Cultural Geography

In my former hometown of Melbourne,

Australia, the audaciously modern lines of the

recently opened Melbourne Museum (2000)

sit stridently alongside the proud Victorian

architecture of the Royal Exhibition Building

(1880). Separated by over a century, these two

buildings obviously reflect the different archi-

tectural sensibilities that adhere to their times.

But their architectural difference belies a set

of commonalities that tell us much about the

idea of empire, and particularly as it expressed

itself through the familiar cases of European

imperial expansion from the seventeenth

through to the early twentieth century. The

exhibition and the museum are emblematic

institutions of the age of empire (Driver and

Gilbert, 1999). Exhibitions were forward look-

ing performatives that celebrated the futures

promised by imperial expansion. Museums, on

the other hand, collected and displayed all that

needed to be salvaged in the wake of civiliza-

tion’s spread. Nowadays Melbourne’s Royal

Exhibition Building houses a motley range of

consumer display events, while its new

museum is a key tourist attraction. Such are

the fortunes of the institutions of empire.^1

Being postcolonial, the Melbourne Museum

can no longer comfortably display the objects

of ‘others’ as an imperial museum might have.

Instead it self-consciously curates stories and

things animated by the experiences and

postcolonial agendas of those ‘others’.The vis-

itor to this museum, keen to see something of

‘traditional indigenous culture’, may well be

drawn to a display that, at first glance, seems

to offer a modest collection of spears. The

display does not, however, tell the viewer any-

thing about the ‘origins’ of those spears in an

anthropological sense. These spears are part

of a self-conscious display that tells the story

of the museum’s own imperial collecting prac-

tices: who collected, how they collected, and

the transnational circuits of trade and

exchange that existed within the museum (as

opposed to the indigenous) world.The display

reflects the ambivalence created when an

imperial institution, like the museum, finds

itself in postcolonial times.The story it tells of

collecting derives from the kind of analytical

perspective delivered into contemporary

scholarship primarily by way of Said’s critique

of cultures of imperialism. The objects at the

centre of the exhibit (anthropologists, their

collecting equipment and their traded arti-

facts) occupy the self-reflexive analytic space

created by anthropology questioning its

ethnographic authority.^2

Much that needs to be said about the

museum as an imperial institution is said

through this exhibit. Yet what of the spears

Section 6

AFTER EMPIRE Edited by Jane M. Jacobs

Introduction: After Empire?

Jane M. Jacobs

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