MCLC: Save the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (1)

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Save the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities (1)
Nice to see that there is some concern for what happens to Asia museums and collections in faraway Sweden.
I was director of the MFEA for five years (2000-2005), so here are a few comments for anyone it may concern.
The new campaign to save the MFEA runs the risk of appearing somewhat narrow-minded, since there are two other Stockholm museums that will also be disrupted, in major ways, if the current small-minded proposals from the Swedish government are realized. These museums, the Mediterranean museum and the Ethnographic museum, also already belong with the umbrella organisation managing the world culture collections owned by the Swedish public.
The EM, of course, also has large collections of direct relevance to Asianists, not least all the Sven Hedin materials from Chinese central Asia, including all those written documents recovered from the deserts; and, all those things which Thunberg, Linnaeus' student, brought back from Japan in the 18th century, etcetera etcetera, overlapping in major ways with the MFEA.
So, this is not just about the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities. It is also more complicated than the campaign message chooses to mention.
The MFEA was already organizationally "absorbed" into the National Museums of World Culture, in 1999. And I actually think this was a good idea. It was a reorganization of four separate-but-kindred publicly owned museums which all deal with non-Swedish cultures, but which were previously split organizationally in awkward ways. Three are in the capital, Stockholm, and one in Gothenburg/Göteborg (currently the one named the Museum of World Culture/s). It does make a lot of sense for these 4 publicly owned museums to collaborate and share resources under a shared new umbrella, including under what I think is the at-least-potentially productive shared concept of "world culture."
I wrote about the previous big fight in the 1990s, over what many small-minded people saw as the scary idea of world culture, and over the fate of these same museums, in my article "The trouble with world culture: Recent museum developments in Sweden." Anthropology Today, Vol. 23, No. 5 (October 2007), 6-11, which I can send to anyone interested.
What's happening now is that the government is claiming that the economic situation of the MFEA and the Mediterranean museum, the two of the Stockholm museums in the city center, is unsustainable because of high cost for rent in the prime location real estate that they have long occupied (the MFEA was founded in 1925 but was installed in its present building in 1963).
How can they claim this? Actually, the government owns all the museum real estate, so it is all public. Confusingly, but in line with the neoliberal policy-paradigm shift that has engulfed Sweden (its "Americanization," as some would say), this same real estate has been farmed out to an agency that runs it for profit and to which the museums are forced to pay exorbitant rent, while not being given back enough funds to pay for it! from the very same government. This insane merry-go-round (the worst of both worlds of socialist and capitalist systems!) is difficult to parse for outsiders -- even in Sweden, where this mystifying system serves as a useful smoke screen for bureaucrats who are out to cut things, and it has already long been used by them as a pretext for firing staff, etc., not least since I left in 2005.
Now the authorities have proposed several alternatives, one of which is to stay put in the current locations, and another to pool the museums into a new or modified building in Stockholm. So yes it is "deja vu all over again", as the Americans say. It is a repeat of the debate in the 1990s, minus much of the 1990s controversy over the concept of world culture. Today the issue is mainly a certain kind of smallmindedness induced by a certain kind of economistic thinking that compels bureaucrats and politicians to reduce funding for anything public (and then try to pretend it is not political!).
Neither of the alternatives now presented would mean scrapping or selling the collections, or completely denying access to them for foreign visitors. But, such access would certainly be severely disrupted, for many years, and maybe curtailed. Moving and building always costs more than one thinks.
What is more, and what certainly irks me, is that it would mean throwing away the major upgrade of the MFEA that I oversaw in 2002-2004 when we revamped the museum, its building infrastructure and main permanent exhibits, rebuilding the storage rooms with scholar's access facilities, etc. etc., in the spirit of making it more accessible to all.
We did all this based on the Parliament's 1999 decision to retain the four museums and invest in the future. (BTW, we completed this major upgrade of the museum despite much unhelpful and counterproductive maligning of the project by some of the old ultraconservative so-called "friends" of the museum, who would rather have the museum suffer as before).
The current public discussion in Sweden typically leaves out any mention of this upgrade, partly because the authorities want us to forget, so they can move ahead under the banner of economic necessity, and partly because the public debate mostly involves scholars who don't know this history, or the budget and policy perspectives, and only see the museums from outside.
So, because I know something about this, I too penned an article for the Swedish newspapers to remind everyone of the dreadful waste it would be to move out. My piece is being considered. It might well be rejected, because the whole story hurts the pervasive self-image of Sweden as a well-managed place ...
The MFEA before 1999 was severely out of date in terms of collections management and security: no registry of objects, many of which were deteriorating in poor and unsafe conditions, etc., all as pointed out by Sir David Wilson, the formidable former director of the British Museum, who was invited to make an assessment which came down to two things: Marvelous collections, and -- you in Sweden now really have to modernize and get your house in order. That was 1997, in the midst of the last debates over the museum's fate.
Yet because of the 1999 decision to keep the museums, we did grasp the opportunity to fix up the museum. That work is now about to be thrown to waste, as the museum might be forced to give up its wonderful location in its historic building on the old Navy island Skeppsholmen opposite the royal castle and next to the #1 Modern Art museum smack in the middle of the tourist center of the city. The MFEA might get packed away once more in its tortured history, and then reappear in an annex to the existing Ethnographic museum, to be expanded to house the MFEA, and Mediterranean, collections. The bureaucrats and politicians are unable to fix the real estate setup, and so they have cooked up this rational-seeming(to them) idea that these museums should be pooled to save money. Given the history, it's tragi-comic.
There is a pattern of how we in remote Sweden try to put away the world in a small corner, so it can't bother us too much:
When Johan Gunnar Andersson, the museum's founder, retired in the late 1930s, the Parliament seriously debated whether to close it as an independent museum -- it had been founded in 1925 as a project to organize the vast collections Andersson had excavated and assembled in China, and that work was complete; the Chinese half had been returned already, as Andersson and the then-Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf had promised. So, some MPs argued it should be abolished, and the remaining objects be absorbed into the exotic archaeology corner of the national antiquities museum. Only reluctantly did they agree to let Karlgren continue with the MFEA.
That in turn had a lot to do with moneyed donors who started to shift the focus of the museum in a major way, away from science and towards fine art collectibles. I write about these trends in a piece that I also can send anyone interested,
"Art and Science as competing values in the formation of the Museum of Far Eastern Antiquities." In Guolong Lai and Jason Steuber, eds. Collectors, Collections, and Collecting the Arts of China: Histories and Challenges. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014, 67-98. ISBN: 9780813049144. upf.com/book.asp?id=STEUB002
Just f y i. By the way, I believe a recent recombination of similar exotic museums has taken place in Berlin. I wrote about the discussions there, and in France over the Quai Branly, in my 2007 piece, and I sometimes bring these things up in my courses, but not in a while now. What's the mood in Berlin today, is anyone up to date? My guess would be that in Berlin, they are better able to think big.
Magnus Fiskesjö <nf42 at cornell.edu>
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 7, 2016
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