Cyclones in Vermont

Any scholar of the humanities/social-sciences who has done any work or read on the topic of museums would not be surprised by Robert Cantwell's contributions to class this week. In particular his third chapter, focused on the Mall, the Smithsonian Museums and folk festivals calls upon his audience (in this case 12 or so graduate students) to not only question what is being presented but by who, where and how. He wants us to see the power relations inherent in hanging bomber planes just inside the door of the Air and Space Museum and calls upon is to strive to consider how the "attic of the nation" inspires us not only to see and learn but to engage in the act of remembering and consuming history in particular ways. Interesting ties can be mad between this week and our readings on authenticity and ideology, but what struck me most this week was a few lines from chapter three:

In our day, it means uncoupling the object from all such patterns, fields, and sequences; for, to us, such constructs represent a kind of hallucination wrought by various cultural hegemonies that have reached - through language, the family, education and communications, and other institutions - into our very modes of perception. A fresh apprehension demands, it seems, that we espouse not only the object, but the ways in which we have been trained, or influenced, to look at it: to exhibit, in effect, our own habitual ways of conceiving the thing, as well as the thing itself. To do so it is, of course, not sufficient merely to isolate the object; instead it must be carried up in a kind of cyclone or loosely confederated objects whose ordinary relations, in which normally that have their intelligibility and their meaning, remain suspended, in doubt, as mere intimation." (68-69)

What Cantwell is introducing here is not necessarily new. Imagining how we display and understand things within the museum setting is not a new field of thought. he is going, it would seem, a step further however in that he is not isolating the item, the museum, the viewer, or the display. His image of the "cyclone of loosely confederated objects" is interesting for sure and perhaps the best conceptualization possible of a folk life festival. While museums are active, requiring the audience and staff to invent, organize, and display... folk life festivals take this active component a step further. As historians (or scholars in general) we must remember always to shoot for seeing the forest through the trees when approaching these types of events.

On a personal note: I am in Vermont for a wedding and have been surrounded by displays, targeted at the leaf-peeping tourists, advertising the image of what is "Vermont", the "Real Vermont." Taking what I am reading of Cantwell it is both expected and unexpected what I am finding in these displays. there are the animal images reminiscent of the Natural History Museum, there are the handicrafts and nick knacks one would find in the nation's attic, yet there are also mini folk-festivals being acted out across the state. Corn mazes and apple orchards make cider in from of an audience, maple syrup collection (while too early in the season to collect) is being demonstrated for tourists, and even the natural habitat (the leaves) are being marketed and "displayed" as unique to the state. I guess in essence I am saying that we don't need a museum, a lawn, or even a folk festival to mull over Ethnomimesis - just take a stroll down the main streets of Middlebury Vermont or any town, city, street, or....