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Paper short abstract:

Examining the possibilities of storage drawers that can be opened by visitors, this paper focuses on the Pitt Rivers Museum to explore whether or not the non-visual senses and active, corporeal encounter with objects may enhance visitors’ cross-cultural understandings in the ethnographic museum.

Paper long abstract:

Much current museum theory and practice emphasizes the importance of story-telling and the inclusion of multiple perspectives in richly layered museum interpretations, with a key objective being the elicitation of empathy for the lives and personal interactions of people in other times and places. Yet in the process museum objects themselves can often appear to recede in significance, appearing as little more than illustrations rather than the complex, material entities they actually are. Increasingly, a strand within both museums and academe is speaking up for objects and the powerful effects they may be said to have. This paper explores the power of objects in the setting of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. Visitors can open glass-topped drawers underneath a number of the display cases and find themselves gazing on artefacts in storage: some with museum labels visible and legible, others not. This experience of the objects is actively performed and, while objects cannot be removed for handling, facilitates their imagined, non-visual exploration. It is a variously pleasing, alienating, surprising or reassuring encounter that may, the paper argues, through its disjunctures ultimately enhance cross-cultural understanding by provoking deeper, sometimes empathic and sometimes troubling, corporeal experiences.