It started, as post-colonial museum challenges often do, with an artist, who is also a Canadian university professor and a Hindu. He sees bronze sculptures from India in the museum collections as “trapped” in their cases, following a tendency of some people to see museums as high-end prisons. Prisons were, after all, also once visited as spectacles by the privileged and well educated, just like museums.

Hindus regard these sculptures as receptacles or vessels of divine power and objects that sometimes take on the presence of the deities they represent. There is consequently, for some, an uncomfortable distance between the sculpture, undressed, isolated, and subject to a dispassionate aesthetic gaze, as in a museum, and the sculpture, dressed, bejewelled and garlanded, subject to a worshipful and reciprocal gaze, as in a temple.

Niranjan Rajah, the artist, and Karen Duffek, the Border Zones curator, invited a Hindu priest to the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) to discuss whether a sculpture could be reactivated or re-sanctified for worship. The chosen sculpture was a bronze image of the Hindu god Vishnu. Prabakar Visvanath, a priest who leads a Hindu temple in the suburbs of Vancouver, confirmed that this was possible with the appropriate ritual, one called an “abishekam.” The curators wanted to film this process, footage that would be shown as a kind of installation work in the Border Zones exhibition.

It is important to acknowledge a few of the challenges posed by such a project. The first is in conservation. “Posterity” has always been a justification for the long-term costs of maintaining the vast collections of museums. The preservation of objects that would deteriorate and disappear in everyday use is a very special responsibility. The benefits of this mission consider future generations and long-term rather than short-term goals, in which a museum’s mandate is to preserve material culture.

This project involves suspending some central rules of conservation. These include some fairly heavy touching of the artifact, because it has to be dressed, bejewelled and garlanded with flowers as part of its revival and worship. The worship includes burning incense or camphor and offering food, flowers, and fruit to the God, all of which poses challenges to museum regulations. It may also include exposing the artifact to climate conditions outside the temperature controlled museum environment. This is after all, a processional image, fitted with lugs and rings so that it can be periodically taken out in a festive procession.

Most challenging of all is the necessity, during the revitalization ritual, of bathing the icon in a succession of liquids. Imagine telling conservators you work with that you were planning to pour over the head of your artifact water, then milk, then oil, then honey, then yogurt, then fruit salad. No wait, maybe it’s best not to mention the fruit salad at all.

The classic push-pull between conservators and the curator is one of the creative tensions of museum work. The introduction of ritual almost always exaggerates this tension, often unhinging it from the usual zone of contention, not to mention traditional mandate and legal responsibilities.

The second challenge has to do with sanctity. Because religion is one of the drivers of distinctive material culture, ethnological museums are full of objects that were once sacred to someone, objects that once embodied, contained, or were charged with sacred power. Part of the viability of museum representation has been the capacity to distance sacred objects from their active contexts, through time and space, and to treat them as symbols or illustrations of power, rather than objects of power themselves.

The prospect of re-sanctifying all or even a good number of objects in a museum collection is daunting, and for some, even opening that door is impractical. In the case of the Hindu sculpture, some would say that the revitalization would oblige the museum to maintain a regular program of worship. A museum is not a temple, nor are curators priests, despite the origins of the terms. But is the museum, as it moves into closer cooperation with the communities whose cultural traditions it represents, really so immune to the sacred?

At the Canadian Museum of Civilization where I work, we have for years arranged religious specialists from First Nations to periodically bless and “feed” particular objects in storage that they feel need such attention. We also have a fully consecrated orthodox Catholic church in our History Hall, where weddings or other ceremonies have been performed. At MOA, masks from the collection have been loaned to First Nations so that they can be used in dance ceremonies hundreds of miles away. And MOA also successfully built a small mosque in the museum at which prayers were conducted during a temporary exhibition. It is important to acknowledge that these are examples of how far it is possible to extend collaboration with communities, rather than some new program that would replace all the traditional functions of the institution.

New curatorial approaches view artifacts not as static relics to be collected, catalogued and preserved, but also as repositories of meanings within dynamic cultures whose stories and values change over time. The receptacles, the paraphernalia, the practitioners, and the devout are all at the door. What happens when Vishnu comes to call?

Stephen Inglis is an anthropologist who has specialized in artists and their communities in South Asia, and has also worked extensively on folk art and craft traditions in Canada. For more than twenty years he directed research at the Canadian Museum of Civilization as Chief of Folklore, Director of Research, and Director-General of Research and Collections. He is now an Adjunct Professor of Art History at Carleton University.

Photo #1, MOA Collections Photograph
Photo #2 and #3 by Gerald Lawson, 14 October 2009.