The power of museums
The South African Museums Association hosts an annual national conference, and the edition for 2022 adopted the theme of International Museums Day: ‘The Power of Museums’. This trend in thinking is topical for museums in SA as they continue to reimagine themselves in response to the demands of changing social and ecological climates.
A key factor that affects the power of museums is their agency. Agency is the capacity of an individual or an institution to guide their own actions and more importantly, to have impacts on people. One of museums’ most important responsibilities is to make peoples’ lives better in some way, and it is a museum’s agency that enables it to carry out this responsibility.
When we talk about the agency of museums, we thus talk about the extent to which museums have the power to improve people’s lives.
There is little point in preserving memory if we don’t make use of it to help improve the present.
For museums to be sustainable, whether it be environmentally, socially or economically, they must have agency, because without agency museums can have no relevance. If museums are not relevant, then how can they hope to be sustainable? Agency leads to relevance, and relevance leads to sustainability.
South African museums today typically focus on equality, inclusivity, and the telling of hidden histories as they work to redress the imbalances of our history. There is a further layer of complexity to this work, however, and one that museums tend to overlook: the deep connections between social and environmental justice. These connections are ever more significant as we look for ways to resolve the global social-ecological crisis. If museums shift their thinking towards justice as a social-ecological phenomenon, this offers fresh potential for them to create agency and relevance, and thus sustainability.
The root of the separation of social justice from ecological justice in museum work lies in the 17th century philosophy of Rene Descartes. Descartes was a radical in his own time, but his approach is no longer suited to ours. He saw culture and nature as fundamentally divided, and the persistence into modern times of this philosophical dualism has created the two broad types of museum with which we’re all familiar: cultural museums, and science museums. The two tend to operate separately, and this philosophical artefact has thus created a museum practice that separates social justice from ecological justice. This division restricts museums’ responses to complex problems that reach across philosophical and disciplinary divisions, such as climate change, land use and ownership to name but a few of the serious and complex challenges we face today.
Historically, the separation of culture from nature and the division of people from the environment supported colonial ambition because it justified exploitation of “lesser” peoples, who were classified as “natural” rather than human, and exploitation of the environment, which was classified as a resource to be used to finance and support the colonial power.
Today’s governance systems continue to rely on the dualist hierarchy to justify their ongoing exploitation, or colonisation, of people and of ecological systems, and national policy frameworks reflect the exploitative attitudes that dominate globally. The dualism of museums, and their separation of social from ecological justice, ultimately supports the injustice of today’s capitalist systems, or at the very least, diminishes the potential for museums to critique these systems.
Museums need new ways to think about the complexities of their context. They need new philosophical perspectives that draw together social and ecological justice and that disrupt traditional ways of thinking and working. Museums cannot rely on policy to drive these changes. Transformation towards a focus on socialecological justice can come about more rapidly if museum workers themselves take action. Exhibition projects can cut across the artificial divide between social and ecological justice and focus on peoples’ lived experience of the challenges they endure today. If museum workers’ develop social-ecological approaches to practice that are in tune with the complex challenges that we face, then they help ensure that museums are relevant, that they have agency, and thus that they are sustainable.
Dr Tom Jeffery, is the Principal Curator, Amazwi South African Museum of Literature. He won the Fitz Simons award for best paper on this topic at the 2022 South African Museums Association National Conference.