Episode 416: Night at the Museum
Transcript! (because accessibility is mandatory)
PDF transcript. Also available via our Buzzsprout page.
Shownotes! (because citations are political)
We really hope you remembered to turn in your permission slip, nerds, because this week we’re headed on a field trip! We’re going to spend a Night (or day, we don’t know what timezone you’re in or how you like to consume this pod) at the Museum!
Which museum, you ask? Well, we’re talking about museums as an institution, broadly. But we’re joined by Dr. Andrew Ali Aghapour, a scholar of religion, science, and history and a Consulting Scholar at the National Museum of American History. More about him—and why he’s here—below.
The 101! (in which we did the professor-work)
Why museums, you ponder? Because face it: you need a hands-on learning moment, where we think and learn about how the world religions paradigm we loathe so very much has extremely real consequences in the world. Museums are a thing that most people know about, have been to, where children get taken on field trips: they are part and parcel of many curricula, from elementary school through college; they are part of how people structure their vacations (when such things were common); they are often the shining stars of a city, town, or university. They are also deeply, deeply impacted by the world religions model, even if they don’t appear to be at first glance.
Which, as you know, is where we come in.
Religion: it’s imperial! We started calling the cluster of things we now call religion (rituals! Sacred texts! Holy spaces! Ways of marking time and stages of life as special! Ways of knowing and explanations for how things got to be the way they are! Et cetera!)—we started calling this cluster “religion” precisely as European and, later, American colonial and imperial expansion took place. We know you know this already. But have you ever stopped to think about how, when, or why museums developed? Spoilers, nerds: it’s also imperial.
As Europe conquered the world, it not only imposed laws and legal systems (callback to our last application episode, What a Mess: Religion & Law) that fundamentally altered how folks around the world saw themselves, thought about “religion,” and understood national belonging. Imperialism was ultimately about extraction: of goods, including people, and of raw materials, including things like lumber, ore, gold, and silver, but also “treasures,” like jewelry, art, statues, ancient and historic artifacts, and more.
If you’ve seen a mummy in a museum, you’ve witnessed the extraction of a “treasure” under the auspices of imperial rule. Period. In short: museums, like religion, are imperial.
But to go a bit further—as you’ll hear in the episode—museums reify the world religions paradigm beyond just existing; they reify the world religions paradigm in how they classify, set up, display, and describe said artifacts.
So in this episode we play a bit with museum maps, websites, and visual arts, all famously excellent subjects for an audio medium. We do so to show you that rarely will you find a “Christian arts” wing, even when the Renaissance or Medieval wings are lousy with Jesus. But, in those same museums? There’s always an Islamic arts wing, even though those collections can range from illuminated Qur’ans (pretty Islamic) to decorated teapots (not super religious at all). To be blunt: Christianity is never labeled in museums, even when Christian subject matter is often explicitly religious in ways that other religious art is not. We also talk a lot about the legacies of imperialism: why is it OK that the Asian wings have statues of deities that, when you read the placards, have been removed from temple sites during colonial or imperial rule? What does it mean to have someone else’s god encased in plastic, under special lighting? To whom do these sacred objects belong?
If museums are about access, then for us, “who has access? at what cost? to whose benefit?” are the primary questions. We walk through them, not really coming to a conclusion, and all the time paying attention to how religion and religions get stereotyped problematically in these important spaces.
As usual, we do not go it alone.
Guest Expert! (because together we are a genius)
Dr. Andrew Ali Aghapour is a rockstar of a scholar: his expertise is on intersections of religion and science, American politics, and popculture. He’s a comedian, appearing on stage in a variety of places but most regularly in North Carolina, as well as teaching improv and professors how to be better off the cuff. Dr. Aghapour is playwright, too. His one-person show, Zara, premiered in 2019, and draws on personal stories, philosophy, and the history of monotheism, telling a story about how identity is inherited and remade in 21st-century America.
He’s on the podcast because he is a Consulting Scholar at the National Museum of American History, and co-author of the recent book, Discovery and Revelation: Religion, Science, and Making Sense of Things (2022).
Little Bit Leave It! (in which we leave you a little bit to remember)
Megan wanted us to remember that museums can be challenging spaces for some folks, like her, and they are challenging places to think about class, race, imperialism, gender, and sexuality, but they can also surprise us, educate us, and inspire us. So wrestle with those things.
Ilyse credits her dad’s weekly museums of NYC pilgrimages to much of her adult curiosity and interests—no lie. But she is, per usual, stuck on the colonialism and imperialism of it all. She is privileged to have had access to some of the greatest collections in the world as a tri-state kid. She is never not thinking about who paid for that privilege.
If You Don’t Know, Now You Know! (in which we get one factoid each)
Ilyse taught us about Emery Mwazulu Diyabanza, a Congolese pan-African activists and provocateur, who has been stealing artifacts from European museums. He’s been arrested in France and the Netherlands, and his whole platform is basically a Robin Hood-meets-cat burglar: he’s liberating stolen African art from European colonizers, often in plain sight. I’ll link to stories in the show notes. For legal reasons Ilyse does not condone stealing, of course. But also, she insists, what if we returned it all.
Megan claims it’s not stealing to bring home literally any object from the British Museum.
Homework! (because there’s always more to learn)
Ilyse assigns Andrew Aghapour’s stuff, enthusiastically, and especially these:
“Discovery and Revelation: Religion and Science in America.” (Both the exhibit at the Smithsonian, so mask up and hit it up, and the book! You want it. It’s coauthored with Peter Manseau)
Zara, a one-person show about religion, immigration, and identity.
For commentary on the play, See: “A Stand-Up Comedian Tackles his Muslim Upbringing and the World of Uncertainty” Religion News Service.
Podcast episode with Classical Ideas.
More public-facing scholarship from Dr. Aghapour can be found here.
including this beautiful birth story, that gets Ilyse every time (not just because the Aghapours are her mishbucha).
Ilyse also recommends things by not-Dr. Aghapour, including:
Dan Hicks, Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (2020)
Shimrit Lee, Decolonize Museums (2022)
Vicki Brennan’s series at UVM:
Megan also assigned things!
Plus one million for all things Andrew. It has nothing to do with museums, but we wrote a thing together about religion, abuse, and Kimmy Schmidt for Religion Dispatches in the early days of my book project, the spiritual if not PRINTED title of which is “always be uppercutting”
And I always want to lift up cool conversations amongst pod besties, so I’m going to recommend you listen to Andrew chat about his research (and more) with FOP Greg Soden on Classical Ideas:
I will highlight some cool pieces about scholarship in museums for our nerds.
The first is an illustrated guide to curating a museum exhibit written and drawn by B. Erin Cole called “I Make Exhibits,” first published in Contingent Magazine and, if memory serves, is now being used by the Smithsonian and the New York Public School system. Which is pretty cool!
Erin Bartram, is both a historian of religion and a museum worker – she does dope stuff at the Mark Twain house, which you can learn more about if you follow her on Twitter. @erin_bartram
Judith Weisenfeld also has a piece worth reading about religion at the National Museum for African American History and Culture for Sacred Matters, right after the museum opened in 2017.
And if you haven’t visited the NMAAHC. All I can say is that you have to go. You just have to. I have no words to describe being in the presence of Nat Turner’s bible. Here’s the link you the object’s page on the Museum’s website and encourage you to explore, bc truly, what a wealth of American history, culture, and religion.