racial and potentially racist underpinnings? Or are they seen to be culturally transmitted and learned, so that non-autochthonous² ethnic groups can share common traits? Do they derive from the communal experience of living and surviving in place? Perhaps in reality there is often slippage between these positions both in museum representations and in people’s beliefs, and place identity can be both strongly conferred or felt and poorly articulated. In any case, museum conferrals of identity function as interpellation – do we, as visitors, belong to (identify with) a suggested identity? Are our credentials ‘in place’? Or are we asked to identify (but not to identify with) a discrete geographically-defined group – for example, the Scots, the islanders, etc. – from outside, and to learn about and to appreciate (or in some cases and at some times, such as in early museums that supported colonial projects and cast colonized peoples as inferior or degenerate, to deplore) their salient characteristics?

Secondly, visitors to museums may encounter representations and reminders of places that have been or are part of their own personal histories, bringing into play affective responses, such as feelings of belonging or non-belonging, interrelated with memory work such as remembering, reminiscing or indeed seeking to forget. In this sense, as part of the theoretical premises of our research we previously proposed a definition of place identity as:

The construction of identity for or by people(s) through reference to place and/or the construction of identity for places through reference to their morphology, histories, cultures and inhabitants. (Whitehead et al. 2012: 14)

This definition is an attempt to acknowledge the identity work that is undertaken by ‘official’ institutional representations, for example in museums, TV, tourist literature, etc., alongside and sometimes in relation to identities that individuals and groups may construct, perform and experience for themselves. It is important to consider that institutional conferrals of place identity and people’s experiences, feelings and statements of identity often inform one another, but that there is also scope for significant mismatch between them. While such mismatch is partly a consequence of the liabilities involved in ‘speaking for’ multiple and heterogeneous communities through institutional representation, it can also be a consequence of representational violence incurred by cultural prejudice, be it conscious or unconscious. For example we may consider the omission in some city museums of reference to neighbourhoods with significant populations of migrant descent or minority groups. At the same time, political factors may come into play, such as the desire to erase the cultural memories associated with specific places that might perpetuate dissent, discomfort or encourage the exercise of ideologies that are no longer accepted by dominant groups. Consider for example the long-standing absence of memorialization of the Führerbunker beneath Wilhelmstraße in Berlin (Macdonald 2009: 4) – a sharp contrast to the spectacular and celebratory museumization of another bunker – the Churchill War Rooms in London. The desire to understand the relationship between institutional representation and people’s experience has fuelled the visitor studies undertaken as part of our work, which will be presented in a future publication.

To be clear, our definition of place-identity does not involve final definitions or deconstructions of the component nouns – place and identity. In a previous MeLa publication we took place, in a broadly social constructionist view that we will qualify in this chapter, to signify ‘the cultural entity constructed and reconstructed through human social representation’, that is, ‘what emerges when particular spaces are imbued with significance through human actions such as identifying, naming, surveying, mapping, bordering, conquering, ruling, representing, celebrating them etc.’ (Whitehead et al. 2012: 13). In relation to ‘identity’, we need an open concept in part because the need to negotiate competing conceptualizations within a unitary definition would produce something too cumbersome to be of use ‘in the field’. But it is also because a less-than-specific definition like this allows for the capture of a wide range of understandings and constructions and is attentive to the very multi-valency and currency of the term itself. As some have pointed out, ‘identity’ is still used in much academic writing but very often without coherent definition or qualified use, leading to critique and both negative and positive problematizations – that is, do we abandon the concept or seek to refine it? (Jones and Krzyżanowski 2008: 38–9). For example, Anthias argues that by rejecting the analytical concept of identity in favour of ‘belonging’ and ‘focusing on location/dislocation and on positionality … it is possible to problematize the epistemological and ontological status of identity and critique the forms of politics based upon these more effectively, while still treating identity as a socially meaningful concept’ (2002: 494; original emphasis). However, it is precisely because the term ‘identity’ has been naturalized and has become part of vernacular expression beyond the academy – it is ‘socially meaningful’ – that we find it to be useful. In this sense, we have attempted to keep the definition of identity open. This is all the more pressing because of affective dimensions that evade classificatory rigour, as in Hedetoft’s suggestion that identity inevitably involves attachments that involve ‘irrationality, emotionality, sentiment and unselfish dedication’ (Hedetoft 2002: 8).

At the same time we find compelling accounts of belonging as a way of rethinking identity. Jones and Krzyżanowski attempt to ‘unpack’ identity ‘into a theory of belonging’, attentive to ‘affinities and attachments that shape the way we perceive ourselves’ and inclusionary and exclusionary forces both internal, such as elective choice, and external, such as citizenship law (2008: 43–4), and productive of a necessarily circular definition:

Identity’ refers to the ways in which people link their complex range of belonging into an ‘ideal type’ situation, in which the multiple differences are incorporated into a collective identity, which can be seen as a proxy of infinitely complicated belongings. We conceptualize identity as a way in which individuals explain their complex belonging in a way that is understandable to others. (2008: 50)

While this is suggestive for understandings of the relationships between identity, belongings and the social, its emphasis on deliberative self-representation to others – similar in some ways to representational, declarative and performative theories of self and identity or (e.g. Goffman 1959; Waterman 1992) – forecloses attention to less formalized experiences of identity. A differently oriented account is developed by Montserrat Guibernau, who explores the dynamics between individual and group identities and posits that identity is ‘constructed both through belonging and through exclusion – as a choice or as imposed by others – and, in both cases, it involves various degrees of emotional attachment to a range of communities and groups’ (2013: 2). In these instances ‘belonging’ is connected primarily to human social relations, although Guibernau’s spatial metaphors hint at the potential for relationality between group belonging and place:

Belonging fosters an emotional attachment; it prompts the expansion of the individual’s personality to embrace the attitudes of the group, to be loyal and obedient to it. In return, the group offers a ‘home’, a familiar space – physical, virtual or imagined – where individuals share common interests, values, or a project. Belonging provides them with an environment in which they matter. (2013: 27)

When we think of ourselves as ‘belonging’ somewhere, a human social dimension may be involved, for we may think of ourselves as part of a group that belongs in that place, with its particular history. Or we may feel more rooted and essentialized belongings, such as our sense of being physicially adapted to a certain environment, or a predilection for a certain kind of landscape. We may feel belongings to multiple places, either because of personal migrations or cosmopolitan attitudes. If we identify as allochthons we may feel that we come to belong somewhere through willing adoption of local and/or civic ideals and practices, or through having major life experiences there. But belonging in place like this can be both elective and exclusionary: we may elect to belong, but this may contrast with competing ideas about who belongs and who does not, and indeed different groups may feel belongings to the same place with entirely contrasting affective and political orientations, leading to antagonisms.

What these ideas about belonging suggest is a way of articulating identities in connection to group relations and how people give meaning to their lives. We are interested in the way in which place might or should be inscribed into the complex of belongings that articulate identity and how ‘sources’ for attachment such as represented places or experiences-in-place might figure (cf. Hedetoft 2002: 2; Whitehead et al. 2012: 19). At the same time, given our interests in place, we also attend to the situational and relational contingency of identities (Jenkins 1996; see also Chapter 6 in this volume on the way in which visitors may shift identification with place in order to accept or reject plural representations of the nation). We also find convincing Macdonald’s (2009: 118–19) argument that we should attempt to move beyond scalar ontologies of place identity, such as the ‘local nesting inside the global’ and instead attend to the way in which categories of place identity such as local, global and transnational are ‘assembled’ by museums, that is, how these categories and divisions between places are produced, sustained and indeed disrupted within museum representations.

Our definition of place identity forms a basis for a number of other conceptualizations of particular importance for museum work, and indeed for heritage and historiography in general. These are the concepts of ‘identity place’, ‘identity objects’ (both introduced in Whitehead et al. 2012: 14–15) and, as developed by Whitehead and Bozoğlu in Chapter 10 of this volume, geo-temporal ‘constitution moments’. Before addressing these concepts,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Museums, Migration and Identity in Europe
• 1 Place, Identity and Migration and European Museums
• 2 From Migration to Diversity and Beyond: The Museum of London Approach
• 3 Re-Placing Europe: An Ethnological Perspective on Frontiers and Migrants
• 4 Walking the Tightrope between Memory and Diplomacy? Addressing the Post-Second World War Expulsions of Germans in German Museums
• 5 The Theme of Migration as a Tool for Deconstructing and Reconstructing Identities in Museums: Experiences from the Exhibition Becoming a Copenhagener at the Museum of Copenhagen
• 6 Negotiating Place, Heritage and Diversity: Young People’s Narratives of Belonging and Exclusion in Scotland
• 7 Destination Tyneside – Stories of Belonging: The Philosophy and Experience of Developing a New Permanent Migration Gallery at Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne
• 8 From Multiculturalism to (Super)diversity: Examples from the Amsterdam Museum
• 9 Migrant Memories on Display: Migration Museum and Exhibitions in Germany
• 10 Constitutive Others and the Management of Difference: Museum Representations of Turkish Identities
• 11 Identity, Complexity, Immigration: Staging the Present in Italian Migration Museums
• Index