Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond

Loss, Liminality and Hopeful Encounters

Sandra H. Dudley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317392361
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Arts & Humanities

Displaced Things in Museums and Beyond looks anew at the lives, effects and possibilities of things. Starting from the perspectives of things themselves, it outlines a particular, displacement approach to the museum, anthropology and material culture.

The book explores the ways in which the objects are experienced in their present, displaced settings, and the implications and potentialities they carry. It offers insights into matters of difference and the hope that may be offered by transformative encounters between persons and things. Drawing on anthropological studies of ritual to conceptualise and examine displacement and its implications and possibilities, Dudley develops her arguments through exploration of displaced objects now in museums and dislocated or exiled from their prior geographical, historical, cultural, intellectual and personal contexts. The book's approach and conclusions are relevant far beyond the museum, showing that even in the most difficult of circumstances there is agency, distinction and dignity in the choices and impacts that are made, and that things and places as well as people have efficacy and potency in those choices.

In Displaced Things, displacement emerges as fundamental to understanding the lives of things and their relationships with human beings, and the places, however defined, that they make and pass within. The book will be essential reading for academics and students engaged in the study of museums, heritage, anthropology, culture and history.

PART I

Departures

1

DISPLACED THINGS

When Pandora opened the jar that unleashed all manner of evils into the human world, Hope, one of the contents, stayed inside. Whether this was so she could stay at hand to help human beings deal with all the evil that had been released from the box, or because she is the worst evil of all, has been debated by philosophers and theologians since ancient times. This book is a journey towards a beginning – of an exploration of the problem of hope in relation to the museum, anthropology and material culture. How do, do not and could museums and, in particular, their artefacts and collections, act as vehicles of hope? What does hope mean in this context? How does this relate to the work of museums as institutions that remember, and forget? And what is lost and gained through time, amidst the accretion and dissipation of knowledge and things?

To address such questions, this book looks afresh at the lives and effects of things, reframing them as a series of displacements and attempting to see as if from their point of view. It offers a new way of approaching the movements and interactions between components of the material world (including people), showing not only that material things can, like people and cultural practices, become displaced but that in fact all their movements can be thought of as displacements. It asks how attention to particular instances in the displacement process for some individual things, can trouble existing ways of seeing not only the movements of things but also the encounters – actual and potential – between different kinds of things. It looks closely at the moments and places passed through and understands ‘displacement’ not simply as a descriptive term for movement through space and time, but as a structured process full of transformative possibility, within which it is the frontiers, hesitations and surprises along the way, that are especially revealing. It is during these apparent pauses that possibilities are unleashed, norms and boundaries are, even if only fleetingly, transgressed, and who or what holds the balance of power, temporarily alters. In these instants, powerful transformations can take place – of things, of the people who encounter them, or both. In that sense, this book offers both a distinctive way of conceptualising the lives and effects of things and an attempt to ‘make the particular speak back’ (Clarke 2019: 82) – to point to the implications and potential reshaping of displacements of, and by, things.

This approach, a displacement anthropology, puts the displaced at its centre and recognises they are neither useless nor adrift, disarticulated though they are from their original or principal geographical, historical, cultural or personal milieu. Grown out of my long-term anthropological field research with Karenni refugees from Myanmar living in camps in Thailand (e.g. Dudley 2010a) and work in museums and heritage sites in Myanmar, India and the UK, the volume is in some ways a response to Myers’s still valid call for further ‘theorising of [the] contexts and classifications [that] objects move through’ (2001: 18), in the years after the publication of Thomas’s now classic work (1991). It is, however, thing-centred rather than context-centred. It pays attention to the qualities, potency and potentiality of things. It understands the life of both things and persons as dynamic, processual, fluid. But the book’s combination of seeing from the thing’s perspective, and focusing on particular moments of change and the stages of displacement they reveal and define, is what distinguishes it from other approaches to things. Thus on the one hand, displacement anthropology demonstrates that displacement is as relevant a frame of understanding for objects that appear fixed and unmoving, such as those that people keep (Weiner 1992), as it is for those for which movement and change is an obvious part of their trajectories. An heirloom object, for example, may appear to its owner not to change or move; but it does not stand still from its own viewpoint. On the other hand, the object’s movements and shifts are not – or, at least, do not appear to be and feel as if they are – always changing. Rather – and as the displacement approach enables us to see – change (including decay and endings) seems to happen in very particular moments.

Ultimately, the book seeks to enable, like Hardi’s poetic treatment of her father’s books in the Prologue, deeper, more complex, empathic understandings of the processes and experiences of dis- and re-connection. It recognises that things, like people, have different stories and experiences of displacement. It raises the possibility of returning things to the centre of the lives, relationships and stories that are woven by and around them. It attempts to show in a very particular way, how ‘the anthropological venture has the potential of art: to invoke neglected … potentials and to expand the limits of understanding and imagination’ (Biehl and Locke 2010: 317). And it demonstrates that while loss, absence, trauma and paradox can characterise what it means and feels like to be displaced, displacements are also full of possibility. Displacement lends a certain quality that can at times be experienced as both creative and characteristic of a certain way of life. Edward Said exemplifies this beautifully in his description of not only sometimes experiencing himself ‘as a cluster of flowing currents’ rather than as a fixed and concrete self, but of his preference for this sense of ‘being not quite right and out of place’ (1999: 295). Indeed for Said, this feeling of being always in motion, in surprising and fluctuating combinations, was quite possibly a ‘form of freedom’ (ibid.). Displacement and its processes change those people and things that undergo it; of course, it is often deeply challenging but, as Sarup describes, while it ‘can be an affliction … it can also be a transfiguration … a resource’ (1994: 98).

In this sense, the displacement anthropology advanced on these pages is optimistic. Yet such sanguinity may at first appear misplaced. Displacement, especially forced displacement, is and can be no leitmotif; it is a globally and locally, temporally inflected reality that might seem an unlikely basis for hope and new insight. Ongoing global failures to deal effectively with the legacies of colonialism, poverty, inequality, conflict and variable resilience to environmental and other risks mean that around our planet human movement, particularly forced migration, is increasing at an exceptionally alarming rate. By the end of 2018, the numbers of people forcibly displaced around the world ‘as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, or human rights violations’ exceeded 70 million for the first time ever (UNHCR 2019). The 70.8 million total included 25.9 million people officially recognised as ‘refugees’, and, at 41.3 million, the greatest number in human history (IDMC 2019) of persons forcibly displaced within their own countries (so-called internally displaced persons, or IDPs). The US Center for Strategic and International Studies predicted that if global trends continue, a staggering 180 to 320 million people will be displaced globally by 2030 (CSIS 2018: v). Contrary to the view of many in the populations of the developed democracies in Europe, North America and Australasia, the bulk of the cost and impact of this huge human dislocation continues to be borne by the developing countries of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Central and South America and the Pacific (UNHCR 2019). At the same time, in most of the developed countries of the so-called global north, there are growing political and social backlashes against welcoming displaced people from elsewhere (Bilgic and Pace 2017; Calamur 2019; Miller 2018; Trilling 2018). Meanwhile, global responses to displacement on this scale are inadequate. The few large-scale interventions are essentially focused on reactive response to urgent humanitarian needs rather than proactively and collaboratively addressing the causes of displacement, and the weaknesses of international law and institutions are made woefully clear (Hathaway 2019; Scheel and Ratfisch 2014).

This enormous scale of displacement makes examinations of its forms and significances in the lives of people and things, essential. Indeed, exploration of displacement in various forms, as object, lens or both, has become increasingly prevalent in a gamut of academic disciplines well beyond refugee studies and migration studies per se. Common, contemporary themes include refugee narratives; refugee trauma, wellbeing and healthcare; refugee education; current shifts in global regimes; and effectiveness in refugee protection and assistance and in prevention of forced displacement. Attempting to understand the refugee’s perspective and experience is central to studies in some disciplines in particular, with different – though often thematically overlapping – approaches emerging from, for example, psychology, anthropology, geography and literary studies. Relatively little of this academic work explores the materiality or sensoriality of the forced migration experience, however. Some exceptions include Dudley 2010a; Hamilakis 2016; Holtzman 2006; Kaiser 2008; Parkin 1999; Scott-Smith et al. 2017; Turan 2010. Turan, for example, argues that some things are important to displaced persons because artefacts facilitate and represent connections to the pre-exile past, whether through direct, personal memory or the imagination and sense of collective identity still active amongst second and later generations (2010). My research with Karenni refugees, however, has demonstrated that while things are indeed frequently comforting, material connections with the past, they actually operate in more complex, and frequently paradoxical and painful, ways (e.g. Dudley 2010a).

The material, sensory, experiential and processual aspects of forced migration are sometimes a focus in interrogations of displacement in contemporary cultural practice beyond academic research. Various journalists, photographers and artists, for example, have explored objects that are in some way significant to refugees, though their approaches differ markedly. In some, the refugees are over-simplified at best; decontextualised and helpless at worst (Dudley 2018a). In others, such as Brian Sokol’s 2013 photographs, refugees appear as strong, complex individuals, full of life and humanity however difficult may be their current and recent circumstances, with real pasts and communities. In yet others, people are startlingly absent and things, sometimes contentiously, stand not only for lives, hopes and loss, but also for much bigger debates. Christoph Büchel’s display at the 2019 Venice Biennale of Barca Nostra, for example, was highly controversial in its repurposing as artwork of a fishing boat that sank in the Mediterranean en route from Libya to Lampedusa in 2015, with the loss of hundreds of migrants’ lives.

None of this academic and other work, however, frames displacement so as to enable greater insight into both the forced migration experience (for persons and things alike) and the movements of things more broadly. This book sequentially maps and problematises the displacement process, examining key, arresting moments in material and social trajectories and encounters.¹ It attempts to interweave the sensitivities to fluidity, permeability and mutability inherent in contemporary non-representational studies of social and material worlds, on the one hand, with continued recognition of structural and performative elements, and of the moments when things at least appear to pause and transform, on the other. The displacement anthropology formulated here does not disavow contexts of mutability and emergence; it recognises the ongoing, messy complexities of displacement and the ways in which social, political and cultural categories continually shift and are repeatedly renegotiated as the dislocated ‘traverse … multiple pathways to incorporation simultaneously in different configurations at different times’ (Levitt 2012: 497; see also Brubaker 2004; Glick Schiller et al. 2006). But at the same time, it foregrounds close attention to the gaps, lags or wedges between places, times, things and persons, the stages of displacement, and the sporadic encounters and boundary crossings that happen along the way. Within this, the focus is primarily on what things and persons do and experience, rather than what they mean, and the aim is both a fresh critical framework for exploration of how and why things move and change, and an emancipatory approach to looking at and interpreting the world. It offers opportunities to decentralise, look differently and productively unsettle. It shows that the separation of things, and people, from the places to which they seemed to belong creates not only fissures and holes, but also new connections and powerful transformative potentials – much of which might give grounds for hope when all else seems bleak.

This chapter provides a conceptual map for those that follow. The remainder of the volume as a whole is divided into three parts, organised according to the model of displacement with which the entire book is concerned (see below). Chapter 2 explores what it is for an object to become displaced; Chapters 3 and 4 look at what is involved in being a displaced object, focusing on the liminal, in between, phase; and Chapter 5 explores the extent to which displaced objects can be at home in their new worlds and, in the process, bring about liberating, powerful and sometimes painfully contradictory possibilities for those who encounter them. The first part of this chapter outlines displacement anthropology and discusses its relationship to theories of ritual. The chapter goes on to consider the position of things in, and the optimistic possibilities of, the displacement approach.

Displacement anthropology

‘Displacement’ implies a movement through space, transferral from one physically defined position to another. As such, it is common to refugees and other migrants and the things they take with them on their travels, to artefacts that now find themselves in museums, to items that have ended up in the wrong cupboard, to the possessions of the dead now removed to relatives’ houses, charity shops or the refuse tip, to articles upcycled into something different and sold to a new owner – to anything or anyone, in short, now somewhere other than where they were formed or once primarily based, in some way as a result of another’s agency. This has two, connected, spatial aspects, both of which come into this book’s explorations, and both of which may be self-evident but are often not straightforward. The first is the material distance or gap between the point of departure and the place of arrival. The second is the physical journey made in order to cross the gap, to get from one position to the other. The existence of the distance sometimes remains a significant issue well after it has been traversed. At the same time the process of moving, and the later traces of the journey, can have substantive impacts upon the voyager (person or thing), the environment passed through, or both.

Displacement pays homage to history as well as physics, however: what was once there and is now here, has moved through time as well as across space. There are also conceptual voyages – imaginative and affective movements – from now to then and back again, in addition to the physical journeys. Displacements are thus true travel stories, spatial practices through time (cf. de Certeau 1988) that produce narratives of expedition and discovery in which people and things become explorers of new worlds. And yet, there is tension and paradox in the crossings between past and present, here and there. On the one hand, the displaced maintain, through ideational and other kinds of journeys, continuities with what has been left behind; they are in a sense in both places at once (Dudley 2010a; cf. Beck 2006). On the other hand, in sustaining connections with the past they risk perpetuating their estrangement from their new abode. In this state, as Tirman makes clear, dislocation is not relocation, but is dominated by ‘two domains of consciousness … memory and alienation. These two feed on each other, the recollections of what is lost and the alienation from what is found’ (Tirman 2001: np; emphasis added). In this, displacement has considerable crossover with other frames of experience and terminology, including that of exile.² Barbour describes the spatial and temporal dislocations of exile, and their articulation, as:

… a way of dwelling in space with a constant awareness that one is not at home … [and] … an orientation to time, a plotting of one’s life story around a pivotal event of departure and a present condition of absence from one’s native land … orientation, or being pointed toward something distant, and also disorientation, or feeling lost and at odds with one’s immediate environment.

Barbour 2007: 293

These co-existences of presence and absence, and of multiple versions of the past and future, are, as we shall see, especially to the fore at particular moments in the forced displacement story. Their relative significances and the ways in which they are shaped, ebb and flow, impact on and change not only the displaced but also those who encounter them.

A term other than ‘displacement’ that has been employed elsewhere in considering the translocations and transmutations of things, is ‘diaspora’. Peffer, for example, explores the implications for the interpretation of African art of considering ‘art objects from Africa as themselves a diaspora, as opposed to the traditional view of African diasporas as the spread of persons’ (2005: 339). Building on both Kopytoff’s object biography approach (1986) and Clifford’s exploration of diaspora (1997), he examines African artefacts ‘as objects in motion, and as objects that articulate between and across disparate cultural histories and the cultural zones of others’. For him, the diasporic frame shows how both people and objects have been ‘sown through’ others within and beyond Africa for centuries. Objects, he argues, ‘are themselves diasporas in the sense that they may hybridise their subjects and their beholders, in different configurations according to historical context’ (Peffer 2005: 340). Basu too develops a diasporic view on objects, in his case conceiving of globally dispersed museum collections of artefacts, particularly those from Africa, as ‘“object diasporas”, whose (material) culture flourishes in exile within the recontextu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• PART I Departures
• PART II Liminality
• PART III Transformations
• Bibliography
• Index