The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg

Abstract

The New History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg. RICHARD HANDLER and ERIC GABLE. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 1997; 260 pp. Cultural anthropology's recent increased fascination with the reflexive ethnographic experience and concern with the material world as a locus of meaning are coupled in this meticulous and well written study of Colonial Williamsburg, a complex based on the reconstruction of the late eighteenth-century capital of Virginia. Inspired by the 1920s vision of a local Episcopal minister and funded by John D. Rockefeller Jr., this living museum rapidly grew into a major tourist attraction and also became a model for the construction of other historical museums. The ethnographic task facing Handler and Gable was made difficult, first, because of the overall size and complexity of the site as a institution and, second, because of the fact that each day as fieldworkers they encountered different tourists experiencing varying interpretive messages. Handler and Gable's ethnographic exposition favors the particular over the systematic (or the microsociological level of interaction over the total social fact). Rather than provide an account of Colonial Williamsburg as a whole, they focus on several vignettes from sites within the central historic area. The reader is informed, for example, that the reconstructed area includes Carter's Grove Plantation (with slave quarters) and Wolstenholm Town (both about eight miles from the city itself), a large of decorative arts and a new archaeology museum, as well as Bassett Hall, the residence of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., but little information is provided about these vital parts of the Colonial Williamsburg experience. Many visitors begin their exploration at the visitor's center, where official publications and orientation films set the stage for the day's experiences; nothing is said of this part of the museum's message. Little is said about several of the more commercial operations, including the various inns, restaurants, golf facilities, and shops (offering furniture and objects reproduced from colonial originals). In place of a comprehensive view, Handler and Gable present detailed accounts in two chapters of the interpretive messages, dramatic performances, and visitors' reactions at George Wythe House. A third member of the research team, Anna Lawson, then a graduate student at the University of Virginia, made a special study of the AfricanAmerican experience at Colonial Williamsburg; the results of her dissertation research would have made an appropriate and complementary addition to this ethnographic record. The fieldwork period (1990-1991) happily coincided with the material and interpretive realization of a new thrust in the museum's representational ideology. The previous decades' concern had been with accurate architectural reconstruction and with uncritical patriotism. Now, a new breed of social historians on staff has started to refocus attention on the experience of social inequality for excluded social groups (principally, slaves and women) and to attempt to place the artifactual record more carefully in the context of the period's consumption patterns. …