Last week, I wrote about fields of research as important sites for generating and defining units of analysis. With respect to my research proposal, I spoke to the possibility of investigating a “range of social practices at the site of the museum as an important cultural text in and of itself.” This week, I would like to dwell on this notion of the museum, and cultural institutions more broadly, as important cultural texts about nationalism — particular with respect to the invisible and visible social practices that take place at the site to produce it and conceive of it. All of this will hopefully serve as a good exercise in thinking through some theoretical framework and methodological ideas that I want to sort out as a write my proposal.
Cultural institutions are important in shaping the and shape the very meaning of culture and their consumption — we can think of this as a dialectical relationship. Benedict Anderson’s seminal Imagined Communities (2006) explores museums as objects and subjects of nationalism. Anderson focused on the role that cultural institutions played in enabling the 19th c. nation-state to recycle and employ their symbolic political capital. Thus, museums play a huge role in the formation of modern national identity. It’s a site where the nation as social construct and it’s territorial scope and extent are produced and transmitted.
National museums are what Pierre Nora (1996) calls lieux de mémoire, or sites that privilege a very particular form of nation-state driven memory. Nora asserts that their very raison d’être and mode of disembodied cultural production delegitimizes lived experienced that are transmitted through more ephemeral milieux de mémoire e.g. oral histories. According to Nora, positivistic approaches to historiography (and cultural institutions that are circumscribed by this interpretation of history) has eradicated subjectivity by delegitimizing lived experiences. He contends that “[i]f we still dwelled among our memories, there would be no need to consecrate sites embodying them” (p. 2). Thus, if memory was inhabited, there would be no need to sanctify space to mitigate the effects of modernization and temporal acceleration. In many respects, the notion of the modern nation-state creates a unity of meaning and identity that is meant to be uncontested and homogeneous. This meaning is generated in and through the museum. Positivistic historiography also assumes the possibility of complete knowledge in its attempt to “reconstruct the past seamlessly and in its entirety,” reinforcing “this view of history as a critical method whose purpose is to establish true memory” (p. 4). Historicized memory resulting from this approach attempts to make the past completely legible in reaction to the ‘conquering’ of traditional forms of memory transmission.
Right now, I’m trying not think about the museum as a site of multi-scalar documentary relationships that constitute a museum as a lieux de mémoire. I’m also thinking about how to develop a textual analysis-based methodology that would help me to analyze the intellectual and physical relationships that constitute the provenance of the museum understood as information about creator context. The museum can be seen as a site of nation-state territoriality that employs physical space and intellectual documentary relationships to render some information legible and legitimize certain experiences while implicitly delegitimizing and obfuscating others. If we think of nation-state territoriality at the site of the museum and it’s archives through Robert Sack’s (1986) idea of “emptiable space”, one could posit that it has been emptied of artifacts (both tangible and ephemeral) that contest the notion of a predominantly ethno-linguisitically homogenous nation state that is generated in this particular social-historical context (pp. 33-34). In applying the theoretical construct of the fonds to analyze museum as a complex artifact involved in the assertion of nation-state territoriality… I could look at the description and arrangement of documentation about the planning of the museum and creator context to see how unity is created among the documents and how the planning of the project has been hailed into the production of the city and province. But now my brain hurts because there’s too many nested relationships and ways of envisioning them through spatial and archival theoretical frameworks… and I haven’t even articulated potential analytical categories or codes… back to the drawing board with more emphasis on using my existing empirical knowledge about my field site to develop a coding framework similar to the one presented by Hartel (2010) in Managing Documents at Home…
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 2006.
Nora, P. 1996 General Introduction: Between Memory and History. In Realms of memory: rethinking the French past, vol. 1: Conflicts and Divisions, eds. P. Nora and L. D. Kritzman. New York: Columbia University Press: 1-21.
Sack, R. D. 1986. Human Territoriality: its theory and history. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.
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