Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The act of curation renders a perspective of reading the space, time, and artifact of an area. In this sense, the establishment of a museum in a certain area, representing (H)istory, would hold a perspective emerging from that very institution. Michele Foucault argues that museums construct a temporality and they come to function as heterotopias, where the society emerging into the present constructs itself in a new vocabulary. A museum within a minority context becomes an interesting case. Here it would mark the very emergence of the need for history, in other words coming into history. How is History written within the larger contours of interaction between dominant and the minority? What would be the state of a minority, represented within these interactions? Curations of minority history is an ethical question of representation and a discursive question of writing minority history. Kodavas, the ethnolinguistic minority of Kodagu, a district in the southern state of Karnataka in India, is a community stuck with the question of articulating history, given the presence of the nation-state and the dominant absence of historic charting. The site of Kodagu becomes an arena of construction of History via the curatorial ventures of ideological institutions. The state, the community, and the individual are all invested towards constructing a certain imagination of the terrain, temporality, and its present. Curation in this context becomes a critical act of approaching the history of the ethnolinguistic experience of the Kodavas through multiple locations and experiences. The paper looks into this site via various questions. What is this position of the curator-(historian)? What are the non-traditional, extra-disciplinary locations of memory that has a direct conversation with History? How does memory and archive function within the day-to-day regularity of the ethnolinguistic minority’s present? What are the various curatorial approaches of institutions that are invested in the area? The paper posits a sense of the ethnolinguistic minority’s present within these complex discursive interactions through the survey of perspective and representations from nation-state, the organizations demanding cultural revival, political-cultural institutions seeking ethnolinguistic autonomous status, and the individual immersed in the community. The position of the curator is one among the many who are attempting such a history. The aim is to look into these attempts and these histories thereby look into the function/position of curation and the curator.