To expand on the relationship between expert discourses and a document’s value beyond the walls of the museum, one can think of how the material culture of past civilizations is curated in the context of prevailing epistemic paradigms, as they circulate and get localized in spatio-temporal contexts. In this vein, the archaeologist Yiannis Hamilakis discusses the transformation of Greek antiquities from ruins or mere stuf to valuable objects indexing a glorious civilization (2009). For Hamilakis, this metamorphosis was the result of an expert discursive formation, an epistemic paradigm, that is to say the Enlightenment ideas, the rise of the political formation of the nation-state and Greece’s invention by Europeans as the cradle of Western civilization. Asking, “what […] ordinary people of the Hellenic Peninsula [thought] of antiquities in the centuries before the dissemination of the ideas of the nation and the foundation of the Greek nation-state”, Hamilakis argues that during the Ottoman years and before Greece’s War of Independence in 1821, the classical antiquities for ordinary people were a “peculiar otherness” rather than indexes or documents of knowledge (2009: 65). As such, they were “tightly integrated in the web of daily life”, either as architectural structures for fortification purposes, ancient temples becoming churches or statues invested with legends or myths (Hamilakis, 2009: 65). As the privileged signifier of the “Greek nation” gained currency among intellectuals and some elites in Europe, the same ruins were now elevated from the domain of everyday life to highly significant documents that had to be preserved and enclosed through ticket admissions and special lighting or by developing knowledge around them, such as in conferences, catalogues, and visual memoirs. By “reworking and recasting western ideals, a process of interweaving these ideas within the cultural matrix of pre-modern society” (Hamilakis, 2009: 75), these ruins underwent a process of artification, as Shapiro and Heinich describe it, ndicating European glory. The Enlightenment discourse, as an epistemic formation emphasizing a “return to the classics”, granted to Western and then local experts the authority to curate ruins, metamorphosizing them from everyday stuf to extremely valuable documents of a civilization.
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Homo Curatorius