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That the potential for social advocacy is always latent in the museum is suggested by the activities of a number of early twentieth-century museum anthropologists who, despite working within the salvage ethnography paradigm of their day, nonetheless tried to oppose the oppressive laws and government policies afflicting the peoples they studied. One such anthropologist was Frank Speck, who lobbied the United States and Canadian departments that oversaw Indian affairs to urge the repeal of an antimiscegenation law in Virginia and the prohibition of Innu fishing in Quebec – a ban intended to protect the sport fishery for white tourists (Pulla 2008). It is only in the late twentieth century, however, that the commitment to activism for social justice was formalized as an ethical obligation. The inclusion of sections on “Activism and Social Responsibility,” “The Radical Potential of Museum Transparency,” and “Visual Culture and the Performance of Museum Ethics” in an edited volume on museum ethics is suggestive of the level of articulation and reflexivity in contemporary museology (Marstine 2011).

Today the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience has proved a successful model of cooperation and collaboration, working with memory sites associated with social and political trauma and violence. Now a global network with around 200 members in 50 countries, the coalition prides itself on an activist agenda which involves understanding the lessons of the past, working “not only to preserve memories of what happened before, but also to understand the context in which these events occurred and apply these lessons to today’s struggles for human rights and social justice.”¹⁴ Crucially, the coalition also recognizes that, “without safe spaces to remember and preserve these memories, the stories of elderly survivors of atrocity can vanish when they pass away; societies that have overcome conflicts may never seek justice for fear of re-opening old wounds; and the families of the disappeared may never find answers.”¹⁵ One of the consistent strategies mobilized by member sites is the conscripting of local survivors as guardians and curators. Visitor experience is thus shaped by the memories of individuals who are intimately connected with the events commemorated at the site and this alone has a huge impact on the motivation for social action.

Museum work with difficult histories presents distinctive challenges and opportunities. It can be difficult to avoid engaging in an unfortunate meritocracy of trauma, especially where different sites of conscience, and the constituencies and legacies associated with them, may be competing for dwindling funds accompanied by a desire for basic human rights. Yet museums have played important roles in bringing to the fore human rights issues, land claims, and other injustices and enabling dialogue to take place in the face of official amnesia. For example, Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of the Bushmen, the complex and intelligent exhibition held in 1996 at the South African National Gallery (SANG), was criticized by some for casting a paternalistic eye on Khoi San culture and history. However, one of the results of the criticism was that it prompted SANG to hold an unprecedented public forum where Griqua and Khoi San rights organizations could air their views on how Miscast had represented their past, and voice the implications for their current status in the then relatively newly democratic South Africa. The Miscast controversy proved to be the trigger that provided a platform for Indigenous rights organizations to restate their land claims. This trajectory from exhibition, via controversy, to political action has been repeated in many other places, further suggesting the value of the museum as a forum where painful issues can be productively opened up as a preliminary step toward judicial and political action.¹⁶ In these contexts museums can serve as rehearsal halls and safe places for debates which might prove dangerously divisive outside their doors.¹⁷ Similarly, as Bruno Latour (2005) has urged, such controversies can usefully reveal what he calls “failures of translation” – the broken connections that link human actors, objects, technologies of representation, and institutions, so that productively functioning systems can be “reassembled.”¹⁸

To follow violent upheavals with massive state and private investment in public commemoration projects is nothing new. Europe is still living with the legacy of both world wars in the form of monuments and war memorials, erected largely through public subscription. The preference continues for memorializing events of national significance, including those with violent and controversial histories, with public statues that honor individuals identified as heroes. Most recently in Kenya, following one of the worst bouts of postelection violence in that country’s history, a government task force was convened in 2007 to solicit from community forums the names and deeds of “heroes” and “heroines.” Ostensibly designed to represent every part of the country, and, more specifically, each of Kenya’s 42 ethnic groups, the task force was initiated to forge a united Kenya and a new public vision of Kenya’s national story in the wake of the violence, through state-sponsored commissions of public statues of historical political leaders (Coombes 2011). The timing of this gesture proved to be opportunistic for the main contenders of the next general election and not without controversy. The task force itself, and the process it began, were shown to be more of a hindrance than a help in the cause of national unity. Because it encouraged a competitive jockeying for position between different ethnic groups who wanted their own hero(ine) to be acknowledged by the state, it reinforced rather than diminished the ethnic particularism that had contributed to the postelection violence in the first place.

All too often, conventional memorials quickly become relegated to the periphery of our sight lines, derelict and forgotten spaces or simply made invisible through the banalization that comes with familiarity. While monuments provide important focal points for public gatherings when they are first unveiled, or later as sites for poignant rituals of remembrance on key anniversaries, the neglect that inevitably follows weakens their ability to inspire an active agenda for social change.

In the Kenyan case it was left to two temporary exhibitions of photographs of the postelection violence to generate public awareness of the extent of the atrocities: Kenya Burning, funded by the Ford Foundation, and Heal the Nation, a street exhibition of Boniface Mwangi’s photos of the postelection events accompanied by a 30 minute documentary (Muhoma and Nyairo 2011; see also www.pichamtaani.org). The Go-Down Arts Centre which curated Kenya Burning, and Mwangi’s Picha Mtaani youth initiative, which organized Heal the Nation, realized that a street exhibition that could circulate the photographs to the flashpoints of the violence would be a far more effective way of bringing home the implications of the killing spree to a broad multiethnic public than keeping the photographic evidence within the confines of an exhibition venue in Nairobi. This exhibition strategy proved so powerful that a recovery tent and a therapist were needed to deal with the fallout from the shocking images. Many of the audience had been protected from directly witnessing events, and for them the photographs provided the first real sense of the extent of the brutality enacted on Kenyans by Kenyans. That this cathartic role should be supplied by two temporary exhibitions is telling. The flexibility of the format has often succeeded where the more static permanent displays in museums have failed, not least because it is easier to take risks with a temporary exhibition than a permanent gallery, the funding for which often necessitates a more prosaic approach to history.

Nonetheless, in contrast to a conventional memorial’s erratic relevance and the advantages of the temporary exhibition, the pedagogic function of the conventional museum has also seen a dramatic rise in recent years. In almost every case where there have been gross human rights abuses, there is now a museum erected to honor the victims. In many of the histories represented the blame is less easily apportioned than, for example, in Holocaust museums, and this ambiguity complicates the process of remembrance. Where such compromises are acknowledged, however, the museum can become a site for healing and reconciliation. Smaller local or community museums have often been more successful in pursuing projects of reconciliation because they can be more responsive to the direct needs of those affected by legacies of violence. They are also freer of some of the bureaucratic obligations affecting large national institutions called on to accommodate broader constituencies, which can make it difficult for them to pay attention to the specific requirements and protocols that make reconciliation effective. On the one hand, the anonymity of a bigger institution can be helpful in providing a “neutral” territory for the disclosure of grievances; on the other hand, the associations of these museums with state sponsorship can dissuade the victims of violence from working with them.

In contrast, local and community museums in postconflict zones are adept at applying local knowledge of the ways retribution and vigilantism operate in their areas and are attentive to local power structures that could either exacerbate the violence or, conversely, contribute to its alleviation. In Kenya, Dr. Sultan Somjee, then an ethnographer at the national museum, worked with grassroots organizations to promote local forms of conflict resolution using elders’ knowledge of how material culture has historically been used to broker peace. The community peace museums he helped to establish all over Kenya were instrumental in initiating dialogue between ethnic communities whose historic antagonism to each other dates back to the colonial period, when the British and their Kenyan allies forced the removal and relocation of communities for strategic and economic benefit. Community museums are often controlled by those directly affected by the traumatic events that have necessitated reconciliation and redress: this is a critical factor in enabling successful resolution. In the case of the Lari Memorial Peace Museum in Kimende, north of Nairobi, for example, the board members of the museum include both ex-Mau Mau combatants and their ex-Home Guard protagonists, and this is one of the strengths of the organization (Coombes, Hughes, and Karega-Munene 2013; see especially Coombes, ch. 2).

There is also, however, a role for large national organizations in processes of reconciliation. This role has been explored in settler societies in New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere as they sought ways to respond to the contestations and activism of Indigenous peoples and to acknowledge the violence of their histories of internal colonization. During the late 1980s and 1990s new policies and laws were put in place mandating the repatriation of some collections and objects and encouraging new models of partnership and collaboration. In several countries, long-standing ethnology exhibits were redesigned and new national museums were created, making it possible to reconceptualize permanent installations of national history and culture. In Wellington, New Zealand, the new national museum, which opened in 1998, was founded on a formal bicultural policy that acknowledges both the country’s demographic diversity and “the unique position of Maori in Aotearoa New Zealand and the need to secure their participation in the governance, management, and operation of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa” (quoted in McCarthy 2011, 114). At the newly created National Museum of Australia, as Bain Attwood writes in Chapter 3, the histories of the massacres of Aboriginal people incorporated into the opening exhibitions survived the demands for revision issued by conservative critics after the museum’s opening in 2001. In Canada, the First Peoples Hall of the new national museum building opened in 2003. Its First Nations advisory committee orients visitors to the exhibition with strong statements about the continuing importance of land to Aboriginal people and their active participation in contemporary life (see Phillips and Phillips 2009). At the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, a new museum, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), was opened in 2006 under Native American governance. Its opening exhibitions featured a series of modular exhibitions curated by Native American community groups.

Many European museums have also developed compelling exhibits exploring their colonial pasts, as represented in this volume by Mary Bouquet’s chapter (6) on Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum and its reflexive portrayal of Dutch colonial history in Indonesia, and Johan Lagae’s discussion in Chapter 7 of an interactive digital experiment designed to give audiences a better understanding of the ways in which urban planning in Belgium’s colonial cities in the Congo structured social relations. While we cannot doubt the importance of such changes in modernist museology, or their influence in fostering a new historical consciousness and respect for Indigenous peoples, these processes are far from complete.¹⁹ The projects just named, furthermore, have been themselves subjected to lively critiques. In Chapter 22 Paul Chaat Smith, one of the curators of the NMAI’s opening exhibitions, discusses the reasons for his museum’s decision to redo them only a decade after they opened (see also Lonetree and Cobb 2008).

Changes in national museums have been paralleled by similar projects in regional museums. It is important to note that, even when changes of government cause national museums to retreat from revisionist historical projects, local museums have often been able to continue unimpeded. In Canada, as Ruth Phillips discusses in Chapter 24, the election of a conservative majority government in 2009 caused a major shift away from the national museum’s traditional focus on Indigenous people and its proactive pursuit of collaborative research and exhibition projects. However, in other museums the critical project continues. At Montreal’s McCord Museum of Canadian History, for example, a long-term exhibition on Indigenous clothing – historically a popular theme for exhibitions of Native American material culture – opened in 2013. While past exhibitions have tended to be celebratory of Indigenous innovation and artistry without noting the dispossessions and enforced changes of lifestyle that lie behind them, the McCord projects a large image of the text from the infamous 1914 Indian Act that specifically prohibits the wearing of ceremonial dress on the long wall adjacent to the opening section.²⁰ Another large projection on the opposite wall shows a video of contemporary pow-wow dancers’ colorful regalia as evidence of historical resistance and contemporary revival. At Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum a revisionist diorama disrupts the objectified treatment of bodies and cultures typical of the twentieth-century anthropology museum. For the new Sovereign Allies/Living Cultures displays in the gallery devoted to Canadian First Nations, curator Trudy Nicks and her Haudenosaunee consultants decided to recreate the “Mohawk Family Group” which had been in view between the 1920s and the 1950s.²¹ Although twentieth-century Mohawk lived in frame houses, endured enforced residential schooling, and in many cases worked as high steel ironworkers, the original diorama represented them as living premodern lives in the imagined time of the “ethnographic present” (Fabian 1983). In the new diorama – humorous and purposely unsubtle – the mannequins wear fringed clothing and a sweatshirt advertising an exhibition on Indian stereotypes. The men wield electric drills and mobile phones and the woman aims a digital camera at the visitor (see Figure 0.3).

Similar changes have unfolded in South Africa since the demise of apartheid. Former national museums were obliged to reinvent themselves as meaningful resources for the majority black population, previously excluded from a museum culture which had negated their presence as actors in any narrative of national history by largely relegating black experience to the ethnographic domain (see Coombes 2003). In the two decades following the first democratic elections, new national museums have been built. Though a number of these have won international prizes, they have not always succeeded in attracting black visitors because of the legacy of exclusion which sometimes makes the concept of a museum unappealing as a location for staging revisionist histories. The fact that many new museums and heritage sites in South Africa draw in vast numbers of international tourists rather than local or national visitors has been highly contentious. Although many South African museums have worked hard to bring new relevance to their institutions, the most successful in obtaining the support and interest of local and national communities are often community run. One well-known example of such success is the District Six Museum in central Cape Town – a member of the

FIGURE 0.3 Recreated Mohawk Family diorama, 2012, The Daphne Cockwell Gallery of Canada: First Peoples, Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto.

With permission of the Royal Ontario Museum © ROM.

Coalition of Sites of Conscience – which was created on the site of the infamous forced removals from that area.

The agency of the museum has also been invoked to support recovery from the broader and more pervasive losses of traditional knowledge that have resulted from often brutal colonial projects of erasure. In addition to the massive appropriation of Indigenous lands, in the course of six centuries of European expansionism and colonization, Indigenous populations all over the world have also been deprived of the basic human right to practice cultural traditions that has now been affirmed by the United Nations.²² In settler societies, assimilationist laws and policies forcibly suppressed Indigenous languages, spiritual beliefs, and ceremonies. At the same time, however, colonial practices of collecting – initially of curiosities and souvenirs and later of more systematically formed ethnographic and scientific assemblages – ensured the preservation in museums of language recordings, material culture, and other expressions of Indigenous knowledge. Museums, in other words, often hold the most important surviving documentation of historical Indigenous cultures and languages and therefore have the potential to serve as primary resources for projects of cultural renewal and restoration.

On a concrete level, recovery can mean the legal and physical repatriation of human remains and specific classes of objects. But on another level, recovery can also involve healing through the restoration of cultural losses and the psychic damage those losses have caused. Museum-based research and resulting exhibitions have made effective contributions to these healing processes, reversing colonial removals that disrupted the normal transgenerational transmission of cultural traditions. Working together, museums and source community members have pooled their expertise to develop more adequate understandings of historical collections. More accurate displays help museums by improving public interpretation and Indigenous community members by removing barriers to self-recognition as theorized by Charles Taylor (1992). One of the earliest examples of this process occurred in 1991 at the American Museum of Natural History during research for the exhibition Chiefly Feasts: The Enduring Kwakiutl Potlatch when elders recounted narratives associated with masks that had been in the museum for almost a century but had never been correctly identified (Jonaitis 1991). This research restored knowledge of the dance and its masks to community members so that they could create it anew in their community.

Similarly, other research collaborations have made it possible for Indigenous people to again make traditional clothing whose designs and patterns had long gone out of use.²³ In Chapter 12, Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown discuss a collaboration between the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Blackfoot of Alberta, Canada which combined joint research, photo elicitation, and the travels of people and museum collections in order to restore the communities’ connection to their historic war shirts. In other projects, museums have contributed to Indigenous language recovery by digitizing wax cylinder recordings to support language recovery and the repertoires of contemporary dance groups. The Smithsonian’s (2014) institution-wide Recovering Voices project has devoted resources to research on and support for endangered languages worldwide and will also produce an exhibition to heighten public awareness. Lissant Bolton’s chapter (10) analyzes the impact of the Indigenous cultural research and revival program established by the Vanuatu Cultural Centre in the Pacific where local community members were trained to document the histories and practices in their areas. Many museums have also recognized that some of the things in their care are culturally sensitive and have agreed to store and care for them – and sometimes remove them from display – in accordance with the practices of the source communities. Such projects are designed not only to support cultural recovery but also to educate non-Indigenous publics about histories of oppression that have not been adequately narrated. On the other hand, as Nicholas Thomas suggests in Chapter 11, museums also need to recognize that not all communities attach cultural value to objects and artifacts, or indeed to heritage and history, and that these reservations should be acknowledged even though they may not fit in with the museum’s agenda.

Globalization has speeded up the transnational movements of peoples as refugees and immigrants, both legal and illegal. As diasporic communities establish themselves in new countries, they have often been regarded with suspicion and resentment as economic competitors and, through old racial stereotypes, as unwelcome representatives of alien cultures. The traditional function of the museum in transtemporal and transcultural processes of translation and interpretation has made them natural sites for projects of familiarization and the deconstruction of stereotypes. New roles for ethnographic museums including proactive exhibits that address contemporary migration have been developed and shown by a consortium of European national ethnographic museums in Rome, Paris, Brussels, and Vienna,²⁴ with funding from the European Community. At Rome’s Pigorini Museum, for example, the exhibit S/oggetti migranti: dietro le cose le persone/people behind things established a shared historical connection between colonial museum collections and members of highly marginalized Moroccan, sub-Saharan African, Chinese, and other migrant communities. As the catalog states:

These projects aim at the sharing of experiences and practices that add value to the collections and promote cultural diversity. They are driven by the awareness that, in the light of new demands for information created by the widespread presence of the representatives of many cultures in a contemporary world traversed by global fluxes that are challenging the physiognomy of Europe, ethnographic museums are being called on to renew their mission and propose new opportunities for interpreting and deriving benefit from anthropological heritage. This has allowed fruitful partnerships and opportunities for exchange of experiences that resulted from scientific workshops and exhibit events, planned with museum directors, curators and employees of partner institutions. (Munapé 2012, 9).

In this volume, contributions by Mieke Bal and by Terry Kurgan, Alexander Opper, and Tegan Bristow explore the social agency of exhibitionary projects involving film and interactive electronic media in mediating experiences of diasporic and migrant populations in eastern Europe and South Africa. Whereas in the early twentieth century the typical museum of modernity saw its role as assimilating newcomers to Western culture, today many museums are discovering a new and activist potential to mediate cultural frictions that arise in processes of globalization and immigration.