26 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 3
Colonialist Anthropology at Colonial Williamsburg
Eric Gable and Richard Handler
One theme in the ongoing critique of
anthropology has been the symbiotic
relationship between colonial power and
the production of ethnographic knowledge. There
are at least three strands in this critique. First, it
has been pointed out that anthropology would in
many cases not have been possible in the absence
of colonial power and, indeed, that "the anthropological
gaze" replicated epistemologically the arrogance
of colonialism. Second, anthropologists have
been taken to task for ignoring the colonial situation
itself, focusing instead on a romanticized
image of the isolated primitive. Third, anthropologists
have even been indicted for providing administrators
with a language with which to justify
their continued control while seemingly modifying
particular policies in the direction of more enlightened
government.
Our collective professional repudiation of
colonialism has led to a significant recasting of
anthropology's subject-matter. To escape the entanglements
of our colonialist heritage, many ofus
have turned our analytic skills on colonialism
itself, and on colonial representations, rather than
on colonized subjects, anthropology's traditional
object. The museum is an excellent venue for this
sort of analysis, and recent scholarship has gone a
long way toward deconstructing the "politics and
poetics" of museum representations.1
Yet it is not
enough to deconstruct representations. It is necessary
as well to examine the politics of administrative
culture, for the work of deconstructing
museum representations occurs in the context of
those politics, not outside them. What follows,
then, is our reflection on the pitfalls of ignoringthe
third strand in the critique of colonialism--of overlooking,
that is, the ways in which one's discourse
can become a part of the Field of power that one
wishes merely to study. In our ongoing ethnographic
study of Colonial Williamsburg, one of
America's premier outdoor history museums, we
found that despite the lessons of history we were
as vulnerable to administrative cooptation as any
of our colonialist ancestors.
To begin, let us recall that to gain access to a
field site (whether colonial or postcolonial) is, almost
by definition, to set oneself up to be coopted.
The harder a field site is to get into, the more likely
is it that one's intellectual independence will be
compromised. Despite the image of open access
which museum rhetoric cultivates, we quickly
learned that these institutions could be as autocratically
closed as any Albania. In 1989, we had
decided to launch an ethnographic study of several
regional history museums, focusing on the institutional
processes through which histories are created
and disseminated to the public. We
approached curators, historians, and educators at
several institutions, most of whom were intrigued
by the possibility of ethnographic research which
might yield insights that could be useful to them
in their work. In the case of two smaller museums,
we went from enthusiastic discussions with these
middle-level museum professionals to meetings
with each institution's director, and in both cases
we were refused permission to carry out our
study.
One of these institutions, a city history museum,
was at the time building a reputation for
mounting cutting-edge social history exhibits. The
director, who had been brought to the museum
several years previously to revive a moribund and
outmoded institution, forthrightly explained the
difficulties of convincing conservative, southern
trustees to go along with exhibits that brought
progressive, critical perspectives to bear on social
history. His trustees, the director explained, liked
the new "look" that he was bringing to the museum--the
look of "a New York museum." He had
been able to use his boarďs desire to renew the
image of their institution to smuggle in, as it were,
perspectives that were not congenial to them. He
told us that one trustee, praising the museum's
well received exhibits on African-American history,
nonetheless confessed to him that he was
"niggered out," that is, that he had had enough
Black history. The director candidly told us that
anthropological researchers, talking too freely to
too many people, might upset the balance of the
institutional relationships he had to manage to
achieve his professional goals.
The second museum that refused us access was
a house museum, the home of a famous American
of an earlier era. We had already presented a
COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURG 27
paper--"Persons of Stature and the Passing Parade"--comparing
this museum and Colonial Williamsburg.
In the paper, we explained that the
house museum made distinctions between elite
visitors ("persons of stature") and common visitors
("the passing parade") while systematically hiding
what they were doing from the public. We argued
that front-line employees in the house museum
were generally dismissive of the common public
while also chafing at what from their perspective
was the arbitrary or adventitious inclusion of people
unworthy of distinction into the exalted category
of "persons of stature." Ultimately, our point
was to show that museums such as this one, which
are self-proclaimed "shrines" to American values,
face what we called "egalitarian dilemmas" in their
day-to-day interactions with visitors. These egalitarian
dilemmas boiled down to making distinctions
among a mass public while appearing not to
do so, and reaching a consensus on hierarchical
distinctions which from some perspectives seemed
arbitrary.
When we met with the director of the house
museum, he complained that our paper was ill
informed, based too much on "gossip" from "the
guides' kitchen" (i.e., employees' informal, lunchbreak
talk) and on past policies which were not
continuous with present ones. He, too, denied us
permission to carry out ethnographic research,
saying, in the end, that his institution was already
"over-assessed." We were annoyed and bewildered
by these refusals. We had, perhaps, been beguiled
by the discourse of openness--to multiple perspectives,
to democratic debate, to revisionist history,
to new ideas--that history museums had cultivated
with growing enthusiasm since the early
1970s. We had also found curators and museum
historians to be engaged in debate among themselves,
and willing to include us in the conversations.
The directors, by contrast, seemed
interested mainly in managing an image of openness
and debate rather than participating in discussions
they could not control (cf. Gable 1993). At
the time, we grumbled about their hypocrisy; but
we should have been grateful to them for revealing
to us something of the institutional politics underpinning
the exhibits and representations that are
the museum's public face.
At Colonial Williamsburg, a much larger institution
than either of the two which had turned us
down, our request met a different fate. There the
corridors of power were remote to us, but we gained
access nonetheless, due to the mediation of two
historians who were also corporate vice presidents.
After months of waiting, we learned of the favorable
outcome of a closed-door meeting in which our
proposed research had been considered. One ofour
historian-advocates reported to us that despite the
opposition of some of his colleagues on the "business
side" of the nonprofit corporation, he and his
allies had been able to use the rhetoric of museum
openness to win our case. His published account of
the matter suggests that questions of public relations
and image were central to the debate:
After considerable soul-searching, Williamsburg
agreed to be Handler's [and Gable's] Samoa, even
after a sister institution got cold feet and backed
out of [their] proposal for a two-part comparative
study. We concluded that we had more to learn
than lose from [their] observations. All the same,
I daresay that my colleagues would not have
risked potentially embarrassing "bad press" if
they had not been confident that the educational
philosophy that guides the [Colonial Williamsburg]
Foundation's work is responsible and
defensible. (Carson 1991:94)
So we began our fieldwork, grateful to our patrons
but also curious about their agenda. What
was in it for them? At the time we concocted a
Trojan Horse theory to account for the institutional
politics which might have motivated our patrons.
In this scenario, we were the ostensibly unbiased
experts whose academic authority would lend
weight to insider intellectuals'developing critique
of institutional inertia. Colonial Williamsburg, as
an insider joke had it, was a "Republican Disneyland."
The joke alludes to a salient critique leveled
at the museum by intellectuals both inside and
beyond the academy. Tb these elites, Colonial Williamsburg
is kitsch. It creates a sanitized version
of the nation's past (Gable and Handler 1994a),
long on the kind of inspirational boosterism that
some people (read Republicans) believe made our
country great, and short on the dirty truth of our
collective past. Like kitsch, like Disneyland, there
is a curious obsession with simulation--Umberto
Eco (1986) calls it hyperreality--but simulation is
squeaky clean, more congenial to conservatives
than to liberals. But most of all, Disneyland is
"inauthentic." In this critique, then, there is a neat
confluence of aesthetics, politics, and science.
Kitsch is too clean; the real thing is dirtier--literally,
but also metaphorically.
If Colonial Williamsburg could be described as
a Republican Disneyland, its leading historians,
our patrons among them, described themselves as
"Young Turks." These scholars, trained in the
1960s, were bent on remaking a moribund institution
by replacing its sanitized "silk-pants" patriotism
with the dirtier and more realistic "new social
history." According to the Young Turks, the
28 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 3
museum's conservatism had two sources: older
"front-line" employees and the business people
who staffed its bureaucracy. In this perspective,
older employees were inflexibly committed, by
training and by inclination, to the patriotic, ColdWar-era
histories the Young Turks wished to replace;
and, beyond the details of any given
historical narrative, the culture and values of
business people did not encourage critical social
thinking.
The tension between business values and educational
values was one of the first things that
struck us about the culture of Colonial Williamsburg,
where a perceived dichotomy between
the Foundation's educational and business "sides"
was frequently a topic of discussion. Colonial Williamsburg
is a medium-sized nonprofit corporation
(its annual budget is over 130 million dollars) with
an institutional infrastructure prototypical of the
postmodern culture industry. The Foundation runs
hotels, restaurants, and merchandising operations
as well as educational programs, exhibits, and
collections. Dependent upon ticket receipts from
nearly one million visitors each year, Colonial Williamsburg
administrators believe that teaching
history to a mass public is as much concerned with
"entertainment" as it is with "education" (cf.
Greenhalgh 1989). Indeed, these two terms are
constantly used by Foundation staff to discuss the
ambivalences that are created by the symbiosis of
Colonial Williamsburg's two sides. The Disneyland
metaphor captures these ambivalences. On the one
hand, Colonial Williamsburg staff are attracted to
the Disney corporation for its skill in constructing
total cultural environments and for efficiently (and
profitably) moving masses of people through them.
On the other hand, they are repelled by what they
see as Disney's crass commercialism--entertainment
with no redeeming educational value.
Colonial Williamsburg staff believe that "sound
business practices" are necessary to the accomplishment
of the museum's educational mission.
They also believe that education without entertainment
is unpalatable to the mass public and
that such a product cannot be sold in the cultural
marketplace. The problem for them is thus to find
a balance between education and entertainment
that will be sufficiently appealing to attract crowds
without degenerating into the pure commercialism
of Disneyland. Each side, business and education,
worries that the institution will be swayed too
heavily by the other side's values. Thus, for example,
the Young Turks saw the entrenched values of
business culture as a major obstacle to their attempts
to renew Colonial Williamsburg's history.
As we pursued our research, we learned that the
Foundation's historians and curators saw resistance
to their agenda emanating from the "front
line" as well as from the business side. Here it is
worth noting that front-line "interpreters"--
"guides," "host[esse]s" or "docents" in an older terminology--constitute
a crucial audience in the
process of museum education.2
At a large institution
like Colonial Williamsburg, there is an elaborate
process for the training of this personnel. In
this process, top management formulates the museum's
overall educational and historiographical
goals, staff historians and curators conduct the
research and write the histories which will underpin
the museum's public programming, and a staff
of trainers and middle-level managers translates
this research into stories and routines that frontline
personnel can in turn use to teach the visiting
public. As a consequence of this structure of historical
production, a great deal of bureaucratic
effort goes into controlling what the front line says,
that is, into making sure that the officially sanctioned
stories, and not others, are told to visitors.
But the task is in a sense impossible, for inevitably
stories change as they pass through the museum's
multilayered organization. Employees at various
administrative levels, and especially on the front
line, may reinterpret, or even resist and subvert,
the stories their superiors assign them to tell.
From the start of our research, our interactions
with our historian-patrons differed in quality from
our interactions with other museum natives,
whether front-line interpreters or business-side
managers. With professional historians we seemed
to share an intellectual outlook and values. Like
anthropologists drinking gin and tonics on the
colonial officer's verandah, when we went to dinner
with the historians we had conversations with
them rather than interviews. And although we
spent hours speculating on their professional motives,
we rarely subjected them to quite the same
anthropological technology that we turned, microphone
in hand, on both the front-line workforce
and the business-side managers.
Initially, our research focused on how Colonial
Williamsburg was constructing the past. As we
repeatedly toured the museum, we became intrigued
by the disjointed, almost surreal quality of
the stories that interpreters told visitors about the
past. Despite officially sanctioned themes and storylines,
guides'spiels never seemed to add up to a
coherent narrative. Nevertheless, as we taperecorded,
transcribed, and analyzed the fragmented
language ofmuseum-speak, we recognized
two master narratives which underpinned the
jumbled facts that formed the substance of most
tours. We called these the narrative of nostalgia
COLONIAL WILUAMSBURG 29
and the narrative of progress, which we took to be
historiographical analogues of anthropological
constructions of the primitive.
At this point in our research, we wondered to
what degree museum employees were aware of
these underlying master narratives. What we observed
was staff members repeatedly turning the
tables on visitors, substituting one narrative for
the other. In other words, visitors who desired a
bucolic Colonial Williamsburg would be pointedly
told of the squalor of the past; and, on the other
hand, visitors convinced of the superiority of the
contemporary world would be "educated" about the
cultural and even technological sophistication of
"the world we have lost." As we saw it, in this
pedagogic game the underlying narratives rarely
became a topic of overt discussion between visitors
and museum staff. Rather, staff members typically
threw out--as historical "ammunition"--seemingly
fragmentary and isolated "facts" which they
thought had the power to destroy preconceptions.
The resulting discourse was a surreal pastiche
rather than a sustained discussion.
An example of this surreal discourse was
vignettes about what we called "the invisible landscape."Atour
guide would point to the lovely shade
trees that dotted the Historic Area, and then explain
that they would "not have been there" in the
colonial period. Sometimes guides would add that
these trees had been planted in the 1930s by landscape
architects under the sway of an overly bucolic
Colonial Revival sensibility. But most of the
time, guides would simply point out the beautiful
trees and then take them away: "as you walk along
the street, you have to pretend that these trees
aren't here."
During this early stage in our research, we were
interviewed at length by a regional Associated
Press reporter. The resulting article was titled "U.
Va scientists examine quirky Williamsburg
tours." It was carried in different versions by several
Virginia newspapers, and it focused on the
questions we were raising about the provenance of
apparently insignificant details in Colonial
Williamsburg interpretations:
Quaint pieces ofhistory weaved [sic] into tours at
Colonial Williamsburg are being examined by
anthropologists searching for a better understanding
of American culture.
1. Official cobnial Williamsburg photograph of Foundation employees dressed as colonial natives,
(photo: Colonial Wiliamsburg Foundation, Williamsburg, Virginia)
30 MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY VOLUME 17 NUMBER 3
The University of Virginia scientists are looking
for significance in such things as why interpreters
at the re-created 18th century village
emphasize the number of trees on the grounds.
Or, why interpreters dwell on dininghabits ofthe
colonists, and why the kitchens were separate
from the houses.
Eric Gable is fascinated about why the interpreters
call attention to the fact that the original
village had fewer trees than the re-creation.
"Why is this little nugget ofhistory considered
so important?' Gable said. "Why is there this
obsession with trees in all the tours?". . .
"What is interesting is that these little peculiar
facts become more significant to the visitor,
rather than what a historian believes is important,"
he said. . . .
Handler and Gable said their research is less
concerned with how accurately history is portrayed
by Colonial Williamsburgas it is with why
events or customs of the time are portrayed the
way they are.
Close attention to detail is a hallmark ofColonial
Williamsburg, said Richard Rotina, a historian
at Old Dominion University.
Handler said a history book offers an interpretation
of history from one or two authors, but
Colonial Williamsburg interprets history
through a sophisticated corporate structure. The
process includes corporate administrators, historians,
educators, front-line story-tellers, and the
audience, Handler said.
Cary Carson, vice president for research at
Colonial Williamsburg, described how the process
works.
"Iťs a bit like the old parlor game when one
person whispers into the ear of another who in
turn whispers the same message to another and
so on until it gets back to the original person who
is surprised at the subtle changes in the message
as it passed through the people," Carson said.
"When one ofour historians happens by a tour,
they are often surprised by the subtle changes in
emphasis--not any inaccuracies or somethingwe
would take issue with, but an alteration of emphasis,"
he said. (Page 1990)
It is easy to see why our friends on the front line
were angered by this article. In the first place, with
its mention of "quaint pieces of history," "historical
peculiarities" and "quirkly little artifacts of history,"
it seemed to trivialize their work. Secondly,
the article opposed front-line employees to "historians,"
"anthropologists," "University of Virginia
scientists," and corporate managers. It seemed to
blame the front line for garbling and trivializing
the stories that the museum's professional staff
intended to tell, thereby turning a coherent history
into a jumble of "quirky" (albeit "accurate") facts.
The reporter's depiction of authoritative experts
questioning interpreters' use of facts seemed to the
latter to be a direct attack on their credibility and
reputation. Not surprisingly, the front line felt we
had betrayed their trust, We, in turn, felt we had
betrayed our informants, but not simply by questioning
aspects of their work in the larger project
of Colonial Williamsburg's construction of history.
More importantly, we realized that our critical
appraisal ofthe institutional representation ofhistory
had all too easily been incorporated into a vice
presidenťs mildly paternalistic critique of the inevitable
ineptitude of the corporation's front-line
employees. In other words, our innocently offered
critique of representational content had become
ammunition in an ongoing reconfirmation of a
managerial sensibility. The episode thus made us
think, with a pained reflexivity, about the politics
of our field site. We began to realize, as any anthropologist
working today should have known, that
an interpretation of the symbolism of power is also
an enactment of power. We learned that it was not
possible for us to comment, as neutral observers,
on Colonial Williamsburg's history--that our interpretations
would have political consequences
(however trivial, as in this case) within the very
"field" to which they referred.
At Colonial Williamsburg, we were initially fascinated
by an explicit war of cultural representations,
as the Young Turks struggled to make
a Republican Disneyland into a democratic dismalland.
But we lost sight of the simple fact that
dissimilar ideologies could be implemented by the
same institutional structure: ultimately, neither
conservatives nor liberals among the corporate
vice presidents were interested in challenging existing
lines of authority in the museum hierarchy.
At Colonial Williamsburg, an enlightened management
never quite succeeds in its goals because (so
it seems) its employees and the public (both of
whom are the natives, as it were) aren't quite up
to the task. As a result, management tends to do
two things. On the one hand, despite a professed
populism and commitment to egalitarian principles,
it accepts, or allows to continue, a hierarchical
and compartmentalized corporate structure
which puts distance between "professional historians"
and the "front line." On the other hand, it uses
this distance to abdicate responsibility for what
the front line does. Here, in short, we have a
colonial situation, a colonial mentality, re-created
in museum practice.
To point out the parallels between a museum
COLONIAL WILLIAMSBURQ 31
and its managers and a colony and its administrators
is obviously to criticize museums in the hope
that they might reflect on that which they take for
granted. In an earlier era, when anthropologists
ignored the realities of colonial authority their
work not only lost the power to critique that
authority, but became potentially available for
authoritarian uses. Iťs not surprising that the
same applies to a "repatriated" cultural critique
which focuses too exclusively on museum representations
of colonialism, or on colonialist representations
of the other, while overlooking the
institutional processes which produce those representations.
Until we transcend this version of a
repatriated anthropology we will be fighting a
proxy war, avoiding a critique of our own participation
in institutional power relations even as we
help to reproduce them. ˇ
Notes
1. See, for example, Ames 1986, Benson et al. 1986,
Blatti 1987, Clifford 1988, Duncan and Wallach 1978,
Fane et al. 1991, Fisher 1991, Handsman and Leone
1989, Karp et al. 1992, Karp and Lavine 1991, Leone
1981, Pearce 1990, Stocking 1985, and Vergo 1989.
2. More attention needs to be paid to the distinction
between what we might call the museum's internal
audience (that is, its front-line interpreters) and its
external audience (the visiting public). Interpreters
constitute an audience in the sense that they receive
the museum's message in training sessions which are
designed to enable them to pass that message along
to the public. But, in studying audience or visitor
response, museum researchers tend to overlook this
crucial internal audience, focusing solely on visitors.
Interpreters thus become a kind of invisible audience;
they are discussed in the literature on "training," but
not in studies devoted to audience response. See Gable
and Handler 1994b.
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Eric Gable is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at
Sweet Briar College. Richard Handler is Associate Professor of
Anthropology at the University of Virginia.