Magic & The Pitt Rivers Museum: A Reflection
On 9th June 2016 I happened to have a free afternoon in Oxford between community talks and, having had to rush a visit to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History here in 2014 , incorporated into which is the Pitt Rivers Museum, I could not pass an opportunity to partake again of its museological delights.
Pitt Rivers Museum: A deliberate close encounter
For the uninitiated, the Pitt Rivers Museum is a free, public display space incorporating the 18,000 or so archaeology, anthropological and ethnographic objects donated to Oxford University by General Augustus Pitt Rivers and, subsequently, thoroughly expanded to over half a million individual objects. To explain a little bit about the museum proper do allow me to quote directly from the website:
“In most ethnographic and archaeological museums the objects are arranged according to geographical or cultural areas. At the Pitt Rivers Museum, they are arranged according to type: musical instruments, weapons, masks, textiles, jewellery, and tools are all displayed to show how the same problems have been solved at different times by different peoples. Many of the cases appear to be very crowded, as a large percentage of the total collection is on view. In some instances, the ‘displays’ are essentially visible storage. If you look carefully you will see that actually a great deal of information is provided about individual objects. There are often small labels, many of them hand printed by the first Curator, which are very revealing. Other information was written onto objects and we also have more modern large display labels in most cases.”
The antiquarian cases are squeezed onto the lower gallery’s open floor space and surmounted by the first and second floor ambulatory spaces above these. The cases downstairs are painted black, devoid of the modern technological input one might associated with a modern museum (the LED downlights, digital thermo-hygrographs, complicated locking mechanisms, QR codes, and AV interpretation) and stand above head-height. They are squeezed into the space with a metre or less between each. The tiny hand-written labels are hard to read and a single 100-word panel in each case describes the general theme without delving too much into the historical niceties.
This description might sound like an awful way to display artefacts, but the effect is astonishing. It absolutely works; the space becomes immersive in a way I have not experienced in any other museum. The low lighting forces you to peer inwards and around objects to see what might catch your eye. Indeed, this methodology of wandering around and gazing at those that do catch your eye is the method I use for getting most enjoyment out of my time here. It isn’t linear, there isn’t a chronology, and after a few moments the sheer quantity of visual stimuli bearing down on the viewer causes the brain’s ability to reconcile or interpret it all to shut down. Perhaps that isn’t quite the right phrase: I find myself passing through the desire to learn explicitly, in a linear fashion and to absorb images and facts into a fuzzy, warm and comforting space where the implicit characteristics of the material culture become prevalent. It sounds romantic but as a heritage fanatic (and an empiricist) this kind of experience is almost spiritual.
The area which really caught my eye (and had not done so on my previous visit tothe Museum in 2014) was the alphabetised casing plan highlighting six cases with the letter D. The ‘D’ cases displayed, in this gloriously chaotic fashion, material associated with ‘Magic, Ritual, Religion and Belief’. Now, for me, this phrase buzzed around in my head all afternoon. The grouping is intended to promote the material culture of ‘supernatural’ elements of human experience. The cases were subdivided by the groups ‘Amulets and Charms’, ‘Amulets, Charms and Divination’, ‘Charms Against the Evil Eye’, ‘Sympathetic Magic’, and ‘Religious Figures and Artefacts’. The Materia Magica was plentiful indeed and took shapes and forms I had never seen, being from well outside my academic comfort zone. The question that kept me standing there for fully fifteen minutes looking at a couple of cases was: how did someone decide on these groups? Magic and Religion are separated by these definitions. The ‘religion’ was primarily votive religion so one might assume then that the magic was not then votive? Apparently not so. There is no seperation of material or, apparently, function.
The Materia Magica of Humans
One presumes that the viewer is supposed to make up your own mind about what religion and magic then represent, despite the fact that the gallery already groups things in such a way and takes some of that onus away. The idea I instead decided to take away from this display is the connectedness of religion and magic within the history of the human experience (and was happy to do so) but I find myself still returning to the idea of nomenclature. Definitions again – damn. ‘Magic’, ‘ritual’, ‘religion’ and ‘belief’ are all individual concepts but their explicit connections are wonderfully muddied and can be (and have been) argued over for decades. Magic and religion may or may not exist as functionally separate concepts in the archaeological record. They may or may not exist as functionally separate concepts in the modern world (that viewpoint being dependent upon who you are, where you are, and your own unique cultural experience). Magic and religion both have ritual elements but ritual does not have be either magical or religious. The inclusion of ‘belief’ in this category is, to my mind, the most contentious of all of them because it is by far the most difficult idea to prove and the most amorphous of all these ideas. Belief must have existed within the concepts of magic and religion and ritual but magic, religion and ritual do not (inherently) require belief for them to be enacted or performed or built. If might require belief for there to efficacy to the action, but not to do them in the first place. Equally, belief undoubtedly exists in individual forms that one might not be able to label as any of the above, so the question then remains how does one identify the material culture of belief?
It’s not a question I can answer. Whether it is deliberate or not, the display in the Pitt Rivers Museum challenged me to define these concepts myself and apply them in my own unique way to the material in front of me devoid of its temporal and geographic context. I was quite aware both at the time and now that my recent studies into the theoretical nature of these terms will undoubtedly impact on my interpretation and consumption of the material on display and has caused me to question both it and myself in an effort to construct some sort of coherence out the museological miasma. I pondered also whether anyone else in the museum was having the same dilemma for that or other material. I pondered further whether materially or culturally specific historic/academic knowledge is a burden or a benefit in this instance: to my mind it could be a burden because one knows there is a greater story to tell and, as historians we are instilled with a desire to tell the stories of people and objects as best we can, so to be unable to engage with this is frustrating; equally, the benefit may come from understanding one object or type of object in detail and being able to use it as a rally-point from which to attempt to understand the inevitably unfamiliar material on display alongside it. Perhaps the mystery is more interesting or more enjoyable? I suppose it depends on what you want from a visit to the museum.
The Museum, more explicitly, is designed to represent the material culture of parts of the human experience in a very generalised and unscientific way. What then does this particular Museum have to offer if it has no specific story to tell? For me it is an immersive space, not worried about the story of the individual objects but about the shared experiences that they are able to represent across vast expanses of time and space (as it turns out that is the point). I, on reflection, found it a place that made me think. It made me think in a quite abstract way about the archaeological material I am personally interested in. This time, same as last, I haven’t left remembering a star object or a specific story but remembering the space and remembering the emotive reaction.
Well played Pitt Rivers Museum. Now then, about those Evil Eye charms…
Comments