The Museum of the Mind by John Mack, British Museum Press, 拢16.99, ISBN 0714126373
THE people of the Marshall Islands use the most intriguing objects to aid their memory when navigating the Pacific Ocean: stick charts. Attached to a rectangular frame, the sticks show currents and wave characteristics; and tiny cowry shells lashed between them represent islands. Rather than actually providing navigational tools in their canoes, the sailors recall the charts in their minds to interpret state of the sea and steer a course to their destination.
This year, the 250th anniversary of the British Museum, is the ideal time for John Mack, keeper of ethnography, to draw on the museum鈥檚 collections to explore the relationship between objects and memory in The Museum of the Mind. In the case of stick charts, the sailor requires factual information and errors can be fatal; with other memories, however, the 鈥渇acts鈥� are more open to negotiation.
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The surrealist film-maker Luis Bu帽uel wrote that 鈥渓ife without memory is no life at all鈥�. Mack quotes this, then illustrates how people throughout the world and throughout the ages have used material culture to ensure that a past is remembered 鈥� not the past. Memory is far more than a mere recollection of factual events. Mack frequently contrasts memory with history as an alternative means to understand the past.
He addresses how the conception of memory varies culturally. In classical Rome and Greece it was associated with civic virtues 鈥� knowledge, learning and reliability 鈥� while among the Luba people of the Democratic Republic of Congo it reflects people鈥檚 relationships.
Mack takes the reader on a tour of memory objects: mnemonic devices; portraits of the living and the dead; memorabilia; souvenirs and photographs. He roams widely through time and space, as fascinating when writing about the quipu of the Inca 鈥� a set of knotted strings used to transmit information around their empire 鈥� or the Canterbury tokens 鈥� souvenirs made for medieval pilgrims.
He shows most insight when examining how portraits are used to create memories. He stresses the significance of attaching, and at times removing, names that can transform an anonymous image into a specific individual 鈥� facial resemblance itself often being of marginal significance. Such attempts to transform memory by altering material culture continue today, exemplified by the Taliban鈥檚 destruction of the two massive Buddha figures in Afghanistan in 2001.
As a means of altering history, however, acts of complete destruction are outweighed by those of sacrilege: deliberate attempts to desecrate memory itself. Mack points out that when 50 monuments to Lenin were removed from the streets of Moscow, the empty plinths were far more noticeable than the large sculptures had ever been.
The invention of photography in 1839 was, according to Mack, 鈥渢he greatest innovation in the making of memory鈥�. The way in which a photograph captures a fleeting moment makes it a far more potent means to trigger memory than a film or video clip because they impose their own temporality on the viewer. By providing exact replicas, photographs have an authenticity that cannot be achieved in other media; like conscious memory itself, they are fragmentary records of the past.
The British Museum is a 鈥渢heatre of memory鈥� and Mack鈥檚 book enables us to look anew at many of the objects within its galleries. More significantly, it makes us look anew at the objects within our own homes and appreciate how we use these not simply to remember past events but to create our own identity.
Ultimately this book is not about museums and objects, but about the nature of the human mind. Those who think that the mind can be reduced to the firing of neurons and swilling of chemicals in the brain are missing a trick. They need to take a trip to Great Russell Street in London and step into the British Museum, where the hard matter all around them 鈥� Roman portraits, Egyptian coffins, prehistoric stone axes and the rest 鈥� were once as much a part of the minds of the people who made them as their grey matter was. And today, the same objects become part of our minds, used to create our own memories, some real and some imagined.
The Museum of the Mind cannot help but be a celebration of the British Museum and a justification for such an institution. But Mack鈥檚 study is really a profound exploration of memory that touches on the nature of what it means to be human.