Empire, the British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Century: Archival Criticism

By Gregory L. Cuéllar

Since the modern period, the field of biblical studies has relied upon libraries, museums, and archives for its evidentiary and credentialing needs. Yet, absent in biblical scholarship is a thorough and critical examination of the instrumentality of the discipline’s master archives for elite power structures. Addressing this gap in biblical scholarship lies central to this book. Interrogated here is a premier repository or master archive of the discipline: the British Museum. Using an assemblage of critical theories from archival discourse to postcolonial studies, space theory to governmentality studies, the focal point of this book is at the intersections of the Museum’s rise to scientific prominence, the British Empire, and the conferring of scientific authority to modern biblical critics in the nineteenth century.  Gregory L. Cuéllar initiates a season of historicization of the master archives of biblical studies and archival criticism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Aug 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030240288

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© The Author(s) 2019

G. L. . CuéllarEmpire, the British Museum, and the Making of the Biblical Scholar in the Nineteenth Centuryhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24028-8_1

1. Introduction: Historicizing the Master Archive

Gregory L. Cuéllar¹  

(1)

Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Austin, TX, USA

Gregory L. Cuéllar

Email: [e-mail]

The notion of an archive achieving master status within a nation-state not only implies public consensus around an assemblage of ruling ideologies but also the enactment of physical violence against other human beings. As seductive as the power of a master archive is to the modern state, even to the point of it contracting what Jacques Derrida calls archive fever,¹ the materiality of this power reveals contours of triumph for some and despair for others. For Derrida, there is no political power without control of the archive; yet framed differently, I would add that there is no control of the archive without political power resorting to physical acts of violence against other humans.² Of course, Derrida was not undiscerning of the correlation between state archives and violence. He not only conflates the archive with state power, he also understands the archive as prone to violence (or, as he describes, archival violence) because of its institutive and conservative functions.³ Another way to conceptualize the violence of the archive is through what Derrida calls archivization, which points to how "the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structures of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future.⁴ As Derrida explains, archivization produces as much as it records the event.⁵ What archivization produces is inherently violent largely because it involves what Derrida calls the death, aggression, and destruction drive or archive fever (mal d’ archive).⁶ Here the power of the archive constitutes specific abuses like repressions, censoring, reductions, forgetfulness, erasure, secrets, or what Derrida terms the the in-finite, which is an archiving destruction.⁷ In this way, archivization produces the very thing it reduces, which for state power can legitimate acts of radical evil against other humans. By understanding the archive as the violence on power, Derrida opens the ethico-political dimension of the problem."⁸

The Politics of the Master Archive

For the ruling power, the archive’s allure lies in how it is able to compel a social body about what is true and real while at the same time rendering unseen its silencing mechanisms and productions of otherness. As Thomas Osborn rightly states, "it would be a mistake ever to think that there could be an archive without a politics of the archive."⁹ Here again, I would frame politics not merely as an ideological force but more importantly as an activity that produces power. In Western society, master archives are themselves premised on particular conceptions of what is and is not considered archival worthy.¹⁰ As Elisabeth Kaplan rightly explains, the archival record doesn’t just happen: it is created by individuals and organizations, and used … to support their values and mission.¹¹ Here the master archive has an underside in which truth-making is indeed a subjective process that works to reproduce the ruling power rather than stultify it. Such a claim has in view the everyday operations of archives (archivization) like appraising, collecting, and preserving facts. On the surface, this day-to-day technical labor operates with intentional purpose toward a designated common good; yet when seen from the vantage point of who is excluded, it is clear that this labor seeks to privilege certain forms of knowledge over others. Thus, the question to be considered is how the privileging of knowledge within a master archive facilitates the subjection of those representing the excluded knowledge. The dismissal of other experiences and realities from the master archive comes about by what Albert Memmi refers to as a series of negations: they are not fully human, they are not civilized enough to have systems, they are not literate, their languages and modes of thought are inadequate.¹² In this sense, the archive’s exclusion of particular forms of knowledge is less about preservation of facts than about a common set of values, norms, and beliefs that deem some humans as unworthy of any dignified existence.

At the state level, a master archive has the most to gain from such negations in part because its domain of influence extends over, at the least, a geographical territory and hence a social body. In this way, the people privileged in the national archive reflect the same people privileged in the broader sociopolitical and economic realities of that nation. Moreover, the negated human Other in a nation’s master archive often represents the marginalized human Other in its economy, politics, and social order. Though I admit that social implications are infinitely in flux, the negation of the human Other is traceable within the professionalization complex of academia, which in part pertains to the credentialing of scholars, the rise and fall of disciplinary discourses, publishing markets, and epistemic currencies—to name a few. Yet even with this complex of negation, libraries, museums, and archives are the incubating institutions in the archival violence of human silencing. The origin of such a dynamic is rooted in elite power, for it is here that these institutions are declared stewards of all knowledge. Supporting this claim are their colossal spaces, expansive bookshelves, modes of surveillance, systems of organization, and admissions procedures. In what appears natural to their stewardship of knowledge, it is elite power that ultimately stands to benefit from these everyday practices.

The Indexes of Subjectivity for the Archive

The strains of archival theory that inform this book primarily begin with the revelatory work of Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault and afterward pivot to postcolonial studies and theory.¹³ This trajectory of archival theory acts on the unveiling claims that Derrida and Foucault provide regarding the subjectivity of the archive and the power it wields in Western society. For Derrida, the archive’s subjectivity lies in its techniques of archivization and, for Foucault, this subjectivity comes to the fore when the archive is viewed as the system that governs the appearance of statements as unique events.¹⁴ Distinctive here is how the archive is problematized, so that we understand it not as a benign repository of documents but rather as a form of technology, process, system, and mode of operation for reproducing state power.¹⁵ As Foucault indicates, the archive marks the first law of what can be said and hence determines how what is said is grouped together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities.¹⁶ In tracing the actions of elite forms of power (e.g. nation-state and empire), the archive emerges as a profitable tool, largely because its central function is to define the what, when, where, and who of truth. Yet, as Derrida and Foucault have revealed, this function is not performed objectively but rather is conditioned by a social context in which the biases of designated social bodies prevail as facts. Indeed, this initial awareness of the archive’s subjectivity has given rise to a number of critical studies that historicize the archive’s multiple subjectivities.¹⁷ As Nicholas Dirks writes, the archive is simultaneously the outcome of historical process and the very condition for the production of historical knowledge. The time has come to historicize the archive.¹⁸ In her introduction to the acclaimed book Archive Stories: Facts, Fictions, and the Writing of History, Antoinette Burton also makes a similar charge with these words:

Our insistence on the necessity of talking about the backstage of archives—how they are constructed, policed, experienced, and manipulated—stems equally from our sense that even the most sophisticated work on archives has not gone far enough in addressing head-on the lingering presumptions about, and attachments to, the claims to objectivity with which archives have historically been synonymous, at least since the extended moment of positivistic science on the German model in the nineteenth century.¹⁹

Among the disciplines that have yet to seize the moment in fulfilling Dirks’s call to historicize the archive is biblical studies. Indeed, Derrida’s words come to mind here: a Biblical scholar, as they say, claim[s] to speak in all objectivity while basing himself on ancient or new archives.²⁰ This reminder of the biblical scholar’s incessant reliance on ancient and new archives obliges me to rephrase Dirks’s call; the time has come to historicize the archives of biblical scholars.

Critiquing the Master Archive as a Biblical Scholar

Since the early modern period national museums, particularly those in the Western world, have served as master archives for scientifically based biblical scholars. For many scholars from the English-speaking world, the British Museum is arguably considered an elite master archive for the study of the Bible. Yet what does this status mean as it pertains to the reproduction of elite power and the negation of the human Other? The link between the British Museum and scientific biblical criticism , particularly in the nineteenth century, offers a viable starting point for understanding how a nation’s master archive harnesses its centripetal force over a social body in order to reproduce elite forms of power. This calls into question not the biblical relevance of archival materials at the British Museum, but rather the interstitial domains of technical processes and machineries of truth-making that render these materials valuable to scientifically based biblical scholars. For the nineteenth-century British Museum, these underlying domains were indelibly tied to the brutal ambitions of the British Empire; thus, gaining credibility as a master archive among modern biblical scholars proved to be a profitable endeavor in the sense that by assigning the Empire’s spoils (monuments, statues, reliefs, manuscripts, etc.) to the scientific study of the Bible, these scholars in turn exonerated imperial encroachments on the lands where these objects originally rested. What is problematic about this context was the symbiotic alignment of empire, master archive, the Bible, and scientific discourse to legitimate and reproduce imperial forms of power in places like Asia and Africa.

In light of these concerns, Chap. 2, Mastering Biblical History in the British Museum, examines the British Museum’s state-sanctioned role as restorer and steward of ancient civilizations, particularly those mentioned in the Bible. In this chapter, I contend that the discovery of antiquities and their import to the Museum relied upon a complex machinery of social affiliations and synchronized networks of political power. Indeed, its acquisition of antiquities in the early nineteenth century marked a relational interplay between Trustees of the British Museum, scientific societies, and antiquarian explorers. This nexus of affiliations went beyond personal curiosities and upkeep of individual social privileges. For the Museum, these networks enabled it to transition from a domicile of curiosities to Britain’s master archive—especially as it pertains to the study of the Bible.

In examining the British Museum’s archival development in the early nineteenth century, this chapter also looks at inscriptions of power in its architectural spaces and acquisition practices. I argue that the Museum’s monumental spaces reified the belief that the world lay open in the acquisition of antiquities. I link this belief to what I term an imperial impulse to possess. In other words, as an Imperial State institution, it had at its disposal the British Empire’s widespread colonial networks to execute the discovery and transport of exhumed objects. Here the Museum’s acquisition ambitions coincided with its expansive monumental spaces such that colossal became the desired standard of measurement for ancient objects.

Shifting from the British Museum’s external networks in the early nineteenth century, I move inward in Chap. 3, Books and Bodies in the British Museum Reading Room, focusing primarily on the Museum’s approach to knowledge construction in the mid-nineteenth century. Of particular interest are the 1857 Reading Room and its embodiment of the Museum’s core epistemic preconceptions and educational assumptions. I demonstrate that in the foreground to the Reading Room’s approach to knowledge was a social Darwinist notion that Anglo-Saxon males possessed superior mental capacities, due in large part to their distinctive skull size. In addition, I contend that this sense of cranial superiority was emboldened further by the grandeur of British Imperialism, which, in turn, was inscribed into the Reading Room’s architectural design and spatial logic. As a result, Anglo-Saxon (i.e. white) males were designated as the Reading Room’s ideal readers in that they were the most mentally apt to engage in encyclopedic learning and acquire panoptic knowledge. Placed under the guidance of the Reading Room’s panoptical spatial logic, white male readers were presented an imaginary world of bibliographical totality and therein inclined to view their knowledge production as the exclusive activity of Western civilized life. For female readers in the 1857 Reading Room, the expectations for learning and knowledge production were less ambitious. As I argue in this chapter, the male-prescribed role for Victorian middle-class women was domesticity wherein serious learning and scholarly production were not expected and sometimes were even prohibited. If learning did take place, Victorian women could do so in the Drawing Room, which served as the quintessential female domestic space for comfort, leisure, and light reading. Such expectations made their way into the 1857 Reading Room’s spatial logic, sitting accommodations, and admission policies to the extent that typical Drawing Room furniture was placed in the female reading area. As for white male readers, they were privileged in the Reading Room as those socially expected to produce scholarly thought and serious research; this was most evident in the subjects of theology and biblical studies. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Reading Room’s book arrangement began with theology as its first major subject of study. Such a placement was indicative of the Room’s privileging of theological and biblical scholarly production. This—combined with the Room’s imperial predilections and social presumptions of white male intellectual superiority—socialized white male readers to view themselves as the primary producers of theological and biblical scholarship.

Chapter 4, The Biblical Critic as Collector, examines the subjective nature of collecting, particularly as it pertains to the Museum’s accumulation of biblical manuscripts and the biblical critic’s scientific quest for the original biblical text in the late nineteenth century. I contend that for both the British Museum’s Department of Manuscripts and the modern textual biblical critic (i.e. Lower Criticism), collecting biblical manuscripts was rooted in a Western/European impulse to possess objects in order to construct alternative worlds. Among the primary textual biblical critics this chapter contextualizes in this way is the renowned British New Testament scholar Brooke Foss Westcott. As a nineteenth-century textual biblical critic, Westcott endeavored to reconstruct the original text of the New Testament through a meticulous process referred to as collation. Such an activity involved reading through ancient biblical manuscripts, tediously selecting readings that varied from the Received Text (i.e. variant readings), and methodically transcribing them in a notebook. At issue here was how the Bible entered into a peculiar object system in which Westcott sought to map out its original essence from a collection of collated textual evidence. Whereas Westcott viewed collecting as a professional norm in the modern scientific pursuit of the Bible’s original text, I contend that such a practice constitutes an index of Westcott’s subjectivity.

Drawing on scholarship in collecting studies, I link the social practice of collecting that Westcott championed in his textual criticism to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of collecting as a game of possession and collections as embodied projections of the self.²¹ Within Westcott’s practice of collecting, the biblical manuscript material was redefined by its new context in the collection of collated manuscripts, thereby subsuming these manuscripts to what Susan Stewart identifies as a scenario of the personal.²² For Westcott, a perfectly collated collection of various manuscripts did more to confirm his own self-fashioning desires as a professional Englishman than the original form of the New Testament.

From here this chapter examines how the British Museum was the nation’s collector par excellence of biblical manuscripts and hence poised to fulfill Westcott’s textual collecting needs. Yet various factors went into granting Westcott special access to the British Museum’s prized biblical manuscripts or, as its Department of Manuscripts liked to call them, select manuscripts. At issue here is how Westcott’s collecting world had to adjust to the collecting universe of the British Museum—sometimes in ways that incited Westcott’s disgruntlement. Although Westcott’s scholarly credentials gave him privileged access to the British Museum’s Department of Manuscripts, I posit that his collecting practices in the Museum encountered an unexpected disciplining which, in turn, attuned his self-fashioning aspirations toward the Museum’s ideals of a learned scholar. Different from private collectors who exercise independent control over their collecting world (collector and objects), much of Westcott’s textual collecting was mediated through the manuscript collections at the British Museum and, as such, his self-making was circumscribed by the Museum’s rules and inspectional measures that governed his access to the very objects of his collecting desires.

Chapter 5, Biblical Scholar as Imperial State Agent, examines the Museum’s adaptation of Western archaeological science in ways that appealed to biblical scholars and yet were amenable to the British Imperial State in the late nineteenth century. In this chapter, I contend that the Museum’s version of Western archaeological science yielded various alliances with scholarly networks to the extent that their published scholarship served as an important vehicle for extending the educational reach of the British Museum beyond its physical galleries. Simply by citing a museum artifact in their publications, experts gave credence to their scholarly arguments that was mutually beneficial to their scholarly currency and to the British Museum’s authority as a repository of scientific truth. I argue, however, that implicit in this interchange was a dynamic and efficacious conveyance of a set of values and norms that were ultimately acceptable to the dominant social order. As an Imperial State institution, operations in and alliances with the British Museum were instrumentalized in part to invigorate extant elite power structures. Hence, by citing a museum artifact in support of a scholarly argument, experts invested in the economies of truth-making associated with it. For the former, the gains came in the form of scientific credibility and professional notoriety, whereas in the case of an Imperial State institution like the British Museum the increased influence translated into gains in social and political control.

In terms of tracing the contours of this complex assemblage of diverse forces,²³ this chapter focuses on the biblical scholarship of Samuel Rolles Driver, especially where he references artifacts in the British Museum to support a Eurocentric racial logic. Considered a primer English scholar in the history and development of the Hebrew Bible, Driver’s published citations of museum artifacts conferred scientific authority not only to his arguments about racial differences but also to the ways in which these objects were racialized in the British Museum. With the latter operating forcefully to shape the public’s gaze regarding racial differences, this entire interchange did not end with Driver’s notoriety nor the British Museum’s scientific credibility, but rather with relations of power at the Imperial State level.

Trespassing on the Archive as Method

Interrogating a master archive like the British Museum from the perspective of a racially minoritized body reveals that it is provisional and yet off-limits. Such exclusionary forces bespeak the plight of the human Other: within the master archive many are silenced, erased, and censored without any say in the matter. As a racialized brown-bodied person, I often felt like a trespasser at a number of archives in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Indeed, while in various reading rooms, I could sometimes sense a heightened suspicion from attending archivists about my research motives, especially when the materials were as mundane as signature logs and old readers’ tickets. I admit that I sometimes fell prey to the master archive’s seduction in which my scholarly self relished the professional affirmation that each reader’s card conferred on me. Nor was I immune to the disciplinary rules that governed my movements, actions, and demeanor within each master archive I visited. Hence, as rebellious as trespassing on the master archive may seem, I cannot say that I went unscathed while trespassing—for, indeed, I often had to comply with certain procedures in order to have access to particular materials. On the other hand, the professional real estate I did concede in order to the access the archive was not so all-encompassing that I lost sight of my goal as a human Other to use the master archive as a tool to upend the master’s meta-narrative. Here, I resonate with Saidiya Hartman’s words: One recognizes that writing the history of the dominated requires not only the interrogation of dominant narratives and the exposure of their contingent and partisan character but also the reclamation of archival material for contrary purposes.²⁴ For this book, though, trespassing on the master archive may have in view