Samdok - Nordiska museet

connecting collecting: rassool
Museum and heritage documentation
and collecting beyond modernism:
Lessons from South Africa for the future
Ciraj Rassool
History Department, University of the Western Cape
This article is concerned with the lives and
worlds of museum objects, heritage sites and oral
history collections in the contradictory setting of
cultural transformation in South Africa, in which
new heritage frameworks have been created, but
where old categories and systems of classification
have proved enduring. While colonial ethnography
reasserts itself in the name of indigenous
recovery, heritage systems of documentation, inscription
and knowledge formation continue to be
marked by a politics of paternalism and cultural
atonement. While these features continue to mark
the main frames of national heritage, seeking to
make the nation ‘knowable’, important cases have
emerged where these modernist forms have been
contested and transcended. Chief amongst these
is the District Six Museum, where a transactive
model of museum as forum has sought to draw
the work of collecting and documentation into the
project of constructing a critical citizenship.
In South Africa today, the notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘museum’
are used in different ways. ‘Heritage’ and ‘museum’
are used firstly as ‘document’, where you have a frame-
work of ‘documentary realism’ applied to objects and
sites and which is also now being extended to the domain
of the intangible, such as oral history collections.
Here the main emphases are on inscription, documentation,
listing and taxonomy, where objects are seen as having
objective, fixed and knowable meanings. Once they
have been placed in taxonomic systems, and conservation
plans have been devised, these artefacts, sites and
collections come to be wielded in the service of national
heritage.
Connected to this is the idea of heritage as ‘development’,
where fixed meanings of society and the past
are marshalled for institution building. Here as well, new
museums are being developed to showcase the new nation
of South Africa, and to deliver services to the assembled
nation as well as to tourist visitors in search of
the story of South Africa and the miracle of the new nation’s
birth after the ravages of apartheid. This is heritage
transformation seen as the product of central planning,
and where expert consultants create instant themed environments
(sometimes described as ‘museums’ – such
as the Apartheid Museum) where the story of the nation
is revealed and told. Having been forgotten, the people
are asked to participate in the museum almost as an afterthought,
usually to donate their memories in oral history
projects.
We are living through a time when you can actually
see the logics of this modernism in operation. At Freedom
Park, being created on a hill in Pretoria, we can see how
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