This essay is an edited and abbreviated version of Bennett, Tony. “Mutable, immutable mobiles: museum things” in B. Scherer, O. von Schubert, and S. Aue (eds) Wörterbuch der Gegenwart, Berlin: Mattes and Seitz, 2019.

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hings are no longer what they used to be. Post-human studies; thing theory; new materialisms; objected-oriented ontologies; actor-network-theory – these have all imbued things with a range of capacities that have led to their re-evaluation as autonomous actors in the processes through which both human and more-than-human fields of action and interaction are organised.  

What is true for things in general is equally true for museum things.  In his influential account of the distinguishing properties of museum collections, Krzysztof Pomian (1990) interpreted their contents as “semiophores”: things taken out of general circulation in being selected for inclusion in the sequestered collections of museums on the basis of their special ability to mediate the relations between visible and invisible worlds, to render present and visible that which is absent and invisible: the sacred, the past, the laws of nature.

In the program he proposes for museums as sites for Dingpolitik, by contrast, Bruno Latour (2005) eschews their conception as places where things are taken out of circulation because of any special properties they might have prior to their collection.  Rather, drawing on Heidegger’s concept of the thing as the site of a gathering, his concern is with the properties that things acquire in being gathered together in museums, properties which transform them from, in the famous terms of his earlier formulations, “matters of fact” into “matters of concern” (Latour, 2004).  Reviving the archaic meaning of “thing” as referring to an assembly, Latour distinguishes its status from that of “an object thrown out of the political sphere and standing there objectively and independently,”  contending that “the Ding or Thing … meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them” (Latour, 2005: 23).  By extension, the museum, as an assembly of things, operates as a site for materially mediated controversies – for the posing and provisional settling of matters of concern – rather than mediating the relations between visible and invisible realities.

My reference to “immutable mobiles,” however, relates to Latour’s contention, in Science in Action, that museums have also operated as parts of networks through which distant events, places and people have been rendered mobile so that they can transported, but in a stable form resistant to deterioration or decay, and one which makes them combinable so that they can be brought into variable relations with other similarly constituted things (Latour, 1987: 223).  With nineteenth and early-twentieth century anthropological and natural history fieldwork practices in mind, Latour included the museums from which such fieldwork missions went forth and to which they returned as centres of calculation which – through the accumulation of things that they brought together from diverse locations – were able to act on and to dominate the distant events, places and people from whence those things came.

Two somewhat different conceptions of the museum thing, then: key players in the processes of Dingpolitik through which disagreements among fractured and dissenting publics are worked through; and as parts of centres of calculation through which distant places, events and peoples are acted on and dominated without their having had any say in the processes of collecting and ordering through which their subordination is thus effected.  Both conceptions are useful in illuminating different aspects of museum histories. If the conception of museums as sites for Dingpolitik serves well as a summary of the ways in which museums now seek to mediate/provoke/settle controversies among their divided publics, their conception as centres of calculation captures key aspects of their contribution to the development of forms of colonial administration that have been brought to bear on peoples who have not been counted among their publics.

Yet there are other aspects of museum histories which require that we add a third dimension to our understanding of museum things. This brings me to the first part of my title: the “mutability” of “immutable mobiles.” What I have in mind here is an amplification of Latour’s conception of immutable mobiles as things which, in being moved from one setting to another, retain their material properties but which also, when combined with other things in different architectural, institutional, and discursive settings, prove to be quite mutable with regard to the kinds of work they perform.

To put the point a little differently, things which reman physically identical with themselves often function as different museum things in being placed in different museum settings shaped by different knowledges. And by different purposes. While undoubtedly useful, Latour’s concept of Dingpolitik needs to be complemented by the perspective of what might be called “Dingpädagogik ”: the operationalization of things so that they might serve as instruments of public pedagogies rather than purely as sites for the mediation of differences between contesting publics.  For museums are now more typically places where things have both pedagogic and political registers in operating simultaneously as parts of apparatuses of public instruction and as sites for mediating the relations between conflicting knowledges and publics.

The epistemic negotiations that now inform the relations between Indigenous knowledges and museums offer a good example of such complex and multivalent “thingness”.  Indigenous materials have proved to be highly mutable immutable mobiles in the complex histories that have shaped their itineraries in being, first, taken away from their originating contexts to be gathered together in colonial centres of collection. They are also now often embarked on new journeys as a result of Indigenous interrogations of the archives of such centres of collection, interrogations which seek to identify the itineraries and provenances of the materials those centres of collection contain and, ideally, to plot the routes through which they might be taken back to the communities they came from.  

The cloak made of woven cedar bark that the Royal Prussian Art Chamber purchased when Captain James Cook’s collections were auctioned in 1819, and that was later transferred to Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, provides a point of entry into these issues. The cloak was acquired by Cook from Vancouver Island in 1788. Made from red cedar, it was worn by both men and women of the Nootka people. When working under Adolf Bastian at the Ethnological Museum in the 1880s Franz Boas catalogued its British Columbia and Alaskan collections. It is, then, likely that he was familiar with the cloak which, in its generic form, he converted into a thing of a different kind when, during his period at the American Museum of Natural History, he included similar cloaks in his life-group display of North West Coast Indians. Here, the cloaks were integrated into a depiction of a territorially grounded way of life organised around the processes of working red cedar into clothing.  Boas developed such life group displays as an alternative to the earlier typological method in which artefacts tools, weapons, and artworks were disconnected from their originating social contexts to be arranged as parts of universal evolutionary sequences leading from the simple to the complex.  In place of such developmental arrangements Boas’s displays sought to evoke the distinctive qualities of ways of life that were specific to particular culture areas and which, rather than being ranked hierarchically, were to be understood on their own terms.

The concept of cultural areas itself proved to be highly mobile, moving through international anthropology and museum networks as part of a set of procedures for collecting and ordering materials from Indigenous peoples that provided an alternative to evolutionary exhibition practices. It travelled to Australia in the 1930s through research collaborations between Clark Wissler – Boas’s successor at the American Museum of Natural History, and ardent champion of the culture area concept – and Norman Tindale from the Museum of South Australia.  Tindale’s various maps, from 1940 through to the 1970s, showing the distribution of Aboriginal tribes in Australia provided a template for subsequent maps plotting the regional distribution of Aboriginal languages and cultures. This is true of the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies 1996 Map of Indigenous Australia which connects different Aboriginal groups, identified in terms of language, ceremonies, songs and dances, to different Countries. This map now features in many museums across Australia in conjunction with exhibitions in which the anthropological concept of culture areas and Indigenous conceptions of the relations between Country and culture are caught up in complex epistemological negotiations with one another.  

The National Museum of Australia’s 2015/2016 Encounters exhibition is a recent example of both the frictions and fusions produced by such negotiations. Consisting of Australian Indigenous items that the British Museum had acquired via a range of colonial mechanisms of collection, Encounters presented these items as at last re-acquiring their true meanings in being temporarily returned to the territorially defined communities – the Countries – from which they had originally been taken. Coordinated by anthropologists and Indigenous curators, the distinctive signature of the exhibition came from the members of the Indigenous communities consulted in the process of its development. Its major theme was that of restoring the objects to their true “thingness” via the testimony of members of the Countries to which they were temporarily reconnected.  

The most symbolically charged object in this exhibition was the Gweagal Shield allegedly collected by Captain Cook during his “first encounter” with the Gweagal people of Botany Bay in 1770.  This is truly a thing of Dingpolitik in functioning as a symbol of both past and, in view of the as-yet unsuccessful repatriation campaign its exhibition gave rise to, continuing forms of colonial dispossession. This was, however, only one of a number of shields which were typically exhibited in the context of the Indigenous Countries to which they were symbolically returned and from which they were presented as reacquiring the meanings they had lost on being taken away while also dragging in their tow new meanings acquired through their subsequent itineraries.

Take the shield from the Jerrinja and Wandi Wandian country in New South Wales (Figure 1).  Sent to London by a prominent local resident it was exhibited at the 1862 International Exhibition, most likely as a generic example of Aboriginal weaponry, before arriving at the British Museum.  The meanings that Encounters identified for this shield were in some registers specific to Country: Uncle Sonny Simms,  a Wandi Wandian Elder, welcomed its exhibition as “a very important part of our lifestyle” with multiple uses: for protection in warfare, to dig for food, and for carrying “fire, like small ash, for your next port of call,” while also reclaiming a locally specific aesthetic register for it by referring its decoration to the tradition of hand stencilling in a nearby cave  (“those hand stencils there, they’re a standout … it’s like looking at the stars” [National Museum of Australia, 2015: 202]).  Noel Wellington of the Jerrinja people, while mourning the act of dispossession and the irretrievable loss of its history that this entailed, simultaneously stressed its pedagogic value: “… what’s it doing in a white man’s hands?  What sort of consultation was there? …They’ve had the shields how long now? ….  150 years down the track and now, all of a sudden, they’ve popped out and they want to know what I think about it. … But I suppose that’s water under the bridge.  If they are having them on display and if it changes minds about our culture and our ways, it can only be a good thing” (National Museum of Australia, 2015: 202).

Things, then, that had been taken far away and which, on coming half-way back – to the National Museum of Australia and not to the communities themselves – and only temporarily, on loan from rather being returned by the British Museum, did not simply become again what they once were (how could they?).  Rather, as things installed in relations of both Dingpolitik and Dingpädagogik, they carried traces of contested histories of dispossession while also operating in the relations between Indigenous concepts of Country and anthropological conceptions of culture areas as locations for distinct ways of life (“our lifestyles” for Uncle Sonny Simms) in ways that lent a new dimension and purpose to the museum’s public educative function.

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References

Latour, B (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers through Society. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Latour, B (2004) Why has critique run out of steam?  From matters of fact to matters of concern. In Brown. B (ed) Things, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.151-173.

Latour, B (2005) From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or how to make things public. In Latour. B. and Weibel. P (eds) Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, pp.14-43.

National Museum of Australia (2015) Encounters: Revealing Stories of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Objects from the British Museum, Canberra: National Museum of Australia Press.

Pomian, K (1990) Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Tony Bennett is an Emeritus Professor in the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University and an Honorary Professor in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and of the UK Academy of Social Sciences.