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Jan 8, 2005

BOOK REVIEW
The evolutionary museum as government
Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism by Tony Bennet

Reviewed by Piyush Mathur

The illicit priorities of the invasion of Iraq glared as the US military coolly secured Iraq's oil infrastructure while ignoring the integrity of its national museum (whose plunder has since been a matter of

legend). To Tony Bennet, who for long has viewed the rise of the modern museum as part of the rise of liberal governance in the imperial West, the destruction of the Iraqi national museum must have meant a great deal more - and less. He is likely to have considered the catastrophe a particularly odd milestone on the historical highway of Western colonialism.

Bennet's book is not a contemporary account - and it does not deal with Iraq, the Middle East, or even Asia (inasmuch as it holds a clear global relevance). The author's impossibly broad core objective is to articulate "the relationships between post-Darwinian developments in the historical sciences, the functioning of evolutionary museums as a new kind of memory machine, the changing practices and priorities of liberal forms of government, and the [variegated] connections ... forged between the historical sciences and practices of government in colonial relationships ..." (p 2).

As such - and within the contexts of the mid-to-late-19th and early-20th-century United Kingdom, United States, and Australia - Bennet exposes the evolutionary museum as a device for socio-cultural governance and epistemological discipline; he also makes a lengthy foray into Germany and occasional references to France. He compares and contrasts the 19th-century and early-20th-century developments in museum affairs with relevant developments in the 18th century and the European Renaissance.

Scientific manipulation
Bennet points out that the evolutionary museum grew out of - and in conjunction with - a certain late-19th-century synthesis of geology, paleontology, natural history, prehistoric archeology, and anthropology. Experts from these emergent disciplines joined hands "to provide an account of the history of the earth, of life on earth, and of human culture and civilization as an integrated and seamless progress" (p 7). Evolutionary museums "functioned as the 'laboratories' for these disciplines" - but they also became one of "the new strategies of cultural governance" via their pedagogic and exhibitory usage, imperial location, and internal logic (p 2).

"The museum's task," Bennet stresses, "was ... to batten down a new order of things ... in gradual and continuous lines of evolutionary development" (p 165); this, however, was possible only by way of "a particular narrative ordering of the relations between [the museum artifacts] through which resemblances were interpreted as descent" (p 162). As such, the evolutionary museum conceived and promoted conceptions of time, space, nature, and self that transformed "peoples distant from Europe into primitives representing moments of prehistory [and] relocated them as ancestors [from] distant past but one which still survived as the bottom-most layer in the archeological make-up of modern man" (p 63).

On a general level, "the place assigned the primitive within [the evolutionary museum] was designed exclusively for Western eyes, for telling a story to and about a metropolitan 'we' by means of the representational roles assigned to 'them'" (p 110). "This exclusionary logic," Bennet argues, "assumed that 'the primitive' would only appear in the museum as an object of display and research, and never as a visitor" (p 110). On a different level, the evolutionary museum redirected attention away from the esthetic uniqueness of the object to "its historically representative qualities" (p 75).

Scientific manipulation of prehistoric global artifacts was not confined to their selective ordering, representation and explanation; in many cases it also included motivated archaeological excavations. Shallow digging, for instance, allowed "early Australian archeologists" to limit "their attention to the stone tools which could easily be found on the surface" and thus "to sustain the conceptions of Europe's armchair theorists that colonized peoples could be represented as primitive but not ancient, as living relics of the European past but without any history of their own" (pp 62-63).

Liberal governance
At the epistemological level, the disciplining aspect of the evolutionary museum rested on its objectified and authoritative presentation of prehistoric past. This entire exercise involved purported collection, classification, ordering, and exhibition of objects - mostly "dead things" - from around the world; it also prominently involved the drive to instill in the public a highly disciplined, guided understanding of the interrelationships among those objects and their contemporary relevance (p 12).

Bennet avers: "In contrast to the [Renaissance] cabinet of curiosities, where the eye was left to meander in the spaces between things, and to the Enlightenment museum" (which used descriptive labels for its artifacts), the evolutionary museum - with its explanatory labeling - sought to "direct the eye in how to read the spaces between things [and] between bodies and their representations ..." (p 176). Rooted in the rhetoric of rationality and progress, the evolutionary museum alongside countered "the continuing influence of the illusionist trickery of fairground entertainers, prestidigitators, sleight-of-hand conjurers and popular showmen" - and it was unwilling to attract "the visitor's attention ... at the price of pandering to the distracted gaze of the cinema, the arcade, or the shop window" (p 16; p 185).

The National Museum of Victoria, in accordance, "functioned as a rational antithesis to the flashy, showy, and corrupting cultures of nature associated with popular circuses and menagerie" (p 147). The relationship between social governance and the evolutionary museum's stress on the disciplining of the eye was not slight as the museum targeted "the working class, migrants, [and] primitives [who] were ... viewed as peculiarly prone to the influence of those hypnotic, trance-like, distracted forms of inattention that were, by the century's close, associated with the development of new visual technologies, especially film, which were believed to diminish any capacity for attentive forms of observation" (p 184).

More actively, the evolutionary museum attempted to serve as an instrument of "adult education" and in tandem with "the new systems of state-provided schooling" that emerged in the late-19th-century UK, US and Australia (p 34). While having clear international and racial contexts, these developments had significant regional differences. For example, economic class was "the axis of the museum's social action" in the UK; however, in the case of the American Museum of Natural History in the United States, "migrant status" also mattered a great deal (p 120). The case of Australia was queered from the beginning because of the overwhelming significance of the aboriginals and their culture.

Australia as Europe's 'Evolutionary Ground Zero'
Australia's living aboriginal culture could not easily be fit into the Eurocentric schema of progressive time proffered by evolution and sought to be illustrated by the evolutionary museum. "There was no common time," Bennet points out, "that connected pre-occupation Aboriginal anatomical, social or cultural life to that of the colonizer" (pp 150-151). The result of this tension was that "Aboriginal culture was itself denied any fold of memory except ... as the endless recurrence of the same on a flat plane of time in which the self ... was construed as a resolutely single-leveled, pre-modern consciousness" (p 137).

Specifically within the realm of Australia's colonial governance, "the historical sciences came out of the enclosed state of the museum [in order to facilitate] the state which aimed to speed up the movement of Aborigines through developmental time" (p 156). The aboriginals, as such, were treated "as if they were ... just as much specimen types as their artifacts [and] their arrangement in social space was managed via enforced programs of assimilation that were simultaneously epidermal and cultural" (p 154).

Conclusion
Entrenched in the scholarly heritage bequeathed by Michel Foucault, Bennet's book, unlike Foucault's histories, is not a reader's delight. Marred by verbiage, repetition, and editorial negligence; overburdened by factual details; and unaided by the author's convoluted syntax, the book could hold the interest of only a determined reviewer or diehard academic buried deep into the narrow sub-field of museum research. This is quite unfortunate given that the book's fancy title, admittedly even its unusual theme, is apt to lure a much wider range of curious minds; also unfortunate is the fact that Bennet has refused to learn any lessons from the reviews of his previous book (on the birth of the modern museum).

On the research front, it is disappointing that Bennet focuses exclusively on the imperialist constructions and notions and Western (archival) sources. The story that we get therefore turns out to be extremely selective at every level. For instance, in arguing that the evolutionary imperialists denied any history to the primitive, Bennet appears to imply as if the primitive desired or needed any.

In other words, Bennet naively privileges history as an epistemology of time - a way to know and think about the past. He shows no knowledge of, or does not interact with, some of the most exquisite critiques of history and historical sensibility that have been developed by thinkers such as Ashis Nandy (especially in his famous 1995 essay "History's Forgotten Doubles") and Vinay Lal (in his 2003 book The History of History). Incidentally, these two authors, especially Nandy, also have a lot to say about politics, culture, governance and colonialism - from which Bennet stands to learn a significant thing or two.

Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism by Tony Bennet. Routledge: London & New York, 2004; 233 pages; US$30.95. ISBN: 0415247470.

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