Response to Bradley A. Clements’ review of “Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols: Ethnographic Collections and Source Communities”

Abstract

In reading Clements’ review of my book “Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols” it is hard to see the book that I wrote. Only a very biased review could argue that my conclusion is that museums can only collaborate with source communities “provided they do not compromise the continuity of museological and anthropological disciplines.” The book adopts an entirely opposed perspective. Neither do I imply that righting “past wrongs” is “anachronistic,” nor that access to cultural heritage is best served by museums. Looking up the page numbers referred to does not help as I can’t find the topics referred to. However the position Clements adopts may explain the many misreadings of my text and his failure to understand my argument. Early on he somehow interprets my critique of Jenkins as failing to recognize the role that “Indigenous cultural and political leaders and museum professionals” played in the process of change. In fact I qualify Jenkin’s position by saying that rather than being a crisis of cultural authority the changes are “more in continuity with museum theory and practice, which has for some time been consciously and cautiously moving towards greater engagement with source communities” (Chapter 1). I am making precisely the same point that Clements is making while acknowledging that this is a process that is ongoing. The focus of the book is on the relationships between distributed collections housed in museums and the source communities to which they are connected. I address the complexity of the relationship but also the importance of understanding the complex spatio-temporal relationships between collections and communities. I do not anywhere use the phrase “infinite museums” nor imply that their collections have an infinite existence. However, I do believe that as museum curators and archivists we need to 1089941 CJXXXX10.1177/15501906221089941Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives ProfessionalsResponse book-review2022