Asylum and the Museum

The term asylum carries both utopian and dystopian associations. The early nineteenth-century mental asylums of the British reform movement were conceived as humane and calm retreats, yet ultimately became cruel and neglectful institutions for the supposedly incurable (Scull, 1996). Seekers of political asylum find refuge from the torture or death that threatens in their home countries but then, in the U.K. at least, they can be dogged by the media designations of “bogus” or “genuine” and detained at any stage in the process with no statutory time limit and no automatic judicial oversight (Fletcher, 2005). Asylums cast their ambiguous shadow over us all.

This essay applies the metaphor of asylum and the language of psychoanalysis toward an interpretation of the similarly ambiguous nature of museums. In his classic book Asylums, Erving Goffman defines an asylum as a closed institution that practices containment and confinement; it is “a place of residence and work where a large number of like-situated individuals, cut off from the wider society for an appreciable period of time, together lead an enclosed, formally administered round of life” (1961, p. 11). That definition can be applied usefully to an understanding of museums. Instead of human subjects, the museum houses secured inanimate objects—although, it should be kept in mind, many were once living people or animals. Its objects might receive intensive and expensive treatment to restore them to their former health or they might be sent to another museum under close surveillance. They might attract considerable moral and political interest or they might be sold or repatriated. They might be stored away with great orderliness and cleanliness or they might languish in places that are too hot,