Museum Archives - Not Even Past

When Answers are not Enough: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

(All photos are courtesy of the author.)

The only facts we know about Rosalia Wourgaft Schatz are that she was raised by Jewish parents in the city of Tulchin in southwestern Ukraine. In 1919 her family emigrated to France and in 1940 when the Germans occupied Paris and began their anti-Jewish politics, she, like many other Jews, was forced to wear the yellow star. In 1942 she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered at age 67.

Rosalia’s brief life story is registered in the Identification Card #1847, found at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, founded in 1983 in Washington, D.C. Her IC is one of thousands that can be find in a shelf near the venue’s second floor elevators, that take you up to the main floors of the permanent exhibit. Before starting the tour, visitors can take an identification card like Rosalia’s, to go through the display with an actual target of the Nazi regime in their hand. The idea is that every person who enters the exhibit will get to know at least one victim. The short biographical information found in these cards are the only data we will ever know of many of the casualties of the Nazis, aside from the fact that they were one of the approximately 6 million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Once on the main exhibit floors, people can see the atrocities of the Nazi regime against Jewish, Roma, Armenian, and other minority populations. One of the main purposes of the curators of the United States Holocaust Museum is to encourage and promote the audience to keep asking “Why?” There is plenty of evidence of the torture and brutality committed by the Germans against their target populations but the basic question, why? still remains unanswered. The need to elucidate responses, find more explanations, and ignite further discussion fuels the intention of the museum professionals. This is evident at the very entrance to the building where vistors see two big posters that state: “This museum is not an answer but a question” and “What`s your question? #AskWhy”

As basic as these inquiries may seem and despite the myriad answers they have produced, there is something missing for the victims and their families. The basic Why? is still hovering in the back of the minds of those who endured and survived the Holocaust.

It is a question that the curators, employees, and researchers of the museum use to create historical memory narratives that include the victims, remember and honor them, and counteract versions that deny that these violent events did actually happen.

Raising awareness of the past to understand contemporary issues is one of the bridges built by memory museums because they demonstrate with facts, testimonies, documents, and images that atrocities like the Holocaust occur. In this sense, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum is considered a pioneer in display and representation of difficult topics. Another of the main objectives of the professional team of the museum is that the world will not allow the repetition of these brutalities. In the current political climate not only in the United States but in Latin America, for instance, where racism, discrimination, and exclusion are acquiring strength, to know that genocide is real and can happen is key. To deny or distort the Holocaust or other violent conflicts invalidates the victims’ voices, and prevents people like Rosalía and many others from finding justice.

This museum, as most memory sites, however, generates polemics. Should the past be relived in a setting like a museum? Do the survivors feel retraumatized by the displays? Is it not better to forget what happened? Apparently not since during the last decades there has been a huge proliferation of memory museums and displays, which demonstrates that diverse communities want to know what happened in order to restore the social fabric of their societies, to decide what to pass on to future generations, and to attempt to prevent atrocities from happening once more.

An Anticipated Tragedy: Reflections on Brazil’s National Museum

Introduced and compiled by Edward Shore

Brazilian researchers have described the fire that consumed the National Museum of Brazil on September 2, 2018 as a “tragédia anunciada” an anticipated tragedy. This week, Not Even Past caught up with historians who have visited and conducted research there. They shared memories of their experiences and explained what this immeasurable loss means to scholars of Brazil. If you would like to add your own thoughts and memories, please go to our Facebook page and leave them there.

Brazil’s National Museum in flames (Foto: Folha)

King João VI of Portugal established the Royal Museum, Brazil’s first scientific research institution, on June 6, 1818, while living in exile in Rio de Janeiro. Located on the grounds of one of Rio’s most iconic parks, the Quinta da Boa Vista, the Royal Museum sheltered botanical and animal specimens from Brazil, particularly tropical birds. European naturalists, including Johann Baptist von Spix, Carl Friedrich Philip von Martius, and Augustin Saint-Hilaire, flocked to the Royal Museum during the 1820s to conduct research and contribute additional specimens to the museum’s growing collection. Brazilian Emperor Pedro II renamed the facility the National Museum and promoted investment in the areas of anthropology, paleontology, and archaeology. By the turn of the twentieth century, Brazil’s National Museum had emerged as one of the largest anthropological and natural history museums in the Americas. Its collection grew to more than 20 million items. These included Luiza, a 12,000-year old skeleton of a Paleo-Indian woman, the oldest in the Americas, and the Bendegó meteorite, discovered in 1784 by a farm boy searching for a lost cow in the arid hinterlands of Bahia. Despite the National Museum’s importance, celebrations marking the bicentenary of its founding were subdued.

The National Museum of Brazil before the fire.

“Brazil does not recognize the museum’s greatness,” National Museum Director Alexander Kellner told the Brazilian newspaper, Folha de São Paulo, in May. “If it did, the country would not have left it like this.”

By 2018, the National Museum had been falling into disrepair for decades. In May 2018, Brazilian reporter Marco Aurélio Canônico observed termite-infested walls, leaky ceilings, and loose electrical wires. Its precarious condition was exacerbated by the Temer government’s austerity measures, which include a twenty-year cap on federal spending. Brazil’s national universities, archives, and museums were among the casualties. The Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), which has managed the National Museum since 1946, experienced a nearly 30 percent reduction in its operating budget over the past five years. In 2013, the National Museum’s budget was $R 531,000 (approximately $132,000 USD). In 2018, that figure dropped to $R 54,000 ($13,500), an amount less than a single graduate student fellowship in the UT Austin History Department. Budget cuts forced the museum to close a third of its collections to the public. This past April, the museum launched an online funding campaign to raise $R 50,000 to reopen a popular wing featuring a skeleton of the Maxakalisaurus, the largest dinosaur discovered in Brazil. As the National Museum’s spending declined, so did its visitors. Last year, more Brazilians visited the Louvre than the National Museum.

The writing was on the wall. In the aftermath of a fire that destroyed São Paulo’s Museum of the Portuguese Language in 2015, the National Museum’s leadership pressed for funding to install a sprinkler system — but to no avail. As a result, 90% of the National Museum’s collections perished in the flames, including Amerindian artifacts and audio recordings of indigenous languages, some of which are no longer spoken.

Seth Garfield, Professor of History, UT Austin

After the catastrophic fire at Brazilian National Museum, I sent an email to a colleague there to express my condolences and solidarity. I had first met him when I was a graduate student in the early 1990s conducting my field research on the history of Brazilian government policy towards indigenous peoples. Like the other social anthropologists who teach at the Museum’s graduate program, his work is brilliant and had a tremendous influence on my own scholarship. He also showed great kindness towards a very junior scholar, pointing me to relevant readings, collections, and specialists. There is much to mourn about the priceless objects that were destroyed in the blaze, the architectural loss of an imperial palace, the devastating blow to Brazil’s historical patrimony. There is much to condemn about the flouting of fire codes, the deplorable state of funding for public institutions and services in Brazil, and the shocking political corruption that lies at the heart of the nation’s problems. Yet for me, as an academic, rather than a museum-goer, the institution’s researchers have always been the main event.

Aerial view of the damage to the National Museum of Brazil after a devastating fire on September 3, 2018 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It houses several landmark collections including Egyptian artifacts and the oldest human fossil found in Brazil. Its collection include more than 20 million items ranging from archaeological findings to historical memorabilia. (Photo by Buda Mendes/Getty Images)

Over the years, I visited the Museum on a number of occasions. I conducted research on the Xavante Indians in the anthropology library, which was totally gutted by the fire. I served on a dissertation committee, attended doctoral defenses, and gave a talk on multidisciplinary approaches to indigenous studies. I confess, I never much liked the trip: the wait at the bus stop always seemed long and the ride took over an hour. But once on the grounds of the stately old imperial palace, whose dilapidated pastel-colored walls only made the whole place feel even more historical, there was a sensation of being transported to another world. A place dedicated to the life of the mind, to the investigation of Brazil’s multicultural heritage and the empowerment of its underprivileged populations. This was a place that the professors, graduate students, and staff gave life to, just as their predecessors had filled its halls and cabinets with fossils, gems, and antiquities.

This undated handout photo provided by Brazil’s National Museum shows a specimen of the Macrodontia cervicornis beetle, at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. The long-horned beetle, an endangered species, can exceed 6 inches in length. (Museu Nacional Brasil via AP)

Now it’s a place where the heart cries out, because it is broken. The automated response from my Brazilian colleague — the kind that usually announces the recipient is on vacation and will only be checking email sporadically — read: “My institution burned in its entirety. All my personal material of 33 years of work in the same institution burned in full. I ask colleagues and institutions to understand that, under many challenges, my colleagues and I try to take care of things. It is not always possible. Thanks for the comprehension.” A lifetime of intellectual pursuit cut down, truncated into a few sentences. The macabre becomes the mundane. A half hour later, however, he sent me a personal message. It read: “The situation is devastating. But we are also all committed to building another Museum. We will need all the solidarity possible.”

Vivian Flanzer, Senior Lecturer, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, UT Austin

Like all Brazilians who learned about the terrible loss caused by the fire at National Museum last evening, I am absolutely devastated. But as an alumna from this institution, this loss feels also very personal. It was at the graduate program in social anthropology where I became trained by leading academics in the field. It was also there that I made life-long friends, to whom I reached out last night.

Being a student at the National Museum was a unique experience. I don’t know of many institutions in which, to reach the classroom, one has to climb up a steep hill with magnificent gardens and enter the majestic building that once was the emperor’s residence and housed important ethnological collections. I have so many fond memories. There was the time when I was taking the entrance exam for the graduate program and left the room to find the restroom. I got lost inside the museum and found myself all alone in a huge room full of mummies. It took me a good 20 minutes and many dinosaurs later to find my way back to the exam room. In the internal courtyard, a beautiful red macaw greeted us when classes were over. There were the intellectually rigorous courses that I took with brilliant scholars, and the amazing library where I did so much research for my graduate work.

Maxikalisaurus topai (Wikimedia)

My thesis from National Museum looked at the power of collective memory. Using concepts from the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, I showed how a community that was largely exterminated by the Nazis became reconstituted in Brazil through the memories and the stories told by their surviving members. I benefited in my training from the finest minds in the Brazilian academia, including João Pacheco de Oliveira, Lygia Sigaud, and Yonne Leite. Now the National Museum is in ashes and I am part of the surviving community telling my story and the stories of others. Hopefully, through our joined forces the National Museum will make history again.

David Ribeiro, PhD student in History, Universidade de São Paulo
(translated by Edward Shore)

“I have to dedicate my professional life to the study of history, museology, and the study of African, Afro-Brazilian, and indigenous cultures. In the wake of what happened at the Museu Nacional, many possibilities for building knowledge about ourselves and the historical experiences of peoples who were and continue to be marginalized vanished overnight. Thousands of items and decades of work turned to ashes. I only visited once, in 2010, the year I started working at the Afro-Brazilian Museum, and I remember perfectly the impact that these two museums had on me. I remember the richness of these collections, but also how neglected they were, too. Rio de Janeiro, with its emblematic museums, such as the Museum of Fine Arts and the Museum of the Republic, is the same city in which valorizes culture only when it is profitable or only when there are possibilities for gentrification. One notices the splendor of the newly constructed Museum of Tomorrow, built to attract visitors during the World Cup, and the decadence of the historic Valongo Pier, just blocks away. University museums, especially those linked to scientific production, education, and cultural heritage are ignored. These are examples of choices made by civil society and by politicians, to whom investment in science, education, technology, and innovation is an onerous expense.

This undated handout photo provided by Brazil’s National Museum shows wooden masks from the Aweti, Waura and Mehinaku indigenous groups, at the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro. (Museu Nacional Brasil via AP)

We see and experience the consequences of the lack of the public investment in health, education, and public safety every day. Culture, which is almost always neglected by our politicians, and which receives little to no attention from the elites, is only remembered when a tragedy occurs. There are a number of cases like this over the past few years. And this will probably not be the last.

As disheartening as it may be, we must press on. The work is overwhelming, our resources are few, and our goals may not be reached for several generations—and this is made worse by the fact the Temer government has instituted a 20-year freeze on public spending—but there is no alternative but to continue. I persist, in history, museology, anthropology and in other fields, working so that this country might understand the deep need to value its greatest good: its different ways of being and existing, of relating, doing, and producing what we call “culture.”

Regina Duarte, Professor of History, The Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
(translated by Edward Shore)

In his book, Biology in Brazil (1938), the zoologist Cândido Firmino de Mello Leitão recalled his experience reading a manuscript by Louis Agassiz, stored in the archives of the National Museum. Agassiz was lamenting the precarious condition of the National Museum that he found when he had visited Brazil during the 1860s. In the margins of this text, Mello Leitão found a note written in pencil at the end of the nineteenth century and signed by the ornithologist, Emilio Goeldi: “still today, the same thing.” Gripping the book in his hands, Mello Leitão was devastated by the difficulties the Museum had faced, despite the dedication of the many scientists who worked there. He resisted the urge to add his own commentary in the margins of the book: “still today the same thing.”

Mello Leitão was one of the scientists whom I researched for my book, Activist Biology: The National Museum, Politics, and Nation Building in Brazil, published in 2016 by University of Arizona Press. I conducted my research at SEMEAR, a rich historical archive based in the National Museum. The tragedy that struck the National Museum is so great that we cannot even repeat what Agassiz, Goeldi, and Mello Leitão had written almost a century ago. Collections, books, and documents were simply devoured by fire. The efforts undertaken by countless men and women for the advancement of science now seem to be reduced to ashes. It is an irreparable loss for Brazil, for scientists all over the world, and for all those who experienced the joy of visiting the National Museum.

Edward Shore received his PhD in History at UT Austin in 2018. His dissertation is entitled “Avengers of Zumbi: The Nature of Fugitive Slave Communities and Their Descendants in Brazil.” He is currently Lecturer/CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow for Data Curation in Latin American and Latina/o Studies at UT Austin.

Notes From the Field: Bulgaria’s Tolstoyan Vegetarians

by Mary Neuburger

It seemed like a bad idea at the time, but I did it anyway. Maybe, just maybe, there was hope that the little museum in the Bulgarian mountain village of Yasna Polyana would be open. Established in 1998, the museum contained the intellectual remnants of the Bulgarian Tolstoyan community, who had created an agricultural commune in the village of Alan Kayryak in 1906-07. They renamed the village “Yasna Polyana” (clear meadow) after Leo Tolstoy’s famous estate, Yasnaya Polyana.

I had visited Bulgaria’s Yasna Polyana–with its shortened adjective form “yasna” (instead of “yasnaya”) before. Two summers ago I had made the long trip, braving the bumpy windy roads of the Bulgarian Strandja—a mountainous region on the SW coast of Bulgaria where the village is perched. But that summer my efforts had been in vain. The museum was closed and locked “for renovation.” As I peeked through the dusty windows in frustration, huge storks looked down on me from their nests on the nearby utility poles. They seemed to laugh at my American optimism, until I finally gave up.

And yet I returned this summer, without confirming that they were open; I could find no phone number or email online. This time google maps betrayed me, sending me down what seemed to be a sheep trail in my rental car. Still, I made it through intact and, as luck would have it, the wonderful curator of the museum was there! She generously allowed me to peruse their collection of crumbling old newspapers, carefully stacked in a back cupboard. As I gleefully thumbed through the materials, snapping pictures on my iphone, the fascinating world of the Bulgarian Tolstoyans opened up to me.

Museum pamphlet “Bulgarian Yasna Polyana” showing key members of the the movement with Tolstoy hovering above them (via Mary Neuburger)

Tolstoy was a figure of global importance in this period. It was not just his famous novels—like War and Peace and Anna Karenina—that brought him fame. He became a towering figure in global exchanges about the moral and ethical concerns of the day. His essays and other writings made him into an intellectual leader and model on a range of philosophical, spiritual, and social questions. Tolstoy cultivated contacts with like-minded people from around the world, though he never approved of the idea of a “Tolstoyan” movement.

And yet one emerged. Before and after his death in 1910, Tolstoyan communes mushroomed around the world, from the US to South Africa—where Mahatma Gandhi set up an ashram named the “Tolstoy colony” near Johannesburg. At the same time, many of the Bulgarian movement’s leaders made the pilgrimage to Tolstoy’s estate in Russia’s Tula province. Khristo Dosev, for example, spent a number of years in residence there and became extremely close to Tolstoy and his inner circle. Dosev became a direct line of contact between Tolstoy and his followers back in Bulgaria. They translated, published, and made every effort to popularize the ideas of Tolstoy in Bulgaria.

By 1907 Bulgarian Tolstoyans had broken ground on their own agricultural commune in Yasna Polyana. Its adherents established a number of agricultural communes across Bulgaria in the years that followed, but Yasna Polyana remained the movement’s epicenter. Its members set up their own printing press for its many publications, which stressed “Tolstoyan” ideas like non-violence, but also temperance, and vegetarianism. The ties to Tolstoy were so strong that many claim that he was headed to Bulgaria in his final days—when he famously left his family estate and headed south. Alas he died along the way. But if anything the Tolstoyan movement gained in strength after his death, especially in the aftermath of World War I. The massive human casualties of the war brought an even greater urgency to the Bulgarian (and global) Tolstoyan project.

Stefan Andreichin (via Mary Neuburger)

In the Bulgarian Tolstoyan museum on that hot July day, I was most interested in the vegetarian strand of the commune’s intellectual and organizational work. I focused my reading (and scanning) on the Bulgarian Tolstoyan newspaper Vegetarian Review (Vegetarianski Pregled), edited by an important member of the movement, Stefan Andreichin. The history of vegetarianism in Bulgaria will be featured in my book on the history of food in Bulgaria. In a chapter that focuses on meat, I will explore the making of a modern meat-eating culture, but also on the vegetarian counter culture that hotly opposed this transition.

This story is best told in global context, and meat was one of the most hotly debated food sources in history—in the past as today. Is eating meat a human instinct, or a learned behavior? Is it the gold standard of fortification or will it kill us? Even if it is good for the human body, what about the ethics of killing animals, the implications of modern methods, or the environmental impacts of meat-eating?

These questions and many more were debated on the pages of Vegetarian Review, in the years between the World Wars. For philosophical grounding, its contributors looked to ideas on vegetarianism that Tolstoy’s famous 1892 essay, “The First Step,” linked to non-violence and Christian ethics (along with a range of other spiritual traditions). Bulgarian Tolstoyans also sought intellectual scaffolding for their vegetarian convictions in famous ancient, medieval and modern vegetarians—from Pythagoras to Buddha, and Henry George to George Bernard Shaw. In addition, the journal featured articles on vegetarian strictures embedded within movements of local origin–namely the Thracian worshippers of the poet, musician, and prophet Orpheus and the eleventh-century dualist Christian sect, the Bogomils.

This preoccupation with historical precursors was coupled with a pointed critique of the industrial machine of modern animal slaughter and meat processing. In Vegetarian Review, “civilization” was derided for turning people into pleasure seeking “machines,” that could “swallow muscles and gnaw on bones” of poor innocent animals. The Chicago stockyards—since the late nineteenth century the epicenter of modern meat production–were seen as a kind of mass death camp. As an article on the pages of Vegetarian Review alleged, “In just one world city, Chicago, 54 million animals, cows, lamb, sheep, pigs and others are killed a year, with enough blood flowing from them to fill a huge reservoir.”

Cover of the Vegetarian Review (via Mary Neuburger)

This clear ambivalence towards “progress,” however, did not preclude the Tolstoyans from formulating a vision of the future. Indeed, far from retreating into the past, Tolstoyan authors advocated change, a “new life,” which they claimed was only possible without “the remains of death in our teeth.” Keeping up with the times, the Bulgarian Tolstoyans enlisted new streams of thought in nutritional science, economics, and ecology in their effort to convince a mass audience beyond its narrow circles. Vegetarianism was offered as a solution to a range of social ills, including the pervasive violence and self-destruction that seemed to be bringing the modern world to the brink of extinction.

Many—though perhaps not all—of their arguments still ring true today. And yet, after a day of reading in the museum, I have to admit that I could not forgo a heaping plate of grilled kebabche — spiced meat patties — to accompany my glass of wine at a restaurant in nearby Sozopol. This region of Thrace, after all, was the ancient home to the cults of Orpheus and Bacchus. And as a historian and enthusiast of food, I had to partake of the local cuisine. And let’s not forget, that I was raised amidst the American cult of meat, in which meat was both seen as necessary protein source and the height of pleasure and leisure—just pull that burger off the barbeque and enjoy. This cult had clear (although distinct) echoes—my research had shown—behind the Iron Curtain. And yet, in both contexts—as globally—there were very locally situated anti-meat schools of thought. In this region those ideas and practices went back to ancient times, but were articulated most powerfully by the interwar Tolstoyans.

Also by Mary Neuburger on Not Even Past:

The Prague Spring Archive Project
Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yoghurt
Cold War Smoke: Cigarettes Across Borders
Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

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The National Museum of Anthropology in San Salvador

Picture of a mural at the Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), San Salvador — Museo Nacional de Antropología (National Museum of Anthropology), San Salvador (via Brittany Erwin)

By Brittany Erwin

With its multiple universities, extensive commercial sector, and fast-growing population, the city of San Salvador has become an important axis of cultural production for the Salvadoran nation. As the country’s capital city, it houses many notable institutions, including the National Archive, The Museum of Art, and the National Theater, in addition to several historic churches. Included in these important institutions is MUNA, the Museo Nacional de Antropología.

Founded in 1883, MUNA was a product of cooperation between Salvadoran president Rafael Zaldívar and David J. Guzmán, a politician and scholar. Today the full name of the museum is the David J. Guzman National Museum of Anthropology in honor of his contributions to natural and archaeological knowledge in the country.

Located in the heart of downtown San Salvador, this museum offers the nation’s most comprehensive exhibition of Salvadoran history. With five exhibit halls, space for temporary displays and artists’ showcases, MUNA serves as a pillar of El Salvador’s effort towards cultural preservation.

The current temporary exhibit explores the legacy of the last significant eruption of the San Salvador Volcano a hundred years ago, in 1917. Seismic activity and its effects on all aspects of daily life is an important reoccurring theme in the historical narrative that this museum presents.

As visitors enter, they encounter a large, striking mural on the interior courtyard wall. Its vibrant colors and graphic scenery illustrate the significant historical impression that this small country has made. Painted by Antonio Barilla and completed in 2011, the work illustrates the story of the nation. Over centuries, struggles for power among different social, cultural, and ethnic groups have manifested in cycles of conquest, internal conflict, and war. In this sense, Barilla’s mural represents the history of this country as a story about people who have turned a legacy of suffering into one of perseverance and triumph. In that same sense, the mural also provides a thematic map to enhance the museum visitor’s examination of the artifacts that make up that history.

The quantity of exhibits in this museum is impressive, ranging from early-Mayan ceramics to modern-day markers of Catholic culture. Three of its more prominent specialties are the agricultural foundations of El Salvador’s early civilizations, the ongoing role of ritual worship in community life, and the consequences of living in a highly volcanic region.

For the student, this institution offers a wide range of historical, biological, and anthropological information about the interesting dynamics between the past, present, and future in this Central American country. In addition to the artifact displays, MUNA is home to a specialized library. Its collections comprise a variety of primary and secondary works pertaining to the political, economic, social, and cultural history of the nation. These resources are available to local and international researchers.

For the tourist, the historian, or the curious visitor, MUNA allows for a Salvadoran excursion to the past, starting from the earliest days of inhabitance and ending in the contemporary reality of twenty-first century life.

For more information about this museum and its collections, visit: http://www.cultura.gob.sv/museo-nacional-de-antropologia-dr-david-j-guzman/

Also by Brittany Erwin on Not Even Past:

The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador

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The Museo Regional de Oriente in San Miguel, El Salvador

By Brittany T. Erwin

In the tiny nation of El Salvador, the West dominates. As a result of commercial and political relationships that developed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there has been significant influence in this Central American country from the United States and Western Europe. However, within the Salvadoran context, the predominance of western history and culture refers to the marked differences between the eastern and western regions of the country, and the east often gets the short end of the stick. One institution born in 1994 pushed back against this enduring stigma by celebrating the difference of the east.

In the west of this mountainous and volcano-ridden country lies the capital city of San Salvador. Founded in 1524, this sprawling metropolis is home to busy streets and extensive networks of both interregional and international exchange. Far away from that hustle and bustle, and at the foot of the frequently active Chaparrastique Volcano, lies San Miguel. This city, the third-largest in the nation is the proprietor of the first museum built in the eastern half of the country.

Museo Regional de Oriente (Brittany Erwin, 2017)

Housed in a former textile factory and one-time military complex, the Regional Museum of the East (Museo Regional de Oriente) tells the story of the east through the multidisciplinary lenses of archaeology, ethnography, and history. Under the direction of Saúl Cerritos, this institution promotes a celebration of the distinct history and heritage of the East. Even without capital-city resources, it tells the important stories of indigenous life in the pre-hispanic era, the complexities of sociocultural interactions during centuries of conquest and immigration, and the resulting diffusion of cultural practices that continues today.

The collections begin with a display of ceramic artifacts whose particular motifs and production techniques place them firmly outside the Mayan influence that permeates western El Salvador. Extensive historical context in Spanish and English accompanies these carefully preserved pieces, dating from the Paleo-Indian period through the post-Classical period, which ends around the time of Spanish contact.

The exhibitions then shift to reflect the living culture of the zona oriental. Displays of artisanal products and pottery with both a modern presence and historical roots reveal the enduring influence of indigenous culture. The final permanent exhibition hall showcases the dozens of local festivals that guide public life in the city and throughout the east. From the elaborate costumes they inspire to the coordinated offerings and ritualized dances that they require, these fiestas reveal an important aspect of local identity. On that note of energetic cultural pride, the tour concludes.

Inside the Museo Regional de Oriente (Brittany Erwin, 2017)

The museum also houses two temporary exhibits, which change several times a year to reflect contemporary issues of historical interest and investigation. Currently on display are a photographic history of the railroads that connected the people and markets of the East until the early 2000s and an exhibit reflecting on the nation’s anniversary of peace after the civil wars of 1980-1992.

This modest museum, constructed in the shadows of its influential western rival leaves a strong impression. Through a careful selection of local artifacts and the presentation of a region-centered dialogue, it encapsulates both the history and culture of the proudly idiosyncratic eastern region of El Salvador.

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Tatlin’s Fish: Art and Revolution in Everyday Life

By Peter Worger

Tucked into the pages of Nikolai Punin’s diary is a sliver of silver paper made into the shape of a fish. Its scales have been drawn with what appears to be black marker or charcoal in an Impressionist style on one side and in a Cubist style on the other. The fish has two fins along its underside and a pointed tail, most of which have brightly-colored orange tips, and there is a razor-like saw of a fin on its backside. An orange piece of yarn is tied to its mouth as if the fish had been caught with it, making it easy to hang or pull out of a book. The whole object is about the length of a page and, since it was found in a book, one can assume it was made to be used as a bookmark.

Both sides of the fish are decorated in silver and orange (Punin papers, Harry Ransom Center).

The fish was a gift from the famous Soviet avant-garde artist, Vladimir Tatlin, to his friend, the art historian Nikolai Punin. The two men worked together at The Museum of Painterly Culture in Petrograd in the early 1920s just after the Russian Revolution when the diary was written. Punin worked in the Department of General Ideology and Tatlin was producing an experimental play by the poet Velimer Khlebnikov, another friend and collaborator in the circle of Russian revolutionary, avant-garde artists. For Punin, Tatlin represented a particular quality of Russian art that made it surpass the latest Cubist innovations in painting coming from France. In 1921, Punin had already written a polemic entitled, “Tatlin (Against Cubism).” In this short work, he argued that Tatlin made the same innovations in art as the French Cubists, but surpassed them because the tradition of icon painting in Russia gave the Russian avant-garde a particular appreciation of the paint surface. The lack of a Renaissance tradition of perspectivalism, according to Punin, also gave the Russian avant-garde a much freer relationship to space. Punin referred to The Fishmonger, as one of three paintings that represented Tatlin’s start in this direction. In that painting we can see multiple fish that have the silver and orange coloring as the paper fish found in Punin’s diary. Tatlin’s early experiences with church art, painting icons, and copying wall frescoes, was crucial in the development of his style as well as his ideas about the role of art in revolutionary society. The icon was both a work of art and an object for everyday use. This emphasis on the image as everyday object became important in expanding Tatlin’s creative pursuits to include the construction of utilitarian objects to transform the nature of everyday life in the USSR during the transition to socialism.

The Fishmonger, by Vladimir Tatlin, 1911 (via Wikiart).

In 1923, Tatlin became the Director of the Section for Material Culture at the Museum of Painterly Culture. During his tenure there, he authored several documents outlining his general program for the role of material culture in the USSR. In an article written under his direction called “The New Way of Life,” he described a series of new projects and prototypes, namely a new design for a coat, and one of five new designs for an oven that could cook and keep food warm for 28 to 30 hours and also keep the home heated economically. Tatlin incorporated the text of “The New Way of Life” into a controversial work of the same name, a photo-montage showing images of the designs that were meant to depict that revolutionary new way of life. He created it for display in the showroom of the Section for Material Culture and the designs were also shown at the Exhibition of Petrograd Artists of All Tendencies. Punin wrote a favorable review of Tatlin’s work in the exhibition, but other critics who believed that art should occupy a place “beyond the realm of the everyday” found the designs inappropriate. Tatlin’s work was revolutionary in that it challenged this traditional boundary between art and the everyday.

A New Way of Life, by Vladimir Tatlin (via Russian State Archive of Literature and Art).

The fish is an important indication of a close personal and professional relationship between the artist, Vladimir Tatlin, and his admiring critic, Nikolai Punin, and it represents the ways that Tatlin and Punin tried to outline a new revolutionary program for art. It also is an example of that very revolutionary impulse in that it is an object to be contemplated for its aesthetic beauty and also to be used for a utilitarian purpose as a bookmark. Tatlin’s work paved the way for a new interpretation of art as something that could be figurative as well as useful; art in revolutionary society could have a place in the daily lives of every individual and not only in the lofty realm of the art establishment. This little fish offers a window onto the theories of the period of the Russian Revolution, when people sought to rethink the entire Western European model of not only aesthetics but also society.

Tatlin’s fish can be found in The Punin Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

Additional Sources:
Anonymous, “New Way of Life,” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).
John E. Bowlt, review of O Tatline, by Nikolai Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, Slavic Review 55, no. 3 (1996).
Christina Kiaer, “Looking at Tatlin’s Stove,” in Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture, Valerie A. Kivelson and Joan Neuberger, eds (2008).
Jennifer Greene Krupala, review of O Tatline by N. Punin, I. N. Punina, V. I. Rakitin, The Slavic and East European Journal 40, no. 3 (1996).
John Milner, Vladimir Tatlin and the Russian Avant-Garde (1983).
Nikolai Punin, “Tatlin (Against Cubism),” in Tatlin, ed. Larissa Alekseevna Zhadova (1988).

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