What's in the Drawer?

Much current museum theory and practice emphasizes the importance of storytelling and the inclusion of multiple perspectives in richly layered museum interpretations, with a key objective being the elicitation of empathy for the lives and personal interactions of people in other times and places. Yet in the process museum objects themselves can often appear to recede in significance, appearing as little more than illustrations rather than the complex, material entities they actually are. This article explores the power of objects and of active ways of discovering them, in the setting of the University of Oxford's Pitt Rivers Museum. Visitors can open glass-topped drawers underneath a number of the display cases and find themselves gazing on artifacts in storage: some with museum labels visible and legible, others not. This discovery of the objects is actively performed and, while objects cannot be removed for handling, facilitates their imagined, non-visual exploration. It is also a process in which, the article suggests, proprioception is of particular interest. Overall the drawers offer, the article submits, the possibility for variously pleasing, alienating, surprising, or reassuring encounters with the potential to enhance the museum experience.