Traditional Responses
Museums have, for example, worked hard to bring traditions of both dominant and marginalized cultures to the fore in a common space, so context might be provided for differing perspectives. As Mithlo has noted,
Developments at the National Museum of the American Indian will be worth noting as an indicator of how extensive the anticipated museological shift will be. The blurring of divisive genres represented by Native American majority museums may offer the complex situational circumstances for the dominant paradigms – Western/objective, Native/subjective – to finally be deconstructed in favor of more realistic forms of representation. As the traditional subjects of scientific inquiry increasingly interrogate standard systems of interpretation, re-figuring them as “Native places of a kind” in national and global contexts, new conceptual terrain can be established outside existing dichotomies.25
And one way of doing this is to focus on respective traditions. Traditions carry the voices of the past forward into the present. They secure our place in the world and are formulated on the basis of our unnaturalness, as a being of choice. Traditions thus suggest that our culture, our civilization, and our religious practices provide us security within this unnaturalness: that unnaturalness is our divinity which must be recognized, realized, and responded to amongst the maze of natural things governed by causes rather than choices.
They resolve our concern that we know we have an identity, despite the recognition we know little else.
Traditions make us, in other words, welcome in a very foreign and threatening environment. And contrary to popular belief, traditions reveal that, like man and his civilizations, they are inherently revolutionary appeals to the case of freedom as individual sovereignty, as individuals are sovereign by nature. Thus the more traditions we can experience, the more we understand.
Technological Innovations
Equally, we should not be afraid to incorporate new technologies into the museum experience. People can now enter a museum and see video, hear voices of people commenting on a particular technique or history, select choices of reading options and further study from multimedia devices, engage in educational activities of looking at respective designs or touching materials relevant to the presentation.
And now, through technology that brings forward the ability to live in a hypertextual environment, the museum can link together numerous texts (e.g., supplementary texts, footnotes, electronic notebooks, videos, weblogs, wikis, etc.). Embracing such a process, where authors in essence cede their absolute control over their material, the reader/observer is allowed to choose their own particular path of learning through which different voices can be heard. This notion of multivocality is no longer limited to extremely esoteric writings of philosophers interested in Derrida and others, but can now actually be found being embraced by museum professionals.26
I am the Eggman / I am the Walrus / goo goo g’joob (John Lennon)
All this is to say that, in-and-of-themselves, these efforts to expand the knowledge base of museum professionals and visitors should be applauded because they are valuable insofar as they can bring new perspectives to the human condition. But this is not to say that gaining such perspective will necessarily define a person Cochiti or Santo Domingo, Lakota or Masai. We and they may be more complete “human” beings because we have gained perspective; but equally we and they, though we now share a common language, will forever remain uniquely ourselves.
We will also not be, nor understand what is to be, a pot. Simply by engaging in a conversation with others like us about what we “think” a pot is, does not make it so. That is because
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