Joshua A. Bell, an anthropologist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., told cultural heritage preservation professionals and graduate students that those in institutions that collect objects have obligations to not only to the objects but also to the societies in which the objects originated. Bell made the remarks as a panelist at an April 10, 2010 conference hosted by the Cultural Heritage and Preservation Studies program of the Rutgers University School of Arts and Sciences at the University’s New Brunswick, New Jersey campus.
The conference was called “Cultural Heritage Now: Prospects, Directions, Futures – a Public Conversation.” Along with a keynote address by National Endowment for the Humanities chairman James A. Leach and assessments of the field of cultural preservation by various experts, the conference offered presentations on “Emerging Topics” by museum representatives, including Bell.
Preserving Dying Languages and Cultural Heritage
Bell, curator of globalization at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, framed his remarks with a description of the aims of "Recovering Voices: Partnerships on Endangered Languages and Knowledge Systems," which is a recent multidisciplinary initiative of the Museum of Natural History, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Center for Folk Life and Cultural Heritage. Recovering Voices seeks both to encourage collaborative research – including with indigenous communities worldwide – in the documentation and prevention of language endangerment and loss of knowledge and to raise public awareness of the problems associated with this threat. Bell explained that, in simple terms, a language is "endangered" when it is not spoken currently by children.
As noted by Bell and documented by Sorosoro, an organization dedicated to preserving linguistic diversity, there are approximately 6,000 spoken languages at present, and about 96 percent of these are spoken by just 4 percent of the world’s population. It is estimated that a language disappears every other week. The Sorosoro Web site reports that, at current estimated rates, more than half of existing languages will disappear by the end of this century.
Bell emphasized the importance of understanding that the disappearance of a language also means the disappearance of an essential component of a culture. He told the audience that too often in language studies “language is divorced from the kind of non-verbal knowledge we all know as well as from social practices.”
As explained by Bell, the Recovering Voices initiative is trying to combine “the spoken and the unspoken” to explore “in a respectful manner the kind of human creativity issues that are in collections and outside collections.”
One way to do that is through the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in 2013, which will deal with endangered languages. As described by its Web site, the Folklife Festival is an annual international exposition of living cultural heritage presented by the Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage. The festival is free and takes place outdoors on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. It typically attracts more than one million visitors each year. (In 2010, the festival takes place June 24-28 and July 1-5.)
In addition to the temporary exhibits planned for the 2013 Folklife Festival, Bell told the audience about discussions at the Smithsonian about a permanent exhibit on human creativity, language, and other forms of human expression.
“With 25 million visitors a year, we’re hoping this will be a platform to argue why these things matter,” Bell said.
Smithsonian Archival Material for Language Validation
Bell also stated that the Museum of Natural History is working with the National Anthropological Archives to “make sense of the 9,000 plus linear feet of manuscripts” in their collections. These include a million pages of grammars, vocabularies, narratives, and other writings.
Bell said that the Smithsonian wants to reach out to various communities that have language validation efforts and make them aware of the archival materials that are available to them.
Moreover, Bell described efforts to “to break down the cultural-natural world divide that too often North Americans put up.” To that end, the Anthropology Department at the Museum of Natural History is working with its natural history colleagues and indigenous communities “to understand what sorts of relationships appear in objects that are a mixture of materials and what are the meanings behind them,” Bell said.
He added that the issues raised by these efforts include:
- what is cultural property and whose is it
- what is appropriate and inappropriate to include in the Smithsonian database
- where heritage begins and ends
- what forms knowledge takes and how it travels
Smithsonian Faces its Past Cultural Insensitivity
In keeping with his theme that museums and other institutions that collect objects bear certain responsibilities, Bell told the audience that the Smithsonian is coming to grips with its past indiscretions toward indigenous communities. As an example, he referenced the description by another conference panelist, Suzan Shown Harjo, of a practice in which the skulls of Native Americans were removed from corpses and sent to Washington and elsewhere for study and collection. The Smithsonian was complicit in this practice.
“The Smithsonian has had a very long and at times tragic and contentious history with indigenous communities,” said Bell, adding, “This is something that we are all aware of in the Anthropology Department.” Through the Recovering Voices initiative, the Smithsonian is “trying to acknowledge these painful histories” and use its vast collections “to help these communities in a way that is mutually beneficial,” Bell said.
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