Musée du quai Branly (MQB), the other and laïcité
Musée du quai Branly (MQB) is a museum located in the centre of Paris, displaying artefacts from across the world. Described as a “glamorous new center for the indigenous arts of indigenous people,” the museum, specifically the permanent collection, focuses on displaying the ‘art’ of cultures distant from France (White 2012, p. 38). This display of objects belonging to cultures distant from France has been argued to produce ideas of the other, be it through taxonomy, architecture or temporal concepts (Price 2007, 2010; Thomas 2008; White 2012). There are also ways in which the other is produced in French society, specifically surrounding those who are immigrants, or whose family are recent immigrants (Malik 2015). Does the production of the other in the MQB differ from the production of the other in French society? First, it is important to discuss how the other is produced in French society. I will also discuss whether laïcité, a social policy which contributes to producing the other in French society, impacts upon the MQB.
Kenan Malik (2015) sums up how the other is produced within French society in his article titled “The Failure of Multiculturalism.” In French society, the de facto taxonomy of classing North African immigrants as “Muslim”, when “immigrants from North Africa have been broadly secular and indeed often hostile to religion”, is a way in which “to cast citizens as the other — as not really part of the French nation” (Malik 2015). Taxonomy is not the only way in which the other is produced in French society. The French legal policy towards the veil is another way in which the other is produced. Through deeming the wearing of the veil illegal, which the policy of laïcité focusses upon, according to Borneman (2009, p.2753), those that wear a veil, de jure, are consigned to the status of the other, through their practice being deemed illicit. However, the main reason that the veil is deemed illegal and produces the other is due to taxonomy itself. The veil has been reduced to a “particular conjunction of religion and gender,” Islam and the woman, even though it has a “wide variation in its meaning” (Borneman 2009, p.2746). This classification of the veil as Muslim means that it is deemed a threat to French society and its assimilationist policy, which seeks to limit peoples membership to a particular racial or cultural group in public. Thus, taxonomy plays a significant part in producing the other in French society. Could the same be said for how the other is produced in the MQB?
According to White (2012, p.44), taxonomy in the MQB is used to reinforce the “non-western” status of the artefacts on show, and thus reinforce their otherness. White discusses the way in which civilisations as a term lacks usefulness in regards to explaining the indigenous cultures whose artefacts are displayed. Indeed, the museum is meant to be a place to display indigenous art, who White (Ibid, p.44) explains only make up “one-tenth of the world’s population”, whist civilisations refers to the “other four-fifths” of the world. Thus the classification into civilisations isn’t useful as a term to understand indigenous cultures, as it may integrate several cultures that don’t have much in common, by their loose “cultural commonalities”(Ibid, p.44).
Temporal concepts, such as the concept that indigenous cultures are from a “pre-contact past”, also contribute to producing the other in the MQB (Price 2007, 2010; White 2012). White (2012, p.48) discusses how objects from a “little-known time” are distanced “from both Native and Western perspectives”. Indeed, there have been moments at the MQB where there has been clear knowledge of an object which the museum has consciously ignored, in order to suit the narrative of objects being from a pre-contact past. One example of this, is “of a large carved housepost from the island of Markira in Solomon Islands”, which an anthropologist had done research on from the 1990s (White 2012, p.49). Yet this object has been described as dating back to the seventeenth century. This temporal concept at the MQB has a similarity with the exhibition James Clifford (1988) discusses titled “Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern.” Clifford (1988, p.201) describes how “the historical contacts and impurities that are part of the museum’s ethnographic work — and that may signal the life, not the death, of societies — are systematically excluded.” The result of this portrayal of an extinct society, as White (2012) writes, distances objects from Western perspectives, and thus categorises them and their cultures as the other.
The colour of the walls in the temporary display titled “Tattooists, Tattooed” further reinforces the status of the other in the permanent collection. In the temporary exhibition, which looks at culture from modern countries, as well as indigenous communities, the walls could be described as the colour of a white person’s skin, as can be seen in Fig. 1. Comparing this to the lay-out of the permanent collection, which you can find an example of in Fig. 2, and which was described by Jean Nouvel, the architect, as a zoo, the sense of othering present in the permanent collection is further reinforced (Thomas 2008, p.290).
Through examining temporal concepts, taxonomy and architecture, it is clear that the MQB and French society differ and are also similar in terms of how they produce the other. Temporal concepts are not used in French society, whilst taxonomy is. However, what is interesting is how the other is celebrated in the MQB, whilst feared or treated as a threat in French society, through the law of laïcité, which upholds “the values of secular republicanism, specifically the protection of the individual from the claims of religion, and of the state from ethnic or religious separatism.” (Borneman 2009, p. 2753). The idea of the societies being portrayed as extinct or dead in the MQB may make sense when considering laïcité. Indeed, if something is dead, how can it be a threat to French ideals? The assimilationist policy of the French government isn’t too distant from the MQB after all, but how far does it influence the MQB, and is this problematic?
Thomas (2008, p.288) illustrates how linked French society and the MQB is by highlighting how it is governed by a “government body” in the form of the “Direction the Direction des Musées de France (French Museums Board)”, which is “part of the Ministry of Culture”. It was also the presidential project of Jacques Chirac, so the link to society and the public sphere of France is not distant by any means (Thomas 2008). As Thomas (2008, p. 288) points out, “culture and politics are indissociable”. The way in which the objects in the MQB are often understood through the lens of art, assimilates the objects through a modern “system of objects”, which distances the object from its original meaning, and places it within a modern system of meaning (Clifford 1988, p.198). In this frame of art, it is the French collectors who are celebrated, with collectors like Kerchache and colonists like Louix XV named in a video summarising the permanent collection on the MQB website (Price 2010). By imposing French meaning onto the objects of indigenous cultures, therein lies an example of France’s assimilation policy influencing the MQB. As the focus on French art collectors may imply, there is also a lack of representation for the cultures whom the objects/art first belonged. This issue is known within museology as the aesthetic/ethnographic distinction, which Clifford (1988, p.199) states was “institutionally reinforced” in the early 1900s.
The lack of ethnographic detail at MQB has come under severe criticism, particularly regarding the lack of representation that the indigenous cultures whose art is being displayed receive (Price 2007, 2010; White 2012). When I visited the MQB, I found there was a distinct lack of any human representation from the indigenous communities. This especially stood out when the objects displayed were meant to be worn on the body, and yet there was no example of how they were worn. Fig. 3 is an example of an object worn on the face, yet given no indication of what it looks like when worn.
All in all, the result of treating the indigenous cultures objects as art is problematic, as it pays little attention or respect to cultures from which they originate. As Vogel (1991, p.193) states, “can we truly appreciate art that wasn’t meant for us, that we don’t understand in its original meaning?” If an art gallery does not pay attention to the original meaning of the object, our ability to appreciate it is questioned, according to Vogel (1991). It is clear that the policy of laïcité impacts upon MQB, in the way in which it encourages a French and modern interpretation of these indigenous objects. However, it is also clear that this ignorance of ethnography creates problems, such as a lack of respect for the indigenous cultures, and a question as to whether we can appreciate the objects whilst ignoring its original meaning.
Overall, it is clear that taxonomy impacts both how the other is produced in French society, and in the MQB. The MQB and French society have their own methods of how the other is produced too, be it through temporal concepts, architecture or social policy. However, it is clear that although social policy doesn’t explicitly impact upon the MQB, laïcité does have an impact on how the MQB is conceptualised, particularly in the way in which the objects are considered art, and put in a French system of meaning. This creates problems, specifically concerning the lack of understanding for the cultures whose objects are presented. A topic to further explore may be how the MQB can improve in representing the other, particularly regarding practices of reflexivity. As Mackey (1995, p.328) writes, we should “problematize how our own social and institutional locations inform our analytical categories and strategies”.
Bibliography
Borneman, John. (2009) ‘Veiling and women’s intelligibility’, Cardozo Law Review, 30, pp. 2745–60.
Clifford, J. (1988) “Histories of the Tribal and the Modern” (ch.9) in The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, pp. 189–214.
Mackey, E. (1995) Postmodernism and Cultural Politics in a Multicultural Nation: Contests over truth in the “Into the Heart of Africa” controversy, Public Culture 7(2), pp. 403–432.
Malik, K. (2015) The Failure of Multiculturalism. Available at: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/western-europe/2015-03-01/failure-multiculturalism (Accessed: 18th April 2015).
Price, Sally (2007). Paris Primitive. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Price, S. (2010). Return to the quai Branly. Museum Anthropology, 33(1), pp.11–21.
Thomas, D. 2008 [Review of] Paris Primitive: Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly. French Forum 33 (1–2), pp. 288–292.
Vogel, S. (1991) Always true to the object, in our fashion, in I. Karp and R. Lavine (eds) Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press, pp. 191–204.
White, G. (2012) Review Essay: Civilizations on the Seine: Sally Price’s Paris Primitive. Museum Anthropology Review 6(1). Pp. 38–62
