uit: Baribal, de indianenclub

Communication is the sole aim of museums. We collect, preserve and exhibit things for that purposes to communicate only - whether its to a scholar or to a member of the public. From its very beginning museums have conserved objects which represent an individual or a collective past. It can, today, offer us a opportunity to understand and experience the unknown world around us.
Indeed museums are shifting their role in society and can, therefore, no longer be hastily branded as temples of the elite, or as Graham Swift once noted as "history's toy cupboard. A past of past times". Most exhibitions today - in the words of Neil Postman do - in some way offer us an alternative view on history and a critical dialogue towards postmodern and tribal societies.

ometimes, however, one is confronted with an exhibition that the message of the museum and the community it represents is not coherent. The museum, in reality a dais for the community, puts forward a mythical past and presents a stereotypical culture which relates toward western 19th century ideology rather than today's world conceptions of 'primitive' art. Its objects are displayed in such a fashion that it offers its spectators little more than a view of today's thriving culture of the 'exhibited community'. More than anything, the exhibition is turned into a cry for help and helps create mislaid sympathies for cultures labeled as extinct or dying. While less could be accurate...

The Stories of the Raven (de vertelling van de Raaf). An exhibition currently held in the Amerika museum, situated in Cuijck, certainly offers its visitors a rich anthropological and functional interpretation of the importance of the bird Raven has to Northwest coast tribes living in Canada and Alaska. Decorative and cedar carved masks representing the Raven as well as red and black designed blankets with images of the trickster are installed throughout the exhibition, giving the visitor an opportunity to understand more about the different adventures saga's of the Raven and the importance of the myth to tribes situated in British Columbia.

Certainly this exhibition offers a bridge into understanding the magical world of understanding the Northwest saga. Yet at the same time this anthropology museum is sending a contradictory and confusing message to its visitors. Throughout the contextualised displays the visitor is still confronted with how the museum is still struggling to find its place to explain non Christian cultures to its audience.
An issue that many anthropological museums are faced with today. But surely the soundless slide show - left for free interpretation by the visitor - can not be the only answer into showing a rich past and diverse present culture. The early 20th century footage does little justice towards what Baudelaire once noted as objects that carry the 'spiritual essence of the soul' but rather reaffirms western fables about primitive cultures. The elegantly colorful masks situated around the small exhibition space have, then, become now a functional curiosity and over rides all the aesthetic qualities of the object the maker intended. Indeed the museum has shown the children and adults alike a different unknown world full of treasures, but in many aspects it has created a romantic mythical cupboard too. And a past of past times.

Michèle Jacobs