1In the summer of 2015, I visited a small Nubian village nested on an island on the Nile, near Aswan, a cluster of houses that could only be reached by boat. My host, a young Nubian man named Magdy [1], worked at the Nubia Museum in Aswan. He was also an amateur painter. He showed me some of his art – colorful representations of Nubian life. One of his paintings seemed particularly striking and somewhat familiar, it represented two women sitting in front of a traditional Nubian painted house weaving baskets. I asked him about that painting, and he said it was based on recollections from his childhood, as well as on his grandmother’s descriptions of traditional Nubian life. He then offered me the beautiful painting, and, when I politely refused, he said: “We, Nubians, honor our guests. It is our culture to be generous and to offer the visitors what they like.” I accepted his gift.
2A few days later, as I was visiting once more the Nubia Museum in Aswan, I was struck by one of the life-size dioramas (life-size display representing a scene) displayed in the ethnographic part of the museum: it was the scene of the painting I had been gifted earlier by Magdy. The scene was identical, aside from two missing plants on the painting, and a door left open in the diorama that had been closed on the painting. The diorama, an imagined assemblage, had morphed into Magdy’s lost childhood and in his grandmother’s nostalgic memories which had inspired his art. Magdy worked at the Nubia Museum and probably saw the diorama daily, perhaps internalizing it as a familiar scene, belonging to his culture and his traditions.
3I decided to examine the ethnographic dioramas in the Nubia Museum and the messages they conveyed: how they had been conceived and how they were received. In a discussion I had that week with the Museum director, Ossama Meguid, he described the dioramas as the favorite part of the Museum for the Nubian visitors, because the scenes seemed so real. Did they seem so real that they could replace or even serve to reinvent a disappeared reality? This paper reflects on the multidimensional stories the Nubian ethnographic dioramas tell: stories of displacement, of reinventions of traditions, stories of representation of a culture and, perhaps, stories of empowerment of a sacrificed group. I first examine the context in which the Nubia Museum was created, then I focus on the dioramas of the ethnographic section. My initial analysis of the dioramas is that they present characteristics of essentialization, racialization, allochronism, elements that have been analyzed in depth by scholars studying other museums [Halloran, 2009; Zittlau 2011; Struge, 2014]. However, what interests me particularly is not only the shortcomings of the use of dioramas as a museological strategy in the Nubia Museum, but also the impact those dioramas may have on the Nubian community and I ask whether the ethnographic section of the Museum acts as a space of symbolic reterritorialization for the submerged Nubian villages. This paper is based on my 2015 visits to the Nubia Museum, extended discussions with the Museum director and two Nubian interlocutors from a village neighboring the Museum, and more casual discussions with other Nubian villages’ members. I also use interviews of the former director of the Museum and journalistic reports of the impact of the Nubia Museum on Nubian and non-Nubian communities in Aswan.
Nubia submerged and the Nubia Museum
4After his accession to power in 1952, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser quickly took the decision to build the High Dam, which would become a symbol of Egypt’s independence vis-a-vis European powers and of its ability to control its natural resources. It was not a new idea: the project of a dam to regulate the flow of water in the Nile and to ensure the availability of irrigation water downstream from the dam had been a priority in Egypt since the nineteenth century. Plans for building the Old Aswan Dam had first been proposed in 1898. After its completion in 1902, the structure was raised twice, first in 1912 and later in 1933. Consequently, the Nile River waters raised and Nubians started to gradually lose their date palm trees, waterwheels and productive parcels of land. The agreement on the partition of the Nile with Sudan was signed in 1958 and the construction of the High Dam started in 1960, creating one of the largest lakes in Africa. The lake extends for 480 kilometers upstream of the Dam, with about 300 kilometers of the lake situated in Egypt, under the name Lake Nasser, and 180 kilometers situated in Sudan, as Lake Nubia. As for the 44 Nubian villages to be submerged by the lake, in 1963-1964, the Egyptian government relocated their inhabitants to the North, in the Kom-Ombo region, within an area stretching 60 kilometers north to south. Approximately 40.000 Nubians in Egypt were displaced. Nubian is a generic term encompassing many sub-groups ; the main groups of Nubians can be differentiated from each other mainly by their dialects: Kenuzi (Matokki) and Fadija (Mahas). Other differences are anchored in their geographical, historical milieus, and political borders drawn by the British Condominium in 1899 divided Nubians into “Egyptian” Nubians and “Sudanese” Nubians. These groups are also divided “according to the experience of relocation in the 1960s as a consequence of the High Dam, since some Nubian villages were not affected by the construction” [Elcheikh, 2015, p. 21].
5The flooding of Nubia endangered archeological sites and artifacts dating from the Pharaonic period. In 1959, the Egyptian government approached Unesco and in 1960, Unesco launched a rescue operation to save the treasures of ancient Nubia: The International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia. It ran forty archaeological missions from five continents and managed to move twenty-two monuments in twenty years. The most well-known relocated monuments were the Abu Simbel and Philae temples, transferred to surrounding areas. Other temples were offered to donor countries who had participated in the Campaign, such as Germany, Italy and the United States. The temple of Dendur was gifted to the United States and has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since the late 1970s.
6After the completion of the International Campaign to Save the Monuments of Nubia in 1981 and the transfer of large monuments to safer grounds, a committee was assembled in Paris to discuss the fate of other artifacts that had been collected during the Campaign. The outcome was a decision to create two museums: the Nubia Museum in Aswan and the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization (NMEC) in Cairo. Unlike the Nubia Museum, the NMEC was not to focus specifically on Nubia, but to showcase Egyptian civilization from prehistoric times to present day using a multidisciplinary approach that highlights the country’s tangible and intangible heritage.
7The construction of the Nubia Museum started in 1985 in Aswan, and it was inaugurated in 1997. The Museum received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2001, an annual award, established to celebrate architectural concepts that have successfully addressed the needs of Muslim communities around the world. The Nubia Museum occupies a 50,000 square meter site on the banks of the Nile, 7,000 square meters of which are devoted to the Museum, a building designed to evoke the Nubian village architecture. It faces the Nile in the manner of traditional Nubian houses and is covered in local sandstone and pink granite. The Museum is organized along a chronological path, illustrating the development of the region from prehistory, Pharaonic times, Christian and Islamic periods, up to the present.
8The Museum was initially designed as a place to store and exhibit archaeological and Nubian objects, focusing on the tangible rather than the intangible. The project’s description of Unesco states: “It will primarily display archaeological collections, objects as well as documents, up to the Islamic period, and some ethnological material” [Unesco, 1981, p. 2]. The ethnological material is largely showcased in life-size dioramas representing glimpses of Nubian life: a wedding, women weaving, a classroom as well as dancers and musicians, all set before the construction of the Dam, in an idealized past.
Cultural and phenotypical reifications
9Dioramas have been cherished since pioneered by Boas, but in the last decades, some museums, particularly in western countries, have removed their dioramas [Chicone, Kissel, 2014], while others have decided to keep or renovate them, preserving them as useful tools that encapsulate earlier representational forms of popular anthropology [Zittlau, 2011, p. 177]. Researchers see ethnographic dioramas [2] as presenting “static, dehumanized caricatures that fuel classic and colonial stereotypes,” and representations of “the supposedly ‘primitive’ technologies of non-industrialized people” [Steiner, 1991, p. 34] ; dioramas “reflect a colonial power constellation in which a dominant culture exhibits a subordinated culture by way of constructed oppositions” [Zittlau, 2011, p. 177]. Perhaps, the most controversial aspects of classic dioramas are that they essentialize and racialize the cultures they represent, which is due to their nature: their elaboration requires electing cultural practices and racial phenotypes. In ethnographic dioramas, the model of zoological dioramas was often followed, and humans were brought in “similar zoological frameworks – while it contextualized artefacts, the dioramas decontextualized human being themselves” [Struge, 2014].
10Processes of essentialization and racialization are conspicuous in the Nubia Museum ethnographic section. Before the dioramas themselves, an introductory panel describes the “Nubian character” in these terms: “The Nubians have a special reputation amongst outsiders [...] their characteristics are generally considered to be honesty, trustworthiness, goodheartedness and cooperation... One cannot associate violence with this land and people.” The description possesses the well-studied essentializing characteristics of descriptions that reduce a group of people to a few psychological and physical traits and create a monolithic stereotype erasing the heterogeneity and cultural diversity within the group.
11The dioramas of the Nubia Museum are constructed ideal realities. As cultural assemblages, they display some cultural practices or moments that are chosen to be representative of a whole culture: students at a madrassa (Koranic school), a wedding, women weaving, or an evening dance. These practices appear to embody the whole Nubianness – which is itself controversial – in an undefined past. Dioramas are also allochronic: the scenes are decontextualized and may bring together elements that do not belong to the same period. When contemplating the madrassa diorama, visitors are not told when the scene took place, if all Nubian schools were Koranic schools, and if young males and females were always schooled together. The scene, composed of mannequins representing six students and a teacher, is devoid of items that can offer cues that could help give context. While trying to represent the typical, they actually are the representation of an impossible reality ; “neither mere aesthetic objects nor primary documents in and of themselves, dioramas are useful interpretive constructs that display general historical facts freely adapted to apply to a collective Everydayman and therefore, to no one in particular” [Halloran, 2009, p. 82].
12Similar to the cultural traits, some phenotypes are elected to become representative of the whole group. While more and more dioramas are “devoid of skin colors and tones and with facial expression kept as neutral as possible” [Zittlau, 2011, p. 175], the dioramas of the Nubia Museum are leaning toward physical realism. Mannequins are built from casts of actual people and those bodies, devoid of thoughts, language, actions and interactions are left as an objectified body on show [Struge, 2014]; they become physical types, almost artifacts, like the pharaonic statues presented in the archeological part of the Museum. The diorama mannequins were conceptualized based on photographs of local Nubians and manufactured in England with an aim to creating an authentic Nubianness. Elizabeth Smith reported the frustrations some Nubians experienced with the government officials in charge of the ethnographic exhibits. A committee of Nubians, including members of the Cairo Nubian Heritage Association, had been formed to consult on the design of the museum’s ethnographic exhibit, but as one member of the Association lamented “government officials ‘did not listen to a thing we said’, expressing his frustration and disgust with the state and Unesco” [Smith, 2006, p. 411]. During her visit to West Aswan in 1998 one Nubian woman complained to Smith about “the mannequins in the ethnographic display of an old women making baskets, saying that Nubian women were much more ‘beautiful’ than those mannequins” [Smith, 2006, p. 411]. The woman claimed the Museum had made the models too dark because “they think Nubians are black (aswad).” The appearance of the mannequins is particularly noteworthy because of the underlying racism associated with Nubian identity in Egypt. The Egyptian national discourse focuses on cultural and racial homogeneity in Egypt – undoubtedly, the marker of difference within Egyptian population is religion more than racial or ethnic identification – but despite a predominant narrative of colorblindness, Nubians are repeatedly portrayed in films and television series as the “black other”, and “these television images sow the seeds of discrimination in popular Egyptian culture, influencing not only the views of the general public but also the social and psychological condition of Nubians themselves” [Hussein, 2014, p. 35]. Nubians are perceived in the collective imagination, as bawab (doormen), household servants, or butlers who wear country garments, such as the turban and gallabiyya, and speak broken Arabic [Hussein, 2014, p. 34]; and the stereotyping of Nubians as a subordinate urban class “exclude Nubians from dominant concepts of Egyptian identity by associating them with either a past slave origin in sub-Saharan Africa, or a contemporary African origin” [Smith, 2006, p. 401].
13Finally, the overpowering presence of Nubian bodies in the dioramas objectifies them. In the representation of the Koranic school, for instance, the main actors of the diorama are people: students and teacher. The students are sitting on a blanket on the floor and the teacher is sitting on a small wooden bench holding a book in his hand. In the background stands a painted house, in the typical Nubian fashion, decorated with flags, and geometric figures. The rest of the composition is made of rocks and sand, and a painting of a felucca (traditional wooden sailing boat) sailing on the Nile. Aesthetically, the diorama is striking: the light is a warm yellow and the colors of the mannequins’ robes, house and sand are in golden tones. The impression that results from these choices is a symbiosis with nature, since the teaching is taking place on the sandy floor, right next to the Nile, and the yellow carpet seems to be an extension of the sand itself. The house appears to also be an extension of the ground, as it is clearly made from sand, and its color is identical to the ground. The image embodies a natural, romantic past of symbiosis with nature, which invokes bucolic memories. Another diorama represents a scene in which people are dancing, another aesthetically eye-catching assemblage. The house in the background is white and lit, decorated with stars and flags. Men dressed in white gallabiyya (traditional egyptian garment) are playing instruments, and a woman dressed in black is dancing. Two other women dressed in black are in the background, apparently talking. The scarcity of objects allows the mannequins to earn the main role in that composition. The result is ambiguous, both romanticizing a time of communion with nature in a beautiful environment and reducing it to a bare moment: Nubians possess very little but their own bodies and their communion to the surrounding nature. The emptiness of the scenes is both esthetically satisfying for viewers and simplifies a culture to a few items, in contrast with the other objects from older times that are displayed in the other rooms of the museum. The Nubian culture appears as sparse and natural, in opposition to modernity.
Shaping identities
14While, unsurprisingly, the Museum dioramas display many of the characteristics of dioramas that have been thoroughly examined by scholars, such as essentialization, racialization, allochronism, visual aestheticism, it is also worth examining how they are perceived by different groups of people, such as the museum community and Nubians from surrounding villages.
15Undoubtedly, dioramas tell us as much about the people and institutions who build them as about those they are supposed to represent. The Nubian dioramas are praised by members of the Museum community, Unesco and the Aga Khan foundation as enabling the public to taste the real Nubia. Despite being critical, scholarly work also showed that dioramas could be an engaging museological strategy. Reiss and Tunnicliffe highlighted dioramas’ pedagogical function in telling stories that are “part of how we learn” [Reiss, Tunnicliffe, 2011, p. 456]; Chicone and Kissel emphasized the strong sensual and emotional component [Chicone, Kissel, 2014, p. 75], which gives visitors the impression that they are not only in a museum but they are touching some reality, counteracting the “museum effect” [Halloran, 2009, p. 80]. According to a report on the Museum from the Aga Khan foundation, “The local people are very proud of their museum. They bring their visitors to see it and feel it reflects their way of life. Their favorite section is the diorama, which has provoked interest and strong memories” [Alamuddin, 2001, p. 10]. It is not clear whether the ‘local people’ are Nubians or non-Nubian inhabitants of Aswan, or whether that remark was based on empirical research, it is not clear either what way of life is reflected – pre or post relocation? The paragraph, though, seeks to demonstrate the role of enabler of the Nubia Museum to provoke memories. It is not clear, however, to what extent those memories are reconstructed by the presentation of a timeless past that is violence-free and trauma-free and seems to be reified in order not to be lost – while much was lost in the move out of the villages.
16The discourses of the former director of the Nubia Museum, Ragheb Mohamed, and the current director, Ossama Meguid also emphasize the positive role of the dioramas within the institution. For Ragheb Mohamed, in his essay on the Nubia Museum, “The last section in the interior of the museum – and the most popular among the old Nubian visitors – are the dioramas showing Nubian daily life as it was some decades ago, when the Nubians were still living along the Nile in their villages of origin” [Mohamed, undated]. During an interview conducted in September of 2015, Meguid marveled at the empowering role of the dioramas for the Nubian community. He explained how local schoolchildren and Nubian families were all drawn specifically to the dioramas that helped them understand their history [Meguid, 2005]. In his essay, Mohamed also noted:
“The dioramas and the rest of the museum are always crowded by Nubians coming with all their family, young and old. It is very moving to watch the old people trying to read all the labels in the interior display, also hoping to find some old artifacts coming from their native area, or explaining to their grandchildren the details of daily life that are now so rapidly changing” [Mohamed, undated].
18Mohamed depicts emotions that are created inter-generationally; grandparents teach their grandchildren about their past of which they may have some recollections; his descriptions could fit any culture that has been evolving and, in that process, discarding some old practices. The fact that many aspects of the “old life” have been largely lost when the Nubian villages were submerged is erased. The story that is told is one of different generations bonding over lost traditions in a changing world. A similar discourse can be found in an article published by al Ahram, one of the most influential Egyptian newspaper: “It has taken a long time to resuscitate Nubia’s heritage but, based on the popularity of the Nubia Museum, where Nubian family groups roam around the two-level, well laid-out galleries to show their children a glimpse of their past – the dioramas of Nubian village life and folklore help them to do so – it is fair to postulate that [...] [it] will be one of the main attractions in Aswan” [Kamil, al Ahram, 2012, June 13-19]. The article also fails to mention the relocation process and focuses on the role of the dioramas facilitators to imagine what village life was in a past that needs “resuscitating”, while the cause of its death remains unexplained.
19The ethnographic representations in the Nubia Museum ignore the trauma of Nubian exile. There are no direct allusions to the displacement itself, nor to what the culture is like now in comparison to before. While the salvaging of archeological monuments from being submerged is well documented, the trauma of the displaced Nubians is not explicitly represented in the Museum. Scholars have noted that when the High Dam was erected, the international community was mobilized largely to save the monuments of Nubia, and less attention was paid to the fate of its people and their cultural heritage, which was strongly connected through history to their original homeland and was submerged beneath the rising water [Elcheikh, 2015, p. 1920]. Evidently, the emphasis on monuments needs to be contextualized: when many Nubian monuments and artifacts were rescued from the waters in the 1960s, cultural and intangible heritage were not necessarily perceived as a priority, which is likely explaining the Museum’s initial emphasis on physical items. Still, the culture represented of the dioramas is a timeless fantasy, that has seemingly been stripped of political meaning, which is itself a political statement. As Benedict Anderson reminds us, “museums and the museumizing imagination are both profoundly political” [Anderson, 1991, p. 78]. The discourse of the Museum community represents the government philosophy of national homogeneity, a crucial strategy in many national museums and, as noted by De Simone, “[...] the [Nubia] museum is located in Egypt and the government’s intention was to emphasize the Nubian culture in its own right as well as to demonstrate how it has fitted into the wider context of the Egyptian culture” [2014, p. 90]. The erasure of the trauma of the displacement serves to foster national unity and to show how the Nubians are unproblematically integrated into Egyptian society. Smith explains that the state views Nubian culture as a vital ingredient of national culture, Nubian political aspirations are potentially threatening to the idea of national unity – which explains the refusal of the government to address legitimate Nubian complaints about Kom-Ombo and the “Right to Return” to their homeland. The Museum, while focusing on the Nubians, still situates itself within an Egyptian context of homogeneity. As noted by De Simone, “[...] the museum is located in Egypt and the government’s intention was to emphasize the Nubian culture in its own right as well as to demonstrate how it has fitted into the wider context of the Egyptian culture” [De Simone, 2014, p. 90]. Interestingly, its director is not a Nubian, whereas the Coptic museum in Cairo has a mandate stipulating that it must be directed by a Copt. The Coptic community was the initiator of the creation of the Coptic Museum and even after its nationalization in the 1930s, the Coptic Church retained control over its management and administration. In 1949–1951, when the government tried to install a Muslim as director, the community strongly protested. Since then, there has been an implicit understanding that the director will always be a member of the Coptic community. This stands in contrast to events in the Nubian Museum, which was initiated by non-Nubians and where non-Nubian directors have been in charge from the outset.
20The narratives in the panels around the displays also contribute to construct the Nubian “character.” When reading the panel describing Nubians, I recalled Magdy’s words when he gifted me his painting, alluding to Nubian generosity and hospitality. When I returned to the Nubian village, I had a discussion with one of Magdy’s friends, Sobhi [3], and asked him what he thought about the description of the Nubian character of the Nubia Museum. To refresh his memory, I enumerated the adjectives on the panel: collaborative, honest, goodhearted. His response was to find examples that illustrated, and therefore validated, the description. He explained the scarcity of Copts among Nubians – all Nubians converted to Islam almost overnight, he explained. When Islam reached Nubia, a Nubian Sheikh embraced it, and the whole community followed, as being collaborative was so crucial to their culture. He offered an example of the goodheartedness and lack of violence within the Nubian community, rooted in how they collectivity solved internal problems before Egyptian authorities had to intervene. What is written on the panel is correct, he wholeheartedly agreed: Nubians are very cooperative and hate violence. He then reflected on some violent instances and concluded that every time violence occurred between the Nubians and non-Nubians, Nubians had been attacked by non-Nubian Egyptians.
21The descriptions are perhaps representative of certain cultural practices among the Nubians, such as a social organization that encourages solving problems within the group and a desire for consensus. Collaboration, honesty and goodheartedness are positive characteristics that members of the group are pleased to present to outsiders. Nubians, in these characterizations, also appear non-threatening to the Egyptian nation, by being intrinsically opposed to violence. The desire to appear non-threatening was also discernible when I mentioned political action to some of the Nubians I talked with in another village. While they embraced the idea of cultural identity, they vehemently rejected any thought of political action. One man put a finger on his lips: “We are not crazy. We never talk about such things!”
22I argue that the focus on cultural practices in the dioramas depoliticizes the Nubian identity and its result is a representation of a benevolent Nubian that serves to reassure on both sides of the ethnic boundary. The Museum institutionally depoliticizes the community and offers an image that is anchored solely in its cultural identity, reified in some scenes such as night dance, madrassa teachings or women weaving. The Nubia Museum’s artifacts emphasize Nubians’ “unity, citizenship, peace and trade under the umbrella of centralized Egyptian dominance” [Smith, 2006]. It is possible, that the suffering and nostalgia of a lost, romanticized past is present and manifest in the sentiments those scenes evoke for Nubians themselves, who know of the traumatic exile and do not need it explained to them. Interestingly, in his examination of Nubian literature, Hussein notes that the bulge in creativity of Nubian literature “stems from the suffering of Nubians caused by the inundation of Old Nubia by the Aswan Dam, the migration of men to the North to make a living, and nostalgia for Old Nubia” [Hussein, 2014, p. 37]. The trauma is obviously present in Nubian collective memory and perhaps does not need to be reemphasized in the Museum. Elizabeth Smith showed that Nubian identity cautiously positioned itself within the realm of Egyptian national identity, without appearing threatening to national unity. This strategy may also be appropriated by members of the Nubian community themselves to foster a sentiment of belonging. Being secure as Egyptians makes it easier for Nubians to “preserve and teach the Nubian language and write fiction addressing the history of Nubians in Egypt” [Smith, 2006, p. 145-146].
Role of the dioramas in re-territorialization:
23The dioramas may have yet another function which is to act as a place of symbolic re-territorialization. Their displacement, referred to as the Nubian Nakba in reference to the Palestinian 1948 displacement, was costly for Nubians. The loss of their territory irremediably triggered a loss of cultural practices, particularly because the Nubian way of life was closely linked to its environment. For instance, before the displacement, Nubian houses were built of stone, clay and sand, the flat roofs were commonly built of palm leaves (jareed) and grain stalks and the arched domes were of clay bricks [Kamel, Abdel Hadi, 2012, p. 79]. The walls of the houses were decorated with paintings of flags, flowers, birds and other animals. The architectural form of the houses was closely related to social relations, as they were clustered in groups called nog or naja, that shared a common ancestor and had a specific division of labor [Bayoumi, 2017, p. 7]. Grauer [1968] also showed that gender roles were impacted by the care of the houses and Nubian females specifically painted Nubian homes. The house painting constituted a mean of expression for the women of the group, and their main occupation within the community.
24After 1964, the Nubians were relocated into camps that were similar to refugee camps, organized in rows of housing units that could hardly support the crucial social structures pre-relocation. These assemblages erased some social boundaries and created others, instilling new types of allegiances and cultural identifications. Studies of the new Nubian houses and of how external decoration, door painting, floor plans and house orientation were modified post-relocation, found some continuity but mostly deep cultural fractures. For instance, Nubian families relocated on Kom Ombo modified their houses to provide more privacy by adding front yards surrounded by fences, and made more space for social hospitality and to host rituals, they also redecorated and colored the houses facades, in the old style [Kamel, Abdel-Hadi, 2012 ; Fahim, 1981]. However, in the interviews conducted by Kamel and Adbel-Hadi, about half of their interlocutors were still dissatisfied with their housing units, even after their modifications [Kamel, Adbel-Hadi, 2012, p. 80-81]. The study shows that many Nubians, particularly among the younger generations, had acquired the habits of the local saiidis (Egyptian peasants) and used in their homes “less elaborative features that are reminiscent of the new local architecture of the Kom Ombo region” and some of the respondents “have no future plans for more renovation in their present houses” [Kamel, Adbel-Hadi, 2012, p. 87]. According to the researchers, that acculturation is coupled with a sentiment of dissatisfaction with their new residences, as “they are still dreaming of their old houses.” The study shows that Nubians’ hopes to keep alive Nubian culture were hampered by an impossibility to recreate the old way of living, largely embodied in the ideal situation of the houses next to the Nile, which cannot be adjusted, and the structure and decoration of the houses, which can only partially be adjusted.
25In contrast, the houses erected in the Museum dioramas are all adorned with the traditional paintings that existed pre-displacement, and they are all facing a painted Nile. The Nubia Museum itself is facing the Nile and painted in the traditional way. All the ethnographic dioramas include the facade of a traditional Nubian house. The class is taking place in front of the door of a house whose facade is decorated with flags and triangles. The women from Magdy’s painting are weaving in front of the house door which is richly decorated with different Nubian designs, consisting of colorful triangles around the doors, themselves painted and decorated with geometrical figures. In a third diorama, Nubian dancers and musicians perform in front of a closed door ; the house is not painted but triangular shapes sculpted in the wall and lit from behind. The houses on the dioramas seem to encapsulate the essence of true traditional Nubian homes with their proximity to the River Nile, their facade decoration and their overpowering presence in every scene, a presence rendered more palpable by the relative absence of other artifacts since the dioramas are primarily structured around houses and mannequins. The Museum dioramas recreate the aesthetics of the time period where houses were decorated and built along the Nile river – a time before relocation.
26Museums can act as sites of reterritorialization. Following Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of deterritorialization [Deleuze, Guattari, 1974], when an object is removed from its initial context, or native place, it is stripped of its meaning therefore deterritorialized, and it can eventually be reterritorialized into its new home, potentially a museum. Is the Nubia Museum, via its dioramas, acting as a space of reterritorialization for the submerged Nubian villages? The immediate answer would be positive, the houses in the dioramic set up are given a central role, as they were in the traditional Nubian villages, they are adorned with painted facades and decorated doors, and established along the Nile. The dioramas reterritorialize Nubian villages, perhaps to the extent that the recreated space is seen as more authentic than the original place which they refer to, partly because they are the only houses known by most of the Nubian population in Aswan.
27Reterritorialization is associated with cultural consumption by tourists, which while also present in the Nubia Museum [Elcheikh, 2015] is not the focus of this paper. It can also be a place of recreated cultural authenticity, crucial for the community that is related to that culture. The notion of being in touch with a lost past is present in the discourse of the Museum community and Nubians of the neighboring villages. Former director Ossama Meguid sees the dioramas as a place where different generations can engage in discussion about life and the past, as well as traditions: “The message has reached its target. The museum is there as a reminder for all of them, and most importantly, it helps the young generation remember their inherited past, and never to let it die.” [Meguid, 2005]
28Nubians I spoke with in the Nubian villages mentioned that the Museum was a good place to learn about that past and how things were before, and the “houses in the Museum look like our houses really used to be.” In that sense the deterritorialization has to do with what Kearney calls “hyperreal spaces [...] in which simulacra are seen as more real than the real thing” [Kearney, 2004, p. 223]. In their hyperreality, the assemblages tell stories that are easy to understand and jump into, allowing Nubian visitors to consume some of their lost past and to be in touch with what is constructed as authentic Nubian culture, which can be empowering for the members of the community. The dioramic assemblages also create an anchor for Nubians’ lost history, a starting point for discussions about the past, which is the strategy highlighted by the Museum community in their mandate to make the Museum a community center where schoolchildren can come and learn. In comparison, the houses in the Kom Ombo area do not appear to be a direct cultural transposition from the submerged villages, as they have followed a circumvolved path in their evolution, from the plain house in the 1960s, to the house in 1980 after about twenty years of occupancy, with architectural and artistic modifications. However, unlike the houses in the dioramas, the 1980 houses have been modified mostly be adding a front yard and painting the front facades. They appear different from the houses pre-relocation. The houses in the dioramas have been transported in a fixed state from the past to a recreated environment at the Museum, which gives a semblance of authenticity to the houses themselves and to the stories they serve to illustrate in the dioramic settings. Ironically, the theatrical museum dioramas seem to have more authenticity than the houses inhabited by relocated Nubians. However, despite seeming hyperreal, those assemblages have been imagined and they serve to reconstruct the past using superficial elements, stripped of their meanings, as it is the case with house decorating. As noted by Feifan Xi, “deterritorialization ultimately produces a disconnect between a past lived, found or discovered, and another as represented by signifiers of an imagined landscape” [Feifan Xi, 2015, p. 194].
29In an interesting twist, while the dioramas may give the impression that house decorating is an ancestral tradition in Nubian culture, it would appear that it actually is a relatively recent practice. According to Marian Wenzel’s study of house decoration in Nubia, carried out in the early 1960s, many of the artistic forms had only existed since the 1920s and they had been initiated by one man, Ahmad Batoul [Layton, 1991]. The functions and meanings of house decoration were also constantly evolving. It could be a type of advertising for the plasterer, a job that itself had varying degrees of prestige across the decades of the twentieth century. The process of art decoration allowed for the creation a new type of profession, the artists and carpenters who specialized in the trade and sough to develop it. Wenzel also noted differences among Nubian communities in their house decorating practices: Sudanese Nubians were more reluctant to spend money on a professional decorator and decorated homes themselves, when Egyptian Nubians used professional artists. She highlighted gender differences, men favoring designs celebrating pilgrimage to Mecca and women decorating house entrances [Layton, 1991, p. 229-230]. House decoration also became a more predominantly feminine occupation in some villages in response to increased male labor migration.
30Wenzel’s analyses demonstrated that a cultural practice such as house decoration initially believed to be old, may rather have been recently turned into tradition. The meanings and functions associated with that practice also varied geographically and chronologically. The dioramas seek to present an authentic Nubian territory in a process of retraditionalization, morphing a recent and heterogenous practice into a marker of cultural authenticity. Further, the various and constantly evolving meanings associated with house decorating are erased and the decoration of Nubian houses becomes something fixed.
Conclusion
31Initially, the Museum was intended by Unesco to display salvaged objects during the Nubia Campaign and the ethnographic rooms seem to have been created as an afterthought, however, they became one of the most important attraction in the Museum, attracting members of the Nubian community to have a taste of their lost past. The study of the dioramas of the Nubia Museum illustrates the ambiguities associated with the use of dioramas as a museological strategy and, concomitantly, the ambiguity associated with Nubian identity.
32At first, analysis demonstrates that the dioramas of the ethnographic section of the Nubia Museum display characteristics of essentialization, racialization, allochronism or visual aestheticism. At the same time, they also act as crowd pleasers, allowing visitors to emotionally experience a situation that is deemed authentic. The dioramas render tangible the intangible, by essentializing cultural practices, and by choosing certain aspects of the culture over the others. The culturalizing of the identity reduces Nubianness to a set of actions: a wedding, a madrassa, dusk dance and basket weaving. Not only do those choices simplify and homogenize the culture, but they also erase any political components of the identity, as well as the experience of the traumatic exile.
33That absence of the political can also be interpreted as a desire from the institution to avoid threatening discussions on Nubians’ potential political aspirations, making them an uncontested part of Egyptian history. It is worth noting that the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization, which was mandated at the same time as the Nubia Museum takes a similar approach. It makes different segments of the Egyptian society part of an encompassing homogeneous Egyptianness in its displays.
34The few discussions I had with Nubians from the neighboring villages, however, show an acceptation of that cultural representation. The traits ascribed to Nubians are indeed positive: cooperativeness, goodheartedness, or honesty. What’s more, feeling as an integral part of the greater Egyptian culture allows Nubians to engage in their own culture without being accused of not belonging. Obviously, these are preliminary reflections and would need further exploration, as the strategy of the Museum is certainly contested as well by segments of the Nubian community [Smith, 2006].
35The aspect concerns the territory that seems to be embodied in the dioramas, and their role as spaces of reterritorialization. The Nubian territory was lost when the High Dam was built and the Nubian population was forced to relocate in surrounding areas. Many cultural practices were lost in the process, such as house decorating. The dioramas give a crucial role to Nubian houses as most of the recreated scenes take place in front of a decorated Nubian home. The houses are set up next to the Nile and they are decorated in a traditional way. The “old ways” have been transplanted to the Museum and allow Nubians to see the houses and, as noted by interlocutors and particularly the Museum directors, transmit that knowledge and explain the traditions to younger generations. The dioramas have a function of vector of identity. However, dioramas by essence are reified representations and only allow to display the visible production of a practice. In the case of house decorating, the evolution of the practice and its functions is lost in a static construction. What is left is solely the painted houses at a given time. Decorating the house is relatively recent and has an economic and social role in the villages, such as promoting new professions, or being used differently across gender lines.
36While the evolution of multilayered practices can obviously not be translated in reified objects, new meanings nonetheless emerge and dioramas may have the potential to become an anchor for the Nubian identity, for those who had never seen Nubian homes before the relocation. In this respect, Magdy’s painting is much more than the mere internalization of the dioramas of the Museum, as a scene of a time that was erased.
