Appropriation of Local Culture in Museum Practices

• Museum practices


  Deals with displays of "everyday life" that represent notions of local culture
• Museums


  • Sites of identity of an imagined nation
  • Spaces where the discourse of an authentic culture through exhibits of everyday life is transformed into displayed life
• Globality is encroaching in a nation's political, economic, social, and cultural agenda
• Representation and identity construction

  Problematic issues of Philippine communities grappling with modernity
• There are dangers of museums presenting an exotic gaze on othered ethnicities and communities for urban consumption
• Community museums


  Alternative to the traditional museum practice
• Critical collaboration


  Working with various local governments hoping for the possibility to instill societal change from within the much maligned political structure of the Philippines
• Museums


  • Communicate to a disparate audience or communities forging artifactual or artificial experience of homogeneity
  • Spaces where social tensions are ironed out and made sensible
• Civil society


  • The crucible in which citizenship is forged more than a mosaic of communities and institutions
  • A stage, an arena in which values are asserted and attempts at legitimation made and contested
• Museums


  • Important elements in civil society that articulate social ideas
  • Define relations with communities whether they intend or not
  • Construct central and peripheral identities because of particular narrations, of aesthetic privileging and political economic interests
  • Play a major role in expressing, understanding, developing, and preserving the objects, values, and knowledge that civil society values
  • Spaces for defining who people are, how they should act, and as a place for challenging outdated and oppressive representations
• Stranger mentality


  The absence of community and solidarity
• Authenticity


  • The core issue that sustains old museum practice
  • A perspective that there are truth claims on cultural ethnicities that are factual and unchanging over time
  • An emotional issue because collective identity, territoriality, and historical claims are involved
• Power and authority


  The discourse on authenticity always revolves around
• Misrepresentation and marginalization


  The discourse on authenticity always revolves around
• Material culture and cultural heritage

  Objects have no authority, people do. We ascribe meanings to objects and then we label them as
• Silences in the collection

  Objects which were rejected by an elite collector
• Exotizing eye


  The "Filipino" as the European's "other"
• How to overcome the colonial trap if one is to embark on an alternative museum practice

  1. Reorient the museum practice that place more importance on people and their capacity to interpret and create contemporary meanings, rather than collect "objects" that stereotypically give image to an indigenous "Filipino-ness"

  2. Indigenous communities would not see the importance of displaying the objects that represent their everyday life if that culture is still lived and experienced in their community

  3. Urban audiences experience the systematic loss of identity brought by colonization and globalization has more need for appropriated life experiences to create a sense of nation authenticated by ethnicity
• Birth of National Museums


  • Follows the same pattern of the story of Noah in the Bible (where he saved as many living things as he could in his famous ark, and felt the need to classify and organize God's creations for a promised future)
  • Felt the need to collect so that the past is brought to the present
  • The impetus to organize and classify so that collections become meaningful
  • Language of display - how does one exhibit collections for a diverse public that would be cohesive and representational of interests of the state and its people
• Objects from everyday life

  Imagined to be saved from the deluge of time, natural catastrophes, and social upheaval to serve as a stable past for a continuously changing present
• Chosen sites of national museums

  Symbolic of the cultural claims of the economic and political centers of the nation
• The concept of the National museum

  A claim to civilization so that more than the objects, the context of viewing and its attendant atmosphere are as important
• The concept and collection of the Philippine National Museum started

  Later End of the 19th century (under Spanish colonialism)
• The Philippine National Museum has experienced a tumultuous history during the American rule, World War II bombings, and loss of important artifacts to influential museums abroad
• The museum was rehabilitated and was transferred to the "Finance Building" (constructed in the American occupation)


  Last Decade of the 19th Century
• The Philippine National Museum


  • Aspires to be the "The Museum of the Filipino People"
  • Method of display has been modernized to include interactive programs, and archeological, ethnographic, and thematic displays
• There is a strong awareness of the diversity of the ethnicities that forms that nation but mostly silent in Muslim identity and their sense of history fighting the colonizers and continuing oppression
• Reasons why it is difficult to persuade people to visit museums

  • There is still no felt need to view a displayed life that is still played out in everyday social life
  • Philippines urban culture has not rapidly changed the everyday landscape where traditions are still played out meaningfully with social change
• Katutubong bayan/Sining Bayan


  Discourse on folk art with its own aesthetics based on environmental and social context
• Traditional folk crafts


  Shaped by the diverse Philippine landscapes that are seen as bastions of ethnicity, honesty, and purity
• Former Museum of Philippine Ethnography (in the Nayong Pilipino Park)


  • Dealt with displays of everyday life and objects such as textiles and farming implements mainly from the indigenous groups of the Northern Luzon and Southern Mindanao
  • The display underscores the cultural context of the textiles but the orientation is mainly visual and discourages interaction
• Tourist art


  Souvenir folk art items
• The touted representations of the Philippine village as an open museum loses much of its credibility when the attitudinal concerns of guides or docents are mainly economic
• Docent


  A person who acts as a guide, typically on a voluntary basis, in a museum, art gallery, or zoo
• Diwa: Buhay at Ritual/Museo ng Kalinangang Pilipino


  • A thematic exhibition on life ways housed in a small gallery at the Cultural Center of the Philippines
  • The main problem here is the accessibility to the public and the symbolic meaning still associated with CCP (misplaced as a Marcosian creation)
• Situ (context) display


  Using mannequins giving approximations of how people have lived and still live today
• Exoticism


  Faraway static communities untouched by modernity (excerpt for the Converse shoes worn by the male mannequin of the araquio tableaux at CCP)
• Narrative of loss of innocence, loss of purity, and loss of meaning for the benefit of an urban-based audience


  The contemporariness of culture and its plausible emergence (subsumed as unchanging coming from the past)
• Indigenous communities have been exploited before in International Expositions at the turn of the 20th century when they were shipped to the US to perform, live as display objects in the middle of a winter (many died, forgotten and lost in historical memory)
• Gawad Manlilikha ng Bayan (National Living Human Treasures)


  • One of the awards given from the state to traditional artists in weaving, pottery, basketry, music, and performance as an attempt to correct the sins of the past and promote traditional art as high art
  • Alongside the award is the responsibility to create "Centers for Living Tradition" where indigenous knowledge can be taught and transmitted