It is in such powerful encounters, however momentary they may be, that the object seems, in Elkins’s (1996) terms, to stare back. In literal terms, the phrase is obviously a rhetorical shorthand: we cannot say that objects gaze or have points of view in the way that we do. However, beyond the philosophical counter that, equally, we cannot say that in some sense incomprehensible to us they do not, the concept has utility. The colony’s subalterns and their historiographers found that they had to put their views and ways of knowing and acting into the vocabulary of the dominant other, the colonizers, if there were to be any hope of it being understood beyond the boundaries of their own group. Objects’ effects and influences, if their workings are to be comprehended from their position, similarly have to be rendered into an idiom we can understand (for which we could do worse than metaphor). Furthermore, the motif of the returned gaze, the two-way stare of curiosity and wonderment or disbelief, is one which readily conjures up a sense of being discomposed, bewildered, or perturbed. Even at a metaphorical level, however, some will balk at the idea of the object’s gaze or point of view as anthropomorphic and thus, ultimately, anthropocentric. To use such person-oriented language in an attempt to decenter the human subject and see how the nexus of relationships in the material world works from where the object is positioned, objectors may argue, seems, contradictorily, to bring people right back to the center because of its apparent emphasis on human processes. Yet why should it be any more anthropocentric to think of objects as having points of view than not having them, given that, for an object and, say, a museum visitor, just as for colonized and colonizer, precisely how “point of view” is characterized will differ? The colonizer who considered the colonized to have no point of view, even where the latter was not easily rendered or understood in the colonizer’s idiom, was guilty of cultural superiority and ignorance; are we perhaps also guilty, if we fail to consider person–object encounters from multiple perspectives? Prosopopoeia is the ascription of an essentially human voice to an inanimate object, animal, or dead body, and here I have effectively adopted it as a methodological tool.
There will be other objections to the application of prosopopoeia in this museum context, of course. Critique made of the personalization or humanization of objects elsewhere (e.g., Loumpet-Galitzine 2011) might also be leveled here. In her assessment (which focuses particularly on the Musée du Quai Branly), Loumpet-Galitzine identifies several objections to this process in the Musée du Quai Branly project. The first is her tracing of a trajectory within it that originates in the nonmuseological discourse of collectors and dealers and transforms anthropological insights into a different kind of narrative, which she argues “offers no new serious consideration of the peoples whose cultures are represented in the Museum. Thus constructed, the discourse is closed by its own dialectics” (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 153). Second, she argues that the museum’s exhibitions’ use of “humanized” objects does not aestheticize the artifacts’ producers or the other more generally, but rather transfers “human qualities to the object,” in so doing making it embody “the humanity of the Other” and depersonalize “the real human being in its favour” (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 154). I do not disagree that this particular museum appears to offer or indeed enable few new considerations, but it is unfortunate that the implication here is that such innovations, even in the case of ethnographic objects, might only be both provided and derived from anthropologists and curators. What of any new assessments that might form in the mind of museum visitors, including those from the immigrant communities to whom Loumpet-Galitzine understandably turns in other ways in her discussion? Of course, any of these sorts of new considerations of displayed objects and the peoples associated with them would be shaped dynamically and unpredictably in the course of the moments of object–person interaction on which I have focused in this chapter; moreover, they would most likely be ephemeral and may well be ambivalent and problematic in various factual, sensual, and possibly ethical ways (see below). They would not have the interpretive authority and weight, or documentation and publication, of the expert, research-based insights of anthropologists or museum representations. But does that mean that the moments in which object and visitor seem to connect, and the powerful affective responses that can result, are unimportant? Certainly museums need to avoid giving inappropriate impressions, such as the evolutionist sense that the objects being viewed are “primitive” even if the societies whence they originate are no longer thus (Loumpet-Galitzine 2011, 154), or the idea that there is only one meaning applicable to an artifact (and the Musée du Quai Branly, for example, has been criticized for doing both; e.g., Clifford 2007; Price 2007; Loumpet-Galitzine 2011). Rather, opening up immediate, and multiple, interactions with objects as far as possible empowers both visitor and object alike. In conceptualizing such engagements, prosopopoeia has its applicability as the attribution to objects of a point of view: metaphorical, but nonetheless a technique for trying to see things from the inside, a potent reversal of perspective (Holmes [1985] 2005) to take forward our understandings of the effects and potentials of objects.
Seeing no perspective other than the meaning-filled, human-centered one whence we see the world perpetuates the distancing of the other – cultural, temporal, material – embodied in and represented by the objects on which we gaze. This distancing is also achieved through the “cultural bias towards vision” (Fabian 1983, 106). Sight clearly dominates both the technology of the museum display and the metaphor of the two-way colonial gaze; nonetheless, “gaze” here operates as a complex, and in practice multisensorial, set of processes. In a material world in which people, themselves physical three-dimensional entities, interact with things, the importance of our bodily performances and memories of the handling and performativity of objects in situations where handling has been possible, are still important in museum engagements where it is not. We combine such remembered and imagined sensations with what we can see of the material qualities of the thing before us. Gazing at a picture hanging on a gallery wall or at a carved wooden bowl in a glass display case, attention momentarily held by the material form, colors, composition, scale, and impact of what I see, my eyes also taking in information that allows me to intuit texture, density, weight, and thickness, I simultaneously objectify the thing before me and am vulnerable to it and its effects on me. Its impacts on my sensibilities are real – if it were not there or if it were something else, my responses would be different. No matter what the influence of my own preconceptions and background, it too has both individuality and effect. These effects will indeed be strongly filtered by my own characteristics – the lens through which I see – but I alone do not determine what happens in that encounter; the object’s characteristics too are fundamental to the outcome. The object’s materiality and my sensibility, then, together can create powerful, albeit culturally, historically, and personally constituted, effects.
These effects can work against the distancing between the visitor and the other represented by and embodied in museum objects, through powerful moments of connection, empathy, and recognition. However, they can also, especially when powerful responses are negative ones, work to enhance the sense of distance. This potentiality of the object and the museum encounter thus raises ethical dimensions too. Is it, for example, appropriate to facilitate the possibility of unencumbered, powerful, moving encounters with objects if the visitor’s interior reflections, which may later become externalized into voiced opinions or even actions, are factually wrong, politically unacceptable, or morally reprehensible? Indeed, more often the museum may be seeking not to bring about these sorts of encounters at all but instead to inform people, only to find that visitors’ responses to the objects and apparent misreadings of the exhibition undo all the effort put into the interpretation. Bouttiaux, for example, writing of her curation of Persona, an exhibition of Côte d’Ivoire Guro region masks at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium) in 2009, described her concern and techniques to convey both that objects used in the past are still functioning in daily and ritual life today and that the cultures whence those objects come are