Cannibal Tours and Glass Boxes: The Anthropology of Museums

Susan Free is a movement analyst, teacher, and freelance writer in
Toronto.

This book reveals the turbulence beneath the conservative surface of
today’s museums. Expanded substantially from an earlier book, Museums,
the Public and Anthropology, the current book is a collection of essays
in which Ames examines further the accountability of museums in
contemporary society, focusing mainly on North American and European
anthropology museums. Ames has been director of the University of
British Columbia Museum of Anthropology since 1974, so the essays are
grounded in his extensive, and often fascinating, first-hand experience.

In the first half of the book, he examines the fundamental
contradiction of the museum mandate: on the one hand, museums have the
responsibility to preserve vast collections of objects for the purpose
of scholarly research; on the other hand, they are increasingly
accountable to a public that wants to be engaged and entertained. Can an
anthropology museum be a centre of relevant ethnological research and
still attract the paying public? Can museum ethnologists practice
serious anthropology without succumbing to the bureaucratic and
promotional demand of the job? Can the cultural groups represented in
exhibits—such as Northwest Coast Indians in Vancouver and black
Canadians in Toronto—have a voice in the way their histories are
represented to the world?

Ames argues convincingly that museums of anthropology can be not only
relevant but vital to the community in which they are situated, helping
the people of a culture define themselves in relation both to their past
and to other cultures. He also expresses the current view that museums
themselves should be studied as cultural expressions of the dominant
culture rather than as neutral agents of representation. The book is
most successful when Ames expounds this vision of a lively, contemporary
museum engaging its public in meaningful dialogue. The essays in which
he attempt to demonstrate what a self-reflexive anthropology might be,
through analyses of various cultural phenomena, are somewhat less
interesting and seem to take the book off track. However, it is
refreshing to read the many Canadian examples set in an international
context.