Creating national and global citizens

What role can museums play?

Peggy Levitt

A world on the move

You only have to walk down the street in any immigrant neighbourhood — Washington Heights in New York City, Kreuzberg in Berlin, or the Bijlmer in Amsterdam — to realize that big changes are underfoot. No doubt many of the businesses you pass will have to do with migrants' homelands, be they travel agencies; ethnic shops selling sorely missed fruit and veg, phonecards, and DVDs; or shops where people can transfer money to relatives back home. This is because more and more people continue to vote, pray, and invest in businesses in the places they come from at the same time as they buy homes, open shops, and join parent–teacher associations in the countries where they settle. Putting down roots in your adoptive homeland while continuing to remain active in the economy and politics of the country of your birth is not just for poor or working-class migrants. Think of the many highly educated, highly skilled professionals that populate the boardrooms and bedrooms of the world's cities and suburbs. Increasingly, they too buy homes, raise their children, vote, and invest across borders.

As a matter of fact, one out of every seven people in the world today is a migrant and these individuals send a great deal of money back home. According to World Bank projections, international migrants were expected to remit more than $550 billion in earnings in 2013, $414 billion of it to developing countries. In twenty-four countries, remittances were equal to more than 10 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP) in 2011; in nine countries they were equal to more than 20 per cent of GDP. In countries such as Mexico or Morocco, these contributions are one of the principal sources of foreign currency, and governments — now dependent on remittances — want to make sure the money keeps flowing. Migrants are also a tremendous source of ideas, know-how, and skills, and some governments try to systematically harvest these social remittances as well (Levitt 2001). To keep migrants close, they offer tax and investment incentives, allow dual citizenship and encourage expatriates to vote, or even create special passport queues at airports for 'returning' emigrants. To keep money coming, they put programmes in place to boost migrants' contributions to development.

These high levels of movement have created what some call 'superdiverse' cities, a term first coined to capture changing migration patterns in Europe (Vertovec 2012; Wessendorf 2013). Initially, most migrants hailed from a relatively small group of countries (the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean in the case of Britain) and shared a religion and language. Over the past decades, however, the large numbers of asylum seekers, international students, and labour and professional migrants moving to the continent came from a much wider range of places, faiths, and language groups, and had very different immigration statuses. A metropolis such as London has residents from as many as 184 nationalities, with 300 first languages spoken in state-run schools (Spencer 2012). How people answer the question 'Who are you?' is complicated. They say 'I'm Jamaican and American' or 'I'm Anglo-Indian' at the same time as they say they are Londoners or New Yorkers. They may announce that they are Muslim, or a professor, or an environmentalist, thereby staking claim to a place by virtue of their sense of membership in a religious, professional, or activist tribe.

For migrants with the requisite language skills, education, and social and cultural capital, living in multiple worlds can produce tremendous rewards. Many low-skilled migrants, without languages and with little education, are forced to move because they cannot gain a secure economic foothold, whether in the country they left or where they are trying to settle. Either way, today's migrants are moving in a world of economic crisis, neoliberal restructuring, precarious jobs, and major cutbacks in social welfare.

These dynamics challenge the basic assumptions about how and where inequality is produced, family life is lived, and the rights and responsibilities of citizenship actually get exercised. New social safety nets are needed to respond to greater mobility and the multiple allegiances people embrace, based on a different set of assumptions about how livelihoods and social security should be organized, and who the winners and losers should be. But first, we need a different vocabulary that allows us to articulate a different understanding of the nation that does not necessarily stop at its geographic borders (see also Maja Povrzanovic Frykman's contribution elsewhere in this volume). We need new ways of understanding identities that are not based on a zero-sum game — that ever more people will identify with several groups at once, their relative importance changing over time. We need new tools that help instil the willingness and skills to engage with difference across the world and across the street.

That is where museums come in. They are one of many messy arenas where these aspirations, skills, and political projects can take shape and where we might make sense of the relationship between people and culture on the move (Karp & Kraemer 1992; Kratz 2011; Macdonald 2003). Museums, in the past, helped create national citizens, so my question is, in today's global world, are they creating global citizens too? How and when are they helping create successful, diverse communities by inspiring an openness to difference across the world and next door? What is it about particular cities that helps explain the answer? What do we learn about nationalism by looking at a country's cultural institutions?

To see how this happens, if at all, I visited a variety of museums around the world, including museums of art, ethnography, and cultural history, and constituency or community museums dedicated to the experiences of particular groups. What I found, as described in my recent book Artifacts and Allegiances: How Museums Put the Nation and the World on Display (2015), is based on 183 first-hand conversations with museum directors, curators, and policymakers, their descriptions of current and future exhibits, and their inside stories about the paintings, iconic objects, and sometimes quirky benefactors who define their collections. My study is about what they think they are doing, not what they actually achieve. In other words, it is not an evaluation or an audience reception study.

I compare three sets of countries at different stages in the arc of their nation-building and world-claiming projects. In Europe, I focus on Copenhagen, Gothenburg, and Stockholm, former bastions of tolerance that have become, to varying degrees, hotbeds of anti-immigrant sentiment, located in countries that are long past their imperial moment. In the US, which some would argue still leads the world, while others would see as in a period of decline, I compare museums in supposedly parochial Boston with their counterparts in the so-called centre of the cultural universe, New York. I then ask if museums in Singapore and Doha, which both use museums to create national citizens and stake a claim to a more prominent regional if not global role, create Asian or Arab global citizens. How does the tension between globalism and nationalism play out outside the West? Taken together, these accounts tell a fascinating story of a sea change underway in the museum world at large, and about how the local and the global come together in different cities and nations.

First I ought to explain what I mean by cosmopolitanism. My study treated it as an empirical question — in other words, I did not assume that cosmopolitanism played a role in the working lives of the museum professionals I spoke with, but rather I asked if it did and, if so, what it meant to them. It turned out that cosmopolitanism has three parts. It can be ideas and values. It can be skills and practices. And it can be the cosmopolitics or political projects that would have to be in place if we were to create a more cosmopolitan world. These three parts did not necessarily come together (Saito 2011).

What, then, are cosmopolitan ideas and skills? Things such as tolerance, critical thinking, listening, curiosity, empathy, reflexivity, and an interest in and willingness to engage with different people and experiences. Sometimes curators mentioned human rights, gender equality, democracy, and the like, but these were clearly problematic in Doha and Singapore. Respondents mentioned cosmopolitan projects much less frequently. They were also much more difficult to agree on. At the end of the day, cosmopolitanism boiled down to being willing and able to participate in a conversation about what our common ground might be. It was recognizing the need for such a dialogue between diverse conversation partners who had the inclination and skills to help move it forward.

Museums and nation-building

Some of the world's greatest museums and some of the world's most powerful nations came of age at approximately the same time. Universal survey museums, although representing the world, also played an important role in transmitting the nation's most revered beliefs and values. To grow strong, a country had to perform well enough so that complete strangers would recognize and claim the knowledge and rituals on display as their own. What got included in a museum's collection and who created it sent clear messages about which groups belonged and what the nation valued. But connection and belonging generally stopped at national borders. Because the nation was defined in opposition to other nations and ethnic groups, people who were out of place — such as immigrants or non-Christians — were not likely to find themselves represented, or, if they were, not without deep biases (see Duncan & Wallach 2004; Macdonald 2011; Preziosi & Farago 2004).

Although clearly important, not everything on display was 'of the nation'. By displaying artefacts from other lands, countries demonstrated their ability to collect and control the world outside their borders. As new ways of understanding and classifying took hold, driven by the emerging disciplines of anthropology and sociology, curators regrouped what had been taxomical displays into evolutionary sequences according to geology and history. The nation occupied the highest rung of the evolutionary ladder, and the people who followed behind needed colonizing, civilizing, and Christianizing. Many museums, therefore, not only created nations but justified their imperialist projects.

Whether they were opening up a former royal collection to create a more unified national public or putting work from regions of the world not seen before on display, museums were never entirely egalitarian projects. They exposed visitors to a certain kind of knowledge based on a certain set of values. The ordering and reordering of objects and their position in relation to one another legitimized particular social and political hierarchies, privileging some ways of knowing while excluding others. Culture and identity could be represented as simple, factual, and real. The trained visitor arrived ready to exercise a particular kind of gaze and to be exposed to a specific kind of objective truth, communicated to them through what Corinne Kratz (2011) calls 'rhetorics of value'— exhibit designs, texts, and lighting that focus visitors' attention and appreciation in specific ways. This 'exhibitionary complex,' to use Tony Bennett's term (1994), makes the things inside museums seem more special, and transforms the museum experience into a model for experiencing the world outside its doors.

These hierarchies stubbornly persist. They are reflected today in the distribution of what museum curators jokingly refer to as 'real estate'. How the square footage in a museum is carved up sends clear signals about what its priorities are. As Kim Benzel, Associate Curator of Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, told me, 'If you come here [the Met] just cold, you come in, there is now a fabulously grand spread of Greek and Roman to your left and an enormous spread of vast and grand Egyptian to your right and then up the stairs is European paintings. Since time immemorial that has been the 'holy of holies' of many Western institutions. You have to really look if you want to find Africa or Latin America.'

Even museum architecture reflects these assumptions. Think of the grand staircases we ascend to enter some of the world's great museums (before accessibility laws encouraged their redesign). The polished stone makes visitors feel as if they are entering a temple of wisdom. Think of the museums' elegant, high-ceilinged entrance halls: the symbolic messages of Western superiority and triumphant progress are embedded in the blueprints. Most visitors are so well socialized into these ideas and ways of behaving, they barely notice when and how they are expressed.

As a result, some critics, such as the anthropologist Ghassan Hage (2000), see museums as beyond salvation. They are simply too flawed to right their historical wrongs. It would be impossible to overcome their Western-centric biases because they display difference too self-referentially and expect too much credit in return. Because museums are elite institutions, the critique continues, only the upper class feels welcome. Rather than being a catalyst for change, they merely reproduce social boundaries and privilege.

A second view dismisses these critiques. Writing in response to people who see museum installations as always 'ideologically motivated and strategically determined', James Cuno (2011), now President and CEO of the J. P. Getty Trust, asks readers if they really experience museums in this manner. 'Do you walk through the galleries of your local museum and feel controlled in any significant way? Do you feel manipulated by a higher power?' He believes that museums still matter and that 'enlightenment principles still apply.' For people like Cuno, museums do not create citizens, be they national or global. They collect, classify, and present facts, calling into question unverified truths and opposing prejudice and superstition for the betterment of humankind. The former Metropolitan Museum Director Philippe de Montebello also declared museums to be unsuitable places for social activism. Museum visitors are not looking for more of what they encounter in their daily lives, but 'something different, conceivably uplifting'.

A third view, held by many of the museum professionals profiled here, is that museums can and must reinvent themselves into viable and socially relevant institutions for the twenty-first century. They know they are still primarily the stomping grounds of people with money in their wallets and degrees on their walls. But they also recognize the tremendous power museums wield in shaping public opinion, even influencing people who never walk through their doors. They believe that museums can and should encourage empathy, curiosity, tolerance, creativity, and critical thinking — in essence, cosmopolitan competencies — that will help them engage with the new immigrant down the street and her family members across the globe. Whether museums consciously or willingly accept this role, they necessarily star in the national performance and in shaping how the nation understands its position in the world.

The cosmopolitan nationalism continuum

No museum I visited told an entirely national or global story. Instead, the nation always reared its head in depictions of the cosmopolitan, and cosmopolitanism always came with something of the national. Rather than seeing these as competing, I think of cultural institutions as being somewhere along a continuum of cosmopolitan nationalism, whose two constantly changing parts mutually inform and transform each other.

The differences I discovered in how institutions do 'nationalism' and 'globalism' have a great deal to do with their histories. Museums are constrained by the limits of their collections and their curators' fields of expertise. They cannot do more than their showcases, storerooms, and bookshelves permit or what they are able to borrow. It also has to do with whether they are publicly or privately funded — the extent to which they are one of several tools that government uses to pursue social goals, or whether they are primarily answerable to donors and visitors whose race, ethnicity, and class change over time. It has to do with scope, whether they began life as museums of art, created to preserve and display humanity's greatest treasures, or museums of artefacts, which were either collected and displayed to preserve national traditions or to teach visitors about worlds beyond their own. There is also often an organizational distribution of labour within cities whereby, implicitly or explicitly, each institution has its role. A city or constituency museum is charged with displaying diversity, while a national museum puts what the nation has in common on display.