A Living Exhibition: The Smithsonian, Folklife, and the Making of the Modern Museum

This dissertation situates the Smithsonian Institution at the center of post-World War II debates about the nature of American culture. Exploring exhibits of “traditional” cultures and the curators who designed them, it shows that the Smithsonian’s museums provided a testing ground for ways of conceptualizing the plural character of American society and culture. I argue that the Smithsonian offered two models for presenting cultural diversity–therapeutic pluralism and contentious pluralism. The former encouraged positive feelings about American society and fostered appreciation of different cultures while glossing persistent inequalities in American life along racial and class lines. The latter breached the artificial divide between politics and culture, and explicitly engaged social, economic, and political issues alongside displays of culture. Both of these models later helped to structure the late-twentieth-century culture wars and the emergence of new museums, such as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, which privileged indigenous and other minority voices. The dissertation explains how museums went from being the handmaidens of colonialism and imperialism to modern institutions that acknowledged, and often celebrated, cultural diversity. This process should not be viewed as a simple triumphal narrative of the victory of subaltern voices over oppressive white-dominated structures. Rather, I illustrate how museum officials, curators, scholars, and activists weighed a multitude of approaches to displaying cultures in the post-WWII era and show that colonizing and decolonizing trends existed in tension with one another throughout this period. The most radical postwar experiment in cultural exhibition was the Smithsonian’s Festival of American Folklife. The festival brought tradition bearers–potters, weavers, singers, dancers–to the National Mall each summer to present their skills and to talk about their lives. It pointed the way toward dialogic approaches to exhibition that would flower more fully in the late twentieth century and early twenty first century. Overall, the dissertation illustrates that postwar curators at the Smithsonian restored museums to a central place in cultural discourses about the nation, proving to a broad audience that older models of display, which had supported colonial and imperial projects in the nineteenth century, might be re-made for an anti-racist age.