4th May 2011

How big is a big society?

Is our society big enough?

Should it be larger? Could it be smaller? Is our society big enough to be a big society on its own or should we invite some other folk along to make it even bigger? More varied and (probably) more scary.

Well, as it happens, we are.

The whole Northern shore of the Mediterranean is now the point of destination of young men from Africa seeking a foothold in the West.

Arrive in Spain or Italy, aquire papers and by virtue of the Schengen Agreement the whole of Europe is open until you reach the English Channel, or if you happen to be Libyan and displaced by NATO bombing and are entering France from Italy, Ventimiglia.

In the 18th and 19th Centuries all the traffic was the other way.  European adventurers, explorers and straight forward pirates, travelled the world from Britain and Europe and conquered and colonised Africa, South America, Asia and the Pacific Region.

Today in most European countries museums are stuffed full with the heirlooms (Booty) of this adventuring.

In January we visited The Wonders of Africa exhibition in Genoa in The Palazzo Ducale, the exhibition features a large number of outstanding traditional African works of art including masks, altarpieces, “fetishes”, funerary posts, ritual objects and items from daily life loaned by and on display courtesy of  'Italian private collectors'.

Last week we visited the Museum of World Cultures in Genova, it is based in the Castello di Albertis and houses the other part of this exhibition, essentially a collection of indigenous art and artefacts brought back to Italy from Africa and especially Papua New Guinea.

It includes a huge collection of African and Shamanistic dolls and representative figures arranged to 'encourage a reflection on the concepts of “purity” and “contamination" that underlie our wishes and fears'.
Make no mistake it is a great collection and well worth a visit in fact we are planning to return to see both exhibitions again before we leave.

But as I went round I found myself being troubled about something and I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was.

I had the same feeling when I first visited Cragside in Northumberland, the home of Lord Armstrong, inventor of the Vickers Gun, until I realised that, somewhere at the back of my mind, whilst admiring the furniture, the architecture and the hydro-electric lighting system, I could hear the crunching of machine gun bullets underfoot.

Castello di Albertis is situated on one of the highest points in Genoa, and was designed in the nineteenth century by Captain Enrico Alberto D'Albertis, who gave it, together with his ethnographic and archaeological collection, to the city of Genoa when he died.

According to its web-site: The museum takes visitors to faraway lands, to the very places to which the captain himself travelled, through collections of artefacts ranging from the pre-Columbian civilisations of Central and South America to Native North Americans and, finally, the civilisations of Oceania and Africa.

Particularly impressive are the African weapons, Chinese spears and European halberds, as well as the Mayan volcanic tuff fragments from the Copán acropolis in Honduras and the Mexican and Aztec ornaments'.
What was troubling me I realised was the image I had of the young men on the quayside in the Porto Antico selling their designer knock offs from large white sheets, which could be quickly folded up and carried away whenever the Policia Fiscale made a tour of the quayside.

On the one hand these once proud people with their ancient traditions, from what Bronowski called the 'Cradle of Civilization', reduced to selling poor copies of European designer, bags, trousers, jackets, sunglasses and watches, whilst keeping one eye open for the next visit from the police. On the other their history and traditions ransacked and their religion, music and culture on display in the museum.

Somehow it seems that, in order to make our society bigger, we had to make theirs smaller?

The exhibitions remind us of the richness of culture, of the variety of cultures and the many ways in which individuals seek to understand themselves and their place in society by means of religious rituals and traditions.

But if the only way we have to make difference 'safe' is by collecting it and displaying it in a museum then surely that is a reflection on the shallowness of our own culture and belief system.

I doubt if you could visit Africa or India or China and find European artefacts collected in the museums ......... apart probably from the Morris Oxford/Ambassador and the Royal Enfield but even then not in a museum ..........