Tuesday, November 14, 2006

Museums - Form of Culture Representation

"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]

 Ethnographic museums have had to address themselves in a concerted fashion to the problems of representation. Museums curators are no longer automatically perceived as the unassailable keepers of knowledge, museums are no longer simply received as spaces promoting knowledge and enlightenment, the automatic resting place for historic and culturally important ethnographic objects.

                                          Ethnological Museum, Pristina

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.
·         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.
·         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.
·         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.
·         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]




 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).






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