Heterotopic Dissonance in the Museum Representation of Pacific Island Cultures

Abstract

Two exhibits, the Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples at the American Museum of Natural History (1971) and Traveling the Pacific at the Field Museum of Natural History (1989), are compared. Foucault's concept of heterotopia is used to examine why, in spite of major recent changes in museum philosophy and technology, the subtexts of the two exhibits remain remarkably similar. Both confuse spatial distance with temporal flow, creating an incoherent framework of disjunctive orders.

The Geographies of Heterotopia

“…A dazzling variety of spaces have been explored as illustrations of heterotopia. Here are some examples: Arab‐Islamic architecture (Tonna ) An environmental installation (Genocchio ) The Museum of Pacific Island Culture (Kahn ) The Citadel LA – the civic centre of Los Angeles (Soja ) Gardens in Vienna (Rotenberg ) The Palais Royal, masonic lodges and early factories (Hetherington ) Vancouver's New Public Library (Lees ) A performance prototype (Birringer ) Local exchange trading schemes (North ) Women's colleges at the turn of the nineteenth century (Tamboukou ) Sites in Fascist Italy (Burdett ) Landscapes (Guarrasi ) Gated communities in South African security parks (Hook and Vrdoljak ) Buddhist Site of Swayambhu in Kathmandu Valley (Owens ) Underground band rooms in Hong Kong (Kit‐Wai Ma ) The Nineteenth century ship narrative (Casarino ) British parks in the late nineteenth century (Joyce , p. 223) Pornographic sites on the Internet (Jacobs ) The cybercafé (Liff ) The museum (Lord ) Chinatown in Washington DC (Lou ) The vampire (Davies ) Norwegian and English prisons (Baer and Ravneberg ) Patterns of disclosure among heterosexuals living with HIV (Persson and Richards ) The shopping mall (Kern ; Muzzio and Muzzio‐Rentas ) Masculinity practices along the Tel Aviv shoreline (Allweil and Kallus ) Burial sites in Kinshasa, Congo (De Boeck ) The group dynamics of a climate camp (Saunders and Price ) The public nude beach (Andriotis ) Off‐shore pirate radio station (Soffer ) The syringe and the shooting gallery (Vitellone ) Derek Jarman's garden (Steyaert ) Hospitals (Coleman and Street ) Abney Park Cemetery in London (Gandy ) The Persian Garden (Kive ) The Lunar Cemetery (Damjanov )…”

Heterotopía y capitalismo en arquitectura. La función ideológica de las heterotopías como discurso propio de la disciplina arquitectónica en la era de la gobernanza biopolítica

“…En la disciplina arquitectónica este concepto ha sido aplicado a las más diversas y variadas realidades: discotecas gays de los años 70 (Betsky, 1997), arquitectura islámica (Tonna, 1990), instalaciones medioambientales (Genocchio, 1995), el museo del Pacific Island Culture (Kahn, 1995), el centro cívico de Los Ángeles (Soja, 1995), el palacio real, las logias masónicas y las primeras fábricas (Hetherington, 1997), la nueva biblioteca pública de Vancouver (Lees, 1997), los colegios femeninos del siglo XIX (Tamboukou, 2000), la noción de paisaje (Guarrasi, 2001), los templos budistas de Swayambhu en el valle Kathmandu (Owens, 2002), las website pornográficas (Jacobs, 2004), los cibercafés (Liff, 2003), Chinatown en Washington D.C. (Lou, 2007), el centro Georges Pompidou y el museo Guggenheim de Bilbao (Shane, 2008), los Massive Open Online Courses (Willis, Lynn y Gettings, 2013) o los establecimientos de comida rápida y las oficinas de teleoperadores (Constantinou, 2014) 1 .…”

The Emergence of Heterotopia as a Heuristic Concept to Study Organization

“…), areas of visibility and accountability in which performance is measurable through technologies of monitoring (Power, 2004). That being said, many insightful recent studies have begun to move beyond this perspective, often using de Certeau (1990) and Lefebvre () to engage with the social practices of space (Cairns et al ., ; Quattrone et al ., ; Watkins, ; Zhang et al ., ; Wasserman and Frenkel, ). Acknowledging and studying heterotopias within organizations would enrich our analysis, especially because they ‘are not in opposition to organization but its very precondition’ (Kornberger and Clegg, : 86).…”

“…1 He defines them as places 'which are something like counter-sites […] absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about' (Foucault, 1986: 24). His call for a science called heterotopology has been partially answered through dozens of articles and books in disciplines as diverse as architecture, geography, and urban studies (Defert, 1997;Bonazzi, 2002;Dehaene and De Cauter, 2008;Fontana-Giusti, 2013;Johnson, 2013), as well as political science, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology (Kahn, 1995;Schinkel, 2009;Wagenaar et al, 2012;Garrett, 2012;Marlin-Bennett and Thornton, 2012). More recently, management and organization scholars have started to contribute to this already flourishing area of research (Hjorth, 2005;Spicer et al, 2009;Steyaert, 2010).…”