Findlen, Paula

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192museum and society,  Jul. 2008. 6(2) 192-195  © 2008, Paula Findlen, Julia Adams. ISSN 1479-8360Book ReviewsKen Arnold,  Cabinets for the Curious:  Looking Back at Early English Museums,Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, hardback  £47.50, pp. xiii + 297.Early modern England occupies a singularly important place in the history of museums.  TheAshmolean Museum, founded at Oxford in 1683, is the oldest public museum in the world stillopen today; the British Museum, which opened its doors in 1759, is a precocious and influentialexample of the idea of the museum as a repository of a nation’s treasures.  As Ken Arnold detailsin his study of early modern English collecting practices, both were products of new attitudestowards things which emerged after the disquieting events of the English Civil War.  Prior to the1660s England made relatively few contributions to the great pursuit of collecting that flourishedin the continental cities and courts of sixteenth-century Europe.  To the extent that it participated,it did so largely in imitation of the European princes and patricians who created the first cabinetsof curiosities.  In the next century, however, leading English scholars and virtuosi came toenvision museums as ‘thoroughly empirical institutions … used to establish publicly accessibleknowledge’ (p. 30).  They created something different and more uniquely their own.  Thisendeavor is the subject of Ken Arnold’s book.Cabinets for the Curious reflects on the goals and practices of contemporary Britishmuseums by placing them in the mirror of the seventeenth century:  the moment in which themuseum first emerged as an important scientific and cultural institution in England.  Arnold’sexplicit purpose is not simply to reconstruct this earlier history, which he does well, but to invokethis history as part of shared conversation between curators and historians (he himself is both)about the function of the museum in today’s society.  By returning to the moment in which themuseum first emerged as a novel institution and as a specific venue in which to present orexperiment with new approaches to knowledge, Arnold invites us to consider how recapturingthis initial excitement about the uses of collections might inspire fresh thinking today about themuseum’s future.To some degree, Cabinets for the Curious revisits the terrain explored by scholars suchas Robert Gunther, Prudence Leith-Ross, Stephen Bann, Michael Hunter, Marjorie Caygill,Marjorie Swann, and especially Arthur MacGregor.  They have introduced to collectors such asJohn Tradescant, Elder and Younger, John Bargrave, Elias Ashmole, John Woodward, andHans Sloane, and to collective projects such as the Royal Society repository.  Rather thanfocusing on a single collector or museum, Arnold provides us with a thematic overview of theemergence of scientific, antiquarian, and medical collecting in seventeenth-century England.He identifies three important practices that shaped collecting in this period, namely, thenarrative, functional, and taxonomic significance of objects as they were presented in museums.Taken together, they help us to understand how the meaning of things was articulate in this initialphase of the museum as an English institution.In the first section of the book, Arnold discusses how Robert Plot, first keeper of theAshmolean and member of the short-lived Oxford Philosophical Society, viewed collecting as‘a material analysis of the English nation’ (p. 49).  Plot’s efforts to combine natural history andantiquarianism provide the starting point for an illuminating discussion of numismatics, thequintessentially narrative form of collecting.  Describing how coins allowed collectors toreconstruct history from the thing itself, Arnold argues for the continued importance of ‘objectbiographies (p. 98) in the modern museum.The second section of Cabinets for the Curious explores two different forms of193museum and society,  6(2)functionality.  Arnold begins by discussing the utility of exotic things within the Baconian historyof trades that interested some members of the early Royal Society.  Arnold asks us to considerhow exactly knowledge of distant lands through their things could be useful.  Highlighting thepersistent problem of studying cultures through objects removed from their original environmentand often poorly understood by those who collected them, he invites us to consider thedifficulties of understanding a variety of (by now canonical) Native American artefacts:ceremonial pipes, wampum, canoes, snowshoes, and the like.  It was not indigenous knowledgeper se that early Royal Society members such as William Petty and John Winthrop sought, buta kind of knowledge in support of a political and economic program of empire.  “Indian” things,in other words, were part and parcel of a diffuse reconstruction of the exotic as it unfolded inaccounts of British travel and colonization.By contrast, medical collections fulfilled the very specific function of demonstrating thevirtues of the new anatomy, medicinal botany, and more controversially chemical medicine.Arnold contrasts the more philosophically inclined physicians such as Woodward and Sloane,and natural philosophers such as Robert Boyle who also studied natural objects with medicinaluses, to more ‘artisanal’ collectors such as the apothecary James Petiver who demonstratedmedicines to sell them as opposed to exploring what their underlying principles might be.  Whiledemonstrating the spectrum of interests and occupations that informed the emergence ofmedical collections, he also argues that by the end of the century they more or less concurredin their desire to demystify the virtues of medicines by drawing the viewer’s attention to thenature of the object itself.  Turning from the seventeenth century to the present, Arnold invitesreaders to consider current debates in anthropology and medical museums about the oftencharged and sometimes disturbing connotations of objects and how to deploy these meaningsin educating people through things.Cabinets for the Curious concludes with a discussion of the role of classification inreflecting concepts of order.  Examining Grew’s catalogue of the Royal Society repository,Arnold finds ample evidence to support his argument that there was a direct relationshipbetween John Wilkin’s proposals for a new sort of universal language that would perfectlyexpress and order things through words, and efforts to create a well-articulated representationof all the species of nature inside the repository.  In the struggles of important naturalists suchas Woodward, Martin Lister, Edward Lhwyd, and especially John Ray, Arnold discerns thepractical limits of Wilkin’s project to capture nature’s complex relationships among species.Describing how taxonomy became the sublime expression of museum science in the eighteenthand nineteenth century, Arnold shows us how, in an earlier and more experimental moment,Lister treated shells like coins, patiently and thoroughly illustrating them while leaving to othersthe thorny issues of interpretation.  Most importantly, he insists upon the importance of Grew’s1681 catalogue as a stimulus to many of the natural historical projects of this period, leaving uswith the image of later curators who simply reconfigured all the categories by cutting up hisentries when the concerns of natural theology (as opposed to the endless and infinitely fine-grained rules of classification) no longer mattered.Cabinets for the Curious is a meditation upon the origins of the museum as a diffuse andmalleable response to the problems of knowledge, its representation and interpretation.  Arnoldconcludes his book by inviting museum professionals and their publics to restore the image ofthe museum as a space of experimentation and play to the contemporary museum.  His historyis, in part, an object lesson about the evolution of institutions that expresses a good degree ofoptimism about the museum’s ability to reinvent itself in the twenty-first century.  An interesting,challenging, and well-written book that is itself an experiment in how to write history for multipleaudiences, it is marred only by an unfortunate number of typos that Ashgate should have helpedthe author clean up.Stanford University Paula Findlen194 Book ReviewsConal McCarthy, Exhibiting Mâori: A History of Colonial Cultures of Display, Oxford/NewYork: Berg, 2007, hardback £55.00, paper £19.99, pp. xx+ 243In this thoroughly researched and richly illustrated book, Conal McCarthy traces the history ofthe display of Mâori culture in New Zealand museums from the mid-nineteenth century to theend of the twentieth century.  Taking a chronological approach, McCarthy’s analysis begins byconsidering how Mâori were represented at the colonial exhibitions and world fairs of the latenineteenth and early twentieth century, and examines the frequent use of Mâori motifs andartefacts to symbolize New Zealand during events like Royal tours.  The main focus of the book,however, tracks the changing politics of display at the Colonial Museum as it transforms throughtime into the Dominion Museum, the National Museum, the Museum of New Zealand Te PapaTongarewa and, more commonly today, Te Papa.Drawing on a wealth of archival photographs, McCarthy provides a visual record of theexhibiting of particular objects.  Images of the Colonial Museum in 1870, for example, revealhow Mâori material was initially displayed as part of the natural history collections, whilstphotographs from the first decade of the twentieth century reflect contemporary views, thatMâori objects should be salvaged and displayed as a memorial to a dying race. An image of themain hall of the Dominion Museum from 1910 shows it to be literally crammed with objects:carvings hang from the ceiling and are placed wherever there is space on the floor, which musthave made for a challenging visitor experience.   In considering how displays of Mâori materialhave changed over time, McCarthy illustrates the conceptual transformation of objects fromcuriosities, to ethnographic specimens, to art, to the present day where objects are presentedwithin the Mâori framework of taonga (highly-prized ancestral treasures).  In this way, the bookmakes an important contribution to on-going museological debates concerning the presentationof ethnographic material as either art or artefact.  Like other recent New Zealand-focused works,such as Amiria Henare’s Museums, Anthropology and Imperial Exchange (2005) and PaulTapsell’s Pukaki: A Comet Returns (2000), McCarthy reminds us that indigenous categories orways of seeing often challenge and complicate such debates.  For Mâori, whether an object ispresented as art or artefact is often a secondary consideration.  As McCarthy illustrates, at theMuseum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in the mid-1990s, Mâori curators initiated areorganization of the displays according to objects’ tribal affiliation and genealogical histories,rather than by their function or aesthetic qualities.McCarthy’s detailed archival research also provides new perspectives on the nowlegendary Te Maori exhibition.  This major exhibition which toured the United States to greatacclaim between 1984 and 1986, before returning to tour New Zealand, has been credited withputting Mâori art on the world map as well as with transforming Pakeha (New Zealanders ofEuropean descent) understandings and appreciation of Mâori culture.  In the twenty years thathave followed, Te Maori has frequently been written about and analyzed by curators,anthropologists, art historians and museum studies scholars from around the world.  Here,McCarthy’s access to the archives reveals the fascinating behind-the-scenes dynamics at theNational Museum in Wellington, as they prepared to install Te Maori: Te hokinga mai (the return)in 1986.  The museum was under immense pressure to ensure the exhibition lived up to itssuccess in the United States and a great deal of effort went into recreating the art gallery styleof display which the American museums had selected.  A quote from the Museum’s AnnualReport for 1987 encapsulates the significance of Te Maori: Te hokinga mai: ‘The impact on theinstitution was … unprecedented.  The Museum had adopted a “truly bicultural approach todisplay” and must never be allowed to “return to its monocultural ways again”’ (p.150).  WhilstTe Maori was, without doubt, a pivotal moment in the relationship between Mâori and museums,this book also eloquently demonstrates the very significant level of Mâori involvement withmuseums prior to the 1980s.  In contrast to arguments that posit museums as instruments ofcolonial power, McCarthy’s narrative aims to foreground Maori agency, revealing theirlongstanding engagement with and resistance to museum displays of their culture.Despite its geographic and cultural specificity, this book will have broad appeal.Sufficient background into the particularities of the cultural politics of New Zealand is providedto make it a valuable resource for anyone interested in museum studies or anthropology.195museum and society,  6(2)Indeed, the images alone make it a fascinating case study of the changing dynamics in therelationship between museums and indigenous groups.  That this book developed fromMcCarthy’s PhD thesis has been noted by several reviewers; yet the thesis-style survey ofrelevant literature included in the early chapters means that those outside a museum audiencecan quickly get up to speed on the debates that shape the remainder of the narrative.  It is ashame that McCarthy does not accord more space to his own voice or opinions.  At times, herisks a certain passivity in his approach, explaining rather than critically evaluating the materialhe foregrounds.  That said, more often than not McCarthy’s analysis does more than just trackthe history of the display of Mâori culture in New Zealand.  In illuminating and insightful waysExhibiting Maori also maps out a way of discovering the transformative dynamics which haveshaped the relationship between Mâori and Pakeha.The British Museum &  Julie AdamsMuseum of Archaeology and Anthropology,University of Cambridge

Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums

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Ken Arnold, Cabinets for the Curious: Looking Back at Early English Museums

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