Ethnographic Museums

In this essay, I will argue that ethnographic museums privilege viewing, at the expense of other senses. I will further argue that by privileging the visual, ethnographic museums become problematic in two ways- firstly, by not accurately representing the cultures they are supposed to be exhibiting, and secondly, by limiting the experience of museum-goers who may be visually impaired or otherwise unable to visit museums that are purely mono-sensorial. After outlining and discussing the problems associated with ocularcentric post-colonial museums, I will offer a few solutions to these problems.
The majority of colonial museums privileged viewing and the visual. In the 17th and 18th century, Europeans believed reason and sensuality to be opposing
A method of critiquing colonial dominance within museums, is critical museology. Shelley Butler uses critical museology to argue against a colonial politics of domination in museums. Butler argues that colonial museums were both ‘silent, and silencing’ (Butler, 2000, p.76). Colonial museums were silencing as they subjected the artefacts to a Western gaze, only artefacts deemed visual interesting were to be shown. The lack of contextualisation of these artefacts meant that they became art for viewing, not for understanding. Svetlana Alpers creates a theory for the lack of contextualisation, naming it the ‘museum-effect’. The museum-effect is ‘the tendency to isolate something from its world, to offer it up for attentive looking and thus to transform it into art’ (Alpers, 1991, p.27). By privileging viewing the object in this way, colonial museums began to enforce the idea of the museum as a space for seeing, or, ‘a space of the 'do not touch’.’ (Hetherington, 2000, p.451). Not only has the idea of the museum as a space in which touch is disallowed been carried through to post-colonial museums, so too has the museum
While there may be the odd few museums that proactively attempt to create multi-sensorial exhibits, the majority still prioritise the visual. Prioritisation of the visual was not always the case in ethnographic museums. In the 17th and 18th century, solely viewing an object was considered to be a superficial method of apprehending the object. Then, as I previously outlined in the introduction, Europeans began to view touch as a lower sense associated with the ‘lower’ races. As time went on, sight became the only appropriate sense for such a civilised space as a museum. Touch was now a sign of lack of civilisation, and furthermore touch damaged artefacts. 
Potential damage to artefacts is now typically the main premise for disallowing touch in post-colonial ethnographic museums. Museums expect the people entering the exhibit to want to look and visually appreciate the artefacts, the idea that people may want to engage with other senses is neither considered, nor