Yet the physical qualities of objects in museum contexts or elsewhere remain inadequately explored in the material culture literature as a factor in the relationships between people and things. There are of course many exceptions, just one example of which might be Keane’s semiotic investigation of the role of materiality in causation, in which he explores the “bundling” of qualities in a particular object and “the historicity inherent to signs in their very materiality” (2005, 183; emphasis original). Others have written extensively on the “agency” of objects. For some this can be a useful notion, when agency is understood as not necessarily implying intentionality (e.g., Gell 1998; Gosden 2005), but for others it remains problematic, with true agency attributable only to human subjects (e.g., Morphy 2009; Knell 2012). Conversely, the agentive actants of actor network theory may be human, animal, or object (e.g., Latour 1993; Law and Hassard 1999). Thus, it seems we have yet to find a satisfactory theoretical alternative that adequately or convincingly accounts for the reality that perception, cognition, and emotional and physical responses are actively affected by the real-world characteristics of objects (see Ingold 2010), notwithstanding that individuals may see, interpret, and react differently depending on the cultural experiences they bring with them.
Extending the colonized metaphor, there are potentially useful insights to bring to bear from postcolonial and subaltern studies. Extensive scholarship in these areas reminds us of the considerable difficulties in constructing a nuanced picture of the subaltern’s history, identity, and perspectives on the colonizers and colonial experience, despite the presumed desirability of doing so. O’Hanlon cautions that this is a particularly hazardous task because of the tendency of scholars originating in cultures wherein “the free and autonomous individual represents the highest value” to slip back into an essentialist and reductive focus on “the idea of the self-constituting human subject” (1988, 197), leading to culturally and methodologically inappropriate assumptions about a particular “nature” or “essence” among both subordinate and colonizers. Instead, she urges, we need to focus on practice: on what is done to and by them (1988, 197). Such a focus still relies on a dichotomy “between those on top and those underneath.” The split is simplistic but remains rhetorically powerful and valuable if we make clear that it operates on two distinct levels, which O’Hanlon terms the “theoretical” and the “substantive.” The former is concerned not “with categorizing actually existing … groups … but with making a point about power,” with making unambiguous the fact that the relationship between the dominant and the subordinate is based on a fundamental imbalance (O’Hanlon 1988, 199; see also Chatterjee 1983, 59). This is important, even though in the reality of everyday life (the “substantive”) neither the dominant nor the subordinate is a homogeneous, clearly bounded, identifiable single group that can or should be easily reduced or essentialized to a simple category. Thus, having established a theoretical position, in later analysis “the categories which we must employ to understand [the] workings [of power and domination] must be as multifarious and nuanced as the courses and ligaments through which power itself runs” (O’Hanlon 1988, 200). In other words – and this is a point directly applicable to the museum – we must first make clear the real imbalance of power characterizing the relationships in the context in question, but then ensure considerable subtlety and dexterity in our studies of the complex machinations at work within it.
The colonized, then, were on the poorer side of a relationship of power, but the processes by which dominance operated were complex, not only in their workings but also in the ways in and degrees to which their effects were experienced. And, importantly, the colonized did not just passively “receive.” As Fanon, for example, realized, even if silenced, the subaltern is not entirely mute (Fanon [1961] 1990; Gibson 2003). The colonized’s characteristics, behavior, and very existence had significant impacts on the colonizers, albeit that they often found themselves having to communicate using the language and ideas of those in power rather than directly via means of their own. (Notably, the production and exchange of objects, however, while still enmeshed within complex and unequal webs of power, were areas in which the colonized were more often able to express themselves, as writers such as Thomas (1991) and Harrison (2011) have shown.) Yet, as interdisciplinary subaltern studies have demonstrated, hearing what the colonized subaltern have to say, recognizing their subjectivity and agency in the traces of the past, and writing their (rather than dominant) histories are tasks of great difficulty and intricacy. Historical records are largely written from the perspective of the elite and there are often few if any other textual, material, or even oral sources to which one can turn for the subaltern’s view. Some groups, in particular, may have undergone so many repeated displacements (conceptually if not physically), continually constructed, even in supposedly sympathetic contemporaneous texts, as belonging to others and, concomitantly, being without agency (e.g., girls and women in nineteenth-century India: see Lal 2010). Recovering any sense of those subjects’ perspectives on their experiences, and actions and impacts on their lives, is thus very difficult; nonetheless, the arduousness of the task implies neither that the influences in the webs of relationships and practices in which both colonizers and colonized were enmeshed went only in one direction, nor that the colonized had no views.
There are significant potential applications of these insights from postcolonial studies to the museum encounter. At O’Hanlon’s (1988, 199) theoretical level, the imbalance of power inherent in the encounter relationship is reinforced, but then immediately we are reminded of the need to avoid generalities and to heed the real complexities involved. Utilizing the colonial metaphor enables us to be aware of the severe difficulties in trying to “see” things from the object’s perspective and prompts us to look beyond our established sources, methods, theories, and concerns in order to seek out alternative ways of trying to understand the viewpoints of things in museums. We are also reminded that subject/object categories, connections, or distinctions can be profitable at the theoretical level but need to be avoided – in fixed and essentialist forms, at any rate – on the substantive plane, where we should focus instead on what actually happens in person–thing engagements. Furthermore, just as it is extraordinarily difficult to see things from the colonized’s perspective, so may it be almost impossible to comprehend the object’s point of view – and it will certainly remain impossible if we fail to look beyond our established sources, methods, theories, and concerns in order to seek out alternative modes of perception and cognition.
So, continuing the metaphor, as the colonized gazed back at the colonizers and formed their own opinions of them just as much as the other way around, let us suppose that this is indeed also what museum objects do. Let us imagine that they too have points of view, and that they look on the visitor just as much as she peers at them. This is not in itself an original suggestion. In encountering “startling” pieces, Knappett says, we find not only ourselves looking at them, but them looking back (2007, 136). This is the reciprocal contemplatory regard in which, as Knappett describes in commenting on Garrow and Shove’s (2007) experiment with a rock and a toothbrush, the “strange” can become “ordinary,” or vice versa. Knappett, citing Oppenheim’s Objet, Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, and Dali’s Lobster Telephone, finds in this experiment an echo of “the