National Museums and the Origins of Nations

Emotional Myths and Narratives

Sheila Watson

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000205473
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Art
• Thema: Museum Studies

National Museums and the Origins of Nations provides the first international survey of origins stories in national museums and examines the ways in which such museums use the distant past as a vehicle to reflect the concerns of the political present.

Offering an international comparison of institutions in China, North and South America, the Middle East, Europe and Australia, the book argues that national museums tell us more about what sort of community a nation wishes to be today, than how and why that nation came into being. Watson also reveals the ways in which narrative and exhibition design attempt to engage the visitor in an emotional experience designed to promote loyalty to, and pride in, the nation, or to remind visitors who are not citizens that they do not belong. These narratives of origin are, it is claimed, based on so-called factual accuracies, but this book reveals that they are often selective, emotional and rarely critiqued within institutions. At a time when nationalism is very much back on the political agenda, this book highlights how museums reflect current political and social concerns.

National Museums and the Origins of Nations will appeal to academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, politics, nationalism and history.

1

Introduction

This survey of national museums and the origins of their nations has taken me down some unexpected paths. I became interested in this topic in 1998, before I became an academic, when I visited the newly opened Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, (National Museum of Scotland from 2006). I was fascinated by the museum’s projection of current political concerns into the past to create narratives origins, progress and development that supported the nationalist views of some Scots. Here, England was not the longstanding partner in a peaceful and prosperous alliance over the centuries but a dastardly bully who had attacked the innocent Scots in the past, stolen their ideas during the Enlightenment and their resources over several centuries, ignored their achievements and subsumed their identity beneath a British one that was mainly England in disguise. The long periods of mutual co-operation, during which time Scots and English traded, married, moved around freely and benefitted from a productive exchange of ideas and ideals, were often ignored. Above all there were several places where the museum went out of its way to stress origins stories that were supposedly completely different from those of England. For example, the Roman galleries downplayed significant Roman influence in what is now Scotland but stressed its importance in the area that became England. The medieval galleries stressed the important of trade with Continental Europe but ignored the most important trading partner, England. The origins of Scottish national consciousness were moulded by wars with the English where naturally the English were the aggressors. Scottish aggression was never mentioned. Several years before the referendum on Scottish independence, this set of exhibitions suggested Scotland was heading for a divorce from the Union. The writing, in the form of text panels, was literally on the wall. When I returned to the museum in 2012, additional exhibitions on the top floor added more information about the campaign for an independent Scotland. The rest remained virtually unchanged. It did not need to revise its exhibitions. After all, in its way, it had been ahead of its time in 1998 and, by 2012, the year of my research visit, time had caught up with it as the demand grew for a Scottish independence referendum.

Inevitably, anyone who carries out international research into museums tends to analyse them at a fixed moment in time. Most of this research was undertaken in the second decade of the twenty-first century, between 2011 and 2016. Follow-up work was undertaken in 2017 and 2018 in some museums, with a visit in 2020 to a final case study, the National Museum of Qatar. Inevitably, some of the displays will have changed by the time this book is published, as will some websites. Sometimes large sections of museums have had a complete makeover since my visit, such as the Canadian Museum of History (formerly the Canadian Museum of Civilization). Its new History Hall opened in July 2017, after my visit in November 2016. Thus, my observations are about how museums presented the origins of nations at a particular moment when I visited them in the second decade of the century, and recognise that these representations are transient.

What I offer here is a snapshot of how museums dealt with the origins of nations during this timeframe. I also recognise, as do all museum professionals, that displays are never perfect incarnations of intentions. The very act of working in a physical space with objects and media sometimes results in some unexpected consequences. Visitors do not necessarily experience the exhibitions as the designers intend, nor do they always absorb the information and stories as some curators and directors might expect (Smith et al. 2011) and I deal with this conundrum in more detail in Chapter 3 on emotions.

I have also chosen to review museums from the perspective of the observer and visitor and not to engage with staff about their intentions. In a book that proposes to look widely at museums around the world, any attempt to develop in-depth case studies with an examination of internal documents, display schemes and interviews with designers, curators and directors would have inevitably ended up with several in-depth examples, but little overview. Moreover, many who work on exhibitions move on in their careers, and interviewing staff present in the museum at the time of my visit might produce a very uneven set of perspectives. National museums are designed to be consumed by the public and, in particular, by two genres of visitors, ‘us’ and ‘them’. Museums speaking to citizens generally wish to reinforce messages about national identities to promote cohesion and loyalty. Museums offering the same displays to foreigners are presenting the stories they wish the outsider to know and to understand. In most cases I was this outsider: I read the text, absorbed the atmosphere, examined the objects and experienced the displays as did other non-national visitors. I took a great number of photographs, made many notes, read guidebooks and discreetly observed visitors as they moved around, noting the most-popular and least-attractive areas and discussed my findings with colleagues and students both formally and informally.

My interest in this topic was first aroused when I joined the EuNaMus (European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen) project team (www.ep.liu.se/eunamus/) researching national museums in Europe. This was three-year research project January 2010 to January 2013, funded under the Seventh Framework Programme of the European Commission (see, in particular, Watson 2011). This offered me an opportunity to develop my interest in the origins of nations in national museums across the continent, where I discovered Scotland was not unique in its fictional and mythical exhibitions of the nation’s narratives. Subsequently, I travelled widely to acquire more case studies, and this book is the result of a ten-year enterprise.

Influenced by this research project, I have adopted the definition of national museums to mean ‘those institutions, collections and displays claiming, articulating and representing dominant national values, myths and realities’ (Aronsson et al. 2012: 10). Most are thus financed and managed by national governments directly, some are at ‘arms’ length’ and managed by independent trustees and some have regional management and funding systems. However, if they purport to display the story of the nation for the nation then they have been included in this study.

In an ideal world a study of this sort would include some qualitative surveys of visitors’ reactions to museum displays and to the national museum as an institution. As Appiah (2018: 60) notes, ‘the story of the texts is the story of the reader’ and similarly the story of the museum is the personal interpretation of each visitor (Falk and Dierking 2000; Hooper-Greenhill 1994). However, in a study that attempts to look at a large number of national museums around the world, this has not been possible. Nevertheless, it is important to remember that the visitor will always respond to the displays described and deconstructed here in individual ways, just as I responded to the Gallipoli exhibition mentioned below. Indeed, we know that visitors take messages the museum attempts to distribute and reinterpret them to suit their own perceptions, prejudices, feelings and personal interests (Macdonald 1992; Smith and Campbell 2015; Watson 2015) and this is discussed further in Chapter 3.

This research project does not purport to cover all nations or even continents. It has attempted an overview of national museums around the world but, inevitably, some readers will wonder why some museums have been included and others excluded. Partly, this was serendipity. Partly, it was the result of the selection of certain themes, such as the foundation stories of settler societies, which led me to various countries and their museums. I have not covered all museums in the same manner. In the end I chose to focus on some case studies rather than to try and do a complete survey in less depth. Certain national museums, such as those in Scotland, China and Australia appear in several chapters, others only once. My aim is not to present a comprehensive account of all nations’ origins stories in museums but to stimulate debate and to encourage students, academics and the interested visitor to look afresh at the way nations explain their existence and present their credentials to the world.

Most of my research took place in history and archaeology museums, with occasional forays into anthropology and art museums. I acknowledge that this focus means that my study has not included many of the great art works where the nation is immortalised and celebrated. However, as a historian by training, and as a former museum practitioner, I found I was drawn to the ways history and archaeology presented narratives of origin in a didactic manner. Thus, much of the research for origins stories in museums has been heavily influenced by disciplines such as archaeology, anthropology and history, while much of the critiquing of such institutions draws on the fields of museum studies, heritage, memory studies, anthropology, sociology, politics and multi-disciplinary academic approaches such as those framed within concepts that include orientalism and post-colonialism. Accordingly, this book places museums within these disciplinary frameworks, which is not to deny the importance of other disciplines and methods of critique, but it is here that I locate my special interest.

The analysis upon which I base my conclusions assumes that displays with narratives, objects, media, space and structures provide visitors with an experience that is more than the total sum of the parts and enables individuals to identify with or react against the collective that is a nation (Weiser 2017: 4). I will explain my deductions by close reference to design, objects and text and recognise this is a personal reading of the spaces.

While I have attempted to separate out some key themes, others are ubiquitous. Narrative in many forms dominates the national arena, such as the stories of ancestors making the land their own and the role of specific foundational events often related to victory (and sometimes defeat) in war. The ‘other’ is also a key player in this field of study. Implicit in all narratives is the concept of civilisation and the role of the nation in its development (Wengrow 2018; Ferguson 2012). Originally, I planned to write this book by examining individual museums in separate chapters, but it soon became apparent that most nations have many origins stories and such a division would be artificial and unhelpful. It also became more evident as time went on that there were some very important emotions at play, including pride, sorrow, fear and guilt to name but a few. My research has therefore identified many such examples and in some cases I have categorised chapters according the ways particular emotions have affected the stories told. I have chosen to focus on feelings of sorrow, pride and sacrifice in war, guilt in settler nations, pride in antiquity and the sense of belonging induced by ethnicity and stories of genetic and cultural inheritance. In so doing I recognise significant omissions – the role of gender in nation making, the influence of class and race (as opposed to ethnicity) amongst others are all deserving of detailed study which time and space do not permit.

Politics and controversy

In my travels I found there was a universal enthusiasm in national museums for tracing the origins of the nation much further back in time than common sense dictates is possible. This is, in the main, a quest for legitimacy and prestige. Nations seek to establish their right to exist by stressing their independence, rooted in the past, often in a mythical narrative that bears little scientific scrutiny. Museums validate these myths and justify the nation’s existence, in part, by demonstrating to the public with the use of material culture when and how the nation came into being. They are one of the many instruments by which a form of communal memory of these foundational moments or episodes are disseminated to citizens (Connerton 1989). These origins stories can be situated in deep in time or in relatively recent events, but they tell us as much about the present as they do about the past. They are exhibited as though they are scientific and dispassionate, based as they are on the evidence of traditional disciplines such as archaeology, geology and history, with the presumption that they are based on ‘an objectively verifiable body of knowledge’ (Samuel 2019: 81). However, all origins stories in museums and galleries are selective, based on cultural beliefs and practices that seek to bind peoples together and, as such, are emotional, eliciting feelings of belonging or exclusion from the visitor. National foundation myths and legends are sacred, generating strong feelings (Kapferer 2012: 1), and they are used to justify contemporary political actions. Moreover national origins stories in museums are the manifestation of a form of historical consciousness (Straub 2006; Rüsen 2005) that draws on myths and legends to make them relevant for contemporary communities. This book is about these traditional and innovative origins stories in museums, their current political meanings and the feelings they are designed to elicit.

When I began formal research into this topic in 2010, liberal politics welcomed the breaking down of borders, and the nation appeared less important. Globalisation, with its porous borders and fluid identities, was in the ascendant. However, by 2020 this trend had gone into reverse. Putting aside for one moment the Coronavirus Pandemic that closed borders and reinforced the power of the nation state, there have been several recent indications that the popularity of nations is rising. The vote for Brexit in 2016 and Trump’s ‘America First’ policy are just two instances demonstrating public disquiet with the consequences of global neoliberalism with its consequences for many people. These include loss of industries to low-wage economies abroad in the face of global competition, a diminishing tax base, rising inequality, lowering of wages, rising migration, political instability and devastation and alteration of communities. Growing attempts by Scotland to secure independence since the turn of the century – with an independence referendum in 2014 and the declaration of independence by Catalonia 2017 – suggest that national identity can also be framed against centralisation in a way that would have seemed unthinkable in Western Europe in the 1990s. Of course, Eastern Europe and Central Asia had already led the way with the revival of nations once the Soviet Empire collapsed. Slovenia, Estonia and Poland were amongst many nations revitalised at this time. Interestingly those who demonise nationalism welcomed the revival of these former Soviet Union satellites (Fukuyama 2002), a total of fourteen independent states not including Russia (Appiah 2018: 79). Meanwhile the same academics now struggle to explain populism, nationalism and right-wing policies, while they remain convinced of the righteousness of the ideal of liberal political views (Fukuyama 2018). The solution offered is less nationalism and more liberal democracy, with little explanation as to how the second will overcome the first. Unfortunately, these arguments appeal more to the head than the heart, and it is to the heart that the idea of nation appeals, as will be seen from a study of the ways in which the nation is conceptualised and performed within the national museum.

National museums are about winners, not losers. There are no museums about ‘almost nations’ or ‘failed nations’ or even ‘not very good, must-try-harder nations’. At least, if there are any, I did not find them in my travels. Even nations that suffer temporary setbacks, sometimes disappearing into wider empires or dismembered into separate political units, ignore this hiatus altogether or, more usually, present these events as narratives of endurance leading to the resurrection of the nation, stronger and better than before. In so doing museums reimagine a return to the original authentic nation, as does the German Historical Museum in Berlin, where the defeat and partition of Germany in 1945 was in 1989 turned into triumphal restoration of unity, the banner exhibited in the museum, ‘We are one people’, celebrating Germany’s rebirth. Similarly, in the National Museum of China in Beijing, China’s humiliation at the hands of Western powers in the nineteenth century is shown as an illustration of the weakness of former political regimes. The National Museum is thus a forerunner to the grand project that is contemporary China, a project that looks back to a mythical glorious past of a state that existed in the mists of time.

Despite this turn to the nation, in Europe new national museums of history appear more difficult to create and curate than in the past, although elsewhere relatively new nations such as Qatar have embraced opportunities to create them. In Europe there have been well-documented cases of national leaders deciding that what a nation needs to help unite it is a common historical narrative made explicit through the material culture of a national museum. In 2009 Nicholas Sarkozy, then president of France, announced his intention to create a new national history museum that would present the story of the French people and state in a coherent master narrative, to bolster French national identity in the face of the challenges it faced from immigration and multicul...