By Pil Qvist Østergaard and Karen Ayerve

The National Museum of Denmark invites us to “take a journey around the world” through its Ethnography collection. What can we expect? A large set of “ethnography objects and archaeological artefacts from non-European cultures as well as the Arctic peoples.” Indeed, the entire collection itself represents a unique cultural experience of rituals, customs and habits performances the Others.

We arrived at the Museum looking for the “People of the Earth” exhibition, and more specifically, the Buddhism room as it is along with the Hinduism the only two world religions present at the Museum, according to its website. We were about to experience cultural encounters in a very different and less expected way.

Buddhism experience?

Before arriving at the Buddhism room, the first questions had already started arising in our heads: too many objects and too little information. “Why?” We kept wondering.

By this point, we had already immersed ourselves in such a diverse, though confusing, cultural scene, as we were leaving behind South American, Indonesian regions and Central Asia rooms.

Many artefacts could seem very exotic or different to the western eye: gold coloured Buddhas, statues of “demons”, clothing very different from western society, etc. For instance, one of the paintings was of a man with very long fingernails. In a western world, this feature has traditionally been seen as a feminine trade, so it would have been interesting to know what symbolism they have in Buddhism. But again, we found no texts but objects that seemed to speak for themselves!

This unexpected scenario built a fence between the exhibition and us. We had a feeling of neither becoming more acquainted with Buddhism nor related somehow. Another element of this creation of distance was the museum’s use of the term: “Bagindien”. This is an old-fashioned term for the countries Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, (West-)Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodja, Laos and Vietnam. It gives you a feeling of the exhibition being portrayed with features of a Eurocentric view.

We left the room feeling as confused as when we arrived and immediately asked the curator for some explanations. It was at that point we found out that this exhibition dated from the early 1990s, exactly when ethnography in museums experienced a crisis of representation. As Mille Gabriel states this meant “very little texts, images, and other kinds of representations (…). The objects are contextualised as art rather than as ethnography”. The exhibition has clearly remained stuck in its early years.

We are aware that the Museum is making an effort to deal with this crisis of representation: they are working on reorganising their permanent exhibitions in new ways. In spite of it, we can’t help to feel it is urgent to make this happen, in order for the museum to reach all audiences, regardless of their prior knowledge of the topic.

Reference:

Gabriel, Mille 2016 New Futures for Old Collections – Contemporary Collecting and Community Involvement at the National Museum of Denmark, Museum and Society¸14 (2) 275-293