Why students should get to know museum objects through their senses – all of them

At the Wereldmuseum in Leiden lie two beautiful Maori waka, a type of canoe that is central to the identity of Maori culture. The waka have not been “acquired” by the museum; they are there on loan, and the extent of the loan depends on whether the boats are properly respected and taken care of. However, this care does not ask for the usual protective display case, far removed from natural elements or greasy hands. No, the waka are required to be kept outside, and to remain in use: once a year the waka are taken on the water for a ceremonial ride, in order to keep the waka alive. These objects come to life because they remain in touch with the physical world, with harsh weather and human hands.

At the expense of experience

The waka at the Wereldmuseum made me think: what do we actually preserve when we talk of the preservation function of museums and heritage institutes? Most historical objects we deem worthy of displaying in a museum are kept in highly protective cases to prevent damage or breaking. What we often forget, is that this is at the expense of experiencing objects more intimately and at more sensuous levels than just the visual. We don’t get to feel the weight of an object, know what it sounds like when you touch it, or know how it smells. The common argument is: the more the human body interacts with an object, the more the object deteriorates. So museums, educators, and conservators make sure that the public is only able to approach the object insofar as it does not take damage. 

This is the usual idea of preservation. But while we preserve the physical state of the object, we lose so much that an object has to offer. The Maori understand the powers that their objects have over them; the waka cannot be “preserved” in our usual ways, their power would die out if they were, and the fact that they physically deteriorate is as much part of this power. Don’t the other historical artifacts we display in museums have similar powers? Shouldn’t we allow them to show those powers in the same way as the waka?

My lips now and his 400 years ago 

In January 2024, I was introduced to a conch. The conch, together with an educator, Fresco Sam-Sin, who already knew the object, was going to tell a story to me. I was handed the conch and was surprised by its weight, as well as its marblelike smooth surface. I would have expected it to be much lighter and coarser, like an empty shell would be. I held its large opening to my ear, I thought I would “hear the ocean” - growing up by the sea myself, this is what we would usually do with similarly looking shells. Then I noticed a much smaller hole at the tip of the conch. Sam-Sin told me about it. It was a hole to blow into, and the conch would make a piercingly hard, horn-like sound. 

Human data obsession

This idea of preservation is riddled with fear, and it involves two supposed beneficiaries. The first I already mentioned: future humans. We are extremely worried that the knowledge we have now, is not shared by future generations. We save soccer fields worth of databases of information on every thinkable subject. There are probably more museum objects of which a fake is displayed than we know of, while the real object is stored away from human sight even. We are obsessed with depriving future archaeologists of their jobs. The drive behind this type of preservation is our heavily increased fear of not knowing. 

We think it is a right to know, and our duty to preserve that right. However, we tend to forget that this ‘knowing’ does not cover all types of knowledge that humans gather. This preservation privileges a type of knowledge driven by data - “raw” bits of information that can be coded, stored and easily transferred. Of course, from behind the glass panes, we could learn that the conch makes sound and was blown by a Manchu general, but we would process it as informational data - even the sound itself we might record as informational data to playback later. But we forget that there is a world of knowledge, sensory or emotional, that spans far beyond information. We cannot code, record or easily transfer what it feels like to blow this conch, to hear its sound live, to be affected by the danger it entailed - these are the stories of the object, not codable or easy to convey: stories need to be told to us. We deprive ourselves (and future generations) of this world of sensory knowledge, by obsessing over the preservation of information. If we are to gather from reading a museum label the fact that the conch makes a sound, why do we need the conch in the first place?

A second beneficiary is often presumed to be the object itself. This is apparent from our use of the word ‘care’. We say we are careful, or treat an object with care or respect, if we are concerned with its physical preservation, that is, it does not break or become damaged. But why are we so frightened of the object breaking? The conch has little investment in staying an ‘object’; it will gladly connect to us in the form of many shatters. No, our fright is imparted by our own investment in the object. We might be afraid that we may never blow on the conch again. However, the irony of this lies precisely in the fact that we never do this anyways. We don’t fight with ancient swords, we don’t farm with ancient spades, we don’t play on ancient instruments. We keep them boxed in to preserve the idea of usage, never freeing them for actual usage. And so when we preserve practical objects, we preserve them for potential practical use, along with the fear that the actual practical use will erase its future potential. Thus we have gotten scarily content with settling only for observing an object’s potential. We are so accustomed to going to a museum and merely looking at a practical object and considering its use, we don’t think twice about falling into the same data driven relationship we build up with every statically caged museum object.