The Brutish Museums, page 5
Anthropology has offered no theory of the ‘permanent’ exhibition in museums of inalienable culture – things that could never be given; no theory of the curation of what has been stolen. As Mauss wrote: ‘To refuse to give, to neglect to invite, just like refusing to receive what is offered, is tantamount to declaring war; it is refusing covenant and communion.’10 What then of the refusal to give back?
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A contemplative period of anthropological theory in material culture studies is coming to an end. The predicament of African museum collections in particular, whether from Nigeria, from Egypt, from Ethiopia, or across the Continent, is reaching breaking point. Anthropology and archaeology need to take the looting of Africa seriously – not as a side effect of empire, but as a central technology of extractive and militarist colonialism and indirect rule, in which ‘world culture’ museums were complicit in brutality, and still are to this day. Our notion of dispossession needs to break apart the old distinction, drawn ultimately from Roman law, between portable objects or chattels on the one hand and the ‘inalienability’ of land on the other. We are accustomed, in the contexts of settler colonialism, to dialogues around land rights and Indigenous source communities. But dialogue about sacred, royal, or otherwise powerful objects, which are equally inalienable in that they could never be given away, takes place in a different register. The pillaging of objects was far from just an opportunistic side effect of what the Victorians called their ‘small wars’ or ‘little wars’ of colonial expansion in Africa. Loot and pillage were of central importance to extractive and militarist colonialism, just as land was to settler colonialism, but dominance of settler colonialism as a model for anglophone academic discourse in and about European imperialism has narrowed our conception of dispossession and its place in the ideology of race, in stark contrast with the genealogies of Raubkunst – the act of taking supposedly degenerate art from those who are defined as inferior – traced by Aimé Césaire, Sven Lindqvist and others from Africa in the 1890s to the soils of Europe in the 1930s.
‘There are two possible courses to affluence,’ the anthropologist Marshall Sahlins once wrote, sketching out alternatives to market economies: ‘Wants may be easily satisfied either by producing much or desiring little.’11 Sadly there is also a third: that of violent theft. What kind of a mode of production is theft? Clearly it involves objects, but also images. The act of putting pen to paper, whether drawing a map, filling out an accession register, or writing this book, can represent an act of taking. Clearly, if it is in any way generative, it is a mode of cultural production in that it is predatory, beginning with the most extreme and dangerous forms of what we today call ‘cultural appropriation’. A theory of taking requires us to talk not just about the life histories of objects, but also about killing: of people, of objects, of culture: the ‘death histories’ of objects.
3
Necrography
Since the 1990s, two dominant abstract and conservative theories in material culture and museum studies have stifled any adequate engagement with colonial violence or cultural restitution. The first of these comes into view with the case of the so-called ‘Elgin Marbles’ – the group of Classical Greek marble sculptures made in the 5th century bce and brought to the British Museum by Thomas Bruce, 7th Earl of Elgin in the year 1812 – which is the usual first point of reference for British conversations about cultural restitution. In January 2019, Hartwig Fischer, the director of the British Museum, announced that in his view ‘When you move cultural heritage into a museum, you move it out of context. However, this shift is also a creative act.’1
In ‘the cultural biography of objects’, such an argument runs, each new event is an accumulation, so an accession into a museum, like any gift exchanged across cultures or between friends, represents another layer added to the life course of a thing; it creates new values, coherences, social links and cultural meanings.2 A generation ago, this use of the idea of ‘the social life of things’3 became an important analytical tool for the study of material culture. But it has come, through sustained use by curators,4 over time to be used by the press officers of Britain’s national museums to distract our attention from, to relativise and thus to diminish, claims for the restitution of objects collected during European colonialism, and to encourage us in the fallacy that we might ever reasonably think ourselves back to some past ‘regime of value’ in which wrongful actions might have been okay, in order to justify ongoing and unresolved injustices. The proliferation of ‘object biographies, their ubiquity in teaching art history, anthropology and museum studies – with little discernible change to how, sixty years ago, a classic British school essay topic was “the life story of a penny”’5 – has brought a new confidence to the old object-oriented museum histories, overstating the stability and coherence of things as they move between contexts: as if there were multiple contexts but only singular things, multiculturalism but static objecthood, fluid meanings but solid things, as if focusing on things gave us bedrock, concreteness, ‘materiality’. But in truth, it is surely only from the privileged position of the museum executive or out-of-touch trustee, relying on the dark arts of conservation and curation, that these objects can evoke fixity. The only thing that is sure about the sustained popularity of object-oriented life-histories, and the accompanying misplaced concreteness, is that it has deepened persistent colonial inequalities – repeated and exacerbated dehumanisations, reproduced and extended dispossessions.
Just as the first idea, that of cultural biography, has served to stifle any discussion of enduring colonial violence over time, so a second idea has served to hold back dialogue and action on cultural restitution in the present: the idea of entanglement. A key text here was Alfred Gell’s influential, densely written, neo-functionalist 1998 book Art and Agency: an anthropological theory. Gell rejected the anthropological study of art in symbolic or aesthetic terms, instead adopting what he called a ‘methodological philistinism’, to frame the study of art as one of social relations not aesthetics, where the focus was on the intention of the artist in extending their agency through objects as a kind of material prosthetic. Examples of museum objects from across the Pacific, Africa and the Americas were discussed in the book, but the location of these objects in western collections was never questioned. The theory of ‘distributed personhood’ was presented as if such scatterings were never inflicted but always willingly undertaken. The artist was presented as empowered through the movement of objects away from him or her, through a heady mix of the traditional functionalist approach of LSE economic anthropology with the so-called ‘Actor-Network Theory’ (ANT) that emerged from 1980s Schools of Management6 and suggesting a kind of ultra-materialistic ‘symmetrical’ approach to treating people and objects as if they were entirely commensurable agents. Gell’s nuancing of ANT – so objects themselves were not agentive, but were conduits or ‘indices’ of the artist’s will – drew much of its politics, which is to say its lack of politics, from the idea of ‘entanglement’, as developed by Nick Thomas. Thomas’s work allowed Gell to distinguish between the ‘reception’ of ‘ethnographic art’ and ‘a genuinely anthropological theory of art’, with all of the inconvenient politics of power left out. How did Thomas’s influential 1991 account of Entangled Objects give Gell the intellectual resources with which to pull this off? It began with Thomas re-reading Mauss on gift exchange in order to question the boundaries between gifts and commodities, and to foreground the ‘creative recontextualization’ of material culture on both sides of colonial histories in the Pacific Ocean, so as to highlight Indigenous agency and ‘the continuing dynamism of local societies’.7 Thomas’s book was a major critique, from the position of anthropological theory, of any assumption in postcolonial theory of ‘the imposition of the West upon the rest’,8 and of any analytical dichotomy between ‘the Western’ and ‘the non-Western’. Thomas argued for giving equal weight to ‘the Indigenous appropriation of European things’ and ‘the European appropriation of Indigenous things’, as if western ‘constructions’ of nonwestern objects were always equally met with the opposite, and mapped a theory of cultural hybridity onto descriptions of the ‘mutual entanglements of objects and people’ and ‘the dialectic of international inequalities and local appropriations’.9 As objects and people are entangled, Thomas argued, so the categories of ‘native’ and European are too. In his preface to Gell’s book, Nick Thomas welcomed its application as an anthropological theory for ‘the workings of all art’, from that which Gell called ‘primitive’ and Thomas described as ‘canonical tribal art forms’ as opposed to ‘high Oriental’ and ‘western’.10
Developing his theory of colonial ‘entanglement’ into a model of ‘the museum as method’, Thomas has expanded his primary critique of scholars who ‘employ critical discourse’ and postcolonial theory, to those who ‘interrogate primitivist representations in display, and otherwise explore the politics of institutions and exhibits’.11 But all along the model of ‘entanglement’, the method of swapping analytical focus back and forth between the ‘agency’ of people and things, of ‘Indigenous’ and ‘Western’ people and communities, actively omits those moments where a relationship is constituted by separations not entanglements. In invoking Gell’s abstract, playful, Duchampian notion of the object as a ‘stoppage’ of a network of agency,12 Thomas erases the events to which museums bear witness when worlds fragment, networks are cut, paths are blocked, movements are forced, when instability is not just in words and ideas but in physical form: when people are killed in their thousands and tens of thousands, when palaces, temples and villages are bombarded, when cultural treasures are looted and sold. Nick Thomas imagines the potential of ‘the museum as method’. Let us instead acknowledge the ongoing status of the museum as a weapon.
These two ideas, more tropes than theories – ‘object biographies’ and ‘relational entanglements’ – have stood, as if mapping onto older anthropological theories of descent and alliance, as the dominant modes of thinking for western museums since the 1990s.13 It is time for that to change. Let me offer some examples of how this dominant school of thought has served to divert and hold back anthropology museums from thinking about colonial violence or taking action on cultural restitution. The examples are drawn from the Pitt Rivers, my own institution, but parallel examples could doubtless be found in any western anthropology museum, not to mention many academic museum studies and so-called ‘critical heritage’ departments across Europe, North America and Australia.
When I arrived at the Pitt Rivers in 2007, quite a lot of institutional effort had recently gone in to re-describing the museum of ‘Anthropology and World Archaeology’ as ‘an ethnographic museum’ containing ‘ethnographic objects’. This definition reduced the many diverse routes through which objects came to be in this place to the provenance history of just one subset of material: that collected during 20th-century participant observation. With its intellectual associations with key thinkers in the discipline, questions of acquisition became neutralised, or watered down at least, in a wider set of questions about the ethics of anthropological fieldwork in the past. In my own work, I sought to develop a model of collections-based research that understood the museum as a kind of archaeological site, where the excavation of the archives would ‘re-shape them, just as excavation constantly re-shapes the archaeological record’.14 But in seeing archaeology as an intervention, rather than an ethnographic act of observant participation, I have, as I think so very many others working in anthropology museums also have, been made to feel out of step with my field and its traditions. Against that background – and today with a degree of white male privilege and institutional position that means there is really a duty to try to get some of this down on paper and out into the world – this book is a first sustained attempt to challenge the equivocations, and apologisms, and obscurantism, and gate-keeping, and the conceit that turns the anthropological museum in upon itself, as a disciplinary venue for hagiography of dead white colonialists and thus for self-regard, even when, as Tim Ingold has very sensibly observed, the very idea of ‘museum ethnography, where there are only curated objects, is simply oxymoronic’.15 The aim is to take the process of excavation further, layer by layer, object by object, and with a decent-sized trowel rather than a mere toothpick: to reveal what is present in the collections visible to the world, which is to make it present,16 and to share this knowledge, to move from an inward-looking, object-oriented to an outward-looking, action-oriented approach to curation.
I first encountered the erasure of Victorian acts of violence in the ‘relational museum’ project, which ran at the Pitt Rivers between 2004 and 2007, just before I arrived. Drawing together object biographies and relational entanglements, the project was a kind of hybrid of James Clifford’s project in his book Routes (1997) to expand the language of the North American model of ‘culture contact studies’ to re-describe anthropology museums as ‘contact zones’ on the one hand, and Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory on the other. Ideas of ‘object agency’ were used in the project to make the quite abstract assertions that ‘objects hold people together’, that collections ‘enable reasonably stable structures that allow people to interact productively’, that ‘the Museum is a dynamic entity, made up of a shifting mass of people and things’, that ‘objects collect people’ and so past networks of human relationships ‘sparking chains of connection’ can be studied to understand the creation of anthropological knowledge, charting ‘the full set of forces – intellectual, institutional, colonial, and biographical – which needs to be taken into account when understanding tangled histories’.17 Just as Jonathan Friedman observed about Clifford’s Routes – that it thought it was moving away from ‘roots’ but in reality was obscuring histories of violent ‘routing’18 – so the Relational Museum project, published as the 2007 book Knowing Things – in the very same year as the Pitt Rivers had loaned material to the largest ever display of Benin Court Art19 – did not once mention the many instances of colonial violence and looting, or address live questions of cultural restitution, but instead invited the reader and visitor on ‘an anthropological adventure’:
The site of our fieldwork starts at the Pitt Rivers Museum, but then moves out to many parts of the world from which objects came … You could start in the Museum with an object, a whole display case, or a person, and follow a chain of connections that would eventually lead you almost anywhere in the world, past or present. You need have no idea at the outset of paths along which you would travel and when or where weariness would lead you to stop. Some routes would be shaped by your prior interests, but many different paths would present themselves, testing your ability to step outside your existing intellectual or cultural framework … Knowing the Museum, like knowing the world, is something of an anthropological adventure.20
Such work was in keeping with the long-standing assertion by collections staff in the Pitt Rivers that the museum is not an unchanging Victorian space, a ‘museum of museums’, but a dynamic and contemporary multicultural place: assertions that sometimes gave way to a ‘growing feeling of frustration at the repeated stereotyping of the Museum as a colonial institution full of Victorian evolutionary (if not racist) displays’.21 A museum research project on General Pitt-Rivers, founder of the collection, explicitly sought to ‘see him as a man of his times’, ‘deliberately uninterested in Pitt-Rivers’ legacy’.22 And a ‘provocation’ that ‘the ethnographic museum is dead’, produced as part of a major international conference on ‘the future of the ethnographic museum’ in fact concluded that ‘Ethnographic museums can be places for discovery and dreaming, for memories and meetings: sites where the freedom to wonder at the variety and ingenuity of man-made things is not yet dead.’23 Important pioneering work on the restitution of First Nations ancestral remains was done in this period, led by Laura Peers and her colleagues,24 and on the ‘digital repatriation’ of photographs led by Chris Morton.25 Nevertheless, through the twin theories of object biographies and relational entanglement, the Durkheimian emphasis of both theories upon the role of objects in the construction and maintenance of social relationships (rather than, for example, even Weber’s account of booty capitalism, or Marx’s description of primitive accumulation – not to mention the many other possible non-European intellectual points of reference) conditioned and facilitated ongoing silences about colonial violence and questions of cultural restitution, while allowing for the persistence of increasingly ingrained historical narratives.
