Girffith

One point discussed in Life Groups & the Modern Museum Spectator is how the museum experience was to attract and educate immigrants and the working class. The museum developed a culture of its own since certain social behaviors, dress and attitudes were expected. The belief was that middle class spectators would promote this behavior and the immigrants and working class would observe and emulate. But in a sense the acceptable behaviors must have been very intimidating to those who were unfamiliar with them. In order to fit into the museum culture one had to observe not only the exhibits but other spectators. Yet, would not the immigrants and working class who were unfamiliar with the museum rules and protocols become spectacles, rather than spectators, themselves?
The role of action and space are discussed in the museum exhibit and film. The museum exhibit's glass partition separates the spectacle from the spectator and also film creates a space when the spectator watches a film of the spectacle. Both provide a distance between the spectacle and the spectator. It also discusses the differences of action. In a museum the spectator is moving and the spectacle remains immobile and in film the spectator is immobile and the spectacle provides the action. Time is also briefly discussed. Many of the museum exhibits included panoramas, waxworks and taxidermy which froze people and action. This type of frozen exhibition is deceiving since culture is fluid and always changing. Even with film ethnographies, time is frozen. However, since the film shows movement and action it gives the appearance that time is not frozen.
It is ironic that while other people and their cultures are presented so as to almost preserve them in museum exhibits and world fairs there is also a desire to force the same people to forget their culture and practices to make them "civilized". We see this in the treatment of Native American Indians who were forced to move from their land to reservations but at the same time perform at world fairs. The same is true even for the immigrants and working class who visited museums who were expected to adopt middle class behaviors.
One thought was that it seems that spectacle was needed to attract spectators with the intent to educate western spectators on other people and cultures, it seems that the spectacle was more of an amusement rather than an education particularly when live persons were involved. One thing not discussed at all is how the people who were used to make plaster molds or as spectacles in World Fairs and live exhibits felt. What were their reactions and feelings? Did they consider themselves to be the spectator observing westerns as the spectacle?