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Museums and Memory: The EnchantedModernityMyrian Sepúlveda dos SantosPublished online: 09 Nov 2010.

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ISSN 1479-7585 Print/ISSN 1740-1666 online/03/010027-20 © 2003 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1479758032000079765

Journal for Cultural Research, Vol. 7, No. 1, 2003, 27–46

Museums and Memory: The EnchantedModernity

Myrian Sepulveda dos Santos

AbstractFrom cabinets filled with curious and exotic objects, laboratories of scientific knowledge

and temples of cultural imperialism, museums gradually evolved into organizedcollections adapted to the demands of the public. In all of these cases, scholars haveassociated museums with a dead past. The objective of this essay is to review modernistand postmodernist approaches to museums, arguing that, while they may correctly pointto the different ways museums reinvent the past, they fail to perceive that modernity doesnot completely eradicate earlier forms of representation. The central issue is the place ofthe past in contemporary life. On the basis of a few examples, it will be argued thatmuseums not only recreate the past, but also work with people’s reminiscences and sacredobjects. Finally, it will be considered that the different ways in which past and present areintertwined is directly related to historical development and territorial borders.

Introduction

Originating from cabinets containing curiosities, museums have undergone asignificant number of changes. In the specific circumstances of Europeanimperialism, they were considered temples that selected and displayed to theworld the achievements of Western civilization in order to strengthen the imageryof national states. Yet the association between museums and the West’s triumphalexhibiting strategies has changed (Negrin 1993; Pieterse 1997). Museums havebeen regarded by European and North American studies as among the culturalinstitutions that have best adapted to the social and political demands of agrowing mass public (Hooper-Greenhill 1994; Huyssen 1995; Prosler 1996).

As a matter of fact, museums have computerized their collections, producedextremely exciting videos, encouraged interactive practices, incorporated newstrategies in display techniques, improved their range of activities to includetemporary and itinerant exhibitions, and most of all, politicized their narratives.It is not unusual for exhibitions to fuel debates that go on for months, as was thecase of the display of the fuselage of the Enola Gay, the US Air Force bomber thatdestroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in the National Museum of Air and Space inWashington; or, most recently, of the exhibition entitled “Mirroring Evil: NaziImagery/Recent Art”. Provocative artwork was put on display in the JewishMuseum, in New York, igniting outrage among those who could not understandwhy art that causes pain in Holocaust survivors should be shown. The world ofart exhibitions has become the world of culture wars.

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Even in countries such as India, Sri Lanka and Brazil, which are not at theheart of the Western culture, and where museums do not attract the attention ofso many people, it is also possible to observe an increasing number of smallerlocal museums, with exhibitions devoted to representations of daily life,interactive practices and contemporary political issues (Appadurai 1986; Prosler1996; Santos 2001a). Over the last two decades, in comparison with othercultural activities such as the movies, the theater and concerts, museumexhibitions have been among the most popular and profitable cultural activitiesaround the world. In Huyssen’s words, they have become the favorite son inthe family of cultural institutions (Huyssen 1995). This role-change calls forsome reflection, and there has been a steady growth of interest in museumpractices.

To many critics, the new museum exhibitions imply the commodification ofhistory, the biased representation of the past and the use of heritage as profitableproducts of the entertainment industry (Hewison 1987; Walsh 1992; Wright 1985).The writings of the Frankfurt School about the culture industry, as well as thepostmodernist accounts of the end of history, have had a strong influence onacademic writings and public opinion. However, the assumptions about either thealienated character of mass media or the nightmare of collective amnesia havebecome too narrow analytic frameworks for understanding contemporarycultural practices.

A growing number of social scientists are less interested in criticizing themanipulative power of consumer practices and the museumfication of the worldand more concerned with investigating the relations between museums,reflexivity, knowledge and identity. These studies are part of a broad range oftheoretical analyses of cultural changes from a perspective that stresses processesof interaction and communication. They have been emphasizing the reflexivecharacter of popular culture and the mediations between the economic, the socialand the cultural aspects of modernity. The relations between domination,exclusion, trauma and imagery become clear as exhibitions ignite outrage andpain. Museums become associated with new practices of citizenship rather thanwith disciplinary and constraining strategies.

The interesting point is that for both the skeptical and optimistic approaches,new museum practices are regarded as the result of the effacement of traditionallinks and values. Museums are investigated as places where memories are deadand traditions invented; as places where new forms of identity and reflexivitytake place; the investigations disagree only on the issue of power. For some ofthem, the dominant elites use the representations of the past to their ownadvantage; for others there is a reflexive process in which the representations ofthe past are used by everyone who is interested in achieving prestige, social statusor power.

The lack of interest in the intertwinements between museums and memoryis a result of the influence of a broad range of disciplinary approaches, fromLyotard’s notion of empty time (Lyotard 1979) to Giddens’ concepts ofembedding and disembedding processes (Giddens 1990), which display astrong consensus about the end of tradition. To both modernist and post-modernist theories, traditional societies were followed by urban, industrial andmodern societies, which in turn were followed by societies in their latemodernity or high-tech stage, in which no persistent pattern is transmitted

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from one generation to the next. To them, the end of local authorities and face-to-face relations entailed simultaneously the establishment of autonomouscategories of time and space and social control over former traditions. Oncecontiguousness with a geographically bounded locality was broken down,human interactions became detached and isolated from previous ones. Thethesis that modern societies move towards a state of traditionlessness is not anew one and is inherent to social disciplines that aim to explain the actions ofhuman beings.

The main objective of this essay is to argue, against the grain, that museumsare not only places where the past is recreated anew, but also places where thepast is present. There are multiple and differentiated forms by which past andpresent experiences are intertwined in contemporary societies and certainlymost of them can be observed within museum practices. I have already pointedout elsewhere that one of the main problems within sociological analyses is thatthey present a one-sided version of the dimension of time in their analyticalframeworks (Santos 2001b). Certainly, there are those who are not so eager toassert the end of tradition (Heelas et al. 1996). Following this, it is possible tocriticize the idea that the relation between museums and memory can only beunderstood in terms of what Thompson calls the re-mooring of tradition(Thompson 1995).

In the first part of this article, I will analyze some of the major social theoriesthat attempt to explain the changes undergone by museums around the globe. Myintention is to show that in order to challenge essentialist approaches to the past,social scientists ignore the complex ways by which past and present experiencesare intertwined. To them, museums are mainly analyzed as institutions deprivedof memories because they are mostly interested in how the present shapes andfilters the past.

In the second and third sections, I will investigate the museum as a place ofmemory. The objective is to show that objects that come from out of the past maybe associated with emotions, values and ideas, which have the power to confrontcontemporary interpretations. There are those approaches that emphasize thepersistence of lived experience transmitted through generations. Yet there is moreto it than that. An understanding of the processes of remembering and forgettinginvolves the perception, first, that a social institution such as a museumsimultaneously invents and is invented by former traditions; and, second, thatthere is an encounter between past and present into present configurations. Thereis no mechanical and unchanging combination between actions that construct thepast and ongoing structures.

In the fourth part, I will go further and explore the fact that the objects we findin a museum are revered by reason of meanings that are beyond one’s rationalcomprehension. To accept the idea that the attraction exerted by an object isrelated to the values attributed to it by former cultural experiences is also to rejectthe detraditionalization thesis. Objects have meanings that transcend those builtby a certain group of people. This happens because they carry in their forms, usesand trajectories fragments of meanings that have been inscribed by people wholived in a different spatial and temporal configuration. It is also part of themodern world, therefore, that people revere inanimate things, which are remotefrom them and their lived past. We live in neither a thoroughly profane nor athoroughly enchanted world.

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I. The museum as a social place

In general, the objects preserved in museums come from out of the past, so thatthe observer experiencing them in three-dimensional space must somehow alsocross a barrier of change in time. Paradoxically, however, those objects are at thesame time timeless – removed from history in the very process of embodying it,by curators seeking (among other goals) to preserve objects in their original form.(Stocking 1985)

Curators gather objects according to many different goals and people go tomuseums for all sorts of reasons – to enjoy themselves, to dress up, to getacquainted with other people, to buy things, to learn and acquire culturalknowledge – and they do so because museums are social places. Recent studies ofmuseums have dealt with this fact and attempted to detach museums from whathas been called the essentialism of founding myths and universal practices ofcollecting. They have sought to unmask the fetishism of material culture that maybe found among governments, citizens and all those concerned with thepreservation of “heritage” objects. Therefore, influential social studies onmuseums are not at all interested in investigating museums as memory-basedinstitutions. Museums are institutions analyzed in terms of their economic, socialand political potentials. If memory is mentioned, it is just to indicate howstruggles for power and economic interests are developed under its name.

Bourdieu and his followers were among the first to point out the relationshipbetween museums and the reproduction of social order. They developed animportant investigation showing the association between museums and themaintenance of elite taste, that is to say, cultural inequalities. Since then, artmuseums have been seen as institutions that not only universalize the meaning ofart and devalue what is not inside their walls, but also as institutions that areimplicated in the reproduction of the social order. Museums attribute distinctionto their visitors, who climb to their social positions on the basis of the symboliccapital they have amassed there (Bourdieu et al. 1969). This work is related toBourdieu’s important theoretical approach, which was able to transcend such oldantinomies of social theory as subjectivism versus objectivism or existentialismversus structuralism. He proposed the notion of habitus as dispositions to action,at the same time that he admitted that social agents were determined by theirrelations of production. He, therefore, proposed the notion of agency in andthrough signifying practices. What is ingenious about his writings is that theyallow us to conceive of symbolic violence, domination and political unconsciouswithout abdicating the notion of practice in the sense of experience (Bourdieu1979).

An understanding of the important role played by struggles over symboliccapital opened the way to social analyses based on what is generally calledculture wars. Some approaches, specially in the United States, have stressed theshifting and contingent character of the social roles of museums and focused onthe different groups that are part of contested and controversial demands. Objectson display are selected and classified according to the interplay of interestsinvolving politicians, directors, investors, curators and the different audiences(Dubin 1999; Hooper-Greenhill 1997; Williams 2001; Zolberg 1996). Close to thistrend, a group of researchers has associated the practices we find in museumswith the increasing reflexivity caused by a set of changes that have been described

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around the globe. Social scientists have pointed out the diversification ofmuseums and heritage centers, the dwindling of authoritative traditions and theincreasing performativity of reminiscence according to one’s own interests (Fyfe1996; Urry 1996). These are approaches that allow positive appraisals of museumpractices, which are seen more as product of the shifting conditions in thestruggles for power than as the result of fixed strategies established by dominantothers. Museums are seen as part of the global world and the criss-crossing ofdifferent traveling cultures, and as such they have been associated with the newleisure and travel industry, which encompasses de-differentiated forms of socialpractice. They are close to those theories that have been stressing that newinformation and communication technology has made possible greater inter-action between individuals and provoked a new sort of subjectivity based on riskand unpredictability (Beck et al. 1994; Giddens 1990; Lash and Urry 1994).

Moreover, there is an overall agreement that museums along with heritagesettings can epitomize collective identity. When people go to museums they feel aspecial affinity for what they find there. They are drawn to things and images thatresemble themselves and encourage their self-confidence. The world of symbols isseen paralleling the world of either totalitarian impositions or plural anddemocratic processes of identity building. The objects on display may be oppressivesymbols of an imperial nation or items representative of a democratic struggle overpower. Along these lines, a wide range of recent studies has investigated theassociation between museums and the construction of the collective images that arerepresentative of nation-states. Art, science, ethnographic and history museums,among others, along with monuments, ceremonies and rituals, have been seen asinstitutions and practices that have allowed for the construction of links ofsolidarity and membership between the people of a nation (Evans and Boswell1999; Gillis 1994; Gonçalves 1996; Poulot 1997). They have followed those studiesabout the processes of nation-building that have mainly argued that people’sfeelings of belonging are closely related to the establishment of institutional goalsand strategies (Anderson 1991; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983).

Many writers have denounced how museums, like all other modern institu-tions, have developed a series of strategies in the symbolic field in order to controlbodies, gestures and manners. Foucault’s and Elias’s writings exert a stronginfluence on those who are interested in denouncing the power of behaviorpatterned upon a museum visit. Their work allows one to consider the role thathas been played by museums in the regulation and unification of socialdifferences (Elias 1982; Foucault 1966). Following these major trends, contempo-rary writers have denounced the ordered representations of the world, theuniversalization of particular values, and the exclusion of people in function of ascientific narrative. Museums legitimized the replacement of personal and privatecategories by scientific ones, and imposed disciplinary rituals in order to controlhuman behavior (Bennett 1995; Duncan 1995; Gonçalves 1996).

According to most studies of museums, these are institutions that have no linkswith tradition. If museums are related to the past, this happens because of theneeds of nations or social groups, which use objects, images and practices asinstruments of their messages. The objects of the past either bestow prestige ontheir owners or are commercialized in terms of market laws. Museums have beencreated, negotiated and set in motion by human interactions and social contexts.Even historians like Wright and Samuel, who were interested in the role

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developed by the past in contemporary societies, considered traditions assymbols that had been built and appropriated by social actors. At issue wasmerely whether the invocation of tradition pointed to a regressive or aprogressive agenda (Samuel 1994; Wright 1985).

What is missing in most studies of museum practices is the awareness that thestruggles for representation and the politicization of culture are also informed bypast traditions. As we have seen, culture wars are mostly analyzed as the resultof present conflicting situations. Edward Shils has correctly pointed out howsocial scientists have obscured the temporal dimension in their writings.According to him, the temporal dimension is not taken up as something to beexplained by modern sociologists. From Marx, Weber and Durkheim to Parsons,there has been a suppression of pastness from social analyses. In his words, socialscientists treat tradition as a residual category, as an intellectual disturbance,which needs to be brushed away (Shils 1981).

Close to this concern is Anthony Smith’s recent book on the representations ofnations. He emphasizes that nations are the result of both social constructionismand traditionalism (Smith 1999). According to him, museum practices are notsupported by a tabula rasa population insofar as people reconstruct their pastaccording to acquired past experiences and expressions. This is to acknowledgethat the present is both reconstructed anew by social agents and shaped by layersof past experiences. The awareness of this double principle represents a stepahead in the way social scientists deal with the temporal dimension. Both Shilsand Smith, each in his own time, criticized those who reduced elaborate symbolicconstructions to elementary patterns of mind. The notion of traditionalism inthese cases has a historical component that is missing in structuralism as well asin social–phenomenological approaches. Yet, despite the remarkable theoreticaleffort to simultaneously consider persistence along with changeability, it is not atall made clear how the normativeness of tradition, defined as the force underlyingsocial actions, can be understood detached from present constructions.

The above-mentioned studies of museums are among the most comprehensiveand sophisticated available at present. None of them see contemporary museumsas simply the instruments of the elite’s interests or dumping institutions of theconsumer culture. Nevertheless, none of these approaches seriously consideredthe associations between museums and memory. This is not a matter of chance.The pivotal point is that the decisive criterion in all these approaches is alwaysrelated to the reconstruction of the past in the present. To these academics, as toNietzsche before them, history, tradition and memory are a matter of appropria-tion and power (Nietzsche 1990). Adorno’s association between the museum andthe mausoleum clarifies the idea well. According to him the German word musealhad unpleasant overtones; it described objects with which the observer no longerhad a vital relationship and which were in the process of dying (Adorno 1981).Thus, for all the criticism of the radicalism of Adorno’s ideas, the assertion thatmuseums are like a family vault for objects underlies most approaches tomuseums originating in the field of the social sciences. However, the objects andnarratives that are inside a museum are not just arbitrary creations of socialengineers. Museums do contain elements of past events and it is possible tounderstand museum practices better by considering two different sorts ofphenomena: the recall of previously experienced events and the reverence forinanimate things.

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II. The museum as a source of reminiscence

Therefore Proust, summing up, says that the past is “somewhere beyond thereach of the intellect, and unmistakably present in some material object (or in thesensation which such an object arouses in us), though we have no idea which oneit is. As for that object, it depends entirely on chance whether we come upon itbefore we die or whether we never encounter it.” (Benjamin 1968a)

From Halbwachs to Nora, memory has been described as a social construction(Halbwachs 1925; Nora 1984). These authors do not consider social memory assomething made of individual attributes, but rather as the result of shared valuesand structures built in the present. The notions of social frameworks of memoryand sites of memory are very close to the conceptions of invented traditions.Frederic Bartlett practically founded the social-constructivist approach to mem-ory (Bartlett 1932). Anthropologists, social psychologists and those concernedwith oral history have continuously worked with the reconstruction of traditionalvalues during one’s life.

Supported by investigations of the different meanings of remembering andforgetting throughout history, historians have related memory to differentcontexts. They also indicated the predominance of creativity and imaginationover the art of memory, described as rote learning, in modern societies(Carruthers 1990; Yates 1966). Insofar as people leave behind the authoritativeimposition of beliefs, values and practices, they seem to conquer the freedom toattribute new meanings, including the aesthetic one, to objects. The interestingthing is that the idea that the objects we find in a museum are removed from themeaningful contexts in which they were formerly produced is not a condition ofmodern collections. The independence from original contexts achieved by objectsis a condition inherent to any collection (Pomian 1987).

Collectors of different kinds forge specific meanings out of the objects theyselect. Noah’s Ark may be taken as the archetypal collection. Clearly, the samplesare not representative of their contexts of origin; the world of the ark has beenbroadly understood as the world of anticipation (Stewart 1984). There are manyexamples of the building of collections with the consequent erasure of the originalcontexts of their objects. One of the most intriguing is the story of a wealthyEnglish collector who became completely disturbed when he discovered thatthere was another edition of a rare book besides his own. He finally succeeded inbuying the other edition for a fortune with the sole aim of destroying it. Storieslike this show us how objects are dependent on the collector’s desires and givesupport to the idea that objects can always be a result of the collector’s desires.

Huyssen is one of the few contemporary writers to think of museums as sitesof possible resurrections. Nevertheless, since he understands that these resurrec-tions are mediated and contaminated in the eyes of the beholder, he can onlydefine our relationship to the past as the one to transitoriness and death, our ownincluded (1995:15–16). Without questioning the findings of such a wideinterdisciplinary research field, I would like to stick to the argument that althoughthe reinterpretation of the past in the present is almost always overwhelming, itdoes not completely efface the possibility that meanings inherited from the pastcan confront present interpretations of the past. The objects that are on display ina museum can still bring to the present meanings that were generated in the past.Although this seems to be a very simple and basic assertion, it involves an

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epistemological question of major proportions since from a social-constructionistperspective an action ceases to exist once it is performed, and from ahermeneutical one transmitted meanings are subjected to continuous reinterpre-tation. In short, do we have an enduring remembrance safe from the distortionsthat are created in the present?

In his writings on Baudelaire, Benjamin mentioned Freud’s description of twotypes of memory: the voluntary and the involuntary. It is possible to associatevoluntary memory with the social and reflexive reconstruction of the past thathappens in a determined moment of the present, and involuntary memory withthe reconstructions of the past that occur in ongoing practices of everyday life.Benjamin acknowledged that involuntary memory was a characteristic oftraditional societies. To Benjamin, Proust’s remembrances of past events was aproof of the end of tradition, since his experience of remembering had the marksof the contemporary situation in which the individual was already isolated. Heunderstood Proust’s experience as a form of remembering that could occur onlyin exceptional conditions. Insofar as objects can trigger remembrances, they serve,on one hand, as traces of lived experiences, and, on the other, as distant and lostexperiences. They simultaneously exemplify enjoyment and catastrophe. Buteven as a special condition, can one remember what does not exist anymore?

To some extent, the difficulty of social scientists in dealing simultaneously withcontinuity and change is not very far from Freud’s main concern with thedynamics of conscious and unconscious mental systems. Probably Freud’s mostimportant essay on the issue is The Ego and the Id, written after his work about thedeath drive, Beyond the Pleasure Principle. In these writings, it is clear that thedrives of the id – the pleasure principle and the death drive – have no means ofshowing themselves to the ego, since they are mute. Consciousness was notthought of as the reflection or emergence of unconscious drives. As it is not myintention to go deeper into Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, I will followDraaisma’s strategy, and analyze Freud’s writings on memory through themetaphor of the mystic writing-pad (Draaisma 2000; Freud 1968).

Freud described two psychic systems and used the metaphor of the mysticwriting-pad, a game that had been recently put in the market, to explain how thesystems were intertwined. According to Freud whereas one psychic apparatuswas responsible for the unlimited receptive capacity for new perceptions, thesecond had permanent, though not unalterable, memory traces of thoseperceptions. The system that records perception does not retain a permanenttrace, and vice-versa. Like the writing-pad, therefore, what is written on thecelluloid is only engraved on the wax paper underneath. One can write infinitelyon the same celluloid since there are always blank screens. Another metaphor canbe found in the computer’s mechanism. A computer not only has the dual systemof a blank screen and a back-up memory, but also allows the retrieval of back-upmemories whenever necessary. The key issue here is that despite giving certaindistinctive qualities to each of these two systems, Freud not only interrelatedthem but also conditioned their dynamic to the specific conditions of one’s life.

It is plausible to criticize the binary constitution of subjectivity and textuality inFreud’s writings with the argument that language always exerts some powerupon meaning. A similar problem is confronted by social scientists when they tryto recognize the dynamics between two systems, one based on reflexive actionsand the other on enduring structures and values underlying social practices. It is

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possible to criticize this dualism, arguing that time is inherent to the narrativediscourse, and asserting the endless interplay of past and present, subjectivityand objectivity. However, if it is true that Freud’s theory is caught between thedualism of consciousness and unconsciousness, it is also true that he avoidedequating its dynamics and possible outcomes to one-sided and abstractmechanisms. It is important to consider that there is no single formula capable ofexplaining the different mechanisms of remembering and forgetting. What I meanis that there are different ways of remembering in a museum and that althoughthe present is always filtering out the past, this may happen in a number ofpossible ways.

According to Freud, the ego depends on three masters: the internal drives, thesuper-ego and the external world. He, therefore, conditioned the intertwinementbetween the pleasure principle and the death instinct, on one hand, and the ego,id and super-ego, on the other, to specific situations. It was through case studiesthat Freud worked out the multiple possibilities of action of these forces upon theego. He showed, for instance, that only in very precise situations, traumatic ones,could impressions bypass reflexive understanding and constitute one’s uncon-scious material. The latter, under specific conditions, could find its way back intoconsciousness, still away from reflexive understanding. Given the complexities oflife, authors have attempted to preserve the links between their theories and casestudies, and one of the greatest contributions left by Freud was definitely in thisfield.

During the year 1999, I conducted research about the meaning of historicalnarratives in Brazilian museums and their impact upon the public.1 We analyzedthe exhibits, display cases and objects, and interviewed both museum profession-als and the public. Most interviews corroborated the general idea that howeverrational, scientific and man-made an exhibition may be, the objects in a museumstill hold meanings that do not correspond to those intended by the organizers ofthe exhibits. This may happen because there is always a gap between productionand reception within communication. It may also be the case that old objects havethe power of triggering memories. A woman in her forties, after a visit to theMuseu Imperial, in Petropolis, reported how disturbed she became when she sawa set of old furniture in the museum. Born into a modest middle-class family shehad once gone to Petropolis to visit her mother’s great-aunt, who was a strangerto her.

When I saw that furniture I remembered a childhood trip. The whole family cameto Petropolis to visit my mother’s great-aunt. It was a big house ant it was full ofchairs, a chaise longue, divans, a couch, and tables, which were very similar to theset that is on display in the museum. I had never been in a house like that. Mostobjects had been covered with dust covers.

The sight of the furniture elicited in the woman smells and emotions experiencedbefore. She first told how dazzling the visit had been and how impressed she hadbeen by the old lady surrounded by so many objects alone in such a big mansion.As she narrated the experience, she built continuous comments upon the firstimpressions that had been narrated, and added, for example, that the furniturewas probably very expensive and that the old lady must have been rich. Shewondered about what could have happened to her. Following, the woman

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observed that the mansion had probably not been as big as it appeared in hermemories. She pondered that she did not have any further information about thelady, although she had a vague idea that she had died soon after the visit.

There were more than 100 interviews, and only in this case did an object triggermemories of the past. Yet the woman’s account is not odd, for all of us haveexperiences of this sort. Like the pastry madeleine described by Proust, objects inmuseums still make people remember lived experiences regardless of one’s willto order, classify and interpret the objects on display. This happens becausemuseums can gather old objects that belonged to people in previous periods oftheir lifetimes. The Museu Imperial is a great national museum rather than asmall museum built in reference to a small community. It is a museum thatreinvents the Brazilian Empire, and receives visitors from all over the nation. It isone of the most visited museums in Brazil mainly due to the fantasy of kingdomit creates. Still the woman’s attention was focused on an object that reminded herof her childhood, and was quite unrelated to the narratives about the Empire thatprovide the basis for the museum.

What the woman reported was not a pure past that emerged in the present, ameaningful content transmitted through time without interpretation. Yet, we mayacknowledge that there are memories of the past that can be recognized in thepresent throughout different types and variations of reasoning. It is certainly notthe complete experience of the past that finds its way into the present, but I wouldsay that there are occasions in which experiences come to our minds without ourawareness of the why and the wherefore. In the above testimony of the womanwho visited the Museu Imperial, it is clear that she completed and filed in herimmediate with ideas and knowledge achieved later: the style of the furniture, thesocial status of the old lady, the size of the house. In addition, it is clear in herstory that the furniture had a dazzling effect when she was a child. The sight ofthe furniture in the museum aroused in the woman feelings that she could notexplain at once. The first meaning attached to the furniture was different from thefurther meanings she later added to the previous experience. In this case, we finda recognition of impressions that lies away from reconstruction. The bridgebetween the two moments seemed to be the feelings involved in theremembering.

III. The museum as a source of emotion

Historically, the various modes of communication have competed with oneanother. The replacement of the older narration by information, of information bysensation, reflects the increasing atrophy of experience. (Benjamin 1968a)

The woman’s description of her memories showed us that any object inside amuseum can work as a souvenir. Being a souvenir is serving as a reference offormer experiences. As people recall different experiences on the basis of the samecandy bar, museums can be seen as basic providers of memory, since their maincharacteristic is the display of objects that have disappeared from everyday life.The phenomenon of recall generated in museums of this kind has largely beenignored. Yet, the same industrial artefact may remind people of different pastexperiences, from a case of marital infidelity to a birthday party. Undoubtedly thisis an experience that is contiguous with the end of the continuous amalgamation

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between private and collective memory. According to Benjamin, Proust’s workrepresented an effort to restore the figure of the storyteller among the presentgenerations; that is to say, to create artificially the conditions of experiencing timein its fulness. He was not talking about literary writing in general, but aboutProust’s writings (Benjamin 1968a). The argument that follows is that there aremuseums that have attempted to create artificially the conditions of oldstorytelling, and some of them have succeeded in doing that.

As part of the educational system, museums certainly constrain emotions, habitsand customs. Like any other public institution, they impose rules and norms. Butmuseums are not just places where emotions have been controlled: they havebecome institutions specialized in promoting certain types of emotion. An objectmay arouse in us some sort of emotion, and it is this emotion that makes usremember past experiences. Nevertheless, whereas the great national museumswill rarely exhibit an object based on someone’s life story, more and more museumsnot only create collections out of people’s lives and histories, but also are engagedin a number of activities involving people’s everyday lives. The material culturegathered by different museums varies and holds different meanings. There aremuseums that are concerned with the community’s response to the objects thathave been selected. The curatorial task involves the gathering of objects abouteveryday life, songs, taped recordings and oral interviews. The material culturethat triggers one’s memory includes photographs, videos, newspapers, voices fromradio and television, and everyday sounds of the past.

Thus, there are museums in which the bridge between past and present is madeup of the emotions triggered by the sight of a significant object. Museumprofessionals have used objects that were part of everyday life as a way ofstimulating visitors’ deepest emotions and processes of remembering. In somemuseums, professionals are interested in providing their visitors with theexperience of remembering in order to boost their self-esteem, and theirconfidence and encouraging new forms of solidarity. Curators use their expertiseto find relevant objects, to pre-test them and to evaluate their efficiency withpeople from different ethnicities, genders, age brackets and social classes. Theyare able to collect objects related to the range of one’s life experience, and they usea variety of objects that have the power of prompting one’s memories. They arevery much conscious that these meaningful objects vary according to one’s age,profession, gender, ethnicity and hometown (Kavanagh 2000).

In these examples, people were transported from the present to an earlier timethrough sight, smell, perception of their own bodies, and the touching of certainobjects. As in Proust’s writings, the site where these emotions could be evokedhas been artificially produced. Benjamin correctly observed that in everyday lifewe are not exposed to the same objects due to the speed of modern life. Museums,therefore, represent today this artificial setting wherein people can find objects oftheir past and have images of past events triggered by them. When a visitor looksat a significant object of the past, she or he is usually taken by surprise, andcannot predict or control the experience she or he is going through. It is like beingin a movie theater. Here Benjamin’s writings are insightful once more. Hecompared cameramen to surgeons, in that they penetrated deeply into the otherwithout leaving any space a safe having any control over their composition(1968:233). However, emotions and intuitions can also be suited to the purposesof museum professionals.

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Museum professionals have learned to deal with what comes after information;that is, with emotions and intuitions. They have perceived that they have to dealnot only with dead objects of the past, but also with feelings. For many decades,the Museu Imperial developed an educational program based on emotions.Educators created special plays in which children could be involved. The mainobjective was to recreate scenes of the past with the participation of the visitor.The past that was created was obviously a new construction, and the links thatwere forged were not between past and present, but between the past that wascreated anew and the audience. Williamsburg is the paradigmatic example ofthese practices. US museums make ample use of emotions to attract visitors.Museum professionals are aware that those who have developed emotional linkswith the museum will become frequent visitors. The theater of memory issuccessful if it is capable of arousing one’s feelings. In the case of the MuseuImperial, for instance, feelings were used to make the audience more sensitive toa narrative of the Brazilian Empire that simply excluded the brutalities that werecommitted against black slaves. But this does not have to be the only wayemotions are used.

Curators have been much more aware of the political consequences of the useof emotions in their practices and they have used them in different perspectives.The case of the Jewish Museum, in Berlin, is a recent example. Museum visitorsclassify the experience as simultaneously threatening and fascinating. To some ofthem, the museum visit was a very special unforgettable experience. As a matterof fact, visitors reported the same harrowing feelings even when the visitoccurred at the time the museum did not yet have any object on display. Thepositive appraisal does not depend on the authentic objects and narratives thatwere on display. It is rather due to the feeling of insecurity caused by tipped walls,stairs that lead to nowhere, and aisles built like labyrinths, that the proposal elicitssuch an emotional response from visitors. Here the curators provide anunderstanding of what happened in the past by artificially causing a feeling ofinsecurity in the present. The feelings of vulnerability and insecurity make onewonder about what happened in the past. In this way, the museum expresses astrong criticism of the Holocaust and encourages feelings of solidarity for thosewho are sympathetic with the Jewish cause.

Museums, like films and television shows, are part of the complex exhibitingprocesses that involve representation, and that cannot be reduced to eitherreflections of reality or politics of social control. A case in point is the recentJewish Museum’s Holocaust Exhibit, in New York. Among the items in the exhibitwere sculptures of such figures as Joseph Mengele and images of a concentrationcamp on the cover of a Lego building set. Rather than showing tragic images ofvictims, they showed the world of the perpetrators. They aroused in the audiencenot compassion and understanding, but anger. The exhibition raised protests andignited outrage among those who could not accept the reasons why a Jewishgroup should cause pain to people who had already suffered so much. Curatorsassembled the artwork of a younger generation of artists, who intended to raisequestions about the nature of the torturer’s mind or to denounce the glamoriza-tion of evil. How to understand the appalling forces that produced the Holocaust?(Kleeblatt 2001). The young artists used imagery from the Nazi era to explore theconstructed nature of evil. How can we understand evil if we are trained tocontinuously stigmatize it as the other? Only a younger generation could have the

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necessary distance to see the ambiguity of the human condition under theHolocaust and raise such questions, since those who suffered such a traumaticsituation do not have access to this past. As the exhibits bring together more thanone generation, knowledge and despair bridge the gap between the Nazi era andthe present. There is here complete awareness that the process of representationof the past involves the construction of the past by artists, exhibits andnarratives.

Museums, therefore, do trigger emotions that are beyond the reach of theintellect. By doing this, they may provide mere entertainment or boost confidenceand integrity among groups of people. Neither the process of remembering, northe emotions raised by them, are reflexive in themselves. Narratives about thepast, no matter how critical and perfect they may be, do not replace memory, andit is memory that brings self-confidence to people. But museums have usedremembrance and emotion in such a way that both have become objects ofrational and intentional behaviors. Even when practices of remembering areconsidered in their “Proustian” sense, they do not represent a guarantee againstthe varying narratives that are associated with them. Museums can easily be seenas machines of recollection specially created to fulfil distinctive and political aimsin the present. Yet museum professionals do not always have the power toassociate the narratives they want with processes of remembering. As we will see,exhibits can be strongly rejected, completely ignored or, what is more surprising,unexpectedly revered. However modern, skilful and critical museum profession-als may be, their power is clearly undermined by the power of mysticalobjects.

IV. The museum as a place of wonders

Even if our own approach to things is conditioned necessarily by the view thatthings have no meanings apart from those that human transactions, attributions,and motivations endow them with, the anthropological problem is that thisformal truth does not illuminate the concrete, historical circulation of things.(Appadurai 1986)

The Aerospace Gallery in the Science Museum in London has a whole sectiongiven over to the tiered display of engines . . . The shapes and the shine of them,the volume and variety somehow please me, and I am not concerned torationalize beyond that point. Both to a technologist and to a person who hatestechnology on display, my personal response may well be irrational, but I like itand that’s all that matters. In this instance I adapted the looking to my own ends.(Kavanagh 2000)

According to Appadurai, our approach to things is conditioned by the view thatthings have no meanings apart from those that human transactions endow themwith. From Simmel through Mauss to Marx, things have been at the heart ofhuman transactions. We have the tendency to sociologize excessively transactionsin things (Appadurai 1986). Yet objects have a movement in time and space thatis not capable of being totally grasped in the present. Historians have turned tomaterial culture to discover the values that belonged to the past, andanthropologists, who have placed material culture in the center of their discipline,are mainly interested in using material culture to understand the nature of human

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transactions. The dispute is about whether the values attributed to an object arethe result of links of solidarity, objective calculation or the intertwinement of thesetwo dimensions. Few studies are aware of the limits of interpretation of materialculture and even fewer are concerned with explaining a mystic atmosphere in aworld in which the individual’s need for rational explanation and free choiceseems to be sovereign.

We find in museums a process of rewriting the past, in which objects are nolonger linked to the territories and the people that previously invested them withmeaning. We have seen that in the case of collections the object is autonomousfrom former contexts (Pomian 1987). This autonomy may yield freedom ofinterpretation. Yet they put on display objects that are valued because of themystery that is associated with it. The aura that involves certain kind of objectshas been discussed from different points of view (Benjamin 1968b; Greenblatt1991; Spooner 1986; Trilling 1972). It is possible to say that we value objectswithout being aware of that. We value an ancient object, though living in acompletely different context, because like myths they do embody elements thatwe recognize even if we are not capable of translating their meanings to our ownlanguage.

The “Mona Lisa” is an icon and not only Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece.Michelangelo’s “David” is another good example of how objects produced foraesthetic value may be experienced as a wonder. These works of art could beadmired for their aesthetic, historical or commercial value. But they go beyondthis. At issue is whether contemporary human transactions are able to grasp thefull range of meanings inherent in exhibitions. The “Mona Lisa” is not admiredbecause it is included by the historicist criteria established by the Louvre’scurators to classify works of art. Nor does the value of the painting derive entirelyfrom its aesthetic qualities either. The attraction that some special objects exertupon the public is due to the unique condition they have attained among otherobjects. As a work of art is considered the unique manifestation of an equallyunique artistic genius, it achieves the capacity of generating admiration, delightand respect in the audience.

I am not so much referring to art works as to all those objects that are celebratedbecause they are rare, unique or authentic. People are supposedly reflective, incontrol of their own actions and able to evaluate their consequent outcomes. Butthey still go to museums to see Egyptian mummies, large whalebones, fossils andstuffed animals, regardless of the knowledge about them they have or want toacquire. The same goes for the Parthenon sculptures housed in the BritishMuseum. Even if we consider that the aura surrounding these objects is a productof a consumer-oriented machine, it is necessary to deal with the fact that membersof society hold in awe only some objects and not others. We must inquire why weare still attracted to these objects.

We have seen that current social scientific approaches usually analyze objectsby abstracting them from their historical trajectories. They become whatever onewants in the present, and their value is the one assigned by people, as a result oftheir social interactions. Museums are said to house odd objects, detached fromemotions, remembering and mystic connotations. Yet, if the links with previouscivilizations are broken, the awareness of this distance is not, since objects outlastthe associations that have been made. It is in this sense that Benjamin defined thephenomenon of the aura – applied to historical or natural objects – as the unique

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phenomenon of distance, however close it may be (Benjamin 1968b). Toexperience the aura of an object means to cherish an object without knowingexactly why we do it. It is rather a matter of trusting that there is somethingvaluable in it than of defining its value precisely. Probably, this is the reason whyBenjamin asserts that the experience of aura of an object is never entirelyseparated from its ritual function (Benjamin 1968b). If the object has taken on therole of a fetish, this entails that values may be present even if one cannot explainwhat are the reasons for it.

The Museu Paulista, in Sao Paulo, is a good example of the gap between thenarratives that are currently produced and those that are acknowledged by visitors.The museum was created by the Sao Paulo elite in the nineteenth century with themain objective of affirming its prestige. It has since then been recognized as the sitewhere the Independence was proclaimed, no matter what curators, scientists,historians and politicians have done in the museum. By the end of the nineteenthcentury, along with the Museu Nacional, in Rio de Janeiro, and the Museu Goeldi,in the Amazonian region, the Museu Paulista had secured an enduringrespectability for the study of natural history in Brazil. In the 1920s, the museumfaced a strong crisis, divided its huge and eclectic collection among differentmuseums and concentrated on the history of Sao Paulo. In the last twenty years, theMuseum put on display objects associated with the everyday life of the city. Despitethe several changes of the narratives on display, the Museum continues to beknown as Museu do Ipiranga. It is most visited on Independence Day and itsbuilding is widely known as the Emperor’s home. The trouble in communicationpoints out to the fact that no matter how modern the narratives are, visitors stillvisit the museum according to a previous collective representation.

As we explore a museum exhibition, it must be also considered that objectshave three dimensions, what allows them a non-verbal representation of life. Weexperience objects, images, concrete and abstract words in a multidimensionalway. In all these situations we use logical reason and interpersonal under-standing, but also our bodies and the different senses. The objects we see in amuseum are forms of representation associated with linguistic information, butalso with the cognition that stems from vision, touch, and the sense of smell. Theyhave meanings that go beyond linguistic understanding. We have a tendency tosubordinate all the human senses to rational and verbal cognition, but those whowrite about memory are aware that objects and images cannot be reduced toverbal information. Objects may not have the effect of providing resonance withthe past, which for Greenblatt depend upon the awakening in the viewer of asense of the cultural and historically contingent construction of objects. But theseobjects may in turn possess the power to arouse wonder, which in the words ofthe same author, “may not be very useful in the attempt to understand anotherculture, but . . . is vitally important in the attempt to understand our own”(Greenblatt 1991:53).

V. Conclusion: Change and continuity

He (Proust) fails to take full account of the fact that even in the very moment ofits conception the work confronts its author and its audience as somethingobjective, something which makes demands in terms of its own inner structureand its own logic. (Adorno 1981)

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The main argument underlying this article questions the strong version ofthe “time–space compression” that is said to occur in late modernity, since itis understood that underlying this approach there is the assumption thatcontemporary individuals live under the circumstances of immediacy andcontingent time. The whole problem is the attempt to encompass the wholedimension of historical time in a one-sided theoretical framework. Termssuch as tradition, modernity and postmodernity suggest the existence ofdichotomized, separated and independent sets of human experiences. The one-sided understanding of the dimension of time and history within socialrelations is magnified by evolutionary perspectives, which describe theordered replacement of one age by another, as well as by theories based on thehomogenizing aspect of globalization. As these theories assert that the modernworld is detached from past traditions, they grasp neither the continuitiesbetween past and present nor the fact that social processes move according toa multitude of rhythms and differentiated encounters, both in time andspace.

We have seen that there is a core belief that tradition – in the sense of theauthoritative way of building sodalities – is gone and that past experiences are notcontingent upon people’s daily life any more. Freedom of choice is the main targetto be pursued. Against the grain, I have argued that remembering is present in amuseum visit. This is to say that there are objects that impose their meaningsupon the observer’s look even as these objects are subjected to rational criticism.In the processes of remembering we are not always in control of what may beremembered.

It is never enough to emphasize that when we talk about museums we talkabout very different types of museums, each of them entailing different meaningsand outcomes for an also very differentiated group of people. The mostprestigious museums are still the art museums, closely followed by nationalhistory, ethnographic and science museums. Museums, therefore, deal with thebuilding of images of different others in space and in time. Museums and heritagecenters have been analyzed for their ability to build images of national, primitiveand ethnic groups and establish a veiled control over the underplayed “other”. Inthe nineteenth and twentieth centuries, museums – along with history textbooks,unifying myths, language and the print – have been described as powerful socialelements in the building of national symbols. In the last three decades a multitudeof new museums has developed the role of constituting a much more plural andfragmented process of identity formation.

Insofar as the awareness of the political consequences of signifying practicesincreases, museums become a privileged object of study. A large number ofscholars have described museums as new sites for symbolic dispute, sincesymbolic resources have become objects of political struggle around the world.These changes are said to be part of a global process, in which new informationand communication technology has developed a crucial role in shrinking thedistance between different cultural settings and separating generations from eachother. Based on the ways objects are seen and perceived in the museums, Iattempted to show that as we observe a museum exhibit, it is possible to observenot only discontinuities but also continuities. This perspective requires a criticismof the idea of radical boundaries suggested by the periodization “tradition,modernity, postmodernity” as well as the existence of nothing but discontinuities

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throughout history. It also acknowledges the permanence of voices of authorityemanating from realms transcending the self in late modernity (Heelas et al.1996).

Therefore, the acceptance of remembering and mysticism is related to thecontinuity of traditional values, which entails, first, the assumption thatinstitutions like museums, schools, churches, and also families, still imposemeanings that are beyond our control. We have seen that the historical circuitlived by objects is larger than one’s life, and that some of their values can attractattention though not be completely understood. The role of objects upon one’s lifeis never fully explained by approaches focused on those interactions, and regimesof value are not always responsible for the selection and exhibition of the objects.Modernity did not completely eliminate the enchanted world, and traditionalvalues are still transmitted between different generations.

Some authors strongly rely on continuities throughout time. As we haveseen, Shils for instance defends the idea that “the opportunities to concentratethe mind under fortifying and disciplining circumstances keep the movementof tradition within the broad limits which define innovations as refinementsand clarifications of the tradition and not as departures from it” (Shils 1981).Undoubtedly, the emphasis on continuities, whether it refers to the elementsthemselves or the relations between them, is important. Shils’ fault is the sameas that of his critics: the generalization of what is particular. The commitmentto traditional values is just one more aspect of modernity. What must beunderstood is that, along with the maintenance of collective representations,reflexive thinking is possible. Although reflexivity is never completelydetached from former patterned behaviors, we must think beyond the synthe-sis of these two terms; different ways of thinking and behaving coexist withone another. The two opposite ways of thinking of tradition and modernityare not completely mistaken, nor is the attempt to build a reconciliation ofthem. The conflict, however, points up to different moments in the life of theobject. Adorno pointed out that neither Valery nor Proust were completelymistaken as they became aware of either the intrinsic nature of the work ofart, or, inversely, the embedding of the work in culture (Adorno 1981). Thisdouble explanation configures not incongruence but the complexity of socialphenomena.

To conclude, we may acknowledge that we are more apt to defy establishedinterpretations, since written texts in an increasingly interconnected world give usmore flexibility in matters of choice. We moderns have learned to use evenemotions as objects of our political aims. At stake is the fact that there are limitsin the freedom of choice and that one of them is related to the exchangeabilitybetween past and present. Although there are elements of the past that areirretrievably lost, there are traces of the past that lie at the intersections betweenpast and present and that must be considered.

Note

1. I would like to thank the research assistants Denise de Almeida Rodrigues, Caty Ane deSouza, Fabio Ponso, and Gabrielle Correa Braga, for their careful work, and theUniversidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and CNPq for their financialsupport.

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Myrian Sepulveda dos Santos is Associate Professor of Sociology at the StateUniversity of Rio de Janeiro. She took her PhD in Sociology at New School forSocial Research. Her research interests relate to sociological and cultural theory,collective memory, museum exhibits, popular culture and carnival festivities. Sheis currently researching changing forms of memory in cultural aspects of modernlife.

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y B

rook

Uni

vers

ity]

at 1

1:27

16

Oct

ober

201

4