The Museum of Other People
The iconoclastic anthropologist Adam Kuper on the crisis in anthropology museums
In 2020, curators at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum removed its popular display ‘The Treatment of Dead Enemies’. Management explained that the exhibit of scalps from North America, war trophies from Nagaland, skulls from New Guinea and shrunken heads from the Amazonian Jivaro people ‘led people to think in stereotypical and racist ways about Shuar culture’. Audiences, they lamented, stood in front of them and described the people who had made them as ‘primitive’.
Are we witnessing the end of what the distinguished anthropologist Adam Kuper calls the ‘Museum of Other People’? Quite possibly he says. Kuper’s The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions , which has just been published by Profile, is a deeply researched account of the rise and fall of museums that display the artefacts of peoples from long ago or far away reveals that they are in a crisis, one that, he warns, could be ‘terminal’.
Museums of other people first came into existence in Leiden, Copenhagen and Dresden in the 1830s and 1840s. Soon after, it was decided that Paris – the ‘capital of civilisation’, in the words of the engineer Edme-François Jomard, who had travelled to Egypt with Napoleon’s army – should have one too. France was expanding its trade and acquiring colonies. Traders needed to learn about these remote lands. Isolated societies were adopting European languages, customs and techniques. Collectors wanted to preserve artefacts that provided evidence of their unspoilt aboriginal condition.
Collections were built though gifts, exchange and purchase, but also theft and ‘encouragement’. As the ethnographer and surrealist Michel Leiris damningly put it when he served as secretary on a collecting expedition for Paris’s National Ethnographic Museum, ‘We pilfer from the Africans under the pretext of teaching others how to love them and get to know their culture’.
They spread across Europe and then the United States. And they were always contentious. Kuper details the different manifestations and purposes of such institutions, which were shaped by senses of nationhood, ideological flux and ferocious debates within disciplines. He describes how ethnologists and anthropologists fought over the best way to understand and study the character, habits and customs of what they described as ‘primitive’ people.
Anthropologists analysed populations by race, ethnographers by culture and civilisation. In 1859, the professor of anatomy Paul Broca set up the Société d’anthropologie de Paris, ‘the first learned society to adopt the title “anthropology”’, and dismissed the ethnologists as being obsessed with slavery and its abolition and lacking scientific principles. They didn’t properly acknowledge the importance of biological difference. Instead, they held firm to the idea that all human races had a common origin.
At their peak during the heyday of European colonialism in Africa and Oceania in the 1880s, collections and displays were tied to shifts in ideas about knowledge and race. With the publication of Charles Darwin’s unsettling propositions, theories about the past and progression were thrown into the mix.
Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, founded in 1884, by General Augustus Henry Lane-Fox, tried to apply the theory of natural evolution to material culture. Lane-Fox claimed to be the first to use the term ‘typology’ for the classification of human productions. Objects of each type were to be ordered in a series from the simplest to the most complex, rather than in accordance with geography or culture, to illustrate the universal process of gradual improvement. Ideas could be ordered like natural species and they too advanced like natural species.
But as the world and ideas changed, so too did these kinds of collections. The American anthropologist Franz Boas put a dent in the idea of the ‘primitive’ and racist theories of evolution when he argued that objects needed to be understood in their local contexts. Nevertheless, as Kuper points out, Boas still idealised what he described as ‘primitive tribes’.
Museums of other people people tried to adapt to the postcolonial world. Racial studies fell out of favour. Anthropologists dropped the word ‘primitive’ and abandoned the idea of timeless, pristine and bounded cultural groups. Exhibitions such as ‘The Family of Man’, a photographic show, presented happy tribal people and the rest of the world as united.
Today, anthropology museums find themselves once again losing authority. In their place, we have seen the rise of ‘identity museums’, such as the National Museum of the American Indian, which opened in 2004 on the National Mall in Washington, DC, described as a ‘living memorial’ to tribal people today.
Here, the voices of the curator are sidelined so that appointed Indians can speak. Modern ideas of ‘lived experience’ trump research-driven expertise. And as a consequence, New Age platitudes dominate. As critic Ed Rothstein pointed out in the New York Times:
Is this progress? Kuper’s account, which applies a sceptical eye as much to the present as the past, is refreshingly free of voguish, self- flagellating moralising. While confronting their limitations, he also shows that the early museums were more than the sum of their deficiencies. Kuper argues, without a hint of rose-tinted sentiment, that the contemporary blanket condemnation of all transactions in the age of empire downplays local agency, such as the selling by communities of material to ethnographers for museums. He cites the case of a woman from the South American Saramaka Maroons, who in the late 1920s gave Melville Herskovits, a pioneer of African- American studies, a food-stirring paddle:
‘Put it in the big house, in your white man’s country, where you told me beautiful things are kept,’ she told him. ‘And write on a piece of paper that Ayobo made it.’
Kuper exposes the limits of contemporary curators who seek to atone for the colonial past, repatriate objects, hide them away, and promote the voices of ‘communities of origin’, whom they themselves select. He suggests that they are as fuelled by romantic and relativistic ideas of difference as their forebears, only now they assert the identity of ‘the other’ as positive rather than as backward. The primitive has been replaced by the indigenous.
Kuper puts forward the case for a ‘Cosmopolitan Museum’ that transcends ethnic and national identities, in which comparisons and connections are made – one that is guided less by politicking than rigorous inquiry. We can only hope that his optimistic vision is realised.
FURTHER LISTENING AND READING:
In my podcast interview with Adam Kuper, which accompanies this post, he explores the different crisis affecting museums. We discuss the repatriation of human remains and he criticises the current drive to repatriate the Benin Bronzes, warning they will end up on the art market and in the homes of private collectors.
THES interview with Adam Kuper and his own life and background
Who benefits when Western museums return looted art? Atlantic writer David Frum argues that the repatriation of stolen objects has become a ritual of self-purification through purgation— and that who it really serves is less clear than it might seem.
'Loot:Britain and the Benin Bronzes' by Barnaby Phillips - good video in which the former Africa correspondent for the BBC and Al Jazeera describes plundering of the Benin Bronzes. Barnaby explores the distribution of the Bronzes amongst the world’s great museums and private collections, and argues for restitution.
Dan Hicks on the Brutish Museum - for the counter view to Kuper (and me).
RECOMMENDATIONS AND LINKS:
Alice Neel: Hot Off The Griddle, the Barbican
Describing herself as ‘a collector of souls’, Alice Neel (1900-1984) worked in New York during a period in which figurative painting was unfashionable. This brilliant exhibition brings together over 70 of Neel’s most vibrant portraits, shown alongside archival photography and film, bringing to life what she called ’the swirl of the era’.
Fabulous thread on Twitter about how artists dressed - and how you can recreate their looks. Hat tip for the recommendation goes to Grumpy Art Historian @GrumpyArt