order of knowledge in pitt rivers museum at oxford
TRANSCRIPT
Joyce Teo | BA(Hons) Fine Art & History of Art Year II Goldsmiths | April 2011 | HT52040A Museums, Galleries and Exhibitions: Framing Art
Order of Knowledge in Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford
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In the preface of a book, Foucault opens with an anecdote of his encounter with a
passage of classifications while reading Borges. He laughed as he read, quoted
from a ‘certain Chinese encyclopedia’:
“animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed,
(c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h)
included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k)
drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just
broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies”1
In laughing at the apparent irrationality of this taxonomy, he has demonstrated
“the stark impossibility of thinking that.”2 Herein lies the presence of different
systems of thought at any given space and time, which predetermine conditions
in which one can know and consequently order. It is in this premise that
Foucault’s The Order of Things investigates; the a priori set of rules that draw
certain thoughts possible while leaving others unthought or impossible to think.
In this light, this paper would take the case study of Pitt Rivers Museum and
attempt to excavate meanings from the uncommon ordering that occurs within
its anthropological collection. Founded by military officer, collector and
archaeologist, General Augustus Pitt Rivers in 1884, the museum follows
particular principles of classification to achieve initial goals contemporaneous to
ideologies in the Victorian era. Since then, slight nuances have happened. These
shall be examined less at the outset to expose datedness but rather, in relation to
how we have come to know what we know of museums today.
Description
1 Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things. Routledge, London. p. xvi 2 Ibid.
1
Pitt Rivers Museum is a three‐level space situated within the Oxford University
Museum of Natural History. Its immediate characteristics are first address in the
audio guide – deliberately vast quantity of man‐made artefacts in crammed and
dim display cases. Unlike most anthropological museums that tend to group their
collections based on cultural group or geographical area, Pitt Rivers had adapted
a typological arrangement, which is still mostly kept by the museum today.
Jewellery, hunting tools, clothing, vessels, toys, keys, money, musical
instruments, ritual or magic items and so on that are collected from different
parts of the world, ancient and modern, are placed in individual vitrines. It is a
taxonomy based on a connexion of forms that can be visually observed. The
objects in each case serve similar functions at different point in time in different
places for different race groups. At first glance, such classification based on
similitude rather than clarify differences and form identities, seems eclectic.
An introduction provided in the museum then explains that such organisation is
to help visitors appreciate the ingenuity of people of different times and cultures
in trying to solve broadly similar problems as humans. Each display case
demonstrates the technological improvement of an aspect of material arts
produced by Man; showing tools of rudimentary forms to its more developed
and complex variations. Taken collectively, they mean to chart Man’s
advancement in ideas and a progress from prehistoric primitivism to a higher
culture of modern times. Evidently, Pitt Rivers conceive of the history of Man
through an evolution of material arts and this ideology shall be closely examined
later.
Because of the dimness of the space and close proximity of artefacts with small,
handwritten labels, visitors are suggested to use the hand torch and magnifying
glass provided. All there is to read are mainly logistical description of where and
when the object was discovered and acquired, inscribed onto the objects
themselves. General texts in each vitrine reiterate the universality of problems
encountered in daily life, to which man has progressively found better solutions.
We are directed to observe the material objects or admire them in their series.
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Also, visual obscurity of both text and object is justified with the reason that “the
Museum has carefully maintained this historical style of display which … now
creates a memorable period atmosphere.”3 Supposedly preserved with a
Victorian aura, the museum itself is seen as a historical object. Not merely a site
where historical knowledge is gained, its mode of display becomes a reflection of
the historical period from which it stems. This prompts an increase in the scope
of thinking about museums that should necessarily be illuminated by Foucault.
His archaeological method of thinking about knowledge is concern with the
general conditions in which particular knowing is enabled. In this case, the
changing historical context, within which museums exist, cannot be ignored. This
avoids the thinking of knowledge as culminating at every present point but
instead, as a shifting system of possibilities, with no fixed definition of rationality
or sense of order. Projecting this into the museum, methods of ordering changes
over time and it is apparent that there can never be a stable or correct one that
lasts.
Epistemes
At any point of time is present a limit that rules what and how one can know.
Foucault terms this formation of rules in different epochs as episteme. He
outlines three major epistemes analogous to three structures of knowing from
the early 17th century to modern times – the Renaissance, classical and modern.
Despite their attachment to chronological time, they do not form a line of
progression, the next not any more advanced than the previous. Events happen,
some epistemes rupture as more epistemes appear. For the analysis of Pitt
Rivers’ typological display, the latter two shall be described.
The classical episteme is characterized as an age of representation. It is
structured by the beginning of classification in the late 17th century. To
understand the world, was through measure and order. The ideal result is all
natural beings represented in a table of differences according to their visible
features. Taxonomies allowed identities to be established and relationships to be 3 Pitt Rivers Museum handout, Apr 2011.
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formed, albeit at one level of the visual. Each thing is represented by a name
within the manageable confines of a generalized surface of comparison. This
would then form a language that is universally understood and make knowledge
transmittable.
An obvious limit of this episteme is the impossibility of representing in the table,
relationships of things beyond the visible. The flat continuity of this taxonomy
proves insufficient for us to understand the organic structures and multiple
functions of each knowable element. Quoting Foucault,
“The link between one organic structure and another can no longer, in
fact, be the identity of one or several elements, but must be the identity
of the relation between the elements (a relation in which visibility no
longer plays role) and of the functions they perform.”4
This marks the collapse of a single plane of ordering knowledge and a rupture
introducing the modern episteme at the end of the 18th century. By inference, it
gave way to multiplicities of meaning as each knowable thing does not simply
have one visual identity; they are conceive through complex relations in this new
space of knowledge. Hooper‐Greenhill, who has examined particular museum
case studies in relation to The Order of Things, points out that the modern
epistemic shift “in [the] relationship from words and things to words and mind
deserves further exploration from the historians of ‘museums’.”5 The proposition
perhaps, is that museums in the modern episteme are not satisfied with
understanding objects in and for themselves. Objects can function in more than
one way and can be drawn together to represent ideas. Apart from a general
table of differences and similarities, the world is being made sense of through
new forms of ordering in the museum.
4 Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things. Routledge, London. p. 236 5 Hooper‐Greenhill, E. (1992). Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. Routledge, London. p. 165
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Founded in late 19th century, Pitt Rivers Museum occurred well into Foucault’s
modern episteme. Foucault describes this modern episteme in relation to the
formation of the human sciences as disciplines,
“The human sciences are not, then, an analysis of what man is by nature;
but rather an analysis that extends from what man is in his positivity
(living, speaking, labouring being) to what enables this same being to
know (or seek to know) what life is, in what the essence of labour and its
laws consist, and in what way he is able to speak.”6
According to him, this concern of man in terms of what he does, was not possible
in the classical age of representation. Man was taken as form and tabulated like
other forms of natural beings. His work, life or speech, which could not be
represented and then classified were disregarded. The strive towards
understanding man beyond physique gives rise to the human sciences and is an
obvious premise of the Pitt Rivers Museum. In a simple way, Pitt Rivers’ usage of
objects to understand humans seem to correspond to the modern episteme.
Understanding the technology contained in each object is but a mean to get to an
understanding of ideas they arise from. By ordering them, we have access to
know what is beyond objects as mere forms.
Culture
Contemporary thought that surrounded the beginning of Pitt Rivers Museum
were indeed coming to terms with man as a thinking subject, not simply a
natural being. This is closely related to a new notion of culture. Pitt Rivers
himself, in an 1875 essay On the Evolution of Culture, identifies a division
between physical science which studies man as a biological unit and science of
culture “in which the subjects treated are emanations from the human mind.”7
6 Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things. Routledge, London p. 385 7 Lane Fox, A. H. (1875). “On the Evolution of Culture” in Myers, J. L. (ed.)(1906). On the Evolution of Culture and Other Essays. Clarendon Press, Oxford. p. 21
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Under the latter, he proposed a branch for a science of the material arts. For Pitt
Rivers, culture began when man started to create and it is that which puts him
atop a hierarchy of living beings, “for who has seen any lower animals construct
a tool and use it.”8 Similarly, W. H. Holmes in elaborating the objectives of 19th
century anthropological museums says, “if the physical phenomena of man
include all that connects him with the brute, his culture phenomena include all
that distinguishes him from the brute.”9 Man belongs to the natural world but
have since developed culture and emerged a superior figure respective to other
natural beings.
Evolution
In continuation, Pitt Rivers theorizes that all development follows a natural and
eventual order, that of evolution “from simple to complex, homogeneous to
heterogeneous.”10
To support this, he identifies three sequential stages of knowing, what he calls
the formation of common sense– empirical, classificatory and theoretical. The
first refers to knowing through basic observation, which even the least cultured
are capable of. Next, is followed by the ordering of these observations into
different classes that are not necessarily comparable. By a second order
observation of these classifications, broader classifications can be formed and
eventually lead us to “trace them to a point of union.”11 The final theoretical
stage to him thus refers to the coming to conclusion that all things are
evolutionary. Evolution being “the necessary and inevitable results of the
extension of classification, implying greater unity and broader classification.”12
Accordingly, the museum of any science would illustrate how all orders,
8 Lane Fox, A. H. (1875). “On the Evolution of Culture” in Myers, J. L. (ed.)(1906). On the Evolution of Culture and Other Essays. Clarendon Press, Oxford. p. 30 9 Holmes, H. W. (1902). “Classification and Arrangement of the Exhibits of an Anthropological Museum” in Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, Vol. 32, Jul – Dec 10 See op. cit. p. 29 11 Ibid. p. 23 12 Ibid.
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regardless of what, are tangential to universal laws of evolution. Quoting Pitt
Rivers,
“The law that Nature makes no jumps, can be taught by the history of
mechanical contrivances ... The knowledge of the facts of evolution, and
of the processes of gradual development, is the one great knowledge that
we have to inculcate, whether in natural history or in the arts and
institutions of mankind; and this knowledge can be taught by museums,
provided they are arranged in such a manner that those who run may
read.”13 [Own emphasis]
These assumptions of continuity and fixed, finite knowledge evoke certain
characteristics of Foucault’s classical episteme. Pitt Rivers’ belief in the museum
to instill this great knowledge coincides with the classical project of creating a
universal language through which one can know. All things have a rightful place
in the order of things and all there is to know follows what we already know.
Ordering in museums is then merely a task of reiterating this natural order. Pitt
Rivers speaks of his arrangement of artefacts,
“Every form marks its own place in sequence by its relative complexity of
affinity to other allied forms, in the same manner that every word in the
science of language has a place assigned to it in the order of development
or phonetic decay.”14
To him, the certainty of natural order is easily evident in the development of
material forms. His idea is of a comprehensive history of Man based on a correct
arrangement of tools so obvious that those who run may read. This ability to scan
is only possible in a one‐dimensional order typical of the classical episteme. As
already mentioned, this ruptured when the 18th century began to discover the
existence of organic syntheses, structures and systems that lies deep beyond
13 Lane Fox, A. H. (1875). “On the Evolution of Culture” in Myers, J. L. (ed.)(1906). On the Evolution of Culture and Other Essays. Clarendon Press, Oxford. p. 24 14 Ibid. p. 11
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what can be represented on the stable surface of the visible. Hence, “the visible
order, with its permanent grid of distinctions, is now only a superficial glitter
above an abyss.”15 Any form of ordering which claims fixity need to be
destabilized to unveil the abyss beneath.
Epistemological Breaks
It is only now that we can address Foucault’s appeal to see epistemic shifts as
arbitrary ruptures, and not as continuous historical progression. The tendency to
read them in chronology is disrupted as we analyse the thoughts that had
surrounded the founding of Pitt Rivers Museum. It is observed that
characteristics of different epistemes are active together in a particular system of
order. However, there is a sense in The Order of Things that different epistemes
are autonomous with contradictory characteristics because what is rational in
one is irrational in the other. Lois McNay similarly addresses the problematic
conception of epistemological breaks. A complete transformation from episteme
to episteme prompts a tendency to search for causes. Yet, “an attempt to produce
a definitive explanation of the rupture falls back into the problematic of
traditional history.”16 In other words, an event that happened before as the cause
for the beginning of a new episteme would be an account of continuous history
rejected by Foucault. McNay highlights that accepting the internal consistencies
of each distinct episteme “permits the denaturalization of concepts that each era
takes to be self‐evident.”17 It goes to show that what is indisputably rational at
this point in time has not always been the case. However, Foucault’s refusal to
“provide a systematic account of the relation between the epistemic order and its
socio‐historical context”18 result in the episteme becoming a “hermetically
sealed, self‐sustaining, ‘expressive’ totality.”19 In so far as they exist as
descriptions of formal properties, epistemes can become slippery assertions.
15 Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things. Routledge, London. p. 273 16 McNay, L. (1994). “The Subject of Knowledge” in Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Continuum, New York. p. 65 17 Ibid. p. 61 18 Ibid p. 65 19 Ibid.
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Only an analysis with particular instances can allow meaningful observations to
be made.
Even though we have aligned Pitt Rivers’ generalization of forms with that of the
classical episteme, his concerns do not end at establishing and understanding a
visual order. The objective for his collection is actually,
“to trace out, by means of the only evidence available, the sequence of
ideas by which mankind has advanced from the condition of the lowers
animals to that in which we find him at the present time, and by this
means to provide really reliable materials for a philosophy of progress.”20
[Own emphasis]
Looking deeper into detail at the displays within Pitt Rivers Museum is needed to
reveal the rationalities motivating its order.
Order and Progress
Part of Pitt Rivers’ project was to fill in the gaps of what we know of the primeval
man by studying who he calls, the modern savages. Their development in culture
is said to have stagnated in equivalent states of primitivity due to
“environmental conditions and unknown factors inherent within their racial
make‐ups.”21 This is an obviously problematic colonial viewpoint he shared with
many of his contemporaries. They believed Victorian Britain to represent the
height of culture and an informed arrangement of his collection would only serve
to confirm that.
The method of abstracting artefacts from contemporary cultures to stand in for
missing links of the past immediately informs us that order is but a mean to an
end. Available parts are pieced together to construct a totality and where there
20 Lane Fox, A. H. (1874). “Principles of Classification” in Myers, J. L. (ed.)(1906). On the Evolution of Culture and Other Essays. Clarendon Press, Oxford. p. 7 21 Lane Fox, A. H. (1875). See op. cit. p. 35
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are discontinuous gaps, it needs to be filled. van Keuren speaks of the ideologies
successfully demonstrated by Pitt Rivers in his collection,
“Knowledge of natural law, of the necessity and rightness of gradualistic
evolutionary change, would help prevent disruptive and destructive
attempts at subversion of the natural order.”22
Previously, it has been established that Pitt Rivers’ espousal of natural order is
equivalent to the search for a universal language characteristic of the classical
episteme. Here, a social and political agenda for inculcating that universal
language can be inferred. Before expounding on this, the clear‐cut functions set
out for public museums in the 19th century need to be outlined.
In 1864, J. Edward Gray identified a two‐fold purpose for museums to be
institutions of education and research:
“1st, the diffusion of instructions and rational amusement among the
mass of the people; and 2nd, to afford the scientific student every possible
means of examining and studying the specimens of which the museum
consists.”23
He continues to suggest two separate parts of collections in museums to achieve
each aim. The former is through methods of display that ensures maximum
information at a glance, easily comprehended by the layman viewer. The latter
grants access to specialists to a greater collection not included in the museum
display to handle and examine each object in detail. Consequently, it is often
forgotten that only a selection of the museum collection is seen. This is
interesting in the context of the Pitt Rivers Museum. On top of its founding object
collection, it has continued to amass photographs, manuscripts, sounds and films
which are not exhibited but is made available as virtual resources online.
22 van Keuren, D. K. (1984). “Museums and Ideology: Augustus Pitt‐Rivers, Anthropological Museums, and Social Change in Later Victorian Britain” in Victorian Studies, Vol. 28 No. 1, Autumn, p.187 23Gray, J. E. (1864) quoted in van Keuren, D. K. (1984). See op. cit. p. 173
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Inevitably, the variety of forms now available to be acquired by the museum has
diversified Pitt Rivers’ primary focus on man‐made tools. The meaning of
technology itself has transformed. Situated within the University of Oxford, it
also functions as a teaching unit, keeping up to its pedagogic tradition.
Similarly speaking about pedagogy in new museums of modern times, Hooper‐
Greenhill mentions,
“Museum pedagogy was based on the idea of the possibility of the
realization through objects of universal laws…The concept of universal
law was pervasive in Victorian culture: politics, morals, history,
economics, art, and education, were all governed, it was thought, by
universal laws or principles true for all times and places.”24
Going back to Pitt Rivers, this universal law was obviously that of evolution. He
believes that by making plain the evolutionary order of culture development,
museums can promote values of progress and civic order to Victorian society at
large. Since culture has successfully progressed in a linear fashion, it is by
analogy that political and social growth is best occurred in the same manner and
any deviations should be discouraged. This designates power to the museum as a
disciplinary institution. As such, museums claim to present universal truths and
bear an authoritative stance in a society’s mechanism of knowing. Hooper‐
Greenhill highlights, “rationality, on the part of the museum visitor, was non‐
interpretive; rationality meant the recognition and acceptance of given truths.”25
With a didactic approach, the museum conveys grand narratives of truth and the
visitor becomes what Foucault calls, a ‘docile body’.
This broadly contrasts with a recent handout in the Pitt Rivers Museum which
states, “no start or finish and no story to follow. It is sufficient to wander through
the maze of cases letting your curiosity lead you.”26 The next section of this paper
24 Hooper‐Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Cultures. Routledge, London. p. 126 25 Ibid. p. 131 26 Pitt Rivers Museum handout, Apr 2011.
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examines this claim through ideas of seriality and quantity in a collection as well
as the notion of objects themselves.
Seriality
With an aim to trace a succession of ideas, Pitt Rivers’ arrangement begins with
the simpler tools on the left and their subsequent improvement follows right in
line, to form “however imperfectly, sequence in each series.”27 (See Fig. 1.) In
each case, sub‐classes are then established based on geographic localities; but
where the forms show morphological affinities, they are placed in close
proximity. This order by resemblances instead of the more common one based
on geo‐ethnic divisions is salient in the context of ethnographic museums. The
problems of the latter often involve an essentialist and reductive representation
of each race or culture group, especially that of non‐Western peoples. However,
this does not mean that a lesser reliance on geo‐ethnic classifications provide
fairer representations. Henry Balfour, the first curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum
says in 1875, “there prevails a condition of unity in the tendencies of the human
mind to respond in a similar manner to similar stimuli.”28 Therefore,
“polygenesis in his inventions may probably be regarded as testimony in favour
of the monogenesis of Man.”29 This homogenizes all groups to a single human
race, and what divide us are differing rates of cultural development. In a post‐
colonial world, it is no longer possible to speak of man in such universalizing
terms.
The emphasis on continuity in such series should also be carefully considered.
Pitt Rivers’ faith in a developmental order treats the collection as one continuous
text. Evolution is seen as a slow and gradual process, effected by accumulating
units of minute improvement. Balfour pointed out the tendency to only record
important stages in history, the “so‐called ‘inventions’”30 that would wrongly
27 Lane Fox, A. H. (1874). “Principles of Classification” in Myers, J. L. (ed.)(1906). On the Evolution of Culture and Other Essays. Clarendon Press, Oxford. p. 7 28 Balfour, H. (1875) “Introduction” in Myers, J. L. (ed.)(1906). see op. cit. p. xvii 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. p. viii
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portray the progress of mankind in leaps rather than real development of the
incremental kind. He said, “[t]he bulk of the links in the evolutionary chain
disappear almost as soon as they are made, and are known to few, perhaps none,
besides their inventors.”31 It is with this presupposition that Pitt Rivers was
interested in assembling large quantities of everyday objects without
discriminating via significance, beauty or rarity.
Within each series, a left to right arrangement automatically sets up a beginning
and an end (the present). The primary objective to search for a simplest form as
the origin follows a traditionalist perspective of history that Foucault constantly
tries to dislodge. Foucault explains his rejection of the point of origin as being the
site of truth,
“From the vantage point of an absolute distance, free from the restraints
of positive knowledge, the origin makes possible a field of knowledge
whose function is to recover it, but always in a false recognition due to
the excesses of its own speech.”32
This mistrust in the origin is due to the fact that any order following one at the
outset only serves to confirm and reconfirm its absoluteness. A fixed origin not
only reconciles the present with the past, it also projects into a future with
certainty; which was what Pitt Rivers guaranteed with the idea of evolutionary
progress. Traditional history writes a linear narrative and this is not unfamiliar
in many museum displays that order via a chronology of time.
In Foucault’s work, the origin is related to power precisely because it is
naturalized as a given to sustain dominating structures. Foucault proposes, in
opposition, an effective history that rejects continuity for discontinuities by
methods of genealogy. Quoting him,
31 Balfour, H. (1875) “Introduction” in Myers, J. L. (ed.)(1906). see op. cit. p. viii 32 Foucault, M. (1977). “Nietzsche, genealogy, history” in Rabinow, P. (1984) The Foucault Reader. Penguin Books, London. p. 79
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“Where the soul pretends unification of the self fabricates a coherent
identity, the genealogist sets out to study the beginning – numberless
beginnings, whose faint traces and hints of color are readily seen by a
historical eye.”33
The possibilities of multiple beginnings prevent any origin from asserting its
history. As briefly mentioned, the origin for Pitt Rivers is man in a primitive state
and via a continuous history, Western man culminates at the highest point of
culture. This alignment sets up a power relation. Western colonial powers are
superior for having reached civilization first and this simultaneously “map[s] the
destiny”34 of the colonized people to eventually get there. Colonial endeavours
can then be justified as stimulating civilization amongst the primitives. Museums
reaffirm this knowledge by acting it out through its permanent display. The
notion of truth is dangerous and powerful as Foucault mentions, “truth is
undoubtedly the sort of error that cannot be refuted because it was hardened
into an unalterable form in the long baking process of history.”35 When
irrefutable, there is only one way of knowing and that is through the eyes of the
dominator who writes continuous histories.
Pitt Rivers’ ideal for a complete series for each technological product is perhaps
more apparent in his theory than can be observed in the museum now. In 2002,
the museum introduced a new section to its lower gallery entitled Body Art. It
involves a thematic selection of objects that set out to show the different ways in
which people of different culture and time have altered their appearance, either
temporarily or permanently, for varied reasons. Typological classification is still
employed. The selection is grouped into sub‐sections related to body
modification, such as mirrors, scent, tattooing tools, foot‐binding, neck coils,
armlets and anklets and etcetera. Objects collected from different race groups
and time period are once again placed close together based on resemblances and
similar functions. An audio guide explains that the selection is mostly extracted 33 Foucault, M. (1977). “Nietzsche, genealogy, history” in Rabinow, P. (1984) The Foucault Reader. Penguin Books, London. p. 81 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. p. 79
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from the museum’s existing collection and where there are missing parts, the
curators sort to acquire more objects. The mechanism of this was not explicated
and what was referred to as missing remain unknown. However, it is obvious
that a complete collection is still intended or even thought possible.
On the other hand, a thematic approach has shifted the focus of the arrangement
away from illustrating a linear development from primitive to advance. Instead,
different tools for physical alteration are grounded in their specific context of
use. For instance, under the section tracing the history of tattooing, the varying
motivations behind tattooing is suggested; such as the facial tattoos worn by
Maori warriers, in Papau New Guinea to mark a person’s maturity, and the
popular use of it in Western context as symbols of gang association or individual
style. Such explanatory texts and photographs of tattooed human bodies sit
alongside tools including wooden tattoo stamps, bamboo needles and electric
tattooing machines that are held in separate display cases. Although not
obviously arranged in order of technological advancement, the unfamiliarity of
certain practices illustrated with photographs might still leave Western viewers
other‐ing them as extreme and primitive.
Quantity
Additionally, it is interesting to note the content of an introductory case near the
entrance of the museum. A pie chart makes explicit that Pitt River’s founding
collection only makes up seven percent of what the collection has grown into,
currently consisting of half a million objects. Pitt Rivers was also introduced as a
Victorian collector who “believes that showing three examples of something is
better than one.”36 It goes on to identify the different types of collectors that have
contributed to the museum acquisition, including museum staff on holiday,
private collectors, curators and researchers. The audio guide contains four and a
half hours of content. Quantity in the collection is of essence here. If Pitt Rivers’
ultimate point to prove was of evolution, the addition of each series shall only
36 Pitt Rivers Museum audio guide, Apr 2011
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serve as accumulating evidence. Though a strict evolutionist approach is no
longer followed, the question is still, when is it enough?
Firstly, the mass quantity of objects displayed in the Pitt Rivers museum
prompts us to rethink the role of objects within a collection. Keeping in mind the
purpose of every object was to fill a part in a running order, the individual
artefact was perhaps more significant in a series than when by itself.
This is both supported and opposed by Baudrillard’s theory of collection. For
him, objects are either utilized or possessed and both functions are mutually
exclusive. Any utility of an object is usurped when the collector possesses it and
it is abstracted into his collection. The collected object thus has no intrinsic value
when divorced from the set it is defined by. However, the value of a collection
lies in its coherence. It is an ideal paradigm whose meaning can be subsumed
under each object. Each object is said to “epitomize the set to which it belongs”37
and a synecdochic relationship between the object and its collection can be set
up. Consequently, the quantity of objects in a collection simply emphasizes this
coherence.
In Pitt Rivers Museum, at least in its beginnings, this correlation between object
and collection is only partly true. Indeed, the object gain meaning in a collection
but alone, it would fail to symbolize the collection. For a synecdochic
relationship, each object has to “become equivalent”38 to be able to stand for
each other as well as the collection. That being said, Pitt Rivers’ sequential
arrangement of his collection poses a problem. Besides, what is missing is the
subject of the collector, the one who invests meaning to the collection. To
Baudrillard, “a given collection is made up of a succession of terms, but the final
term must always be the person of the collector.”39 By imposing a fixed order
camouflaged as natural to the collection, Pitt Rivers removes himself as the
subject or collector. Once the collection is so‐called objective and not one
37 Baudrillard, J (1994). “The System of Collecting” in Elsner, J. & Cardinal, R. (ed.)(1994). The Cultures of Collecting. Reaktion Books, London. p. 12 38 Ibid. p. 8 39 Ibid. p. 12
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subjective to any collector, it can be derived as universally true. Of course this is
fallacious as already previously set up. The collection was intended to establish
the identity of civilized man and thereby confirming Western superiority.
Perhaps one can suggest the Western man to be the hidden subject of Pitt Rivers’
collection whose ends it serves.
On similar ground, Foucault’s modern episteme reveals a philosophical problem
of the concept of man. Man is at one and the same time an object and subject of
knowledge. He is an object in a world to be understood but is also the subject
through which the world is understood. This is poignant in relation to issues of
collecting. He possesses the capacity to collect objects and order them as he
wishes but yet, this capacity is always limited by his finitude (a lifetime of
collecting is still not enough) and predefined by the discourses available to him
(methods of ordering is already determined by what is rational at any given
point). Perhaps to reconcile this limit and get closer to an ultimate truth, there is
a tendency to rely on nature and material objects as unchanging facts.
Quantity can also be addressed in terms of this idea of human life the museum is
addressing. The collection is divided into types which appear arbitrary and the
cases are somewhat ordered alphabetically, with ‘Masks and Performance’ and
‘Musical Instruments’ nearby ‘Magic, Ritual, Religion and Belief’, followed by
‘Textile and Clothing’ nearby ‘Transport and Navigation’ with ‘Treatment of the
Dead’ and etcetera. Almost like an organized disarray, the museum seems to
ambition to catalogue every aspect of daily life. Most notably, the collection
consists of many models ‐ of types of dwelling, modes of transport and other
objects too large to fit into the vitrines. This conveys an all‐encompassing
attitude towards collecting man‐made artefacts. The material existence of the
artefact itself is perhaps no longer as important as the aspect of life it represents.
Does this equate to a change in the valuation of objects since Pitt Rivers’ time?
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Object as site
Pitt Rivers’ choice to illustrate the evolution of culture through the evolution of
material arts is very much grounded to the understanding of objects as “pieces of
unmediated ‘reality’ and therefore closer to a primary world of evidence.”40
Concrete objects are used to verify an abstract notion of culture. Similarly,
objects represented something more than themselves. However, just like the
‘reality’ they were evident to, the objects themselves have been destabilized.
Hooper‐Greenhill in using Foucault’s term, usefully rethinks objects as “sites at
which discursive formation intersects with material properties.”41 Discursive
formation, similar to episteme, refers to the language and structures available
that makes certain discourses possible. Quoting her,
“The meaning of objects are constructed from the position from which
they are viewed. The gaze of the knowing subject, the individual standing
in a particular place within history and culture, focuses on those aspects
of the object which she is able to recognise and thereby grasp both
visually and conceptually.”42
There is an emphasis on a point of entry to knowledge that is determined by
each individual’s existing experiences. This way, meanings are not permanently
inscribed on objects and museums cannot rely on them to establish absolute
truth. The objects, the museum and the viewer, no matter how, all operate in an
episteme.
In an article extending Foucault’s analysis of museums as heterotopias, Beth
Lord takes museums literally as a space of difference. She explains that firstly,
museums extract objects from the context in which we normally understand
them. Since these objects are dislocated from different conceptual orders, their 40 Hooper‐Greenhill, E. (2000). Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Cultures. Routledge, London. p. 106 41 Ibid. p. 104 42 Ibid.
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juxtaposition creates a space of difference where interpretation is a necessary
process. “[W]ithout interpretation, without representing a relation between
things and conceptual structures, an institution is not a museum, but a
storehouse.”43 It is not the objects, but it is the different concepts they come from
that are on display in museums. In Lord’s almost ideal account of the museum,
the process of interpretation is at play in the gap between objects and concepts.
She argues that as a heterotopia, museums provide a site where different
systems of representations come together to interact in their differences and
reveal their historical contingencies, instead of blending them together as one
continuous total history.
The abovementioned gap can be spoken off in relation to one of the museum’s
newer acquisitions. This object of interest is a collecting box created by artist
Tim Hunkin, titled The Anthropologists’ Fund Raising Ritual (1996)(See Fig. 2a). It
serves a double function of being an actual donation collecting box as well as an
“example of twentieth century culture”44. Consisting of several carved wooden
figures representing the collectors who had made significant contributions to the
museum, it is an automated machine that is activated when visitors walk past its
motion sensor. Bells would ring and disrupt the silence of the museum space,
and when a donation is made, the wooden figures bow (See Fig. 2b). This
programme is akin to a ritual.
An accompanying cartoon booklet drawn by the artist casually explains the
concept and technicalities involved in this object. It says, “the Victorians who
invented the subject of anthropology were often decidedly patronizing about the
people they studied. Today anthropologists accept that their own beliefs and
cultures are equally strange and worth studying.”45 Turning anthropological
study back onto those who conduct it can be seen as a self‐reflexive gesture.
Placed amongst other official anthropological objects, this animated collecting
43 Lord, B. (2006). “Foucault’s museum: difference, representation and genealogy” in Museum and Society, Vol. 4 No. 1. 44 Hunkin T. (1996). Cartoon booklet about Pitt Rivers Museum Collecting Box. Available from: http://www.timhunkin.com/96_pittrivers_booklet.htm 45 Ibid.
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box questions but do not intrude with any assertions. In sync with the museum’s
claim to celebrate human ingenuity, this handmade automata is constructed by
appropriating everyday technology including motors from car windscreen
wipers and metal chains from inside of photocopiers. The choice of these over
more contemporary technologies is intended for the box to “blend invisibly”46
into the museum. This mimicking of a less contemporary aesthetics cast doubt
on the museum’s focus on technological progress. Altogether, the many ways in
which this object sits within the museum’s collection is demonstrative of the
interpretation process capable of destabilizing any fixed meaning.
In conclusion
This paper has described certain collecting and display practices of the Pitt
Rivers Museum and attempted to understand them in relation to the changing
roles of museums. By accepting Foucault’s description of different epistemes, one
can notice the inconsistent ways through which knowledge is sought in different
socio‐historical contexts, even as each knowledge claims itself as ultimately true.
Using the specific example of Pitt Rivers Museum also work to problematize
Foucault’s conception of epistemological breaks as arbitrary ruptures. Other of
Foucault’s theories have been borrowed to denaturalize concepts of evolution,
progress, seriality, origin and continuity. Lastly, the paper serves to extend
meaning making from objects themselves to the invisible structures in which
they materially lie. With respect to these organic structures, the museum’s
power to hold down on something indefinitely rational is indefinitely challenged.
[5956 words]
46 Hunkin T. (1996). Cartoon booklet about Pitt Rivers Museum Collecting Box. Available from: http://www.timhunkin.com/96_pittrivers_booklet.htm
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Fig. 1 Serial arrangement of contemporary Aboriginal Australian and Melanesian weapons to demonstrate their development from a single rudimentary stick form.
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Fig. 2a. Rest position of wooden figures in collecting box.
Tim Hunkin, The Anthropologists’ Fund Raising Ritual (1996)
Fig.
Fig. 2b. When a coin is inserted, wooden figures is triggered to bow.
Tim Hunkin, The Anthropologists’ Fund Raising Ritual (1996)
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List of Images Fig 1. Lane Fox, A. H. (1875). “On the Evolution of Culture”, Proceedings of the Royal Institution, vii (1875), Plate 3. Taken from: Hopwood, N., Schaffer, S. & Secord, J. (2010). “Seriality and Scientific Objects in Nineteenth Century” in History of Science, xlvii. Fig. 2a and 2b Tim Hunkin, The Anthropologists’ Fund Raising Ritual (1996) Available from: http://www.timhunkin.com/58_pitt_rivers_collecting_box.htm Accessed on: 26 Apr 2011