Iziko South African Museum

Iziko South African Museum
Suid-Afrikaanse Museum
Established 1825
Location Company's Garden
Type Zoology, palaeontology, archaeology
Accreditation Iziko museum
Public transit access Bus: MyCiTi 101, 106, 107
Website www.iziko.org.za/museums/south-african-museum

The Iziko South African Museum is a South African national museum located in Cape Town a city that is a capital of South Africa and has the famous prisoner site of Robben Island. The museum was founded in 1825, the first in the country. It has been on its present site in the Company's Garden since 1897. The museum houses important African zoology, palaeontology and archaeology collections.[1] Iziko is a Xhosa word meaning "hearth".[2]

History

The South African Museum was founded by Lord Charles Somerset in 1825 as a general museum comprising natural history and material culture from local and other groups further afield. In time, it developed greater systematic organisation and classification similar to the evolutionary models that were prominent in European and American museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The focus on natural history encouraged the notion that very little divided the animal world from the human subjects who were documented.

This continued until the 1990s with the reservation of cultural history museums for the display of settler histories and the relegation of material culture from other cultures to natural history and anthropology museums. "Bushmen", referring collectively to San and Khoi indigenous groups, were considered lowest on the evolutionary timescale and as living remnants of "civilised" man's prehistory, akin to the highest form of ape. As such, they became the subject of intensive research, particularly from 1906 onwards under the directorship of Louis Péringuey. Subsequent research on Bushmen was informed by the rise of physical anthropology, a discipline in the European scientific community that drew direct correlation between physical type and evolutionary status and therefore intellectual, cultural and social status, as discussed in a 1988 article by Annie Coombes.[3]

Between 1907 and 1924 Péringuey initiated a casting project, carried out by museum modeller James Drury, in which sixty-eight body casts of "pure Bushmen specimens" were taken in a process that was both humiliating and painful for the participants. The title of Drury's book, Bushman, whale and dinosaur, detailing his 40-year affiliation with the South African Museum, gives some indication of the status these specimens were given.[4]

Important past exhibitions and displays

Bushman Diorama

Some of the casts made by museum modeller James Drury were displayed in the South African Museum from 1911 but without any contextualisation or acknowledgement of the Bushmen’s complex social and cultural networks. With accompanying museum labels in which they were continually referred to in the past tense, the Bushmen were consigned to history and extinction. It was only in the late 1950s that Drury’s casts were given any contextualisation in the form of the Bushman Diorama when they were displayed in an invented cultural setting based on an early nineteenth century painting by Samuel Daniell. However, the newly revised label once again emphasised the narrative of extinction and lacked any historical contextualisation or information about the Bushmen’s individual histories.[4]

The Bushman Diorama was not the only South African Museum display that historicised ethnic groups in this way. The African culture gallery also featured a series of displays of casts or models of "dark-skinned people" (in ethnically-defined groups) who "live in rural areas and are located in timeless places such as 'tribes' or 'groups'". The Bushman Diorama deserves particular attention though, as it has been at the centre of much contestation but also a popular tourist attraction for foreigners, locals and schools. The focus of tours was largely the physical appearance of the figures; teachers and tour guides would routinely use the display to emphasise racialised physical features such as skin, hair type, body shape and genital forms.[5]

In 1989, in recognition of the ethical and unequal power dimensions involved in the display, the South African Museum took the first steps to mediate the diorama. This came in the shape of an adjoining exhibition that investigated the rationale for the casting project and explored the backgrounds and identities of the people who had been cast.[6] Photographs from the casting process were shown and one of the figures was dressed in early twentieth century (instead of hunter-gather) attire to alert viewers to the constructed nature of the diorama.[5] Continued revision occurred in 1993 with Out of Touch, an auto-critique that added "dilemma labels" and contrasting superimposed images to the display cases in the African cultures gallery (and the diorama) in order to destabilise the narrative and to "qualify previous notions of cultural stasis by acknowledging urbanisation and other changes".[7]

Miscast

The exhibition that was most seriously aimed at a revisionist history of the diorama was also the most controversial and publicly debated. In 1996 Miscast: Negotiating the Presence of Khoi and San History and Material Culture was exhibited, not at the South African Museum, but at the neighbouring South African National Gallery in order to counterpose the ethnographic discourse that had characterised the Bushmen in such a disparaging manner.[5] The curator, Pippa Skotnes, used installation art as a medium, which focussed on the visual elements of the exhibition and the visitors' experiences. However, installation art, which allows a great degree of freedom for the artist, also allows for more varied interpretations (and misinterpretations) from the audience. The exhibition featured Bushman material culture, thirteen resin casts of Bushmen bodies and body parts, instruments used in physical anthropology and a vinyl floor underlaid with generally derogatory newspaper articles, official documents and pictures of Bushmen from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These were contrasted with photographs on the walls of contemporary Bushman life taken between 1984 and 1995.[4]

The fact that visitors had to step on representations of Bushmen was seen as a literal "trampling of culture" and many of the visitors felt that Skotnes had reiterated the ethnographic and museological practices that she was trying to challenge. The exhibition also brought to the fore politics of identity and representation. Bushmen representatives argued that Skotnes could not speak about or for people she "did not understand" and while some consultative protocols were followed with "official groups that were just forming", the general consensus was that these were inadequate.[6]

After Miscast there have been various exhibitions at the South African Museum and South African National Gallery with a general focus on Bushmen rock art and paintings. One of the exhibitions ended with a Bushman healing ceremony that included the lighting of a sacred peace pipe and traditional song and dance. These exhibitions also utilised strategies such as quotes from Bushmen individuals and a replica cave with its interior coated by a giant photograph of a real cave to "allow the viewer to experience something approximating what the Bushmen might have felt originally" and as an answer to the deficiencies of past Bushmen displays.[6] In April 2001, the Bushman Diorama was closed.

Exhibitions

Asbestos pipeline with gypsum crystals. Water pipeline from Rooikop to Walvis Bay, Namibia
Iziko South African Museum

The museum is organized on four levels and hosts a variety of exhibitions, from rock art to fossils, marine animals and meteorites.

Ground level

Level 1

Level 2

Level 3

References

  1. ↑ "Iziko South African Museum". Iziko Museum. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  2. ↑ "Meaning of Iziko". Iziko Museum. Retrieved 14 July 2014.
  3. ↑ Coombes, Annie (1988). "Museums and the Formation of National and Cultural Identities". Oxford Art Journal. 11 (2).
  4. 1 2 3 Coombes, Annie (2003). History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. Durham & London: Duke University Press.
  5. 1 2 3 Transforming Museum on Post-Apartheid Tourist Routes in Karp et al (eds.) Museum Frictions: Public Cultures/Global Transformations. Durham and London: Duke University Press. 2006. pp. 107–134.
  6. 1 2 3 Dubin, Steven (2006). Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
  7. ↑ Rankin, E.; Hamilton, C. (1999). "Revision; Reaction; Re-Vision: The role of museums in (a) transforming South Africa". Museum Anthropology. 22 (3).
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Coordinates: 33°55′44″S 18°24′54″E / 33.92889°S 18.41500°E / -33.92889; 18.41500

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