"Museums
exist in order to acquire, safeguard, conserve, and display objects, artifacts,
and works of arts of various kinds.” Peter Vergo 1993
What are museums?
Museums are
expressive (ideological) institutions rather than interpretive (scientific)
ones. Even those who reject the possibility of non-ideological knowledge would recognize, however, that the expressiveness of a
'scientific' institution is at least in part a function of its interpretive practice
or of its claim to such practice: a relationship that is also contentious
throughout the academic world including biological and social and cultural anthropology.[1]
Two significant
critiques of museums have recently been advanced. Both take a constructionist
view of representation. The first uses the insights from semiotics and the
manner in which language constructs and
conveys meaning to analyze the diversity of ways in which exhibition create representations of other cultures.[2]
The second
critique forefronts questions of discourse and power to interrogate the
historical nature of museums and collecting. It argues that there is a link
between the rise of ethnographic museums and the expansion of western nations.
by exploring the link between knowledge of other cultures and the imperial
nations, this critique considers representation in the light of the politics of
exhibiting. But we must also ask: is
this definition essential or historical? Does its interpretation vary over
time? On one hand the definition of museums signified ‘a mythological setting
inhabited by the nine goddesses of poetry, music and the liberal arts’, namely
places where the muses dwell’(Findlen,, 1989) referred to the library at
Alexandria, to a public site devoted to
scholarship and research. So this early classical etymology allows for the
museum’s potential for expansiveness. Museums could therefore reconcile
curiosity and scholarship, private and public domains, the whimsical and the
ordered, (1989). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an alternative and
varied terminology was accorded to contemporary” museums” [3]
Museums in Kosovo: A First Post-War
Assessment
Like Bosnia,
Croatia and other republics and regions of the former Yugoslavia, Kosovo had
its own general museum, called the Kosovo Museum (Muzeu i Kosoves) the museum
is housed in a 19th-century building in the old city center of Prishtina that
until 1912 had served as the seat of the Ottoman provincial government. Founded
in 1949, the Kosovo Museum has departments of archaeology, ethnography, and
natural science, to which a department for the study of the National Liberation
Struggle was added in 1959. It has sponsored archaeological excavations and
other scientific work; since 1956 it has published an annual journal called_”Buletin
i Muzeut i Kosoves”(Kosovo;s museum bulletin) [4]
A museum that was destroyed in the recent war
was the Memorial Museum of the League of Prizren (Muzeu Memorial i Lidhjes së
Prizrenit), burned down by Serbian police using shoulder-launched incendiary
projectiles on 28 March 1999.
In addition to the Kosovo Museum, there are
also smaller local museums in Peja, Mitrovica, Gjakova and Prizren. In their
form of organization and content, most of these follow the same general pattern
as local museums in other parts of the former Yugoslavia. Established after the
second world war as museums of the National Liberation Struggle, they
subsequently acquired bodies of other materials, including archaeological artifacts
collected from the vicinity, as well as ethnographic and folklore items and
natural science collections.
The local and regional museums in Kosovo are:
·
The Municipal Museum in Mitrovica housed in the
restored 18th-century hamam (Turkish baths) of Zenel Bey, this museum has the
second-largest archaeological
collection after the Kosovo Museum, as well as more modest ethnographic and natural history sections and the requisite World War II memorabilia.
collection after the Kosovo Museum, as well as more modest ethnographic and natural history sections and the requisite World War II memorabilia.
·
The Regional Museum in Gjakova housed in a
restored 19th-century Ottoman mansion (Konak of Niyazi Halil Ismail Bey), it is
a general museum with a small ethnographic and archaeological collection and
mementos of World War II.
·
The Regional Archaeological Museum in Prizren.
Also housed in an
old Ottoman building, it has a collection of artefacts from archaeological excavations at Romaja and other sites in the Prizren area.
old Ottoman building, it has a collection of artefacts from archaeological excavations at Romaja and other sites in the Prizren area.
·
The Memorial Museum in Peja. is now in the
19th-century Konak of Mehmed Tahir Bey,
a restored Ottoman mansion that was formerly used as the municipal public
library.
Other, more
specialized museums are:
·
The Memorial Museum of the League of Prizren --
the Ottoman-era building
where the League held its meetings in 1878, with documents and
artifacts connected with the League and with leading figures of
the 19th-century Albanian national movement.
where the League held its meetings in 1878, with documents and
artifacts connected with the League and with leading figures of
the 19th-century Albanian national movement.
·
The Museum of Oriental Manuscripts in Prizren --
housed in the
16th-century Sinan Pasha mosque and displaying treasures of
Prizren's Gazi Mehmed Pasha Library (founded before 1588)
and other mosque libraries.
16th-century Sinan Pasha mosque and displaying treasures of
Prizren's Gazi Mehmed Pasha Library (founded before 1588)
and other mosque libraries.
·
The Minerals and Crystals Collection of the
Trepca Mines at Stari Trg.
·
The Museum of Medieval Mining at Kishnica. [5]
Exhibitions
Exhibitions
should not be evaluated in terms of fidelity or sensitivity to their themes but
in terms of their effects on contemporary contests around identity and power.
Rephrased to allow evaluation in both respects, this bland view is
unexceptionable yet it does little to help curators strike an appropriate
balance or critics to judge fairly what they have done. How accurately a
display represents its chosen subject is almost always a matter for experts,
while how well it is done with regard to audience response - beyond possibly
uncritical approval on one hand and hostility on the other - is usually a
subjective matter.
Exhibitions should reinterpret the
otherwise anonymous creators or bearers of cultures as individuals and active
social subjects, and should give an impression of the dynamics of the cultures
represented.
However, limitations of available material and (especially) of
documentation mean it is often difficult to support a new interpretation of
cultural phenomena with collections acquired by ethnographers or others working
within an earlier paradigm. Materials unsuitable for one purpose may still,
however, be useful for another; there are many ways, for example, to convey
sensitively and strikingly the complexity and achievements of other societies,
or the interdependence of exhibited and exhibiting cultures, especially in
relation to the latter's museum subculture. [6]
Photography and Memorialization
Since the
emergence of our species, human beings have engaged in ritual action and
aesthetic undertakings to honor those who have died. For all the dramatic
cross cultural variation in mortuary and memorial practices, human societies
the world over share an intense preoccupation with the management of relations
between the living and the dead, and in various ways organize and reproduce
social collectivities (from families to nation-states) through memorial undertakings.
Mortuary and memorial practices are invariably central to the constitution of
relations of power and authority; in democratic and advanced industrial
societies, the precise forms and terms under which the dead--especially victims
of war, genocide, terrorism or atrocities—are memorialized are subject to
intense political contestation. [7]
In his classic 1936 essay, "The Work of Art
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Walter Benjamin suggests that in
some instances, the older cult value of the image is retained in photographs of
the dead. Memorial practices the world over have deployed photographic images
and photographic practices in a great variety of ways.
One of the latest exhibitions of photography and
memoralization in Kosovo occurred in post war period, when the people who lost
their family members exposed the photographs of the missing persons [8]
The association
“The Mothers’ calls” (Thirrjet e Nenave) has continued to put in front of parliament
building the photos of missing persons before the start of dialogue between
Pristine-Belgrade.
Photography and Memorialization; in a sign of protest
for the missing persons during the war, hundred of photography are exhibited in
front of Kosovo parliament building in Prishtina. Photo: F. Rr
How are objects acquired?
Many of the
objects in the Museum were used in daily life; for example, the biggest single
group of objects is the collection of stone tools. Everyday objects are not
necessarily precious or valuable in monetary terms, and they would probably
have been thrown away if they had not been collected. Their value is in
demonstrating how people lived and thought in different cultures. Their
original owners were often happy to give or sell the object to an interested
collector. In the earliest years of anthropology,
words and things were treated as objects
to be collected: the Linnaean concept of material objects as natural history
specimens parallels the folklorist's notion of narrative plots as collectible, map
able, comparable things (Chapman 1985; Stith Thompson 1965). Boas, early on,
considered them to be 'pre-existing' attributes of culture (Jacknis 1985),
somehow pure because they seemed to him less influenced by the ethnographic
observer than other aspects of culture. Museums and folklore journals built up
their independent collections for 'later study'.
Yet this notion of putting words and
things in museums and archives as though they are discrete, unmediated,
objective artifacts is one that continues to be contentious. Rosaldo has been
critical of the ways some historians equate oral testimony with archival
records that can be stored for eventual use. He argues that oral history has
only one purpose - reconstitution of the past, not collection for its own sake,
that oral traditions are texts to be heard, not documents to be stored. [9]
Anthropological writing about the social life
of things still seems less self-conscious than
writing about words, possibly because words have come under
the deconstructive eye of linguistics while objects remain a relatively unanalyzed
common-sense category of western culture. Critical attention to objects,
though, is opening up parallel discussions about how we constitute material
culture (Tilley 1990). Analyses of the ways 'things' are embedded in social
relations (Appardurai 1986), or of how objects become commodities (Kopytoff
1986, Dominguez 1988) help to revise perspectives about what constitutes an
object in the first place. A notion underlying much of museum
practice, that objects in museums are frozen in time and are primarily evidence
of the past, is not universally shared (cf. Fenton 1966). In many non-western
cultures they are understood to be not inert things, but to have life histories
that do not stop when they enter museums (Kopytoff 1986; Zolbrod 1987).
Cultural destruction In Kosovo
The following is
the section of the report of our Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey dealing with
museums in Kosovo conducted in October 1999, with support from the Packard
Humanities Institute, as an initial, independent post-war assessment of the
state of architectural heritage and cultural institutions in Kosovo. The
findings of the survey are being shared with NGOs and international bodies,
such as ICOM and the
Council of Europe, with a view to promoting assistance projects for cultural heritage in Kosovo. Information collected by the survey in Kosovo concerning possible violations of international law on the protection of cultural and religious heritage is also being forwarded to the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTY. [10]
Council of Europe, with a view to promoting assistance projects for cultural heritage in Kosovo. Information collected by the survey in Kosovo concerning possible violations of international law on the protection of cultural and religious heritage is also being forwarded to the Office of the Prosecutor of the ICTY. [10]
One of the most important Archeological Kosovo figure
“Hyjnesha në fron”, has been taken back from Belgrade into the museum of Kosovo
by the head of the mission Michael Stainer, on 3 june 2002. This antique figure
was stolen by Serbian authorities during the war in Kosovo.
The Hague
tribunal indicted Slobodan Milosevic and five other senior Serbian and Yugoslav
officials with "criminal responsibility for violations of the laws or
customs of war." The tribunal's statute says this includes "seizure
of, destruction, or willful damage done to institutions dedicated to religion,
charity, and education, the arts and sciences, historic monuments, and works of
art and science."
During an
assessment survey made in October 1999 in five of these museums (the Kosovo
Museum, the regional museums in Peja and Gjakova, the Museum of the League of
Prizren, and the Museum of Oriental Manuscripts in Prizren) The only museum
that was totally destroyed was the Memorial Museum of the League of Prizren (Muzeu
Memorial i Lidhjes se Prizrenit), burned down by Serb police using
shoulder-launched incendiary projectiles on 28 March 1999.
Other museum
collections in Kosovo have also been despoiled, not by acts of deliberate
destruction but by appropriation. By order of the Serbian Ministry of Culture,
the most valuable prehistoric, Classical and medieval archaeological artefacts
from three important museum collections in Kosovo -- the Museum of Kosovo, the
Municipal Museum in Mitrovica and the Regional Archaeological Museum in Prizren
-- were removed to Belgrade at the beginning of 1999, ostensibly for an
exhibition. From the Neolithic to the Early Middle Ages, opened at the Gallery
of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (SANU) on March 24, the day NATO
launched its air war. A glossy 747-page catalogue of the exhibition, with
illustrations of 424 of the items taken from Kosovo, was published during the
war by SANU. It's a safe bet that none of these items (which include artifacts
of Kosovo's Dardanian/Illyrian and prehistoric cultures, held by modern
Kosovars to be the roots of their own civilization), will ever be returned to
their rightful owners, the museums in Kosovo.
“The collection
of the Museum of Oriental Manuscripts is still on display in the Sinan Pasha
mosque in Islamic sacral art, including both art objects and manuscripts,
suffered large-scale devastation during the war, as more than 200 mosques --
comprising 1/3 of the 607 Muslim houses of worship in Kosovo -- were destroyed
or seriously damaged by Serbian forces as part of "ethnic cleansing"
operations carried out between May 1998 and June 1999”[11].
Library of Hadum
Suleiman Efendi in Gjakova , founded 1595; the building dates from 1733, held a
collection of ca. 200 manuscript codices and 1,300 rare books in Ottoman
Turkish, Arabic, Persian, and Aljamiado (Albanian in Arabic script), as well as
the regional archives of the Islamic Community dating back to the 17th century.
The library was burned by Serbian police and paramilitaries on March 27-28,
1999. [12]
Conclusion
On of the most
important cultural institution of one country are museums. Its multi functional
role indicates and represents culture of a particular period. The objects
presented in museums should be preserved to revitalize their cultural
representation toward the world audience and the importance of cultural
heritage in order that its influence will reflect in the policy of cultural
identity.
The new
dimension of the work in cultural heritage should be focused in restoration and
new projects to enrich the cultural values. The museums in Kosovo have faced
war destruction. Lot of monuments and objects have been destroyed and stolen
and at present time they are placed in another place as representation of
another culture. Also in the post war period several new exhibition have
presented the destruction in the past times, damaged objects, photography,
clothes etc.
The only hope of museums in Kosovo is stimulus
for new incentives in restoration of antique, traditional and art objects
Organization of festivals and exhibitions in historical centers, castles or in
other places. Also on of the most important issue is managing the folkloric
heritage values through sophisticated multimedia devices such as CD, cassettes,
video camera, photography etc in order to try representing all the sides of
national cultural values.
Author:
Fazli Rrezja
Ma in Journalism
[1] Haraway
1989, Reynolds 1991, Clifford/ Durrans, Brian “Museums and selective
criticism” http://pittweb.prm.ox.ac.uk/Kent/musantob/thobrep2.html
[2] Hall
Stuart, Representation, “Cultural
Representation and signifying practices” 1997, The Poetics and the politics of exhibiting
other cultures, Lidchi Henrietta, chapter three, pg 151 http://pages.ucsd.edu/~bgoldfarb/cocu108/data/texts/Lidchi.pdf
[3]Ibid
[4] Riedlmayer, Andras “Kosovo Cultural
Heritage Survey”, Harvard University, February 2000. http://www.bosnia.org.uk/bosrep/marjune00/museums.cfm
[5] Rizvanolli, Masar “The league of Prizren (Lidhja
e Prizrenit), 1878-1881” (Arkivi i Kosoves, Muzeu i Kosoves 1978. 39 + 37 pp)
[6] Cruikshank, Julie “Representation, and
Meaning”. The article first appeared in 1992, in Anthropology Today 8 (3): 5 -
9.
[7] Schattschneider, Ellen Photography and
Memorialization: Washington, DC
by, Department of
Anthropology
[9] Blackwood, Beatrice ‘The Origin and
Development of the Pitt Rivers Museum’, Occasional Papers on Technology, no 11
(1970), Pitt Rivers Museum
[10] Riedlmayer,
Andras “Cultural destruction”, Harvard University, February 2000 http://www.aidainternational.nl/informatie%20organisatie/essays/balkan/Cultural%20Destruction.html
[11] András
Riedlmayer Kosovo Cultural Heritage Survey, Harvard University, March - June
2000
[12]
Prof. Bajgora, Sabri (The Faculty of Islamic Studies in Prishtina).
