On labels, taxonomies and (self)identities
Roxana Coman
Dora d’Istria, Institute of National Heritage / Institutul Național al Patrimoniului România, Bucharest
Last year, scrolling through Facebook I saw an announcement of a new exhibition at my former place of employment, The Bucharest Municipality Museum. The museum, founded in the 1920s and 30s, curates the history of Bucharest within the framework of Romanian history. In the 1950s, the museum was moved to a nineteenth-century aristocratic townhouse known as the Suțu Palace, built in a Neo-Gothic/Romantic style by two Austrian architects. It’s there, among the artefacts showcasing the grand narrative of Romanian national history, that I discovered my love for objects. I enjoyed working with metalwork and textiles. Their intricacies, materials, usage, and circulation raised so many questions and created so many avenues for research. Engaging with the museum and its objects, I once again found my way back to academia.
The exhibition in question is Fashion at the Gate of the Levant, or Ro Modă la porțile Levantului in Romanian. Its aim was to explore textiles and consumption patterns of the former Ottoman provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. All the topics right up my alley. The issue, though? The interpretative framework of the exhibition was the exotic, melting-pot-of-civilizations type entanglements. The Levant, according to the curator, was the area between the “Oriental” shores of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, including the Near East, the Caucasus, and the Balkans. This wasn’t the first time the curator and the museum had engaged with the East vs. West divide, which once again centred on the former provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia as regions “at the frontier between the Orient and the West.” An exhibition featuring paintings related to travel to the West and the East adopted a similar (self-)orientalising approach.
My first reaction upon seeing the Facebook ad was to deconstruct the whole concept of the exhibition, taking into account not only the fact that the Levant had already been discussed by scholarly contributions as an invented geography, but also numerous contributions from Romanian scholars that go beyond the East/West discourse regarding the patterns of consumption in eighteenth-century Wallachia and Moldavia. Nicoleta Roman, Constanța Vintilă Ghițulescu, and Ovidiu Cristea, for example, emphasize the shifting loyalties of Wallachian and Moldavian hospodars, engage with women’s history there, and discuss the Ottoman material culture in the context of the internal Ottoman trade.
While academic discussions do not often reach broader readership, literature certainly does. Contemporary Romanian literature has its fair share of historical novels. Take for example Doina Ruști or Simona Popescu who focus on the so-called Phanariot eighteenth century. Ruști’s novels, Zogru and Cat o' Friday paint the eighteenth century as populated by fantastical creatures, where magic was something of a natural occurrence. These stories remind me of the tone I used in designing the educational activities for children during my years as a volunteer at the National Museum of Art of Romania. Simona Antonescu’s Manuc’s Inn about the popular Armenian merchant Emanuel Mârzayan offers a detailed and informed portrayal of the Ottoman realities. At least I thought so until I reached the part about the Danubian Principalities’ place within the Ottoman Empire, when one of the characters uttered something like: “But what do the Ottomans have to do with Wallachia and Moldavia? The countries have never been theirs.” It was time for me to close the book, never to finish it.
The Fashion at the Gates of Levant is no exception as to the exoticizing gaze through which contemporary Romania engages with its Ottoman-era legacies. For example, the exhibition presents late-nineteenth century mangal braziers or bindallı-style embroidery as emblematic of the eighteenth-century material culture. What is more, the objects are labeled with a simple explanation: “Oriental workshop.” The poster design announcing the exhibition features Dora d’Istria, a pen name of the orientalist Elena Ghica (d. 1888). Daughter of a prominent politician and private collector Mihalache Ghica, Elena is famous for her books that include the titles like Les femmes en Orient (Women in the Orient) and Des femmes, par une femme (About Women, by a Woman).
The exhibition and its discontents felt personal, too. Among the exhibits was a series of metalwork artefacts, including ones with Arabic inscriptions to which the curators did not provide translations. As a former curator in charge of the Bucharest Municipality Museum’s collection of metalwork and decorative arts, I loved working with the objects. I tried to identify them as closely as I could, to never just label them as “Oriental.” When a label said “spice/perfume container,” I dug deeper and discovered that it was a Havdalah used on Sabbaths and holy days. I always requested funding to hire an Arabic specialist to properly identify the objects. However, the answer was invariably a version of “we don’t have the budget for it.”
Was it all for nothing, I wondered as I stared at the computer. I felt involved since the presence and afterlives of Ottoman material culture in Wallachia and Moldavia had been the reason why I wanted to return to academia. I wanted to take the keyboard and post something passive-aggressive on social media. I took a deep breath instead, and decided to write something to critically engage in a manner that is less problematic, more attuned to how we seem at times to just perpetuate anachronistic syntagms. I felt that I should hold back because institutions do not always take criticism as something that could be used for improvement. Another reason why I held back is that I often let my feelings guide me into reacting instead of listening to what they were teaching me. So, one tweet later, I followed the self-questioning spiral into my own accountability, generously sprinkled with self-sabotage.
“Who are you to judge?” reverberated in my mind. “You were a naïve student with poorly written essays and articles. You were superficial in your research, in your analysis, always jumping to what felt true, with limited access to scholarly resources that could hone your skills as a specialist.” The accusations kept coming. “Look at your Academia.edu page, the articles that you hastily posted.” All I could see were the many missing career building blocks, many mishaps, always what wasn’t there.
I thought how many students of my generation lacked access to academic resources, adequate training for the competitive international academia, guidance for writing grant applications, or essential know-how as to how academic systems operate. How little we knew and were taught about the criteria that academia used for assessing the value of one’s work. I remember my teacher’s comments during my student years about scientometry as a useless, one-size-fits-all type of evaluation, without ever mentioning how grant applications and careers depended on it.
Scientometry counts citations like one counts likes on social media. It is one of the main anxiety triggers among academics, but its effects are felt even more among the scholars from the Global South. We who write in our native languages face expectations from journals and institutions to learn the big four: German, English, Italian or French should we want to ever be accepted. Having experienced these types of comments from middle-aged, white men, oblivious of their privilege to impose such colonial-style pressure, I felt anger.
At the same time, I wished that scientometry of my scholarly work had been my only source of angst. There, in the background, loomed also family history, precarity, and abusive supervisors who encouraged the disparaging voices running the show in my mind. Depression and anxiety blur the view of the countless hours spent doing PhD after my nine-to-five job as a bookshop assistant, sometimes falling asleep on the keyboard, international projects I collaborated on, summer schools...
I still oscillate between my ability to control my reservoir of anger for having to fight for everything and the feeling of not being enough, of being out of place. My education, my family background, the missing building blocks keep informing not only my anxieties, but also who I am as a professional.
Labels and taxonomies don’t define museum objects only. By trying to see myself in academia, I realized that academics come with their own. As a curator and researcher, I am acutely aware that they are a double-edged sword. On the one hand, labels, and taxonomies facilitate our understanding of the world around us. On the other, though, they confine people, events, concepts into boxes. I struggle to navigate situations in which I have to define who I am and what I do in easily legible ways. What label do I use? How do I make myself fit into clearly defined theories, concepts, or topics?
Similar to many other scholars, my professional experience includes diverse types of jobs and is divided between museums and academia. Recently, my curatorial skills were used as a bargaining chip to the point of erasing my existence as a researcher. My position in the institution was defined by what I could do for my colleagues’ projects. Coming to my PhD program with a BA and MA in art history, my supervisor told me that I was "an art historian and will never be a good historian.” Again, faced with labels and struggling to navigate them reminded me of how taxonomies in both museums and academia demonstrate the variety of (re)visions.
The labels “Oriental,” “Turkish,” “Balkan” attached to artifacts of Islamic and/or Ottoman provenance encountered in various museums and academic publications speak volumes about the intellectual underpinnings. Questioning what lays behind them is often a journey that confronts not only carelessness but also the confusion and even prejudice of my Romanian colleagues that I often had to face. I was so often told that there is no research in museums, despite all the research we actually invested into the exhibitions. I was also often addressed as “you museum people,” contributing to the existing divisions between museum world and academia.
Labels are, of course, also reliant on the context and shared codes. In my work, I use “Orientalism” to analyse nineteenth-century Romanian paintings depicting harem scenes or interwar private collections organized around an exoticist gaze as in a recent study co-written with colleagues that investigated the private collection of Marcu Beza. When I present my work in international settings, colleagues rush to suggest that I may be using the concept too lightly or that it’s too overrated. Of course, that brings me right back to how my academic formation informed my way of engaging with concepts and theories. Coming from the background that emphasized the archival research as the only way to do research, I have struggled to find my theoretical footing and carve my place in the competitive academic setting.
At the end of the day, this is what everyone does, including the curator of the exhibition that was the point of origin of this essay. We publish, curate exhibitions, give talks, and have peers assess the value of our work. The labels and taxonomies we use in engaging with either the artefacts or our work can be instrumental in our professional path. Before using the term Levant to define the Danubian Principalities, one should aim to understand the complexity of it. The term Orientalism comes with a similar burden as Balkanism, yet another ascribed label. So, I decide to return to the Facebook post announcement for the exhibition opening and see it as an opportunity for reflection on what defines and makes us who we are, the lessons we learned, the ones that we still need to learn, the value of what we already have.
