There was a recent post on the Museum Audience Insight blog about “Historical cooties”. In a similar vein, I want to think about history being radioactive. By this I mean considering history as having a “half-life” – and thinking about how this influences what we tell and how we tell it in our museums and heritage sites.
I started thinking about this late last year, in response to Susan Cross’ blog post about Remembrance Sunday. At the time I saw a distinction between events that occurred within living memory (i.e., things we lived through ourselves), events within family recollection (i.e., it was before our time but we know an older relative who was directly connected to it), and events beyond the reach of this living recollection (where the past really is a foreign country). I guessed the limit of this living connection to be about 100 years. Once you get much beyond this, distinctions between eras and events start to diminish and smooth out, a bit like the decay curve above. So 20th century history has an immediacy to it that (say) the Victorian era no longer has. Fewer shared cultural touchstones and assumptions survive that length of time. So, things that would have been self explanatory to the Victorians need re-interpreting for a 21st century audience (an important thing to recognise when interpreting objects and sites from this period). Even more so when we go further back – such as the medieval period or the Roman empire (both of which span several centuries in themselves but are now considered to be more or less homogeneous from this temporal vantage point).
More recently, a discussion with Gretchen Jennings on the Museum Commons blog got me thinking about the other end of the decay curve. When events are so new, so raw, so contested, that museums decide they’re too hot to handle. Gretchen describes how US museums are engaging (or more to the point, not engaging) with the 10th anniversary of the Iraq war as a case in point. Getting back to the radioactivity metaphor, museums might be collecting the hot, unstable material of current events, but then they are “burying” it – until such time as the “stable isotopes” of history (less dangerous, less contested) can be safely recovered and interpreted.
So if history were a radioactive isotope, what would its half-life be? I’d be interested in your thoughts on this. Currently I’m thinking it’s somewhere in the order of a single generation – say 25-30 years. It’s interesting that this is the time period for which most Cabinet records are sealed, suggesting the most “hot” phase has passed by this time. But it might take 2 or 3 half lives before a period becomes a “stable isotope” – something like World War II. This is not to suggest that “stable” history is not contested either – as in the curve above, the “hot” parts of a story might fade with time, but they never completely disappear.
I’m really intrigued by this idea in relation to those “hot button” topics that seem to remain raw even after decades and centuries have passed. The example of the Smithsonian’s attempts at interpreting the Enola Gay and different interest groups reactions, for example.
I’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of stories about cultural conflict (Japanese internment camps in the US, European-Native interactions in the West, etc.) and it still surprises me how quickly people take offense at, and feel defense of, history that’s gone through multiple half-lives. While time definitely provides perspective and can dampen the reactions (I’ve seen this happen in the span of 10 years or less), the subjects can still seem SO radioactive.
The response/advice from most people is time – that we need to give these subjects and the people we want engaging with them more time because of how real, how raw, how radioactive they still are. And there’s truth in the idea – that sometimes we’re still just too close to something to be anything other than reactionary. But that stance worries me, also, because of all of the opportunities we can miss.
What do we miss in terms of collecting, oral histories, perspectives, discussions, debates, community exploration, and community healing when we wait? People die, other events take precedence, our memories shift and change. It’s all incredibly unstable, but incredibly necessary. And too often we’re not doing much about it.
Many thanks for the hat-tip Regan, and to that reference to ‘historical cooties’ which I love (even though I had to look up what ‘cooties’ were, we don’t have them in the UK!).
I love this metaphor, especially when you clarified that the time to stability may vary. I have experienced that on two occasions, one where we realised that the history of a building that had once been a workhouse (and therefore dreaded by the local community) and is now a Rural Life Museum could be told, whereas the museum planners 30 years earlier had been very clear it was too soon. I think both decisions were right. The other was concerned with the experience of British and Commonwealth soldiers as Far East Prisoners Of War in the 1940s. That was too hot to handle – still very radioactive.
I am gearing myself up to delivering a talk on interpreting and commemorating the centenary of the FIrst World War at the Interpret Europe/ NAI conference in Sweden. As part of my limbering up exercise I asked my parents what they remembered of the impact of that war. No, of course they don’t remember the war, any more than I remember the 1939-45 war. In fact by an interesting mathematical coincidence we were born equidistant from those conflicts.
I have a very clear recollection of my parents as people who had lived through ‘their’ war; they talked about it a lot, both their experience as civilians and miscellaneous brave exploits of the British military. So I reasoned that their parents talked to them about the First World War. I think I was wrong. Certainly they had no memory of it. It seemed to me that the conversations may never have happened and there are several reasons, to do with the nature of the war and the nature of society, why that could be true. Anyway, It felt like a long ago, lost and cold history. Quite possibly a stable isotope. I was sorry about that.
Thanks Katie and Susan for helping me flesh out this metaphor. Like different atomic nuclei, maybe different kinds of history have different half-lives. Also, maybe some topics are the weak alpha-emitters and others emit the equivalent of piercing gamma rays.
One thing you’ve also both touched upon is that half-life might vary not just by topic, but also by culture. To a “Western” mindset, 100 years is a long time. But in the context of the 50,000+ years of Australian Aboriginal history for instance, it is just a blink of an eye. These cultures may have a sense of continuity that spans multiple generations. So while we colonisers might be thinking things certain issues are well and truly in the past, from an Aboriginal perspective they may not have even passed one half-life yet.
Also perhaps the way certain stories permeate a culture could make a difference. I get the impression that World War II had a greater impact on civilian life (due to blackouts, rationing, etc. which I don’t think were factors in WWI), perhaps leading to more ‘sharability’ in the experience as more people had the common reference points in their experience. By contrast, WWI was more off in the trenches, and a type of warfare that was so traumatic for those involved that many barely spoke of it again. (Family folklore quotes my WWI-veteran great grandfather as saying something to the effect of “if you can talk about it, you weren’t really there”).
It makes you wonder how our era will be recalled by history, the era of 24-hour news and ubiquitous camera phones.
Regan,
Your mention of variation between cultures is such an interesting one. I haven’t had the pleasure of working with Australian Aboriginal history before, but I have worked with the experiences and spaces of several American Indian tribes, including the Sand Creek Massacre and a famous PaleoIndian archaeological site (12,000 years of history!). What I’ve noticed is how differently two cultures can react to the same idea.
I remember running a training for all staff and volunteers who were going to be working on the archaeological site. The goal was to familiarize them with the archaeology, but also to help them understand what the area and the artifacts mean to the tribes with a historical connection to the region.
For the tribal representatives who joined us, it was an opportunity to share and grow and find a common goal in helping visitors experience the site. For many (not all, but many) of the “Anglo” people in the audience, it was a reminder of American-American Indian history. There was a lot of push back to that reminder, resentment and repeated assertions of a lack of guilt because what had happened had not been “their fault.” As some people were trying to open themselves up to new ideas, others were completely shutting down and refusing to engage with anything that wasn’t “Western.”
Two cultural groups, each with a different half-life to the same information, and two very different reactions.
Along a similar vein, you might find this article on a new Sand Creek Massacre exhibit in Colorado interesting (disclosure: I worked on the exhibit, but was not part of its conception or planning): http://www.westword.com/2013-02-14/news/sand-creek-wounds-are-still-fresh/full/
And to reference your thought on cultural permeability and Gretchen’s original ideas on museums and the anniversary of the Iraq War, the ideas around the affect on civilian life carry through.
Growing up as a military child, my life was very affected by Desert Storm. And I thought everyone’s was. It wasn’t until I was in university, outside of the military bubble, and the Iraq War began that I saw how little most people’s lives were affected. The war was tangential – something to be reacted to and talked about, but also easily temporarily forgotten unless you had a direct connection to the conflict. You could go an entire day, or several, and not have to think about war if you didn’t want to.
So where do museums come in? How do we succeed in engaging our communities in the subjects we think need to be talked about, that we’re passionate about, when our visitors don’t have the same passion?
Hi, Regan, thanks for this great metaphor and for mention of my post. I very much like what Katie said above about the issue of time:
“The response/advice from most people is time – that we need to give these subjects and the people we want engaging with them more time because of how real, how raw, how radioactive they still are. And there’s truth in the idea – that sometimes we’re still just too close to something to be anything other than reactionary. But that stance worries me, also, because of all of the opportunities we can miss.
What do we miss in terms of collecting, oral histories, perspectives, discussions, debates, community exploration, and community healing when we wait? People die, other events take precedence, our memories shift and change. It’s all incredibly unstable, but incredibly necessary. And too often we’re not doing much about it.”
I think that museums are not only missing opportunities when they don’t use their collections and expertise to address issues that are on many peoples’ minds but are “difficult”; they are ignoring responsibilities (that they have set for themselves) in two (at least) ways:
1) The responsibility, included in most mission statements, to educate, to elucidate, to help create civil discourse
2) The responsibility, again in many mission statements, to engage with their communities. In the US there are so many returning veterans that need so much. Seems like museums, particularly with collections related to history and the military, could make such good connections of all kinds with vets and their families if they were a place to talk about some of the issues.