Douglas Greenberg writes, re Ellen Schwartz's suggestion to compare the
Jefferson/Hemings story with the Iroquois confederacy/U.S. contitution
question:
 
>Those of us who work in
>museums ought to be insisting on the absolute requirement that our interpretive
>activities rely upon the best available scholarly work -- whatever conclusions
>it may lead us to. History is not merely a matter of opinion; it is a
>discipline with rules of evidence and logic that ought to be respected.
>Needless to say, this is not to say that historians don't frequently
>disagree about matters like these. They do.
 
I agree, absolutely, that interpreters should rely on the best, most
recent, scholarly work, and would further suggest that  disagreements that
arise in the process of doing such work  be *shared* with museum visitors.
 I don't think that most interpreters do that --- the norm, it seems to me,
is for the interpreters to "tell a story", and for the visitor to accept
that "story" as "truth" --- regardless of how that "story" came to be
constructed in the first place.  And the whole issue of how "The Great Man"
owned slaves and,possibly, sired children by  S. Hemings is, at its heart,
a politically, socially charged issue.  And, as one recent poster put it
(sorry, I somehow deleted the post) the slave issue is really  *more*
important, and more relevant to how we understand and contextualize the
contradictions between Jefferson's life and his present-day image.
 
As a museum visitor, I would like for interpreter to share (as much as is
feasible) the disputes and controversies with me --- to involve me in the
dilemma of deciding "what *is* the "truth".  It's *not* always
clear-as-glass --- despite our best attempts to use rules of evidence,
logic, and, in the case of archaeology at least, the scientific method.
 
I've heard some scholars ( mostly archaeologists with a strongly positivist
perspective) say  that to acknowledge (to "the public", in museum settings)
the  biases inherent in the production of  "truth" could lead, somehow, to
a lack of public faith in the usefulness of producing that "truth".  I'd
give the museum visitor more credit than that.
 
It also occurs to me that this thread overlaps the "TwainTwisters and the
politics of label copy in museums" thread --- the "story" that museums tell
is in the labels as well as in the guided tours.  To quote (out of context,
to  be sure) Jenni Rodda's recent posting:
 
< museums, we were told, are elitist institutions, what interest do museums
have in the
common stuff of people's lives, especially the things people would rather
ignore or forget?......The final exhibition generated more discussion than
controversy, and became the first in a long string of such
exhibitions--dealing with working people, the tobacco industry, and so
on--that allowed the objects very much to speak for themselves, and which
opened the muse's doors to everyone in the community.>
 
I suppose my postmodernist colors are showing.
 
Carol McDavid
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