CAUGHT BETWEEN A ROCK AND A GLASS CASE: WHY THE CORRECT ANSWER DOESN'T MATTER

A Musse Bouche | Jordan Fee

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As a student who finds himself at the crossroads of Museum Studies and Food Studies, I am lucky to work in a butcher’s shop. I will immediately acknowledge the fact that a business like this may not be everyone’s favourite– I myself have grappled many times with my own feelings about the agricultural industry. Nevertheless, I do find that this space gives me an opportunity to interact with people and develop an understanding of how people interact with what they eat.

Source (Note: This is not the store that I work in. This store is in Spain.)

Recently, I have begun to see that parts of my job involve practices and processes that also exist in cultural institutions. (Note: Check out another article published earlier in the week by Selin about different types of displays outside of the museum!) Like in a museum, we display items in glass cases that are then assessed by those who enter into the shop. People ask questions about where the products have come from and use their imaginations to devise an approach. I have also conducted a number of ‘tours’, where I take time to explain to customers what it is that we offer and how that relates to the business's philosophy. This essentially amounts to our mission statement, and like in a museum, most people working with me may call it forth in a matter of seconds.

Source. (Note: No furniture was harmed in the making of this article)

About one month ago, I had an interaction with a customer that I have since been unable to forget. A mother walked in with her young child and approached the section of the store where we sell poultry, amongst a few other things. The child saw something that she did not understand and pointing at this item, she asked what it was. Her mother, sensing that the answer to this question might disturb her child, provided her with an incorrect answer. I should clarify here that the mother was entirely aware of what the item actually was. She chose to provide the information that she felt comfortable providing, and I would never judge a person for doing that. I would never even question such a thing. However, all of a sudden, the child turned to me and asked me what it was.

Source.

Most of the time, we believe that authenticity and honesty are things that people expect from their visit to the museum – that there is a fundamental desire to see “the real thing”. We are happy to provide facts and talk at length about the assigned meaning of things. But is our mode of understanding these objects really better than others? Are the values assigned to these objects meaningful to everyone? Or is it possible that we have been fooling ourselves?

In the moment when I was asked by that child about this object on display, I was caught between what I knew to be true and what the mother wanted for her child. She wanted their day together to be characterized by happiness, not by confusion. To her, providing her child with the ‘correct’ answer was not important; what was important was their spending time together shopping at stores in the market. I would also like to note that, as the conversation progressed between the three of us, the young girl kept asking questions that seemed to imply that she knew that we were lying to her. Her line of reasoning was very logical, and we found it more and more difficult to obscure the truth.

In the end, both left the store with the true answer still left unsaid. But ultimately, I am happy that this interaction provided a pair of individuals with the opportunity to ask each other questions, and to further develop their own understanding of one another. In situations like this, the ‘authentic’, the ‘honest’ and the ‘correct’ are negligible. What is important is how these two acted out their own respective roles and had a conversation about the object. Both left the store content, and I have seen them both many times since. Had I felt the need to tell this young woman the ‘correct’ answer, this might not have been the case.

I believe that this story can serve as a lesson to museum professionals. Yes, it is true that the information that we possess in regard to our objects is both useful and meaningful. And yes, it is also true that a butcher's shop is ultimately quite different from a museum. However, we need to accept the fact that what we consider to be meaningful may actually be entirely meaningless to another person. If we can acknowledge this, then we can begin to incorporate it into our practices. Of course, I am not encouraging natural history museums to begin mislabelling specimens for the betterment of the public. I am simply saying that, as museum professionals, we have been given the opportunity to develop unique, complex – and sometimes illogical – relationships with the objects that we house in museums. Perhaps we should afford our visitors the same opportunity.