The New York Times
June 30, 2008
Connections

Identities on Display: Bonding at the Museum 

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/r/edward_rothstein/index.html?inline=nyt-per> 

SEATTLE - In Ballard, a quiet neighborhood not far from the waterfront where many of its residents once worked, I found a replica of an Icelandic badstofa. 

I am sure I am not alone in never having seen a badstofa, nor even in knowing what one is. But looking inside at its sharply slanted wooden roof, the large tome open at its far end, the two blond children - mannequins - glancing up during a dark night, I began to get some idea. 

This was, after all, a badstofa in a museum, and the accompanying text let me know that as old-fashioned as this life-size diorama might seem, it was a shrine to memories of 19th-century living spaces - the badstofa - in Iceland. 

The floorboards of this one, we are told, were salvaged from a fishing vessel and laid down as they traditionally had been, with gaps to allow the body heat of the animals kept below to warm the badstofa. During long winter nights, each family would enact a cultural ritual - a kvoldvaka - as the sounds, smells and warmth from the animals would rise from below: reading aloud from medieval Icelandic sagas or the Bible, singing, weaving, talking by candlelight. 

And out of such badstofa - and this was the main point - many Icelanders also made their way across the Atlantic and then across America to settle in Seattle. Out of such crucibles were modern citizens made. And from such citizens came institutions like this: the Nordic Heritage Museum. Almost 30 years old and housed in a former school building, it is said to be the only museum in the country devoted to immigrants from Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden. Special exhibitions focus on each country, giving some sense of the lands left behind and the cultures that evolved when transplanted to a strange and distant place.

The major exhibition here, which originated in the mid-1980s in two Danish museums, chronicles the shared modern saga of these Nordic peoples, their rural pasts, their hazardous journeys to the Midwest heartland and their arrival, finally, at the northwest corner of the United States. Here the landscape was familiar, and logging, fishing and mining were vital trades. By 1918 a third of the residents of Seattle came from Nordic lands. Now, the museum reports, 17 percent of the population of Washington State claims Nordic ancestry.

In many ways this modern saga is quite familiar, with adventures as imposing as in ancient tales. And despite all its variants, it is the defining saga of the contemporary identity museum, the kind of institution that is as central for our time as the imperial art museum was for 19th-century Europe. The identity museum is created by a group to recount its past trials and present achievements. It is also a community center and meeting place, meant to solidify the identity it celebrates. 

Here are our origins in a distant place and time, these museums say. We left them behind, setting out on a great journey facing untold horrors, nourished only by that past. We had to overcome many difficulties, some of which tempted us to forget who we were. Now, finally, we have triumphed. The museum is a monument to a reforged identity in which our past is a hyphenated part of our future. 

That is also the subliminal tale in the recently rebuilt Wing Luke Asian Museum here. That is the narrative of the Arab American National Museum that opened in 2005 in Dearborn, Mich. In March a relatively modest Northwest African American Museum opened here, with its main exhibition hall telling that tale about the migration of blacks to this area. (Slavery did not extend this far west; there were also only 406 black residents in Seattle in 1900.) The museum recounts aspects of black success in its art exhibitions, and in its tribute to this city's great jazz clubs of the early-20th century.

The National Museum of the American Indian <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/n/national_museum_of_the_american_indian/index.html?inline=nyt-org>  in Washington, D.C., retains a similar structure, even though it addresses native peoples. It just inverts the perspective: our trials began not when we moved to faraway lands but when others journeyed to ours. Narratives of testing and triumph lie behind many Jewish museums as well. The most epic example may end up being told when the National Museum of African American History and Culture opens in Washington in 2015. 

The dominance of this saga is partly due to its accuracy. Though it is deeply preoccupied with a group's trials, its overall message is also affirmative. It is the great modern story of liberal democracy overcoming tyranny, injustice or racism. 

That story is given a twist derived from recent decades of activism: identity, not liberal democracy, is the real savior. It is by being true to our tribal past, or to our racial roots, or to our ethnic origins, that we finally overcome. That is one reason to preserve our identity - indeed, for enshrining it in a museum. It is by elevating identity that liberation is achieved. 

But there is something strange. First, almost all these museums end up defining identity not by its intrinsic solidity but by the opposition it encountered. There may be similarities among Japanese, Korean and Chinese cultures, for example, but they are united as "Asian" solely because of resemblances in discrimination or characterization encountered as immigrants; long, diverse and often hostile histories dissolve into a single identity.

Indian tribal history, even before European settlers, is rife with warfare and rivalry, but that is irrelevant to the American Indian museum. Its view of identity even insists on similarities between, say, the Tapirapé of the Brazilian jungles and the Yupik of Alaska, connections that may exist only because of shared difficulties in confronting nontribal modernity. Even the Nordic identity subsumes historical differences: a parade takes place in Seattle every May 17 because that is the date Norwegians celebrate their constitutional independence from the Danes and Swedes. 

There is much artifice, then, in celebrations of identity, and in some cases much distortion as well. This may partly account for the almost old-fashioned romanticism of some of these museums, in which origins and identity triumph over modernity. That is one effect too of the Nordic Heritage Museum, which is rustic, crafts-loving, nostalgic and even quaint in its display. 

But the Nordic is also one of the most intriguing identity museums I have seen because it is so secure about its past. The museum's literature explains that it developed from the growing focus on identity in the 1960s and '70s, but it is distinctive because it has so little to be aggrieved about. It simply pays homage to its peoples - giving their origins a roseate hue - while informing us about them.

It will be interesting to see how that story is transformed as the museum rebuilds itself in a new location in Ballard that promises to lure far more than its current 55,000 annual visitors.

In the meantime, at the very moment of the supremacy of the identity museum, there also seems something overripe about it. It has begun to seem formulaic, old-fashioned. And that means it is time to retreat to the badstofa to rethink the past and how we shape it. 

Connections is a critic's perspective on arts and ideas.

Copyright 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/help/copyright.html>  The New York Times Company <http://www.nytco.com/>  

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