| Author keywords |
exhibition mediation;First Nations;icons;life;religion;touch |
| Abstract |
Citing things from Native American, Native Hawaiian, Christian Orthodox, and Roman Catholic communities, this chapter asks what it might be for things to have life. Although they exclude human-made and many naturally occurring things, even hegemonic Western notions of life in biological terms are unsettled. The distinction between what is natural and what is artificial has only local efficacy, and even then it is equivocal. The chapter discusses what the places in museums might be of things with life, in some sense, including the sacred. Focusing on the power of touch, it argues that exhibition mediation, whether in museums or elsewhere, can do much to inhibit or to encourage specific forms of attention – devotional, aesthetic, historical – selectively, though mediation can never entirely expunge a sense of life where it exists. Further, museum mediation does not only take place in exhibition galleries. It occurs just as importantly in storage areas, laboratories, study rooms, and, in some instances, in rooms set aside for devotion. For things to have life, then, implies variable worlds in which that quality – life – itself varies. |
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