I have always thought that the objects people's insistence that the
preserving of objects as the first mission of the museum is rather
ridiculous. It is an oversimplification of a very complicated activity
which, indeed, ends up with collections of objects such as stone axes or art
works. However, the collecting of objects is a pretext for something else.

Today I have read an article of Eric Davis, " Museum and social control in
Iraq" in *Commemorations: The politics of national identity*, Princeton
University Press, New Jersey, 1994. Davis shows how the museums of Iraq have
been used by the regimes, British or that of Saddam Husayn, as means for
social control. "Whether relating to "hight culture" in the form of Iraqi
Museum or the 'Abbasid Museum, or "low culture" in the form of the Costume
and Folklore Museum or the House of Popular Culture, the regime has used the
representation of the past to diffuse very well-defined ideological messages
to the populace at large." (p. 101) Could it be said more clearly that the
reality of museums is very comprehensive.

Steven Weil in Museum News wrote an essay last year about the fact that
museums in fact always have an ideological purpose, assumed or explicit, and
it cannot be assumed it is always undebatable or completely benign