Facts and power
Reflections around a community history
museum in Shetland
Turid Markussen
Department of Social Anthropology / Sami Studies, Institute of Social Science, University of Tromsø
Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the cand.polit.-degree in social
anthropology, Spring 1997
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Introduction
Museum development in Britain
Understanding museums
Studying history in
Shetland
Chapter 1: Modernisation
A period of transition
Northmavine perspectives
Theorising modernisation
Chapter 2: Memory
Remembrance
Pragmatism
Reflexivity
Perceptions of the past
Modes of memory
Memory and modernisation
Chapter 3: Museums
The exhibitions
Objectification
Space and time
Life in Northmavine in
the past
Nostalgia and knowledge
Chapter 4: Power
A political institution?
Norse imagery versus
community history
The workings of power
The Museum
as social and material manifestation
Pragmatism
Chapter 5: Facts
Hybridisation
Tangwick
Haa Museum: facts and constructions
The institutional framework
The Coyote or Trickster, embodied in American Southwest Indian accounts, suggests our situation when we give up mastery but keep searching for fidelity, knowing all the while we will be hoodwinked. ... Perhaps our hopes ... turn on revisioning the world as coding trickster with whom we must learn to converse.
Donna J. Haraway
My sincerest thanks go to everyone in Shetland who took the time to talk to me about my (at times rather incoherent) project, including members of the history groups in Northmavine and Unst, the caretakers at Tangwick Haa Museum, and many people in various organisations and institutions based in Lerwick. They, along with several other individuals, generously shared their knowledge and views with me. Thanks in particular to everyone in Hillswick, at Hillhead, in Ronas Voe, in Bressay and in Baltasound who accommodated me, fed me, lent me their cars, offered advice, looked after me while I was ill, and generally did all they could to make my life as easy and pleasurable as possible. In addition to being vital for my project, the generosity and the company that was offered me wherever I went, were vital for me.
Also, my thanks go to many at the University of Edinburgh, where I spent the year prior to going to Shetland. The encouragement I received from Tony Cohen and the many discussions with fellow post-graduate students in the Department of Social Anthropology were particularly valuable at this early stage.
During the later stages of the project I have become indebted to several people in Tromsø. Thanks to all participants of 'avhandlingsseminaret' in 1995-96 for reading and commenting on earlier drafts, and to my supervisor, Trond Thuen, for helpful comments and an open attitude toward the project. Kevin McCafferty spent many hours reading proofs and suggesting improvements to my English, and might, to his dismay, discover that many passages have been altered or added since then. Thanks to him, and likewise to Bjørn Braaten for making his time and creativity available for the purpose of producing the front page. The discussions among students and staff at the Department of Social Anthropology/Sami Studies in Tromsø in recent years are reflected in this thesis in many ways, and all the fun has helped keeping me going. In particular, I would like to thank Trude Borch, Eva Klingenberg, Kristin Lervåg, Johnny-Leo Ludviksen, Finn Sivert Nielsen, Elisabeth Sandersen and Hege Aasbø. In various combinations, they have commented on many drafts or otherwise responded to my ideas, they have discussed with me, encouraged me, and not the least, laughed with (and often at) me. Their help and friendship have been indispensable. Lastly, I am thankful to my flatmates during the past eighteen months, Bjørn Braaten and Hege Aasbø, for many inspiring discussions, for having put up with more than most and for generally being on my side.
Tromsø, April 1997
Turid Markussen
Heading north from the Shetland capital of Lerwick, you arrive eventually at the impressive lava cliffs of Eshaness that face the Atlantic ocean. Shortly before the cliffs themselves and roughly thirty-nine miles from Lerwick, you encounter a wee road that leads down to the hamlet of Tangwick. The road cuts through the hill for a bit, then passes over one of Shetland's many cattlegrids, leads past a few croft houses, and lands you at the bottom of the road at a small car park next to a larger building. This building, the Haa of Tangwick, houses a museum run by the Northmavine Community History Group. Passing through a wooden gate and walking the few yards along the paved path running next to the narrow building, you arrive at the entrance: a low door half-way down the side of the haa. Once inside, new arrivals will likely be greeted by the caretaker on duty. After briefly browsing around, perhaps you leave. Or, perhaps something caught your interest, and you take the time for a closer look at some of the objects and photographs, or to read some of the information displayed alongside. This may give you a glimpse into 'what life was like before' in Northmavine, into the 'old crofting ways', into the perils involved in trafficking the surrounding seas, or perhaps into some odder bits of local heritage, like the story of the renowned Johnny Notions who, before his time, and with rather poor resources, invented inoculation against smallpox back in the eighteenth century. Perhaps also you chat for a bit with the caretaker, who would likely be very willing to answer any queries you might have, and may even ask you a thing or two as well. Then you leave, driving up the narrow road on which you approached, and perhaps now heading further into Eshaness, toward the cliffs you have seen such spectacular photographs of.
A growing literature on museums emphasises multiculturalism and the existence of multiple histories.(1) New museums are often intended to complement or reconceptualise the existing, authoritative histories. Some authors have voiced criticism regarding certain uses of the past.(2) A dominating perception seems to be that people construct enhanced images of the past in an attempt to halt processes of change. In Shetland the number of museums has increased rapidly in recent years. Also, the isles have gone through considerable changes in the course of a few decades. In this thesis I address the issue of how one specific, small, rural museum relates to those processes of change. Rather than resisting change, my contention is that, through relating to certain of the negative implications of modernisation, the museum established in the Haa of Tangwick influences the general course of change. Moreover, people have diverse and multifaceted relationships to the past and I argue that the effect that the Museum produces is achieved, not by constructing a fictitious past, but, among other things, through an increase in the awareness of facets of the past that are otherwise often ignored. In the remainder of the Introduction I provide a background, empirically and theoretically, for the issues under examination. Also, in the final section, I discuss the methods of approach.
Tangwick Haa Museum, which was officially opened in the summer of 1988, is but one of a number of small community history museums to have opened since the mid-1980s in Shetland. In 1980 the Shetland Community History Project was launched, and following this several history groups were formed. The Project was focused on oral history, which by then had become a significant field of research in Britain. Gradually the focus of many of the history groups shifted or expanded, and several have now opened or are planning to open a museum or visitor centre, while many of those museums already in existence have plans for expansion. In recent years many of them have been working to fulfil the requirements set by the Museums and Galleries Commission(3) for registration as a museum, a move encouraged by the Shetland Islands Council's Section Leader for Museums. The museum sector in Shetland has generally been vastly expanded during the course of the last decade, and the community history museums make up a very substantial part of that expansion.
The situation with regard to museum development in Shetland is by no means unique; rather, it is mirrored by similar processes all over the world. Renewed interest in local culture and history, manifested in the emergence of museums, can be found in the most diverse locations. In Britain, small museums run by volunteers, usually with little or no public funding, have appeared throughout the country.
Prior to going to Shetland for the first time in the summer of 1993 I had spent somewhere between one and two years on the British mainland. Most of the time was spent in one of the two cities where I lived during this time, Norwich and Edinburgh. My time in rural areas had been limited to the odd day out of town and very short holidays in the Yorkshire Dales and on the west coast of Scotland. However, it did not take long before some general impressions formed. Anyone travelling around Britain will encounter scores of local museums, heritage centres, nature trails and the like - places that claim to draw attention to just how peculiar this little corner of the land is. Nevertheless, I was left with an impression of uniformity. So much of the interpretation of culture and nature alike is done within the frames of a common grammar. There are standardised ways of developing a place so that it is transformed into and easily recognised as 'a site'. If you should feel at a loss when it comes to how you should look at or understand what it is that meets your senses, ample help will be provided, in the form of well laid out paths, arrows marking entrances and the direction you should walk in, interpretive boards placed at strategic locations, and so on. All done so that whatever is decided to be the 'attraction' can be easily identified and digested, before one hits the road to sample yet more pieces of 'heritage' before lunchtime. It is very easy to find yourself trapped within this logic, the logic of worldwide travel and tourism.
People travel for many different reasons, and visits to places where the so-called 'heritage' is 'interpreted' are often not included. Britain, however, has been portrayed as a country particularly obsessed with its 'heritage' (Hewison 1987). This might be hard to verify, but a powerful conservation movement is indeed present and the rate of establishment of new museums is remarkably high; in Scotland there are approximately 400 museums, about half of them having been set up during the past two decades (Ambrose 1993, p. 5). Robert Hewison, in his book The Heritage Industry: Britain in a Climate of Decline, issues a warning concerning this development. He quotes the Director of the Science Museum in London, Neil Cossons, who commented on the tremendous growth in the number of museums in Britain in a radio interview in the mid-1980s: "You can't project that sort of rate of growth much further before the whole country becomes one big open air museum, and you just join it as you get off at Heathrow" (1987, p. 24). The trend has continued in the decade after Cossons' comment, and is manifest also in Shetland. For a place with a population of 22,000, the existence of at least fifteen museums or interpretive centres, in addition to several sites managed by Historic Scotland or Scottish Natural Heritage, speaks for itself. Hewison's argument is that the obsessive preoccupation with the past has come about as a result of an idea that Britain is in a state of terminal decline. After the Second World War, although the British Empire was gradually disintegrating as processes of de-colonisation gained momentum, the domestic climate was one of modernisation and renewal. This was also the period when the Welfare State saw the light of day. In the late 1960s "a period of rapidly rising inflation and increasing unemployment" began, however, and subsequent change has taken place in "a climate of decline" (p. 40). Conservation work is supposed to counter the decline, but what actually happens is that the past is approached in a way that only serves to further deepen the crisis. This is so, Hewison argues, because the past is typically portrayed in a nostalgic light, so that it appears more desirable than the present. Other and more genuinely new developments are thereby stifled.
The presence of conservation work and museum development in Shetland marks the integration into a nationwide (and indeed worldwide) framework of interpretive facilities. The way in which the place is interpreted bears many resemblances to forms of interpretation encountered in other places. At the same time, in Shetland and elsewhere, there is considerable variation in how the so-called cultural and natural heritage is developed. Some of it is done by the large heritage organisations, some by individuals in their spare time; some is done to attract tourists and induce them to spend their money locally, some for the enjoyment of delving into the history of one's forebears. There are different kinds of actors involved: individuals, private businesses, charitable trusts, local authorities, independent or semi-independent organisations. And there are different kinds of motivations: personal, economic, social, idealistic, political.
In his book Managing New Museums, the Director of the Scottish Museums Council, Timothy Ambrose, boldly states that the causes of the swelling interest in museums in Britain "are not difficult to understand" (1993, p. 4). He goes on to note three different causes: (1) the increased pace of change in society since the Second World War, (2) the increased scale and rate of destruction of the environment and (3) the change in the economy from manufacturing to services. That the interest in history in many cases should be related to such developments, I find probable - these reasons do indeed bear certain resemblances to what one often hears people say themselves when talking about their interest in history - but they can hardly be claimed to qualify as reasons in themselves. Ambrose's third cause, the transformation of the economy from industry to service, is well documented, but the question of what exactly makes 'heritage' a profitable product remains to be addressed. An answer could be thought to lie in the first two allegations: that the increased pace of change and appurtenant rate of destruction create an interest in the past and the natural environment that makes heritage a profitable product. However, this leaves unanswered the question of why some people respond to change and supposed destruction by delving into the past, while others don't. Also, for those who do have an interest in the past, there is the question of whether it is actually motivated by change as such and, if so, why it appears a meaningful way of relating to change.
Ambrose does not find reason to contemplate such issues; rather, he states that, considering the quickened pace of change in society,
"[i]t is not surprising that there has been corresponding reaction against such change. ... In a very real sense the past is enlisted to combat the present" (1993, p. 4).
The understanding of the phenomenon that he thus offers can easily be correlated to the approach to the past that Hewison criticises. The kind of change people encounter is in both cases assumed to be experienced as a threat in one way or another, as representing a form of decline, and the past is evoked to counter this process. Although there are numerous examples that confirm this impression, as Hewison documents, no evidence is supplied that confirms the validity of this claim when it comes to all the new museums. In other words, it seems to me a preconceived, and thus potentially misleading, way of conceiving of the phenomenon. That it is presented in the Introduction to a book published by the Scottish Museums Council, addressing itself to people who are in the process of setting up new museums, does not improve matters. One should think that it is important that people around the country involved in setting up a museum would benefit from a more informed vision of what deeds the past may be enlisted to perform.
Considering the scale of the phenomenon, it is peculiar to find so little critical reflection in museum and heritage circles around the question of why the past holds such a fascination for so many people, especially within the institutions that act as the country's foremost promoters of this interest. There is much to Hewison's criticism of the obsession with the past: that nostalgia occupies a far too prominent role in perceptions of the past, and that in thus making the past seem more desirable than the present, attention is drawn away from the real problems facing people today. However, if better uses for the past are to be found, it might be fruitful to look at the various ways in which the past actually is approached. Assuming there to be more to the prevalent preoccupation with the past, than an attempt to evade the forces of the present, there is indeed a need to address the question of what that 'more' might contain. When I write in this thesis about one particular museum, it is with this issue in mind. I will not attempt an exhaustive elaboration of the uses the past might have. Rather, in pursuing a certain set of questions in relation to a particular use of the past, I hope to stimulate a more general reflection on what the past may be enrolled to do.
The past and contemporary understandings of the past have been subjected to increasing attention by anthropologists. At one time the classical anthropological account was one in which people, due to the application of a particular style of writing, the so-called 'ethnographic present', were portrayed as living in an eternal present moment, as if the basic structures or patterns in their lives were not subject to change. However, criticism of the exclusion of change from ethnographic description has long since become commonplace in anthropology.(4) When the issue of change came to be recognised as central to anthropological understanding, it was first addressed in the context of integration into a modern and global world order. Later there has been an increasing recognition of the existence of history prior to the advent of modernisation processes, indeed of history as a dimension of all social and cultural reality. Kirsten Hastrup's formulation of this point in her Introduction to the edited volume, Other Histories (1992), is instructive. She criticises anthropology's propensity for defining its object of study in spatial terms only:
"We have dealt with societies and cultures as entities separated from one another in space. By contrast, historians have dealt with periods or epochs. A truly 'historical' anthropology must include reference to both space and time, not only because 'history' is the unfolding of society through time but also because 'society' is the institutional form of historical events." (1992, p. 7)
With the increasing recognition within anthropology of the existence of history in all societies, also prior to European intervention, the Western notion of history as homogenous, linear and continuous has been challenged, as Hastrup points out:
"The unified sense of history seems to be a discursive rather than a social fact and the product of a highly literate Enlightenment heritage. In Europe as elsewhere there is a multiplicity of histories." (1992, p. 2)
Following the recognition of the fundamentally historical character of all social reality, and thus of the existence of multiple histories, there has been an increasing appreciation of the importance of people's own perception of their past. As anthropologists have shown a growing concern with these perceptions, a particular theoretical approach has come to be favoured by many, an approach that feeds on the more general theoretical tradition known as constructivism. Essentially this approach sees the various perceptions of the past as 'constructed', 'invented' or 'created'.
This approach to folk perceptions of the past has, however, created problems of its own. An article by Roger M. Keesing, addressing conceptions of the past in the contemporary Pacific, presents a useful discussion of the sorts of issues that are at stake (1989). Across the Pacific, in the post-colonial era, myths of ancestors are being created, myths that come to act as powerful political symbols. However, Keesing argues that these 'created pasts' are often idealised versions of bygone times, and owe more to Western ideologies than to actual historic events in the region. In support of this he refers among other things to the propensity for people who are dominated to "internalize the premises and categories of the dominant", to the fact that "the discourse of domination creates the objective, institutional realities within which struggles must be fought", and to the tendency among Third and Fourth World people to form representations of their own culture "as counters to or commentaries on the intrusive and dominant colonial culture" (p. 23, original emphasis removed). These structural tendencies become manifest, among other things, in perceptions of the past that
"incorporate Western conceptions of Otherness, visions of primitivity, and critiques of modernity. The imagined ancestors with whom the Pacific is being repopulated - Wise Ecologists, Mystical Sages, living in harmony with one another, cosmic forces, and the environment - are in many ways creations of Western imagination." (Keesing 1989, p. 29)
When facing these kinds of 'created' pasts, Keesing states, scholars are often confronted with a dilemma: However mistaken the versions of the past might be, one may still sympathise with the political struggle that the recreated pasts facilitate, and to challenge the perceptions of the past by attempting to correct them may undermine that struggle. If the perceptions of the past thus created serve a cause that is just, perhaps one need not worry so much about their factuality, Keesing reasons, but then he considers the more complicated cases. For, the problem becomes more acute when it is considered that a situation is rarely that simple, as when a perception of the past resulting from a selective idealisation helps improve or consolidate the position of a local elite: "In the contemporary Pacific [the recreated pasts] are being used both to recapture just rights and to deny them" (p. 19).
Keesing's solution to this problem is to encourage more radical and sceptical conceptions of the past, to get beyond the idealisations:
"In Pacific communities on the eve of European invasion, there were multiple 'realities' - for commoners and for chiefs, for men and for women, for young and for old, for free persons and for captives or slaves, for victors and for vanquished. ... The 'authentic' past was never a simple unambiguous reality. The social worlds of the Pacific prior to European invasion were, like the worlds of the present, multifaceted and complex. Moreover, however the past may be constructed as a symbol, and however critical it may be for historically dominated peoples to recapture this ground, a people's cultural heritage poses a challenge to radical questioning. We are all to some degree prisoners of 'real' pasts as they survive into the present - in the form of patriarchal values and institutions, of patterns of thought, of structures of power. A deeply radical discourse (one that questions basic assumptions) would aspire to liberate us from pasts, both those of our ancestors and those of (colonial or other) domination, as well as to use them as political symbols." (p. 25)
I am sympathetic to this argument, as it goes some way in suggesting how one may relate to perceptions of the past so that they are complemented rather than undermined. However, there are further problems inherent in the constructivist approach to the past, problems that Keesing does not address. These problems are of a conceptual nature, that is, to do with what words one uses in talking about people's perceptions of the past, and what meaning those words have.
Keesing positions himself firmly within the approach I have characterised by saying it sees the past as 'constructed', 'created' or 'invented', and refers in this context particularly to the volume edited by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger called simply The Invention of Tradition (1983). In his Introduction to this book Hobsbawm defines the basic concept of 'invented tradition' in the following manner:
"The term 'invented tradition' is used in a broad, but not imprecise sense. It includes both 'traditions' actually invented, constructed and formally instituted and those emerging in a less easily traceable manner within a brief and dateable period - a matter of a few years perhaps - and establishing themselves with great rapidity. ... 'Invented tradition' is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past. ... However, insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of 'invented' traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. In short, they are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition." (1983, p. 1f, my emphasis)
If Hobsbawm's definition is to be taken seriously, one could think of other traditions also instituted in response to a novel situation, traditions that did make a reference to the past, but were not 'invented'. Keesing, although he holds that the 'created pasts' may be both mythical and real, restricts his discussion to fictitious pasts. However, there are issues beyond the question of true and false when it comes to understanding folk perceptions of the past, and if terms such as 'invention' or 'creation' come to imply that the version of the past under discussion is false, there is a problem when the constructivist approach is applied to any perception of the past, true or false. The pasts spoken of then risk being dismissed even before they are subjected to analysis.
In a sense, what takes place when an anthropologist writes about someone's approach to history, contextualising it socially, politically, historically, is an act of deconstruction.(5) What is most commonly associated with deconstruction within anthropology is the questioning of the discipline itself, of the positions from which it speaks and the concepts it applies when speaking. The outcome of this process of questioning has been the recognition of the fundamentally positioned nature of anthropology, and thus of the need to be sensitive with regard to the political implications of what one writes. When the same deconstructive technique, consciously or unconsciously, is applied to other subject positions than anthropology, including those of marginal groups, the political implications are even more direct. Basically it is the political nature of someone else's position that is revealed, which means that the anthropological account enters a field where there is already a political struggle going on, whether explicitly or implicitly. This requires careful reflection on the part of the anthropologist on the role of anthropology in relation to this ongoing struggle.
This is exactly the problem Keesing addresses, but my allegation is that, although his perspective is valuable, it does not deal with the issue on the conceptual level. For when it comes to the application of constructivism to the multiple perceptions of the past that exist, this is often done in a way which suggests any of these perceptions to be mistaken. In Hobsbawm's case this is explicit, in Keesing's implicit. What I mean to imply is not that constructivism should be abandoned, but rather that the various applications of constructivism be approached critically. The problem arises when the way in which multiple histories are dealt with is such that any version of history is rendered invalid. This is a possible outcome, not of deconstruction in itself, nor of constructivism in itself, but of the application of concepts such as 'construction' and 'invention' to any perception of the past, if this carries the implication that the 'created' past is in fact incorrectly recreated.
In fact, this kind of application of constructivism is not in line with the approach that Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann developed in their classic essay on constructivism, The Social Construction of Reality. By saying that reality is socially constructed they do not intend to imply that the resulting constructions are fictitious. In fact the question of truth and falsity does not enter into it at all. Rather, the term construction is intended to capture a feature of all reality, namely that it is somehow made by the way in which human beings live their lives in it. Berger and Luckmann make clear that there is no contradiction in saying that something is constructed and that it is real. They end the Introduction to their book by making this point explicit, thus positioning themselves simultaneously in the traditions of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim:
"Durkheim tells us: 'The first and most fundamental rule is: Consider social facts as things.'(6) And Weber observes: 'Both for sociology ... and for history, the object of cognition is the subjective meaning-complex of action.'(7) These two statements are not contradictory. Society does indeed possess objective facticity. And society is indeed built up by activity that expresses subjective meaning. And, incidentally, Durkheim knew the latter, just as Weber knew the former. It is precisely the dual character of society in terms of objective facticity and subjective meaning that makes its 'reality sui generis', to use another key term of Durkheim's. The central question for sociological theory can then be put as follows: How is it possible that subjective meanings become objective facticities? Or, in terms appropriate to the aforementioned theoretical positions: How is it possible that human activity (Handeln) should produce a world of things (choses)? In other words, an adequate understanding of the 'reality sui generis' of society requires an inquiry into the manner in which this reality is constructed." (1971, p. 30)
I will not recount the argument that Berger and Luckmann proceed to develop on the way in which reality is actually constructed, but rather just point out that, in contrast to this approach, the application of constructivism to perceptions of the past sometimes seems to lose sight of the fact that all parts of human reality are constructed and that this in itself is not to say that it is somehow not real. As human beings we enter a world that is already constructed, and we have no choice but to go on constructing it. Construction is thus a precondition of all human life. Everyone does it: anthropologists, carpenters, civil servants, housewives, farmers, lovers, relatives, scientists; we do it today, as our forebears did it in the past and our ancestors will in the future. An implication is that not only are there different versions of the past today, but there were actually different pasts. An anthropological approach to the different contemporary perceptions in the past must recognise this, which is, of course, what Hastrup and others do in the volume quoted above, Other Histories, when stressing the non-unilinearity of history. Hastrup observes that "[a]nthropology's specific contribution to the study of history seems to be precisely this: to rewrite world history as a non-domesticated multiple history" (p. 3). However, anthropology is far from alone on the scene. The increasing interest in history seen in latter decades can in many ways be seen as an expression of this. When oral history emerged as a field in its own right in Britain in the late 1960s this was in an attempt at capturing the different pasts that existed, and furthermore, when an increasing number of local museums have been established, this is similarly often to draw attention to parts of the past otherwise overlooked.
If anthropology is to succeed in portraying history as a sort of complex unfolding in which many elements resist being subsumed underneath the dominating patterns, one must search for ways of talking about the various pasts produced from other positions that do not tacitly deem them invalid. Any version of history is exactly that: a version, and thus a product, to a point, of the particular situation that produced it, that is, of the present. The challenge is to be able to talk about the situatedness of history without explicitly or implicitly implying that it is misrepresented, and that recognises the existence of multiple pasts. This kind of application of constructivism to the field of 'created pasts' is what should be sought. If a contemporary perception of the past is mistaken or biased, there may well be good reasons for pointing that out, as Keesing argues. However, if the approach is one that deems any such perception invalid, anthropology indeed faces a serious problem.
The soaring number of museums, in Britain and elsewhere, is often remarked upon. Only occasionally is it noted that many of the new museums are different kinds of institutions from those already in existence. Writing on ethnographic museums, George Stocking remarks that when it comes to the historical processes that have led to the collection of objects in museums, the most important ones have been those of colonial domination (1985, p. 5). It has been a matter of collecting objects relating to someone perceived as 'other' in relation to oneself. This, Stocking states, also holds true for collections relating to 'folklore' in the same national context as that in which the collection is held. The processes of industrial development and social change that have generated them, he says, have sometimes been appropriately characterised as processes of "internal colonialism" (1985, p. 5). In both cases, it is thus a matter of museums that display representations of 'the other'. Such museum practices have frequently been contested in recent years, however, and increasingly one finds that new museums are ones in which the people whose past is exhibited are the people who manage the museums.
When professional museum people worry about the swelling 'museum sector', this often seems to be ignored - a fact which becomes very significant if they try to enforce the standards developed in the vastly larger and more affluent institutions in the new museums. If it is acknowledged that there are actually various histories, and that the new museums may be aimed at capturing those histories, it becomes apparent that politics is involved in the relation between the old and new institutions. What appears to be a matter of professionalism - the recommendation that standards should be heightened in the small museums - then turns out to be a very political matter indeed. In this perspective it is perhaps not so strange that it may appear convenient to present the reasons people have for delving into their past as having to do with their inability or unwillingness to change, and thus of their interest in history as a reaction against change.
What Shetland people involved with community history museums most often said regarding why they think their museum is important, was "to avoid things getting lost". This links the museums to change, as losing things indeed alters something. However, the question of how the museums relate to change remains to be addressed. In Chapter 1 I discuss the processes of change that have taken place in Shetland from the 1950s onwards. Museums represent a way of remembering the past. In Chapter 2 I discuss how different forms of memory are affected by change. A discussion of how the past is portrayed in Tangwick Haa Museum and of the conception of change it embodies appears in Chapter 3. This discussion involves treating the Museum as a discursive phenomenon. In Chapter 4, through a focus on power, I address the question of what the interest in the past does to the present. This involves including non-discursive facets of the Museum in the analysis. In Chapter 5 I discuss constructivism in the light of the preceding analysis.
The empirical research for this thesis was carried out during two periods: from June to November 1993, and from September to December 1994. For a good deal of this time I lived in different locations in the area of Northmavine, where the Tangwick Haa Museum is located. The exhibitions in the Museum provide an important part of the data under discussion. However, much data stems from other sources, particularly the conversations I had with the people directly involved with the Museum and written sources (reports and documents, statistics, magazine articles).
Participation in people's everyday lives is a methodological ideal in social anthropology. Partly as a result of the relatively short time I have been able to spend in the area, and partly due to the fact that I write about a process that has unfolded over several years, I rely extensively on questioning people involved with the Museum, rather than on participation in the activities in question. This approach has its limitations, as so much of what takes place in people's lives is never verbalised, or verbalised only in the specific context in which it naturally belongs. The challenge is to evaluate what one has been able to learn in such a way that one does not draw unsubstantiated conclusions. In making sense of the things people said to me I have relied extensively on impressions formed as a result of living in the area that relate to many other aspects of the place. Although much would have been gained with more in depth empirical study, the sort of information I have accumulated provides a sufficient basis for developing some perspectives on the interest in the past found among certain people in the area.
My account does not in any way claim to be the story of the Tangwick Haa Museum. I hope, however, that I have provided some perspectives - on the one hand, on the Museum and ways of relating to the past, and on the other, on the theoretical understanding of such phenomena - that may contribute to a continued reflection around both the theoretical and the practical issues involved.
Tangwick Haa Museum opened in 1988, and is run by Northmavine Community History Group, which started in 1981. The Museum is open to the public every year from May to September. A Trust(8) is formally responsible for the management of the Museum, but in reality it is the Committee of the Northmavine History Group that is responsible for the exhibitions, as well as the day-to-day running of the Museum. The exhibitions are mainly concerned with the cultural history of Northmavine, but there are also displays on natural phenomena. The Museum's Collection Policy is very open, and basically any item relating to Northmavine's past may be included in the collection. Due to the availability of objects, most of the collection is concerned with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Part of the exhibition space in the Museum is devoted to permanent displays, but every season a new theme is researched and exhibited. Exhibitions have been mounted on such things as crofting, fishing, religious life, trade and the shoreline. The Museum is visited by substantial numbers of people every summer, local residents and visitors from afar. Particularly the latter category has been on the increase lately. However, when the Group takes the trouble to mount new exhibitions every year, this is to cater for the local public.
Along with many other community history museums in Shetland, Tangwick Haa Museum receives financial support from the Shetland Amenity Trust, a quango (quasi-independent non-government organisation) that relies for much of its funding on the Shetland Islands Council and its oil funds, while also working to secure funding from other sources. It was through the Amenity Trust that funding was found to restore the formerly derelict building in the first place,(9) and in addition to capital costs, the Trust also pays the running costs of the Museum.
Much of the work at the Museum is done on a voluntary basis by members of the Northmavine History Group. The Group was formed following the launching of the Shetland Community History Project in December 1980. By the time of the Community History Project, oral history had grown into a substantial field of interest in Britain, having been established as a separate field of research initially by a number of radical social historians in the late 1960s. The Shetland Project was also essentially focused on oral history, and aimed at generating as broad participation by the general public as possible. It was based at the Shetland Archives, where the collected material was to be stored. As it turned out, much of the oral history material produced was collected by people employed directly through the Archives. The history groups did, however, also collect some material, and in Northmavine one of the members made a substantial number of oral history recordings on the period between the two world wars. Most of the material that the groups worked with was of a different character, though. Large scale maps were distributed by the Community History Project, and on these such things as place names and fishing meiths were registered. To the meetings held by the history groups people also brought old photographs, documents and objects that were made available for everyone to view and discuss. These early meetings in the Northmavine Group were according to all reports very enjoyable.
Northmavine History Group still arranges meetings in the winter-time, as do many of the groups around Shetland, but now these meetings usually feature a speaker who addresses some aspect of Shetland or local history. Slide shows are also popular. Still, not as many people have been attending these meetings recently. Much of the activity of the History Group has instead come to be focused on the Museum. Every year a new topic has been researched for the purpose of making an exhibition. Among the members of the History Group there are many older people who are very knowledgeable about the past, and who have old objects or photographs in their possession. During the winter the members also get in touch with whoever in the area they know to be informed about the topic they are looking into, or who might possess items that could be exhibited. One of the members copies old photographs, another does the typing needed for the displays, and in the weeks prior to the opening of the Museum every spring, the actual exhibition is put together. For the most active members a considerable amount of time goes into the work at the Museum. There were several people in the History Group who expressed regret that not more actual recording was being done, though.
In recent years, much time has been spent preparing the Tangwick Haa Museum for full registration with the Museums and Galleries Commission. The Commission, a quango set up initially in 1931 as an advisory body, has increased its authority and now acts as an important regulator of the museum world. 1988 saw the implementation of its Registration Scheme for museums in the United Kingdom. The Scheme enforces a set of minimum standards on institutions that seek public funding. Formally speaking, the Shetland Amenity Trust, which, as mentioned above, funds the Tangwick Haa Museum, has nothing to do with the Registration Scheme. Still, many think that registration might prove necessary in the future to secure the continued availability of funding for the running costs and maintenance of the Museum, and the Shetland Islands Council's Section Leader for Museums strongly encourages registration. The requirements for registration include, in addition to such things as the adoption of a Collection Policy, the individual labelling of each artefact with a unique number as well as the maintenance of what is perceived to be a fairly comprehensive register of all items.
Getting registered is not the only concern of the History Group, however. Currently they plan to renovate a wing of the Tangwick Haa that only was secured when the first restoration took place. The extra space will be used for storage, research and exhibitions. Also, they plan to make a permanent display on Northmavine's history.
I spent the greater part of my time in Shetland in the district of Northmavine, where the Tangwick Haa Museum is located. During my first stay I lived on one of the housing estates in the area. Although barely afforded mention in Mike Finnie's "architectural guide" to Shetland - he describes the estates as "featureless" and hurries on to more notable buildings (1990, p. 62) - such estates of grey, box-like houses, whether they are built by the Shetland Islands Council or by privately managed housing associations, are in fact most characteristic of contemporary Shetland.
A modern housing estate is a visible outcome of the period of transition experienced in Shetland in recent decades, as are such features as the modern road network that cuts across Shetland's many hills, the roll-on-roll-off ferries that connect the largest islands in the archipelago, the fish farms that can be seen in so many of the more sheltered voes, the plastic-coated silage bales dotting the fields after the grass has been cut, the huge cruise ships regularly at anchor in Lerwick harbour during the summer, the large fleet of Eastern European factory trawlers or the extensive oil terminal on the shores of Sullom Voe. Closely interwoven with such transformations in the materiality of Shetland are a wide range of other changes. Improvement of the communications network has changed patterns of movement, making it easier to travel between previously distant places for work or leisure; the establishment of the oil terminal has brought in a higher number of incomers; mechanisation of agriculture has transformed the co-operative patterns associated with crofting. Every conceivable field - social, cognitive, cultural, material - has undergone some sort of transformation.
What I have just described is a modern place. Modernity cannot be measured by the quality of roads or the number of incomers, however. Marshall Berman describes, instead, in his book All That Is Solid Melts into Air, modernity as a particular kind of experience:
"There is a mode of vital experience - experience of space and time, of the self and others, of life's possibilities and perils - that is shared by men and women all over the world today. I will call this body of experience 'modernity'. To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world - and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are." (1983, p. 15)
One of the things a visitor to Shetland soon comes to hear, is indeed how much things have changed, and how different they were before. It is this very experience of living in a world that keeps changing, that promises development and destruction in the same breath, that Berman terms modern. It was in this kind of atmosphere that people said they started the Museum. As one woman put it, "I guess we all felt that a lot would be lost." However, there has been change in Shetland before, without many museums having been established. It is thus not obvious why the experience of change has motivated the establishment of a museum, or why so many people now think it to be important that things should not get lost. To answer this, one needs to address the question of what exactly their experience of change is.
Although, historically speaking, change has been the rule rather than the exception in Shetland, it is the transitions experienced during the period from the 1960s onwards that people tend to refer to when they talk about changes, particularly those associated with the oil-related developments that took place in the islands in the latter half of the 1970s and early 1980s.
If a time were to be pinpointed for when this particular course of change began, perhaps the extension of the electricity supply to nearly every household in Shetland during the 1950s and 60s can stand as one of the more decisive moments. In addition to allowing for a whole range of modern conveniences, electricity brought with it television, which radically extended awareness of the outside world. Electricity was introduced at a time when the Shetland economy was in a slump. Public work schemes such as the provision of electricity and water supplies and the improvement of roads were initiated to relieve the situation and keep the menfolk off the dole (Donald 1983, p. 200). Employment of a more lasting nature was scarce, though, as the herring fishing which had boomed so spectacularly in the early part of the century, although still significant, was a shadow of its former self, and there was little to substitute for it (Donald 1983, p. 199; Smith 1977, p. 69). Up until the late 1960s there was a widespread pessimism regarding the future of Shetland. Indeed, it is easy to draw a bleak picture, reliable employment in the islands being scarce and the rate of emigration having nearly doubled during the 1950s as compared to the previous two decades(10). An indication of the prevailing sentiments can perhaps be found in the motion carried by an annual debate forum in Shetland, the Althing, in 1955: "Remote areas are a liability to the nation." (Donald 1983, p. 203.) I doubt that the question of why spirits were so low can be fully accounted for by these facts, however. Parallel to the process of decline was another process: the growing relevance of the national context. An increasingly well developed transport and communications system decreases isolation and brings a greater degree of interdependence, but, as Daniel Bell has argued,
"[A]long with a greater degree of interdependence has come a change of scale - the spread of cities, the growth of organizational size, the widening of the political arena - which has made individuals feel more helpless within larger entities, and which has broadened the span of control over the activities of any organization from a center." (1974, p. 42)
Processes such as these were significantly affecting Shetland in the 1950s - when the local economy was weak - and onwards. Television, in particular, has played a crucial role in nationalising the populations of modern states. However, television was also one of the ways in which the contrasts between different regions within the nation became increasingly apparent, in this case the contrast between Shetland as a backward and desolate place and the more prosperous parts of the mainland of Britain was brought to the front of people's consciousness.
The situation was soon going to change, however. Increasingly, from the 1950s onwards, the view that economic development in Shetland was possible, and could and should be stimulated by means of resources found locally, was voiced (Donald 1983, p. 202). Over the coming years a number of projects were launched, or attempted, with a varying degree of success. 1965 witnessed the formation of the Highlands and Islands Development Board (later to be renamed Highlands and Islands Enterprise), and it was through their financial assistance that things really began to happen (Donald 1983, p. 205).
Still, it was only with the events of the coming decade that the speed of transformation was radically accelerated. The story is familiar to anyone with an affiliation to Shetland; it is the tale of the discovery of oil in the North Sea and the subsequent development of services to cater for the off-shore oil and gas fields - of greatest consequence was the construction of Europe's largest oil and liquefied gas terminal in the islands. That the coming of oil had a considerable impact on Shetland is beyond doubt. For a long time opinions were divided on the question of whether oil would be a good thing for the islands; apparently, emotion raged high in the "Our Reader's View" column of the Shetland Times in the 1970s. After the Shetland Islands Council (S.I.C.) had secured a deal with the oil companies, there was little doubt that there would be an economic benefit. Still, there was well-founded concern about the long-term effects upon the Shetland economy, which, when the oil and gas resources were depleted, would still have to prove viable. Also, there was concern about the sheer influx of people in the construction phase: 1980 saw a peak workforce of 7,000, most of whom came from the south and had to be accommodated and fed.(11)
Today, although there certainly have been problems with the oil-related developments in the islands, there is widespread agreement that oil on the whole has been a good thing for Shetland. Some of the benefits are obvious: Oil has brought employment, and also allowed for subsidised transport, social benefits, rural leisure centres and the like, on a scale unparalleled in most other parts of the U.K. It should be stressed that oil is not the only sector of the economy that has been developing since the 1950s and 60s. Massive investments in the fishing fleet, particularly in the islands of Whalsay and Burra, have turned the fisheries into a most lucrative industry for many; fish farming has appeared as an industry in its own right and now makes up a substantial fraction of Shetland's economy; income from tourism has since the early 1980s risen by well over 100% (S.I.C. 1995). There are sectors where there have been ups and downs, and certainly the easy availability of work on the oil terminal meant hard times for other parts of the economy; still, in spite of some turbulence along the way, the overall picture for the 1970s and early 80s is one of substantial increase in material welfare.
A substantial body of literature on the 'impact of oil in Scotland' has been produced, in an attempt to document or foretell the consequences of sudden industrialisation. In one of these volumes, an article by Anthony P. Cohen appeared, in which he argues that there are fundamental inadequacies in much of this literature when it comes to accounting for the actual cultural processes at work in such contexts. The cultural impact he identifies as the awareness people develop of themselves and their own values when having been made aware of others during the course of industrialisation (1980, p. 165). The development of oil in Shetland was instrumental in bringing this kind of awareness about, but as suggested above, and as Cohen also argues, the impact of oil can hardly be seen in isolation from the impact of all the other influences on the cultural process. Cohen argues, though, that from the moment the prospect of radical change in association with the discovery of oil in the North Sea was first presented, a process of cultural accounting began to take place. This process has found many empirical expressions. There was in the 1970s, parallel to the coming of oil, a big revival of local music, art and dialect writing. A greater interest in local history and traditions developed and found expression in new ways. A wide range of organisations and societies were formed all over Shetland, as a consequence of an increased awareness of the importance of community. A multitude of assertions regarding the special character of the 'way of life' in Shetland, the mental dispositions of Shetlanders, or the social life in the islands, have seen the light of day.(12) The fact that most of these affirmations portray Shetland and Shetlanders in either a positive or a self-ironic light testifies to the existence of confidence regarding what is perceived as peculiar to Shetland.
Following the decades when the economy was weak and the population trend negative, there was thus, on the one hand, a period of substantial economic development, and on the other hand, a period of cultural transformation in which the perceptions Shetlanders had of themselves and the place they inhabited altered. After the completion of the oil terminal in 1982 - the terminal had then been operative in four years - both the economy and the population levels have been fairly stable(13). The prevailing sentiment in this period regarding Shetland's future has been relatively optimistic. Reduced activity at the oil terminal in recent years has, however, already forced the S.I.C. to cut public spending, and this fact has served to underline the need to find other reliable sources of income. It is widely recognised that, even if the oil still may last well into the twenty-first century, there must be something in place to substitute for it when it eventually runs out. The optimism is checked, then, by an appreciation of the precariousness of the situation, a precariousness stemming from the limits of the natural resources, but most of all from the fact that decisions regarding their management often are taken outwith Shetland.
Although the patterns of change described above are characteristic for Shetland as such, the various districts are affected in somewhat different ways. The transformation of the economic structure of Shetland has implied a geographical restructuring of work, and a higher number of jobs are now found in the more central areas, particularly in Lerwick and at the oil terminal at Sullom Voe, where people from different parts of the islands are often employed(14). The improvements in the infrastructure (better roads, more buses, better ferry services) are crucial in this process, enabling more people to travel a longer distance to work. This remains an impossibility in the outlying parts of Shetland, but in the more central areas such commuting is common.
In Northmavine, which is situated on the north-western part of the largest island in the Shetland archipelago, Mainland, as many as 166 out of an economically active population of 364 had work outside the parish in 1991. Among the jobs available, both within and outwith the district, many are kinds of jobs that were not available a few decades previously. When it comes to jobs within the district, primary industries, particularly agriculture and fish farming, dominate along with services (primary schools, a health centre, a hotel, shops, etc.), but the one fish factory is also significant, providing 16% of the jobs (S.I.C. 1993). Some of the jobs outside Northmavine are not very far away, as the oil terminal at Sullom Voe, which employs many people resident in Northmavine, is situated within easy travel distance for those who have a car at their disposal. There are significant numbers of people travelling to Lerwick every day, however, and especially for those who go on the bus, the time spent travelling to work is substantial. The shortage of jobs locally is of particular concern for those who lack adequate transport, which means that the problem affects more women than men. It is obvious, though, that the increased availability of work outside Northmavine was crucial for the increase in population in the 1970s and for sustaining a stable population since. Before this time, the district had experienced very severe depopulation (see n. 10, p. 23).
Another feature of the local labour market is the relatively high proportion of part-time work. Indeed, an increasing reliance upon part-time workers is a characteristic of the national labour market. Whether or not this is a trend that significantly affects the situation locally I do not know. The proportion of part-time employment is high in the rural areas, anyway, if nothing else then for reasons of scale: Many jobs need to be carried out locally but are not extensive enough for someone to be employed full-time. The result is that a relatively high number of people combine a number of different jobs to get by. A very typical combination is that of a couple working a croft, where the man, and sometimes also the woman, has other employment. I know of several examples of married couples living on and running a croft, where the man has a full-time job either in Lerwick or at the oil terminal, and the woman a part-time job in health or other services within Northmavine. All kinds of combinations occur, however, and it is not in any way uncommon to encounter people who have three jobs or more. In addition to the problem of finding suitable work in the first place, there is also a question of logistics here: It takes something to make it all come together, particularly if there are children who need to be looked after, as there is no organised pre-school care.
What we see, then, is a situation in which many people have different kinds of jobs than they would have had before. Fishing in its current form and fish processing have their origins in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and fish farming is of even more recent date. The oil industry and associated services stem from the 1970s and 1980s and during this period more jobs have been created by the local authorities too (Ratter 1985, p. 134). Also, those having the same kinds of jobs carry them out differently, as is the case with crofting. Crofting has been undergoing change for a long time, but particularly so since the 1950s, since when it has ceased being the main source, or even a very significant source, of income for many people. Cohen writes that in Whalsay most of the island's approximately 130 crofts would not be said by their proprietors to yield an income that could be regarded as an economic return (1987, p. 100). Although crofting is a far more important contributor to people's incomes in Northmavine, the same tendency is present here. What once was a crucial means of survival has thus become far less important in economic terms to many people. Also, the agricultural sector has been steadily modernised and increasingly regulated. Apparently, keeping up with the alterations to the national and EU agricultural regulations requires a substantial effort.
There is a clear consciousness in Northmavine, as elsewhere, that without the oil and without the modernisation - whether induced by oil or by other things - it would have been hard to sustain a stable population in the area. A woman living in Northmavine once talked to me about the changes that have taken place, saying "everything now is the best". She quoted the new premises for the local school and the health centre as examples of this. She then related a conversation she had just had with someone regarding a stretch of road that had recently been improved. There had been resistance to the road, she said, as some thought it would damage the environment, and a petition had been signed against it. The road runs across the hill, at one point past a loch, where some thought the birdlife would be disturbed. The woman said now that the road has been built, one can see it is all very good: It has not destroyed the loch at all. There may be bigger shops elsewhere, but mostly people have everything they need in Shetland, she added in conclusion. Of course there are practical problems in relation to the new situation, like the problem of finding work in the first place, of dealing with the logistics of combining different jobs and other responsibilities, or of finding one's way about all the red tape resulting from ever new regulations. Apart from such practicalities, however, people did to all appearances cope very well with the new situation.
At the same time that people are well aware of and appreciate the material benefits delivered by modernisation, it is obvious that not everyone partakes in those benefits equally. While there has been an overall rise in material living standards, there are very obvious differences within Shetland, between those who have made the higher earnings and those who haven't. Housing is one field in which this is apparent. In the rural areas there are many different types of housing. There are the old croft houses(15), still the most common mode of housing in 1981 (Ratter 1985, p. 132), some substantially refurbished, some not; there are various other old buildings, like school houses, converted into private homes; there are a variety of flats and houses on modern housing estates, including some sheltered houses; there are different kinds of privately owned modern houses, ranging from the very modest to what comparatively speaking appears rather luxurious. The difference, in material terms, between an old croft house that has not been refurbished, or only minimally so - a common mode of housing, especially for many elderly folk - and a modern villa, is considerable. I came to understand that although many people spoke favourably of the last house in the area featuring an open fire, there were also those who were worried that their lodgings would appear backward.
In the face of all the spectacular products of modernisation, whether those in evidence in Shetland, or those documented daily in the national media, uncertainties regarding what Shetland can contribute are commonly encountered. Among young people, I was a few times confronted with the question, "What on earth are you doing up here?" Sometimes the tone of voice would betray an anticipation of an answer that in some way or other would confirm a positive image of Shetland. Other times, a genuine uncertainty surfaced.
There were two contexts in particular where I encountered such uncertainties. One was in conversations about the past, the other in relation to tourism. When it comes to the former, a woman who herself takes an active interest in local history at one time said to me she thought some of the old folk "were ashamed of the old stories". Indeed, some of the old people who talked to me about the past were clearly worried that the stories they told would not interest me. On another occasion the same woman said, while talking to me about her childhood experience of growing up in what she described as mainly a subsistence economy, that she sometimes thought she grew up in the Middle Ages.
When it comes to tourism, a few people said to me that they wondered whether the tourists would be disappointed with what they got to see on holiday. A woman living in a village where most of the coaches that take groups of visitors to Northmavine come by, once said she and others sometimes wondered what they came there for. You saw them walk in the middle of the road, expecting everyone to slow down, all stopping in the same place to take the same photograph, of the same view, and wonder whether they took that one photograph because they thought there was nothing else to see. "You wonder, 'cause there are so many of them," she remarked. For there is indeed a steady flow of people during the summer months, both organised trips and individual arrivals. Some stay in the area for a few days, most just visit for the day. Several people living in the area commented that the Tangwick Haa Museum was a good thing, for on a rainy day there was nothing else to see there.
Although there is a clear recognition and appreciation of the benefits of modernisation, and an argument could be made to the effect that confidence and optimism abounds in Shetland, such examples suggest that the increased awareness brought about by the increased presence in Shetland of people, ideas and technology from elsewhere also feeds certain doubts concerning what is perceived as indigenous to Shetland.
Uncertainty and confidence, fear and pleasure, relief and sorrow - all sentiments that are characteristic of modernity, that is, of an experience of a state of changeability or flux in society. A theory of modernisation, the social processes that create the flux (Berman 1983, p. 16), would have to be able to grapple with such different kinds of sentiments, all of them characteristic of the present period in Shetland.
Berman's project in the book All That Is Solid Melts into Air, is exactly to find ways of understanding modernity that come to terms with such apparently conflicting reactions and sentiments. Parallel to the processes of modernisation, visions of those processes have been conceived. These different visions, or modernisms, Berman argues, were at their most vibrant in the nineteenth century, by which time the forces of modernisation had gained momentum and the world many people found themselves in already was a world of industry, urbanisation processes and mass communication. The 'definitive' vision of this modern environment Berman finds in Marx, whose writing captures and thrives on the contradictions of the modern world:
"On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors of the latter times of the Roman Empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary." (Marx quoted in Berman 1983, p. 19f)
Thus, the very revolutionary forces that will overthrow the modern bourgeoisie are to be found in the bourgeoisie itself:
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and with them the relations of production, and with them the relations of society. ... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social relations, everlasting uncertainty and agitation, distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones." "All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and men at last are forced to face ... the real conditions of their lives and their relations with their fellow men." (Marx quoted in Berman 1983, p. 21)
"Thus," Berman goes on, "the dialectical motion of modernity turns ironically against its prime movers, the bourgeoisie" (1983, p. 21). There are many other voices in the nineteenth century, but Berman holds that they can be likened to each other and to Marx, in that they face the inherent contradictions of the modern world head-on, in recognition of the simultaneously immensely productive and vastly destructive consequences of modernisation. Berman characterises the voice of the nineteenth century thus: "It is a voice that knows pain and dread, but believes in its power to come through" (p. 23).
"What has become of nineteenth-century modernism in the twentieth century?" Berman asks next (p. 23). The twentieth century has been extremely creative; a tremendous production of ideas and works of art has seen the light of day. At the same time, Berman laments, it seems we have lost our grasp of the modern life from which this production stems:
"If we listen closely to twentieth-century writers and thinkers about modernity and compare them to those of a century ago, we will find a radical flattening of perspective and shrinkage of imaginative range. Our nineteenth-century thinkers were simultaneously enthusiasts and enemies of modern life, wrestling inexhaustibly with its ambiguities and contradictions; their self-ironies and inner tensions were a primary source of their creative power. Their twentieth-century successors have lurched far more toward rigid polarities and flat totalizations. Modernity is either embraced with a blind and uncritical enthusiasm, or else condemned with a neo-Olympian remoteness and contempt; in either case, it is conceived as a closed monolith, incapable of being shaped or changed by modern men. Open visions of modern life have been supplanted by closed ones, Both/And by Either/Or." (1983, p. 24)
Whatever visions of modernity there are, these visions are not confined to the books and theses of the learned. Rather, they are implicit in most of what modern men and women do, feel and think, as these visions are part of the stuff that we are all made of. Berman's concern is that this century's visions, its modernisms, are lacking in scope, and that they are therefore unable to portray modernity in all its complexity and ambiguity. Whether they whole-heartedly embrace modernity or are overtly anti-modern, they seem to have lost touch with the sort of complexity and subtlety with which the nineteenth-century thinkers conceived of the modern world. I think Berman's concern is pertinent. The visions we have of the world in which we live are crucial when it comes to dealing with that world. If those visions are flawed, or otherwise inadequate, there is indeed reason for concern.
The reason I bring this up in the present context, is that museums are modern phenomena, and in any explanation of a phenomenon characteristic of the modern world, there will be implicit a notion of modernity. When Ambrose, the Director of the Scottish Museums Council, said that the establishment of museums amounts to "a reaction against change", there is implicit in this an assumption about how people experience change, that is, of the nature of their modernity. The development of a museum is conceived of as an anti-modern undertaking, and people are thought to engage in it in an attempt to reconstruct the assumed stability of bygone times. As suggested above, this would be a gross simplification of the sentiments found in Northmavine, including the people involved with the Museum. For a start it only addresses the uncertainties, but equally important, it entails an assumption about what it is that causes the uncertainty, namely the instability of modern life.
This kind of vision of modernity is most characteristic of the present time, and constitute but a variety of the visions Berman speaks of. It is not so strange that gloomy perceptions of modernity have been on the increase; after all, the time when modernity could be uncritically embraced are long gone, as the problems it causes are all too obvious, with the ever increasing divide between rich and poor and the looming threat of environmental disaster. Reactions to this include post- and anti-modern stances, but also, among those who continue thinking modernity is here to stay, there is a tendency to overemphasise its destructive or oppressive implications. Michel Foucault can be taken as an example of this, focusing as he did on total institutions (the clinic, the prison) and how the modern discursive regime gained a hold on bodies and minds that amounted to near complete control (Berman 1983, p. 34f). Only in his last work, The History of Sexuality (1990), does a more open perception appear, in the form of a notion of resistance.
Foucault's major works on power were published in the 1970s, when the disillusionment with modern civilisation was gaining force. Another deconstructive approach of considerable influence is that of Jean-François Lyotard, set forth in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (1984). Here he challenges what he calls the 'grand narrative', a kind of narrative that he sees as characteristic of the modern era. The grand narrative attempts to legitimise knowledge by way of reference to progress of one kind or another (emancipation, enlightenment, efficiency) (see in particular part 10). Although presenting itself as universal, the grand narrative, Lyotard holds, carries within itself the seeds of its own delegitimation. This is so because it separates itself out as a special field (science of one kind or another). In doing so, it is obliged to refer to something outside itself to obtain the necessary amount of legitimacy. As the claim to legitimacy is thus itself outside the narrative it seeks to legitimise, this claim cannot be deemed legitimate by reference to the rules of that narrative (part 10). In what Lyotard in this book calls the post-modern condition, this problem is avoided, as the discourse that seeks to legitimise knowledge is immanent in that knowledge itself (p. 54). When knowledge is legitimised locally, multiple small narratives may thrive, but they can never ignore the question of legitimacy - rather they have to commit themselves to continuously reworking the reasons why they claim their voice to be a valid one (p. 54).
This argument has led some readers to think that Lyotard sees modernity as a thing of the past. However, this is a misjudgment. There is nothing to stop the small narratives from trying to realise modern values. What Lyotard deconstructs, then, is not modernity as such, but a certain vision of modernity, that which expresses itself through the grand narrative. In a later piece, Lyotard clarifies his use of the concept 'postmodern', and suggests instead that we speak of 'rewriting modernity':
"I have myself used the term 'postmodern'. It was a slightly provocative way of placing (or displacing) into the limelight the debate about knowledge. Postmodernity is not a new age, but the rewriting of some of the features claimed by modernity, and first of all modernity's claim to ground its legitimacy on the project of liberating humanity as a whole through science and technology. But as I have said, that rewriting has been at work, for a long time now, in modernity itself." (1991, p. 34)
So, the postmodern is itself inherent in the modern, and rather than urging that the modern project should be abandoned, Lyotard can be read as contributing to that project himself. It appears, then, that the modern (in the sense of a rewriting) takes many forms, and that maintaining a critical stance may itself amount to a modern attitude.
Underlying the view that the establishment of museums is intended to resist the instability of the modern world is the assumption that people perceive modernity as essentially an evil, that is, that they think instability or change to be negative in itself. However, people may be thought to resist a particular course of change without thereby committing themselves to a quest for stability. Although there are signs of uncertainty with regard to the kinds of change that are taking place, this need not imply that change as such is considered essentially in negative terms. Such critical stances may rather turn out to be modern themselves. This is also consistent with Berman's conception of modernity. According to him, it is fully possible to lead a meaningful life in the midst of ambiguity:
"To be modern, I said, is to experience personal and social life as a maelstrom, to find one's world and oneself in perpetual disintegration and renewal, trouble and anguish, ambiguity and contradiction: to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air. To be a modernist is to make oneself somehow at home in the maelstrom, to make its rhythms one's own, to move within its currents in search of the forms of reality, of beauty, of freedom, of justice, that its fervid and perilous flow allows." (1983, p. 345f)
This vision of modernity is critically at odds with perceptions of modernity that see instability, disorder, fragmentation, a state of change, as basically a problem and ignore the positive potential. Although such negative visions of modernity may find ample support in the modernisation literature, the question remains whether it might not be the case that such understandings produce the reality they purport to describe.
What has been suggested in this section is that the kind of experiences people have of the modernisation processes, of change, are diverse. On the one hand, it is clear that modernisation has brought material welfare (and thus security against certain of the hazards of life in the past) and grounds for confidence in what the future may bring. On the other hand, the change has also brought new kinds of social differentiation, bringing Shetland more closely in touch with the hierarchies of class found in other parts of Britain, and has perhaps more firmly than ever fed an awareness of the differences between Shetland and the outside world, an awareness that has inspired some uncertainties in things perceived as indigenous to Shetland.
Whether these uncertainties can be seen as a reaction against change as such, whether they just result from the effort of coming to terms with modernisation, whether they result from the feeling that other paths of change are blocked off - these are issues, then, that need to be addressed empirically. Moreover, how the Museum relates to experiences of change is equally unclear. Is it a way of dealing with uncertainty? Or, does it result from the new-found confidence? Is it an attempt at gaining more control over the course of change? Or is it a way of soothing the pain induced by loss of what was familiar? It could be any or all of these things, or perhaps the best questions are not even included on this list. The point I want to make is simply that the questions of how people experience the change, and how the Museum relates to those experiences, are not adequately accounted for. When these issues have been opened up, it becomes increasingly obvious that saying that the establishment of museums implies using the past to combat the present or that people experience change as a threat, is not as innocent as it may seem. It may well be that some experiences of a particular course of change, of instability, are painful. That is not to say that people may not at the same time find in that instability the promise of a better life.
In the following chapter I discuss the question of change with reference to different ways of relating to the past, that is, to different forms of memory. In the subsequent chapters I focus on what kind of change the museum in Northmavine addresses, and how the interest in the past can be seen to relate to experiences of change.
On Tuesday, 29th September, 1812, at noon, wind west, a fine day, William Nicolson, tenant in Roeneep, was in the ebb taking limpets from the rocks at Roesound, near Roeneep, when he saw an animal come up to one of the rocks which he took to be a seal, but to his amazement the animal stretched out two arms of human shape and raised itself on the rock where it seated itself like a man of middle stature. The head and face seemed like a man's. The head was bare with very long hair which it turned aside from its face with its fingers, and seemed to wring the water with its hands. The face seemed red coloured, resembling a fine human complexion. The arms were covered with (seemingly) sealskin to the elbows and naked from there to the points of the fingers, which seemed white. The body was clothed seemingly with seal's skin which had the appearance of being drawn in plates round the neck. The legs were white and had the appearance of a cover on the feet, which the animal seemed to draw up with its hands over the legs and above the knees, and which it seemed then to fasten over its thighs. It sat the whole time (about ten minutes) with its back to Nicolson and turned round its head and both sides and looked repeatedly at him. The man was unable from terror to have called to it, even if he had intended to do so. The perfect resemblance of the animal to that of a man made him actually take it for one, and he is fully persuaded that it was a Norway Fin, a Norwegian which tradition says often travels the seas clothed in seal skin for the purpose of driving the fish off the coasts here to the shores of Norway.
The above declaration was made by William Nicolson in presence of John and Arthur Cheyne, merchants in Hillswick, and James Clark their servant, on 6th day of October, 1812. William Nicolson is willing to attest on oath that the above declaration is truth.
This story appears in a booklet published by the Northmavine Community History Group called North by Mavis Grind(16). It was issued in the early 1990s and incorporates a wide range of material in the form of stories or poetry, written either in the local dialect or in English. The contents either date from or refer to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Tales of supernatural beings, of foul weather and shipwrecks, appear alongside stories relating to the crofting and fishing of bygone times.
In the previous chapter I described some of the changes Shetland has undergone during the course of the past few decades. The result is a place characterised by a complex mingling of old and new. Practices with a long history of development within Shetland thrive alongside practices that have only recently gained a foothold in the isles. In the midst of this complexity, people get on with their everyday lives, and in the process create ever new instances of mediation between the new and the old. Most of the time the nature and existence of such a mediation is not made explicit; you just get on with it - 'it' being represented by such things as securing your winter fuel by having peat cut using modern machinery, relating the latest episode of Coronation Street to your friend in the local dialect, baking fruit loaf in the microwave. I also said that one of the characteristic features of contemporary Shetland is a particular kind of reflexivity concerning the place people inhabit, what Cohen has termed 'cultural accounting' (1980). This reflexivity is related to the changes Shetland has undergone in the last two or three decades, and takes a variety of forms, including an increased interest in the past. The booklet referred to above is a product of this reflexivity, as are the community history museums found around Shetland. Part of the modernisation processes, then, are changes in how people relate to the past, changes in the nature of memory, in other words. It is with these changes that the current chapter is concerned. I will begin by making some preliminary remarks regarding the nature of memory and its relation to the past.
The past is by definition something to which one has access only through memory. If something exists, whether it is of a material, social or cognitive nature, it is by definition a thing of the present. An object, idea or social institution may be old, but its past is nevertheless no longer in existence (Johansen 1989, p. 228). Or rather, its past only exists as memory, that is, in a mediated form. Different processes of mediation will have different characteristics, but what they all have in common is that a sort of dialectics is at work in which a modification or alteration of those things brought in touch with each other takes place. Material objects may be mediated by a wide range of natural processes, as well as by human manipulation. Ideas may be mediated through being confronted with other ideas. The passage of time always involves mediation of one kind or another, a process in which the original thing (a wooden stool, a flower, a social custom, an idea, crofting techniques) is modified, expanded, transformed. 'Memory' is a term that draws attention both to the end result of such processes of mediation, that is, to what remains, and to the material or capacity that contains that end result. It is on memory, in all its facets, that the reconstruction of history depends. There is no way of having direct access to the past; only its tracks remain.
At the same time, humans, and everything that surrounds us, are constantly emerging out of the past. In this sense there is no choice left us but to relate to the past, even if it remains true that that past only exists as remembrance. Numerous examples of trying to 'evade one's past' may be thought of, but the past is always there, as memory. The teenager's attempt at rebellion is just one example, here described by Salman Rushdie in his short-story "The Courter":
"And I looked at my choleric, face-pulling father and thought about British citizenship. My existing Indian passport permitted me to travel only to a very few countries, which were carefully listed on the second right-hand page. But I might soon have a British passport and then, by hook or by crook, I would get away from him. I would not have this face-pulling in my life.
At sixteen, you still think you can escape from your father. You aren't listening to his voice speaking through your mouth, you don't see how your gestures already mirror his; you don't see him in the way you hold your body, in the way you sign your name. You don't hear his whisper in your blood." (1994, p. 202)
This passage reveals that I think of memory in rather broad terms. However mediated the relationship with the past is, it remains the case that human beings are bound to the past in a variety of ways. Although conventionally thought of as a cognitive capacity, memory is also physical and biological. Thus, Paul Connerton argues in his book How Societies Remember for the existence of bodily memory:
"Our bodies ... keep the past ... in an entirely effective form in their continuing ability to perform certain skilled actions. We may not remember how or when we first learned to swim, but we can keep on swimming successfully - remembering how to do it - without any representational activity on our part at all; we consult a mental picture of what we should do when our capacity to execute spontaneously the bodily movements is defective. ... In habitual memory the past is, as it were, sedimented in the body." (1989, p. 72)
Connerton's conception of habitual memory is based on a notion of the body as being not just physical or biological but also social. An early elaboration of this notion within the social sciences is found in Marcel Mauss' essay "Body Techniques", originally published in 1950. By 'body techniques' Mauss means "the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies" (1979, p. 97). Mauss explains how his notion of these techniques grew from the knowledge that people in different societies do such things as walking or swimming in different ways. The challenge was to be able to account for these bodily phenomena in a way which could also grasp their social nature. To speak of them as techniques does just that, as Mauss by technique means "an action which is effective and traditional". Techniques are effective in the sense that they are felt by the person executing them as "actions of a mechanical, physical or physico-chemical order", and traditional in the sense that they are taught: transmitted from person to person (p. 104, original emphasis removed). Such bodily competences as swimming or walking are thus deeply social, as the social is essential in the learning of these techniques. To know how to do something one must also remember how to do it, and this is what Connerton reminds us: that these techniques, being bodily, constitute a form of memory. Bodily memory is, in other words, a form of memory that is as socially specific as cognitive memory.
However, the limits of the body (themselves blurred) do not mark the end of remembrance. Everything this world consists of has the capacity of memory: In so far as something is temporal, existing in time, it functions as memory. The chemical balance of a beaver's brain, the genetic material of sunflowers, driftwood washed ashore, the behaviour of pet dogs, the geological composition of a rock, the gases in the atmosphere - everywhere tracks left by past times can be found. Different kinds of events leave their traces, traces that afterwards appear as material, cognitive, social, biological tracks. Some kinds of memory are obviously more durable than others. A person's memory is ultimately limited to the lifetime of the body, although a lot is forgotten much faster. The production of material imprints compensates for this transient character of human memory. The most important materialisations are writing and recordings of sound and pictures. And yet, even in material form, memory remains a thing of the present. Whether we speak of linguistic, physical, cognitive or biological memory, what remains will never be the same as what once was. The traces that are left of the past are, as I said above, mediated, transformed. In a sense this only amounts to saying that everything that exists is temporal, resulting from the simultaneous dissolution of one moment and materialisation of another. Memory, then, is what ensures continuity through time.
Looking at the recent development of interest in local history in Shetland, one might easily be led to conclude that prior to this development the past was largely ignored there. Employing a wider concept of memory, this impression is easily refuted, however. The past was, and still is, present in a multitude of ways (albeit in a mediated form): in physical objects, in speech, as traces in the landscape, in many of the practices of everyday life. The descriptions provided at the beginning of this chapter of how old and new constantly intermingle are examples of how the continuous mediation of the past actually takes place. Most of the time the mediation of the past is of such a pragmatic nature. This is why Cohen, writing about Whalsay, can describe practices relating to crofting, fishing with hand-lines, peat-cutting and the use of language as 'repositories of the past' (1987, pp. 98-141). These are all practices in which the past is tangibly present (in the form of memory), practices that maintain a strong continuity with the past. One could add that in the landscape in which the work is carried out and among the tools used to carry out the work, however many changes have taken place, there will also be ample evidence of past times. However, also these continuities may be said to result from the pragmatism of everyday life in Whalsay; as Cohen says, "the past has no inherent value [in Whalsay] but is prized, rather, for its present usefulness" (p. 135). When something old - a tool, a linguistic trait, a social practice, a certain skill - is kept, it is kept due to its pragmatic value, then, rather than for the sake of a supposed intrinsic value due to its age. This pragmatism is coupled to what Cohen calls a lack of 'sentimentality' regarding the past, and there is in Whalsay, he says, "a consequent disparagement of interest in anything related to the past which has no such practicality" (p. 135). Cohen goes on to state that although a selective idealisation of the past takes place, "[t]he past there is always just 'da aald days' rather than 'the good old days', as it might be farther south" (p. 136).
Cohen's description of Whalsay refers to the period between 1973, when he arrived there for the first time, and 1986, when he completed the book, and this fact may account for part of the contrast to what I experienced in Northmavine in the 1990s. In spite of many things being different between the two places, the relative lack of romanticism with which the past in Whalsay was perceived resonates in certain ways with how people I spoke to in Northmavine perceived of the old days. There was typically a sobriety in what people said, and no-one failed to recognise the benefits brought by change.
What one woman in her late thirties said regarding the change that has been experienced in latter decades can serve as an example. Our conversation took place in her kitchen one morning while her children were away at school. She lives in a relatively new house, and we were surrounded by the same modern conveniences that you would expect to encounter in a modern kitchen anywhere in Britain, in addition to a large Raeburn fuelled by peat. She said, "When we were children there was no road to the house, no water ... Our children have no idea what it was like. Even I can remember that we had no electric light." Although there will always be an element of idiosyncracy in a statement, however subtly expressed, the image this woman conveyed is a common one: A materially poor past is contrasted with the much richer present. This kind of contrasting of past hardships with present comforts also takes place with reference to a more distant past. Telling me about her interest in history, another woman - she is a teacher and works a croft with her brother - said the following: "It's something to do with the continuity of human existence in an area. I look at the yards and wonder how many people have cultivated there. ... You wonder what it was like a hundred years ago. Me and you wouldn't have been doing what we are doing now." She went on to say you learn to "appreciate your freedom": If you were born on a croft a hundred years ago, you would be getting married or go into service. There wasn't much choice, unless you were a merchant's or laird's offspring: "For a woman it must have been sheer drudgery."
As I showed in Chapter 1, the changes seen in Northmavine since the 1960s are substantial, and the material welfare, and the resulting range of options regarding how to live one's life are more or less universally acknowledged and appreciated. Too many people have memories of or knowledge about the hard work that was required to make ends meet for them to romanticise the past. A woman in her fifties who now has an office job told me about how her parents "almost killed themselves" working on the croft that they relied on for getting by when she grew up. Also, much of the work carried out in past times is embedded in physical remains: fields, buildings, fences, tools. These may not be in use anymore, or may be in a different kind of use, but much remains present - visibly, tangibly. Thus, it appears that much is remembered as a result of the pragmatism found in everyday life, as the activities people engage in leave biological and physical tracks: People's bodies become adapted to the tasks they are set to perform, the landscape is modified by farming, all sorts of things are produced that testify to the activity that once took place: a barn, a churn, a fiddle, a sweater. Due to these materialisations, as well as what people remember without the aid of such tracks, the hardship and toil that went with life in the past for so many people is simply too obvious for most of them to lapse into the sort of pastoral idealisations that have enjoyed and continue to enjoy such attraction in more urbanised milieux.
However practical people may remain when relating to the past, any talk about it is also reflexive, and although such reflexivity is hardly new, with the establishment of the history groups and museums it has taken on a new form altogether. For Whalsay, Cohen relates the heavy presence of the past to the apparent lack of interest in conservation work:
"With the past so much around them, both materially and conceptually, Whalsay people have no need to fetishise it. Old objects are not valued for their age and there is little evidence of interest in the preservation of relics." (1987, p. 134)
Whalsay is one of the by now few places in Shetland that do not have a community history museum.(17) I am unsure of the significance of this fact, as interest and participation in the museums elsewhere also varies. However this may be, in Northmavine there did not seem to be an opposition between the lack of romanticism with which the past is perceived and the positive interest in the past that the History Group is an expression of. Some examples of the kind of motivations behind this interest will illustrate the point.
Although a few people were very articulate about their interest in history, quite frequently, when asked why they had become involved with the history of the place, they would grope for words, eventually replying something like, "I've probably always been interested in history." And, as often as not, that would be the end of that discussion. Clues to understanding why people spent as much time and energy on work with the History Group and Museum would have to be sought in a different way. Whether or not, and in what fashion, people articulated their reasons for being interested in the past, for participating in the History Group and running the Museum, it is obvious from what I learnt about it whilst in Shetland that these reasons are complex and many. As documenting the full spectrum of variety obviously is impossible, I have limited myself to giving an impression of the kinds of differences that exist. The examples I include are chosen primarily with this end in mind. Although none of the cases are entirely unique, the degree to which they are representative of major motivational trends may therefore vary.
During a conversation I had with a woman, while she was visiting me during a spell of backache that bound me to the house, we got to talking about the past. She was asking me about Norway in the Second World War, which she is old enough to remember. In the middle of the conversation, she offered an explanation for why she was interested in history. She knew, of course, that this was the kind of thing that I was interested in. The woman said her preoccupation with history was "just for the amusement of it". She went on to tell me that she had recently listened to an oral history tape her son had recorded. She then related a story from the tape, a story about a sister and a brother who, when their family was struck by fever, had fled their home in the far south of Shetland and eventually ended up in Northmavine.
On a different occasion, I was visiting one of the members of the History Group, a man in his early 70s. I enquired about his interest in history, and the man specified that he was interested in the "old traditions", "the old way of life", and added, "I like to see that it at least is being recorded". He went on to say that he had seen "a big change" in his time. "Probably the biggest change up here", he said, "was the Hydro-Electric." After this he gave me a detailed and entertaining account of the different ways of producing light prior to the advent of electricity. He described the workings of the windmills that people used immediately prior to the extension of the electricity lines, as well as different types of lamps that were used before them - all in great detail and with genuine fascination. His enjoyment in talking about the changes that have taken place during the course of this century, many of them in his own lifetime, was obvious throughout the visit.
Yet another visit, this time to a woman who lives on a modern housing estate in the area. Her family used to run a business in the village where she lives. In the mid-70s, the time when the construction of the oil terminal started and higher wages became available, her father died, and the business was split up and sold off. When I asked her what she found most interesting about history, she replied, "I suppose it would be shops and trading, because that was my life." She went on to say that her father taught her a lot of history, but added, "Sometimes I feel I didn't listen enough." Then she told me about her father's early years, working on the beach. Later he started working in the shop, which he took over when the former owner emigrated to Australia. Gradually he expanded into new fields of business and built up a firm that employed as many as fifty people in the area by the time he died. On another occasion, when talking about the development of the business, she stressed that the village is "saturated in history".
Around the time of the actual restoration of the Tangwick Haa, an animated piece appeared in a magazine that was published in North Mainland at the time, written by one of the prime movers in the setting up of the Museum. He argues fervently in favour of the Museum. He points to people's enthusiasm and feelings for the project, compounded of elements such as, "desire to understand, curiosity, a felt need for continuity and also regret that so little, perhaps nothing, can actually be known of our past as it really was". He then moves on to say that in this enthusiasm there are grounds for optimism, as it is a mode of resistance toward the Thatcherite representations of the past that filter through the media.(18)
Someone else who were involved with the Museum when it was first set up was a man, now sadly deceased, who was incredibly knowledgeable of past times. He produced an impressive compilation of local residential histories, among other things. He explained his interest in the past humorously as "a sign of old age". Other old people talked of their involvement in the History Group and Museum as "a night out" or a chance to meet others and "yarn".
In these different accounts - and I stress that they are only examples and do not account for all the different reasons for being interested in the past, nor are they in any way exhaustive of the interest of the individual people in question - in these accounts the interest in the past appears to be grounded in very different ways. The first example points out the sheer pleasure in hearing stories of the past, the second relates this to a general tide of change experienced in one's own lifetime, the third links it to family history, the fourth is explicitly political, and the fifth links it to age. None of these themes exclude one another; on the contrary, they are often combined in individual people's motivations, although the particular configuration of these and other themes will vary for each individual.
Although the motivations people have for being interested in history are multifaceted and varied, some clues to more general patterns can be found in what they actually said about the past. When people talked about earlier times, they addressed the most diverse topics: family history, bad winters, crofting techniques, folklore, social events, disasters at sea, notable personalities, material culture, social inequality - in short, every conceivable aspect of life in the past. If I made enquiries concerning what it was about the past that interested people, the answers would be equally diverse. However, there were certain more general themes that seemed more recurrent than others, and that many also explicitly drew attention to.
Above I have argued that people do not romanticise the past, and that there is a firm recognition of past hardships. There is, however, more to the stories of deprivation than I suggested above. Different times have offered different trials for those who are not of great means. The first half of the nineteenth century is a period people quite frequently refer to in this context.
From the late eighteenth century onwards Shetland-based merchants began to attain prominence, gradually replacing or complementing the position of the lairds, as the feudal landowners were called (Smith 1977, pp. 24-26). Some of the lairds had begun improving the economy prior to this development, and those who successfully adapted to the changing times remained central to the processes of economic development that took place. However, as the influence of the merchants increased, the lairds directed most of their attention toward the improvement of the land. The most radical measure involved the replacement of small tenant holdings with larger areas of arable land, a process that took the first half of the nineteenth century to accomplish. This process is known as the evictions, as it involved forcibly moving people off the land. However, as the lairds in Shetland were also involved in the fishing and their tenants served as fishermen for them, it was most often a matter of shifting people about, often to poorer land, rather than forcing them to emigrate, as the latter option would have deprived the lairds of their fishermen (Smith 1977, p. 33). The period of the evictions is frequently referred to when people speak of the more distant past. I was told several stories of evictions in Northmavine; one involved a man who was evicted three times, first at Hillswick, where a hundred people were ordered to leave in 1822, and later from other locations in the area. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries also saw a series of famines, which hardly made the situation easier.(19)
Tales of past deprivation or hardship are, however, often at the same time tales of how people managed to cope under harsh conditions, whether due to poverty, bad weather or exploitation. One of the male members of the History Group told me about the famines of the early part of the nineteenth century to illustrate what interested him about history. People, he said, were "very, very poor, in fact they were starving". What fascinated him, he said, was, "how they lived, how they actually survived during that period of deprivation". At an earlier point in our conversation, he talked about how you tend to think that everything about the modern life is so smart. He went on, "When you start looking back at what your forebears were doing ... They really were very clever." With a little twist of emphasis, a story of hardship turns into a story of ingenuity. In such twists of emphasis an idealisation of the past surfaces, but note that it is very selective. It is the skill and ingenuity that enabled survival, even when there was very little to support that survival, that is in focus. This aspect was stressed in many of the things that were said about past times, sometimes very explicitly so, as when a woman exclaimed, as she was telling me about how they had discovered the walls of a particular building to have been filled with sawdust for insulation back in the 1890s, "It's amazing what ingenuity can do!"
Ingenuity is a complex concept, involving both practical competence and a measure of inventiveness or imagination. The fascination or respect many people had for the skills and talents of their forebears is in a way reminiscent of the kind of fascination many people have for art, at least if one adopts the perspective on art forward by Alfred Gell. He has written an article on why it is that art, in all its different forms in different parts of the world, impresses people (1992). The reason art captivates us, he holds, is that we find it hard to comprehend how it came into being:
"The power of art objects stems from the technical processes they objectively embody: the technology of enchantment is founded on the enchantment of technology." (p. 44)
In order to elucidate this statement, Gell recounts the following story:
"When I was about eleven, I was taken to visit Salisbury Cathedral. The building itself made no great impression on me, and I do not remember it at all. What I do remember, though, very vividly, is a display which the cathedral authorities had placed in some dingy side-chapel, which consisted of a remarkable model of Salisbury Cathedral, about two feet high and apparently complete in every detail, made entirely out of matchsticks glued together; certainly a virtuoso example of the matchstick modeller's art, if no great masterpiece according to the criteria of the salon, and calculated to strike a profound chord in the heart of any eleven-year-old. Matchsticks and glue are very important constituents of the world of every self-respecting boy of that age, and the idea of assembling these materials into such an impressive construction provoked feelings of the deepest awe. Most willingly I deposited my penny into the collecting-box which the authorities had, with a true appreciation of the real function of works of art, placed in front of the model, in aid of the Fabric Fund.
Wholly indifferent as I then was to the problems of cathedral upkeep, I could not but pay tribute to so much painstaking dexterity in objectified form. At one level, I had perfect insight into the technical problems faced by the genius who had made the model, having myself often handled matches and glue, separately and in various combinations, while remaining utterly at a loss to imagine the degree of manipulative skill and sheer patience needed to complete the final work. From a small boy's point of view this was the ultimate work of art, much more entrancing in fact than the cathedral itself, and so too, I suspect, for a significant proportion of the adult visitors as well.
Here the technology of enchantment and the enchantment of technology come together. The matchstick model, functioning essentially as an advertisement, is part of a technology of enchantment, but it achieves its effect via the enchantment cast by its technical means, the manner of its coming into being, or, rather, the idea which one forms of its coming into being, since making a matchstick model of Salisbury Cathedral may not be as difficult, or as easy, as one imagines." (p. 47)
If one thinks (rightly or wrongly) that one could produce the same work of art oneself, surely it fails to captivate one. The power of a work of art can thus be attributed to its ability to resist our comprehension. This argument is based on that of Georg Simmel when it comes to his ideas about what it is that constitutes a valuable object. Gell quotes Simmel, who holds that:
"We desire objects only if they are not immediately given to us for our use and enjoyment, that is, to the extent to which they resist our desire." (p. 48)
It is from this resistance to our desire that the value of an object stems. However, when it comes to art objects, their power does not stem from our desire to possess the objects themselves. Of course, if an art object is within our price range, we may want to buy it, but, Gell argues, the resistance which it offers is not primarily found in the limitation of our purchasing power, and the main desire regarding art objects is accordingly not the desire to actually own them:
"The resistance which [art objects] offer, and which creates and sustains this desire, is to being possessed in an intellectual rather than a material sense ..." (p. 49)
In some places the coming-into-being of art objects is attributed to magic, in other places to 'talent'. In art circles in the West there have been endless discussions about what exactly it is that makes something art. Whatever the culturally specific explanation, I think there is something similar at stake in people's fascination with other's 'ingenuity', as there i