Taboo Valuation – Museum Decisions Not to Value Certain Objects

The common trajectory of modern society, and particularly organizations, tends to be one of increasing quantification, standardization and rationalization (Ritzer 2013: 5; Weber 1978). With a few notable exceptions (Zelizer 1985), we seem to be moving more things into the market, through financialization (Krippner 2005; Velthuis and Coslor 2012), systems of audit (Power 1999), and the like. This rationalizing tendency makes cases where we move away from scientific rationality both unusual and interesting. This links to more general views of commensuration as a social process (Espeland and Stevens 1998) and where cultural and regime differences can impact specific valuation practices (Fourcade 2011).

One useful lens to understand the motivations against rationality comes through the idea of sacred or taboo categories. Viviana Zelizer’s framing of “hostile worlds” (2000; Zelizer 2006) when it comes to items that could be trivialized or value-compromised through contact with the market is a useful sociological foundation for studying the decision to exclude certain items from the monetary sphere, as seen with art or care work (Coslor 2010; Torres 2014; Velthuis 2005) and potentially requiring structures to obfuscate and minimize the impact of exchanges between the two spheres (Rossman 2014). More specifically, we see anthropological views of sacred items exposed to money or exchange and different moral enactments (Belk 1989; Bloch and Parry 1989). The interface of money and sacred items, or those imbued with intimacy, shows one intersection of moral views and practices, while a quite different view emerges if we ask about practices and categories deemed taboo or stigmatized. From this line of work, we find issues of stigma transfer, i.e. stigma-by-association (Kulik, Bainbridge and Cregan 2008; Pontikes, Negro and Rao 2010), as well as strategies to minimize, normalize or counteract stigma. For example, an examination of “dirty work” highlights the ways that managers are aware of stigma and enact strategies to minimize taint (Ashforth et al. 2007). In a case where we see movement away from rationalization and marketization to uphold cultural and moral barriers, we might well ask whether a hostile worlds or taboo categories lens would prove to be a better fit. Are resulting barriers and movement away from a “flat” rationality the result of hostile worlds views that uphold sacred and intimate spheres? Or should we look to a process of construction particular types of commensuration and quantification as “immoral” one of stigmatization?

This question is better answered in an empirical context that would help us better understand processes and practices. This paper uses the case of museum valuation as a window into modern audit-focused society, focusing on deliberate decisions of what is not valued. Using research at the Melbourne Museum in Australia, we find an increasing audit culture, based on government rules about accounting for government assets, including cultural assets. Within this context, we also see a set of decisions initially made in the first 1995 valuation exercise—but continually reaffirmed—not to value certain types of items, primarily human remains and secret/sacred Aboriginal items.

 Museums have received attention from management and organizations scholars, typically using sociological, institutional or economic approaches (Alexander 1996; DiMaggio 1991; Feldstein 1992; Star and Griesemer 1989), and museum professionals have also been of interest (Duncan 2002), given the consolidation of professional practice (e.g. American Association of Museum Directors 2011). Less has been said, however, about their specific valuation practices and processes, despite the location of a museum as a site that draws together different types of value, from scientific to historical to cultural value, and often acts to instutitionalize or consecrate value. In this case, we see the institutionalization of non-valuation, both through the category and selection process of those items excluded from valuation, which interviewees commonly termed “exclusions.” As explained by one museum professional, ‘exclusions are those items where it's deemed inappropriate to put a financial value on it’ (fieldnotes, 2015-09-30).

One key example of an item excluded from valuation are human remains. From historical status as a type of scientific research, ethnology or curiosity, the situation of human remains in museums has changed both through the empowerment of interested stakeholders, such as tribal peoples, the professionalization and global links among museum professionals, and in coordination between governments. The latter has been seen for example, in the July 2000 meeting of UK and Australian Prime Ministers and their Joint Declaration to “increase efforts to repatriate human remains to Australian indigenous communities, wherever possible and appropriate” (Department for Culture 2005: 5).

The planned paper draws from my current ethnographic research at one Australian museum, where I have had the good timing to be able to observe the process of one of the major five-yearly valuation exercises. With ongoing ethnographic fieldwork, I look forward to using the SASE miniconference to consolidate some of my thoughts around valuation and decisions not to value.