As someone who loves visiting museums, I read this essay with great interest and was underwhelmed by the conclusion:
No matter how intricate or well researched a palimpsest—at any cultural institution—it will never solve the problem of perspective. We can never escape ourselves or the times in which we live. Maybe this is the best we ever do—and maybe that’s fine. Maybe seeing museums as deeply flawed but instructive monuments to that attempt at understanding, rather than as definitive catalogs, is the best way to allow them to teach us about ourselves. Sometimes, we need the reminder not to believe something just because it’s written on the wall.
That said, it is a valid argument that a museum is like a rich person's living room opened to the public and in that sense perpetuates their world-view which is far from representative of the average population never mind the poor and oppressed. In any age, those who were fighting to the finish just to survive did not have the luxury of preserving their own history. Much of it had to be be traded or bartered for sustenance.
My grandmother used to say, in a refugee family like her own, it is considered a very big deal to have any single article of of jewelry from a few generations ago to gift to the daughter during her marriage. To her, the inability to pass on significant pieces of jewelry was the greatest sign of a family having fallen on hard times. Once she landed on her feet in Kolkata, she clung to her modest acquisitions and refused to replace old with new. Everything she owned was from the 1930s and she refused to let go. When she passed, one of my nieces who lives in Kolkata took over most of her belongings.
Her home is now in a sense a family museum - just that it is not one that would be of any interest to anyone outside our family. Is this a rich person's living room? Depends on your scale I supposed. T is affluent and has a house big enough to hold my grandmother's things very comfortably. It is true that she likes to show them off to anyone who visits and has even a passing interest in her beautiful mahogany almirah and dressing table. In a sense T has set the tone for how the history of my mother's family is known and told. She is able to do this because her circumstances allow her to do so.
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