Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 2, August 2001 | Page 121

Museums of Imperialism

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viewer rarely remembers. All that is important is acquisition, collection, display,
national prestige and economic value. As Inderpal Grewal has observed, “The
history of the museum can be seen as the history of colonization” (Grewal 214).
O f central concern here is that these trophies are contested after being
obtained at the expense of lives and histories and are, in turn, legitimized by a
Western value system built upon layers of narratives (Barthel 31). Most of the
major museums in the West reflect a past association, in some form, with imperialism
and its history of conquest upon non-white peoples. Museums came into being on
a massive scale at the same time as the expansion of colonies. Donald Home suggests
that this was due to “a desire” of Europeans and others to order the universe. At the
same time, museums also served an “unintended function of putting people in
their place” (Horne 15-16). In an almost chronological set-up, one can tour the
treasures and trophies of conquest. To further complicate matters, these items are
displayed with only a brief mention of their (original) symbolic value or religious
association. The focus is usually on the artistic or craft-oriented aspect, where they
become quaint objects devoid of their history.
By removing traces of “culture” from these items, it is easier and quicker
to forget their association with and meaning to people. The past becomes purged
of all its ugliness, and all the violence associated with obtaining the object is
effectively omitted. As well, Western meanings and associations become attached
to the artifact, further blurring its origins. As Grewal writes, “the visitor to the
museum absorbs alien histories and cultures within the historical context of his
own history” (Grewal 199). Thus, for example, the British Museum was seen and
believed to “contain the whole world” but it also came to embody the power of
Britain as a nation, capable of all that was necessary to collect, create and organize
the world (Grewal 206).
There is an aura of high art, civilization and status attached to most
museums, making any association with them prestigious and beyond criticism The
public assumes, with very little knowledge, that the pieces are there because they
are there. Regardless of who donated them, there is a patina of civility to the objects
within a museum.
Indiana Jones is thus free to roam the world and pluck whatever he is told
to get, whatever he wants, or whatever he is paid to obtain because the object will
rest within the religious-like (hence beyond question) confines of a museum. One
is led to believe that once in this “proper place”, the object will attain a status and
visibility that the non-Western culture could not appreciate. Only in the wealthy
West can this type of thinking happen. The level of status granted to a museum is
so high that every major city has to have a museum and usually commissions a
world famous architect to design it. It then becomes a repository of the past, a large
treasure chest to display what “we” were capable of taking from others. Often,
fragments from this past come to symbolize whole cultures.