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- Convenors:
-
Jonas Tinius
(Saarland University (ERC Minor Universality))
Sharon Macdonald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Margareta von Oswald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
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- Discussant:
-
Henrietta Lidchi
(National Museum of World Cultures)
- Stream:
- Who Speaks and for Whom?
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 30 March, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Over the last decades, Europe's heritage institutions have come under public scrutiny over their responsibility for representing societies in the making. This panel asks how, through such critique and activism, institutions and the meaning of Europe and 'the West' transform in this process.
Long Abstract:
Over the last decades, Europe's heritage institutions have come under public scrutiny over their responsibility for representing societies in the making. From the toppling of Leopold II statues in Belgium, the activist 'theft' of colonial loot from the Louvre in France, to calls to demolish the nascent Humboldt Forum in the German capital, Europe is called out to take responsibility for its colonial past. What is at stake in these debates, often waged and initiated by civil society organisations and minority activist groups, is the role of heritage as public theorisers of society at large.
At the core of these tensions is a renegotiation of the responsibility of 'the West' for itself and the institutions and epistemologies that emerged with its colonial enterprise. Implicated in this debate is the role of anthropology. Its institutions and its forms of knowledge production are called to take responsibility for unjust pasts and just futures. But who speaks 'for' the 'West'? And how do its institutions 'take responsibility' without reiterating the structural asymmetries of voices heard and silenced? If the institutions 'take responsibility', is this simultaneously an act of ownership and therefore potentially problematic? Are there ways of 'taking responsibility' that entail giving up responsibility - e.g. via acts of restitution?
This panel seeks ethnographic contributions on the responsibility of 'the West' in European heritage institutions. Who actually does the work in practice? And in whose name does it appear? We are interested in case studies from within heritage institutions in transition.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 30 March, 2021, -Boris Wastiau (Musée d'Ethnographie de Genève)
Paper short abstract:
What is “taking responsibility” as a museum director and as an anthropologist in an “ethnographic museum”? Who may I speak for, and do I speak “for the West”? The paper will address the decolonial engagements and repositioning of the Geneva Museum of Ethnography (MEG) and its curatorial staff.
Paper long abstract:
This paper will address the responsibility of defining the future management of collections of colonial nature and provenance in a so-called “ethnographic museum” in a country, Switzerland, which had an indirect engagement in European colonialism. It will review briefly the broad array of stakeholders and present the steps that the curatorial team has taken to “decolonise the collections” and to engage in a renewed curatorship. Emphasis will be given to new responsibilities defined and endorsed by museum staff in relation to the strategic objectives they have defined for the 2020-2024 period, and to the positioning strategy of the institution. Responsibility will also be considered in the context of institutional risk analysis and delegation of competence. What responsibilities are defined and distributed in the governance of the museum? What responsibilities are defined by professional or personal ethics? The paper will then challenge the (colonial?) notion of “heritage institution”, its self-imposed and unreconstructed core missions and curatorial traditions, which must be addressed in a real epistemological break to enable new forms of engagement with our audiences and partners. In this context, who may I speak for, as a citizen and as an anthropologist, as a museum director and as a civil servant, and do I feel legitimate to speak “for Europe” or “for the West”?
Damiana Otoiu (SNSPA, Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
The AfricaMuseum in Tervuren, an emblematic monument of Belgium’s colonial history, has just reopened its doors after a thorough renovation intended to decolonialize it. The present paper retraces some of the key moments of the interactions between museum staff and African diaspora(s).
Paper long abstract:
In December 2018, the Royal Museum for Central Africa of Tervuren, in the vicinity of Brussels (RMCA, renamed AfricaMuseum) reopened its doors to the public after thorough reconceptualization. In a room full of museum employees from several continents, researchers, politicians, art dealers and journalists, Billy Kalonji, chairman of the RMCA-African Associations Advisory Committee (COMRAF) and member of the Group of Six, applauded the reopening as a « great milestone for African communities », especially because the reconceptualization of the museum had been achieved after a series of debates (‘sometimes quite heated ones,’ he added) between the museum’s team and ‘African diasporas’. The main goal of the renovation project and of the founding of the COMRAF was, in the words of museum’s director Guido Gryseels, to develop “a more critical narrative about the colonial past, compared with the one-sided perspective we used to offer” (AfricaMuseum 2018). A second, no less essential aim was to transform the former “temple” of colonial propaganda as conceived by the Belgian king Leopold II into a “platform for debates which welcome all opinions” (Ibid.). Whereas the reopening of the museum was celebrated indoors, the collective No Name gave an artivist performance outdoors, waving placards with the slogan ‘A stolen past, a stolen present. Freedom for the people of DR Congo. End white power over African heritage.’
In the present paper, I propose to retrace some of the key moments of the interactions between museum staff and African diaspora(s) during the first decade of the COMRAF’s activities.
Alessandra Ferrini (University of the Arts London)
Paper short abstract:
Rome’s former Colonial Museum will re-open in 2021, within the Museo delle Civiltà. Hiding behind strategies of artwashing and tokenism, the museum’s alleged decolonial attitude will be read against its existing institutional practice, lack of funding and unchallenged fascist and racist roots.
Paper long abstract:
In May 2020, the Museum of Civilizations in Rome (Muciv) announced the opening of the Museo Italo-Africano in 2021. Located within the EUR fascist architectural complex, it will re-house the collection of the former Colonial Museum. Having laid in storage since 1971, it was handed over to the Muciv, an umbrella institution founded in 2016 and bringing together four existing ethnographic museums.
Several concerns have been raised on the actual feasibility of the project due to its timescale and understaffing. Moreover, funding has been allocated for display rather than research work, making the proposed collaborations with artists, scholars and representatives from former colonies, difficult to realise. The curators have since defined these plans as ‘decolonial’, without explaining how they will be implemented or how institutional racism will be challenged.
By analysing institutional practice, including the work with diasporic communities conducted by the Muciv so far as well as the unchallenged whiteness of their visual arts programme and staff, this paper will call into question the curators’ propositions. I will consider the Muciv’s celebratory attitude towards its fascist architecture and the ethnographers who founded its main collections - all involved in the development of scientific racism. I will then argue that the Muciv’s alleged criticality towards the history of the recently annexed former Colonial Museum, hides a refusal to account for its own history. Through strategies of ‘artwashing’ and tokenism the Muciv is thus able to deflect from their use of colonial and fascist rhetoric, and to maintain asymmetric power relations.
Erica Lehrer (Concordia University)
Paper short abstract:
How do the stakes and approaches of “decolonial” museology change when the responsibility for transformation is laid at the doorstep of a classical ethnographic museum in Poland, where a key problem is the distortion and elision of local Jewish - rather than remote overseas - heritage?
Paper long abstract:
This paper takes an under-studied angle on the question of who speaks ‘for’ the ‘West’ and how cultural institutions ‘take responsibility’ for colonial heritage: that of an East-Central European (ECE) ethnographic museum, specifically in Kraków, Poland. ECE societies were without classical overseas colonies, and were themselves victims of various forms of Western colonial imperialism - while also being perpetrators of other forms of “internal” European domination. ECE regional institutions are also still disentangling the legacy a half-century of Soviet communism, while simultaneously being subjected, arguably, to forms of Western neo-colonialism (e.g. via EU cultural policies). The question of which voices are heard and silenced is thus complicated in the region, as the “classical” colonial roots of the museum form are obscured by the cultural, political, and emotional sedimentation of multiple additional “colonialisms”, and the heritage on display relates more to internal majority-minority relations and imaginaries than to overseas “non-Western” peoples. I offer an ethnographic perspective that troubles the emerging language and principles of post-colonial redress and repair as they travel to the “other” Europe. At stake in these debates is the ability for both local and foreign actors to apprehend forms of symbolic violence produced at the intersection of the legacies of multiple colonialisms, the Holocaust, and communism, and the need to develop (anthropological) vocabularies of damage, care, and affiliation sufficiently capacious to address them – even as ECE historical policy legislates a “pedagogy of pride” that rejects any sense of culpability and claims the position of the aggrieved.