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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
This paper, based on doctoral research carried out from January 2003 through July 2005, addresses the interpretation and representation of non-Western religious material culture in Western museums and offers a comprehensive view of the way traditional religious Yoruba objects are displayed in contemporary museums in Britain. Museum exhibitions can be conceived as a visual narrative, which absorbs the religious essence of traditional religious non-Western objects into broad categories. At the same time, these categories are still strongly affected by Western aesthetic appreciation, understanding, and classificatory systems. In museum displays, traditional Yoruba religious material culture loses its distinctiveness and is absorbed into global pan-African representations. Therefore, in order to be able to reach more informed or "authentic" interpretations, museums should include the memories and voices of the people who are "closer" to the original meanings of traditional religious objects.
INTRODUCTION
When enthusiastic and erudite collectors created their first cabinets of curiosities, they could not foresee in which complex, public, and socially significant institutions their private and intriguing rooms would develop. Indeed, since their creations, the notion of the "museum as a room filled with curiosities" has changed and museums, as organizations, have accomplished different purposes. They have shaped their role according to the changeable needs of contemporary society and from elitist, academic institutions have become public, informal learning environments; from intimidating, dusty mausoleums they have transformed into open, intercultural forums.
Nowadays, the number of museums in the Western world is extremely high and, as Thomson has astutely pointed out, museums have been and are still created either from a big collection or from a big idea (Thomson, 2002). However, it is indisputable that since their birth, one of the primary purposes of museums has been the preservation of material culture and of the related documentation for the benefit of contemporary and future generations (Pearce, 1996). Museums, in fact, host the tangible traces of the past and because of this, they are very poetical environments: they are "magical places, repositories for the wonders of the world, dynamic participants in our interpretations of the past, and places for launching dreams of the future" (Thomson, 2002, ix).
This paper aims to give a comprehensive view of the way traditional religious Yoruba objects are displayed in contemporary museums in the United Kingdom. (1) The paper has been organized in three main sections. The first section will be concerned with museum displays, the "visual" aspect of museum exhibitions, and the importance of the act of looking at objects in museums. The second section will present the issues related to religious objects in museums. The third section will be a review of the different museum approaches in relation to Yoruba religious objects in museums in the United Kingdom. (2) The paper asserts that museum exhibitions can be seen as a visual discourse. The visual discourse absorbs the religious essence of traditional religious non-Western objects into broad categories, which are still strongly affected by Western aesthetic appreciation, understanding, and classificatory systems.
MUSEUM DISPLAYS AND VISUAL CULTURE
Museums are the official repositories of people's tangible and intangible heritage, because, through their collections, they keep and exhibit past and present people's histories and memories. Specifically, in relation to contemporary society, museums and their collections are used to build cultural bridges between the displayed items and communities and between different local communities. However, the relationship between communities, museums, and their collections is strongly determined by the self-definition and perceptions of the communities within the society (Parkin, 1999). Indeed, it is important to consider that contemporary British society is made by different cultural and ethnic groups, which have arisen through complex historical processes of migration and diaspora and which are characterized generally--although not universally--by a constant process of integration of different cultural characteristics. Museums, therefore, reflect this multicultural and multiethnic climate as well as the integration and often the renegotiation of broadly accepted cultural identities. Concerning this, Henrietta Lidchi (2006) has explained that museum "exhibitions cannot be taken as disinterested representations of what is 'out there,'" since they are influenced by contemporary social agendas and cultural needs (p. 94). Furthermore, museum exhibitions are definitely "one of the principle means by which the people access [first of all visually, different] culture[s]" and every aspect of them (p. 94).
As mentioned in the introduction, this paper focuses on a specific category of objects (traditional Yoruba religious objects) and on a specific category of museum exhibitions (ethnographic exhibitions). However, before discussing the way traditional Yoruba religious objects are presented in British museums, it is important to define the way the term ethnography is used in this context. The term ethnography has had a complex history. Among several others, one of its key uses has been in the traditional language of museums, where in "Curators of Ethnography,.... Ethnographic collection," or "Ethnographic Gallery," the word simply means "material not from Europe or (usually) the East and Far East." It is in this sense that the word ethnography is used in this paper. In addition, ethnographic exhibitions are profoundly visual products (Lidchi, 2006, p. 95). And it is the visual aspect of museum exhibitions as well as their relation with the notions of visual culture and non-Western cultures in museums I would like to briefly discuss.
Visual culture is related to the way images and objects contribute to the visual and social construction of reality. Visual culture is, in fact, the interpretation of different forms of visual evidence and concentrates "on the cultural work that images do in constructing and maintaining ... a sense of order in a...
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