Mariam Ibrahim ALMULLA
(University of Qatar)
Abstract:
E.H. Carr states that: ‘In the first place, the facts of history never come to us ‘pure’, since they do not and cannot exist in a pure form: they are always reflected through the mind of the recorder’.
Obviously, interpretations of heritage and objects involve the personal and collective point of view of politicians and curators, which may influence the readings of these objects. Carr compares the influence of the author, in our case the curators, on the reader to fishing, where the author picks up the information he wants to present from various resources he might come across. As such, he states that ‘no document can tell us more than what the author of the document thought about what he thought had happened’. The question of historical facts may create a tension relationship between what the curators present, and the audiences as subjective readers. This is especially so if we analyse why objects that were collected and ordered in the 1970s are now being reordered and more objects collected, as this highlights that there is a renewed desire for the same objects to be presented as part of a different narrative.
For me, this fact raised an essential question: How far could we then consider the ordering of the objects and reconstruction of heritage in Qatar as representative of historical facts? Within my paper I analyze the narrative of collecting and objects’ interpretations in Qatar.
Keywords: objects interpretations, Qatar, Museums, collections, Heritage