Back in July 2013, at the Future of EthnographicMuseums conference, the excellent Wayne Modest spoke about the way racism and
colonialism seem to haunt ethnographic museums, and the extraordinary institutional
amnesia most museums seem to have about their histories, and the role these
histories played in constructing colonial relationships of power. It was a
thought-provoking presentation. As part of his querying of issues of power in
museums, Modest problematized the term ‘source communities’, asking how museum
engagements with such communities might conscript them to a status of
difference vis a vis the mainstream audiences which remain the staple ones for
museums, and which fund museums.
In 2003,
Alison Brown and I published Museums and
Source Communities, a reader of newly commissioned and republished articles
about the relationships between museums and the communities that their
collections come from. The volume was UK-oriented, and we hoped it would help to
strengthen the sense of responsibility between museums in the UK and the mostly
overseas (but now often immigrant) communities whose material heritage is cared
for and displayed in those museums. We realized that access to those historic
treasures is crucial for maintaining identity for certain groups, and indeed
for aspects of cultural survival. Given the physical and political distance
between museums in the UK and those communities, we were concerned that museums
in the UK did not take this relationship seriously. At a conference, I once
asked a deputy director of the British Museum whether he understood that
communities of origin might have greater need to access their material heritage
than, say, London audiences, and might require more institutional and staff
resources spent on meeting those needs. He said no, he didn’t see that, and thought
that all audiences should be treated alike, that to do otherwise would be
discriminatory.
For the
book, we chose the term ‘source communities,’ rather than ‘communities of
origin’ or other possible terms, as a convenient and deliberately direct term,
hoping to see it become part of ordinary professional language and thinking. It
has done so. UK museums have shifted tremendously across the past decade,
embracing the concept of special relations with source communities and engaging
in many special projects with these communities. The idea that museum collections
can play special roles in marginalized communities, or might have social or
biomedical or therapeutic healing properties, has also been extensively
researched. Concepts of audiences and access have been debated and museums have
begun to try to diversify their audiences in serious ways. The profession has
really moved on.
The term
‘source community’ has been critiqued by some Indigenous people as implying an
extractive relationship. As Brown and I noted in the introduction to Museums and Source Communities, that is
precisely what the nature of the relationship was historically. Is it still so
today? Have the attempts to create relationships of greater equality made
‘source community’ an awkward term in the present? I’m not so sure. I still
favor the directness of the term, the implication of deep and ineradicable
tensions and relationships between the partners involved. And in answer to Modest, I think I’d say that
there is still need of a concept of ‘special
relationship’ between museums and these communities, so long as the material
heritage housed by museums is still desperately needed for cultural survival.
Yes, that’s a status of difference, but one I think will be necessarily with us
for some time.
