Culture: The History of Us from Cave Art to K-Pop, by Martin Puchner. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 2023.
REVIEWED BY SHANNON SUTTON
Culture: The History of Us from Cave Art to K-Pop by Martin Puchner follows the thread of art, religion, and society from paleolithic cave paintings in France to the unread manuscripts of the Future Library, only to be unsealed in the year 2114. The untangling of this thread reveals a complex interaction between the artist, the art, and the viewer. Puchner divides the lifecycle of culture into three categories – storage, loss, and recovery. Using a number of examples throughout history, he examines the way that misunderstanding and human errors in the recovery phase can lead to original ideas, in ways that the primary individual whose work is being misinterpreted and re-envisioned could have never foreseen. In his brief discussion of Chauvet Cave in the introduction, Puchner touches on the most philosophical question in human history: why? Why did humans begin to create art, and why do we continue to do so today?
Puchner begins in earnest with an analysis of Nefertiti and Akhenaten’s act of rejection of their ancestral culture, in order to reimagine their own legacy. As they spurned their heritage, they invented their own artistic style and delved into one the earliest examples of monotheism. However, upon their deaths and the rise of their son, Pharoah Tutankhamun, their experiment was intentionally wiped from the records and forgotten until an early twentieth century archaeological expedition. This exemplifies Puchner’s assertion of the life cycle of culture, through creation, loss, and rediscovery. We see this cycle again and again in examples Puchner provides throughout Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Through these examples, Puchner argues that borrowing — and misunderstanding — aspects of culture from different groups is necessary for the preservation and continuation of humanity.
Unfortunately, Puchner fails to bring a post-colonial view to his analysis. He focuses primarily on aspects of culture that are intended to be shared, like Plato’s philosophical dialogues and Hildegard of Bingen’s medical knowledge. In doing so he fails to consider that some things are not supposed to be shared with others, and the sharing and potential misinterpretation of those things is destructive and degrading to the culture of the group who created them. Especially in the complex modern world that lives in the shadow of historical atrocities, we must listen to the wants and needs of others. Who has the right to tell a marginalized group of people that they do not own their culture, and that they must share their closed practices with the people who have enacted great violence upon them for generations, for the good of humanity? Who has the right to tell someone that they must put aside their suffering so that their heritage can be bastardized for the sake of continuation?
While there is a degree of sensitivity missing from the analysis of Culture, it is an intriguing study of history that raises the question: what next? If humanity is stuck in a never-ending loop of storage, loss, and recovery the reader must ask themselves what will we recover next? And what will we lose? We tend to assume that in the digital age we are more capable of preserving our culture than prior generations. However, the adage of “the internet is forever” is not truly accurate. Servers go down, internet archives stop functioning, and content is lost every day.
The questions raised in this book are of particular interest to museum professionals as we look toward the future of the museum field. Holding space to ponder the origins and meaning of cultural materials, the multidimensionality of ownership and cultural “recycling,” and the strengths and weaknesses of modern preservation efforts allows new professionals to form novel and creative thoughts and solutions to both the tangible and ethical issues in the museum field.
Shannon Sutton is a first year MA student in the IU Indianapolis Museum Studies Program.
