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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)
Francisco Martínez (Tampere University)
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- Formats:
- Roundtable
- Mode:
- Face-to-face
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Madrid
Short Abstract:
Anthropology and its museums have long been seen as carriers of imperial legacies, and there have been many calls for their undoing. Yet, dealing with their difficult pasts has generated as much critique as collaboration. This roundtable addresses this paradox and asks what else might be done.
Long Abstract:
The call to undo anthropology as a discipline is bound together with critiques of modern museums and ethnographic collections that likewise call for their decolonisation or even scrapping. Attempts to address museums’ difficult heritage has, however, been the impetus for the development of reparative methods and forms of generative knowledge production. Provenance research, for instance, has become more widespread, generating new knowledge about collections and in some cases led to returns. Collections have also been the focus for collaborative curatorial work, assembling various forms of expertise, especially that of those who earlier made and lived with the objects, but also that of committed others, such as artists, collectors, and researchers. Such collaboration has enabled new understandings and perspectives, including indigenous, as well as necessary conceptual and methodological innovation; and in some cases, it has contributed to broader and more durable change to both institutions and relationships.
Museums and collections are, then, being reassembled as sites and catalysts for reparative forms of research, and platforms for the redoing of difference, heritage, and ways of knowing. This context is the backdrop to the questions addressed by this roundtable: To what extent has the work of undoing in and of museums led to constructive reassembling? What terms, concepts and methods have been produced? How far have new knowledge and ways of knowing, and wider institutional and relational change, been enabled? What were the stumbling blocks and limits? And how far can the museum act as a method for wider transformation of anthropology itself?
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Tuesday 23 July, 2024, -Vibe Nielsen (University of Oxford)
Contribution short abstract:
Through examples from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, this paper illustrates how curators are dealing with legacies of colonialism and changing their curatorial practices, at a time when museums the world over are met with calls for decolonisation.
Contribution long abstract:
‘What's in a name?’ Shakespeare's Juliet asks philosophically, adding: ‘that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet’ (Shakespeare [1597] 2008: 62). However, in present-day museums, a name is not simply a name. When it comes to exhibition texts and object labels, names of people and places are not insignificant variables. Especially not, when the descriptions in question were written at a time when European colonialism justified worldviews that divided people into groups of either ‘savage’, ‘barbaric’ or ‘civilised’. Through examples from the ethnographic fieldwork that I have conducted at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford since early 2022, this paper illustrates how curators are dealing with legacies of colonialism and changing their curatorial practices, at a time when museums the world over are met with calls for decolonisation. For many years, museums neglected their responsibility to not only cater for but also represent a more diverse part of society. Only within recent years, in the aftermath of protest movements like Black Lives Matter and Rhodes Must Fall, have curators and other museum professionals begun to discuss more openly the negative impacts of previous curatorial practices and publicly engage in debates about decolonisation and repatriation. Highlighting the negative impact that stereotypical and racist representations of museum collections have had on society, this paper presents how a leading institution, within the field of ethnographic museums, attempts to diversify its representation and shed new light on previously neglected parts of the history of its collection.
Julia Binter (University of Bonn)
Contribution short abstract:
This paper argues that processes of restitution profoundly reshape museums as epistemic sites and proposes the renewed attention to listening as key method to work towards epistemic justice.
Contribution long abstract:
Historically, museums have profoundly contributed to epistemic injustice, severing material culture from its lived environments and epistemic ecologies, putting them into depots or behind glass only to re-signify them according to Eurocentric notions of culture and often racist world views (Tsosie 2017, Vawda 2019). A wealth of knowledge connected and enacted with these ‘cultural belongings’ (Buckridge and Gwasira 2021) was thus marginalised or even destroyed. Recent calls for the restitution of cultural belongings to their places of creation and use underpin their claims not only with the colonial contexts from which they were translocated but by the knowledge which can be reactivated by their return and resocialisation. My contribution to the roundtable discussion will take the collaborative research, exhibition and restitution project “Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures” on the collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin as a starting point to self-critically reflect on the ways in which museums could work (and be reworked) towards epistemic justice. Two of anthropology’s oldest techniques – listening and translating – were key in shifting and reassembling the sovereignty of interpretation, necessitating retuning methods and rethinking the site of the museum itself. Could an ‘epistemology of listening’ contribute to adequately acknowledge and accommodate forms of knowledge beyond Western academia and Eurocentric regimes of care? What happens with the museum as epistemic site when the reactivation of knowledge with returned cultural belongings no longer happens in the physical space of a museum but, for example, under a Baobab tree in rural Namibia?
Sarai Martín López (University of Barcelona)
Contribution short abstract:
The movement for museological decolonization has compelled many museums in Europe to reassess their colonial legacies. Based on the case of the Ethnological and World Cultures Museum of Barcelona, this paper analyzes the paradoxes that museums encounter when addressing a crisis of legitimacy.
Contribution long abstract:
Faced with the historical revisionism movements that have been sweeping the international landscape, European ethnology museums are compelled to revisit their colonial past and question the (neo)colonial epistemologies of categorization and exhibition of their collections. In Barcelona, the Ethnological and World Cultures Museum (MUEC), inaugurated as the Ethnological and Colonial Museum in 1949, constitutes an eloquent case study to ponder the frictions that arise in the pursuit of an increasingly contested legitimacy. Just five years ago, the museum began collaborating with research initiatives and outreach activities. These efforts were aimed at responding to the demands for review and resignification, such as the study of particularly problematic collections or the removal of human remains from its permanent exhibition. However, these strategies run the risk of being applied purely for aesthetic purposes.
Based on the ongoing ethnographic study's results, this communication aims to address the paradoxes currently faced by this museum considering challenges and reparations demands from various actors - decolonial movements, academics, politicians, and cooperation agencies. Taking this museum as an example, this paper aims to contribute to the panel discussion by asking the following questions: How can museum decolonization initiatives be framed in institutions that are stuck between the obstinacy of promoting and preserving a colonial legacy and the increasing pressure to explore their past? Is it possible to collaborate from academia and social movements in museum reparation initiatives without actively participating in the whitewashing?
Siobhan McGuirk (University of Almería)
Contribution short abstract:
Imperial power is expressed in the will to possess, name, know, and preserve the culture of ‘others’. We must remake the museum otherwise. Practices from southern Mexico can challenge anthropologists to redefine ‘the museum’ – and the meaning/making of collections and 'authenticity'
Contribution long abstract:
In this roundtable contribution, I point to two museums in San Cristobal de Las Casas to argue that a radically expanded conceptualisation of ‘the museum’ is a necessary feature of efforts towards decolonising praxis. Attention to how museums are being reimagined, de- and re-constructed by Indigenous communities, outside of large institutions and geographic centres of power, reveals novel reparative methods and new forms of generative knowledge production already in play – paradoxically overlooked because they sit outside of, and challenge, eurocentric frames.
The Kakaw Museo del Cacao teaches the history and culture of cacao. Its collection of objects is valuable, but none are ‘real’. ‘Mayan codices’ are flanked by interpretation noting the whereabouts of the originals – Bodleian Libraries; Museo de America (‘Códice Madrid’); Dresden Library (‘Códice de Dresde’) – but the analysis is authored, assertively, by the Kakaw team. Downstairs, traditional chocolate-making workshops offer ‘authenticity’ otherwise.
Museo Migrante (MuMi) is a pop-up framework of photographs, political education texts (in Tzotzil), and craft resources. It is (re)constructed and filled in with drawings, reflections, paper cranes and figures at each site it occupies – in agricultural fields, village squares, remote schools. Its ‘collection’, exploring the intersections of migration, Indigeneity and rights, is ever-changing; always fleeting. It is a site of knowledge-production and sharing reserved for its makers alone.
These infrastructures critique inescapable facts of Imperial power: to take, to (re)name, to create knowledge about, to preserve. They are museums undoing museums. The challenge is: will Anthropology recognise them as such?
Gabriela Nicolescu (The National Library of Romania)
Contribution short abstract:
My paper uses waste as a key concept for research and public engagement, to explore the limits of visibility in museums. I combine two bodies of ethnographic data: on unindexed and de-structured collections in two state institutions and research on waste management in private blocks of flats.
Contribution long abstract:
Building on expertise at the intersection of contemporary art, anthropology and exhibition making, I explore ways to give visibility to what is very often made invisible: the importance and cultural uses of waste. How can research on waste management in post-socialist environments contribute to the process of scrapping the museum? How does the post-socialist conditions of dealing with objects contribute to current post colonial debates?
According to sociologist Michael Thompson (1979), waste is key in allowing change and transfers of value between three main categories of objects: the Transient (of whose value decreases), the Durable (of whose value increases) and Rubbish (no value). I suggest that the porosity of museums and of other important cultural state institutions (Nicolescu 2023) allow the storage and display of complex and problematic items that can be perceived as Transient, as well as the Rubbish of history. Inspired by artistic interpretations of waste including Ilya Kabakov’s 'The Man who never threw anything away' to Agnes Varda’s documentary 'Les Glaneurs and la Glaneuse', I use exhibition making and the museum as methods of research and public engagement to discuss the values that waste can take and to explore ways in which to exhibit the Durable.
Research on unindexed and de-structured collections at the National Library of Romania and at the National Museum of the Romanian Peasant allows us to see the social and cultural construction of value and how these transfers of value are made both locally and globally.
Hansjörg Dilger (Freie Universität Berlin)
Contribution short abstract:
This paper examines the role of activist engagement from 'societies of origin' in creating new ways of dealing with the coloniality of ethnographic collections. It discusses the ambiguity of the emerging collaborations in terms of their continued dependence on institutional resources and goodwill.
Contribution long abstract:
Recent public debates on the coloniality of ethnographic collections have had a transformative impact on anthropological museums in Northern Europe. In particular, these dynamics have been aligned with the reformulation of institutional (self-)imaginaries that seek to involve 'communities' and 'societies of origin' in exploring the histories and determining the futures of ethnographic collections. These institutional openings have also become a window of opportunity for a wide range of actors from the contexts from which these objects were taken to actively shape this process; and to become involved as key actors in the resulting political and/or institutional decisions.
In my paper, I explore the ambiguous dynamics that public pressure and institutional aspirations to transform museum practices in the wake of the promise of decolonisation have created in the case of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. By focusing on recent instances of collaboration with communities and societies of origin, most prominently the case of the Ngonnso’ statue from Cameroon, I show that activist actors and groups have played a crucial role in transforming object-related representations and practices within the museum itself. At the same time, the emerging collaborations are marked by ambiguity, as more consistent – and especially structurally embedded – ways of dealing with the demands and expectations of the individuals and groups involved are caught up in institutional hierarchies and contradictions, as well as the continued dependence of all collaborations on institutional resources and goodwill.
Carl Deussen (University of Amsterdam)
Contribution short abstract:
I propose an understanding of ethnographic collecting based on the affects of the collector. By showing the desires that motivated anthropological practice under empire, I aim to deconstruct the very concept of 'ethnographic collecting', and to create new affective strategies for the museum today.
Contribution long abstract:
What were the motivations behind imperial ethnographic collecting? In this paper, I argue that the collector's affects are an important and hitherto overlooked aspect in answering this question. Using a pair of Japanese vaginal balls, or rin-no-tama, from the collection of German anthropologist Wilhelm Joest as a case study, I show how affective constellations of (sexual) desire and White guilt could drive collecting decisions and anthropological research. I use this example to show that such affective impulses are not peripheral explanations - to paraphrase Ann Stoler, they were not the "soft undertissue" of imperial anthropology, "but its marrow". I propose, therefore, to question the explanatory potential of 'ethnographic collecting' by making the concept itself an object of inquiry. In undoing 'ethnographic collecting', I aim to discover what is obscured by its supposed self-evidence - the role of collecting in the affective self-regulation of empire. This affective historical research can, in turn, play an important role in addressing the affective constitution of the ethnographic museum today. Re-introducing the affects of ethnographic collectors can challenge the presumed unaffectedness of White actors, past and present, and enable new generative modes of affective transformation and healing.
Camila Opazo Sepúlveda (Universitat de Barcelona)
Contribution short abstract:
The aim of this ethnographic research is to analyse the Museum of Ethnology and World Cultures of Barcelona, its critical exhibitions and its intercultural work with Latin American migrant audiences. This work reflects on the role of this institution in the creation of more just social imaginaries.
Contribution long abstract:
Ethnographic and World Culture museums are developing practices that address colonial legacies still rooted in contemporary societies. Moreover, these museums play a central role in connecting with the cultural diversity that characterises the current demography of some of the former European metropolises. The aim of this paper is to critically analyse the proposals that the Museum of Ethnology and World Cultures of Barcelona has developed to respond to postcolonial critique, both through its exhibitions and its intercultural work with migrant audiences. Critical exhibitions on the colonial past, academic seminars for reflection and reassessment of the institution, and an artistic creation workshop focused on Latin American migrant populations are the main interest of this ethnographic research. While the institutional projects critically examine the city's colonial past and reflect on the social function of the museum, the migrant narratives question the ownership of the collections and make visible the underrepresentation of groups from former colonies. The MUEC thus becomes a site where colonial hierarchies are materialised and agglomerated, extractive economies are questioned, and the violence perpetrated by museums in general and ethnological museums in particular is denounced. The study reminds us of the position of these institutions as central spaces for the re-elaboration and re-signification of our post-colonial present, as well as their responsibility in the necessary configuration of other, more egalitarian and just futures.
Dan Hicks (Oxford University) Lennon Mhishi (University of Oxford)
Contribution short abstract:
If empire is an unfinished project, and if abolition, as we learn, is far from over, then we must surely attend to the places that were created to make it endure. Museums are one such place. What would it mean to abolish the museum?
Contribution long abstract:
Empire is not over. Just open a newspaper, or doom-scroll your social media feed, and it’s immediately clear that what an older academic language described as “post-colonial” is far from in the past. Even Stuart Hall’s equivocal account, back in 1995, of the question “When was the post-colonial?’, feels hard to comprehend today.
If empire is an unfinished project, and if abolition, as we learn, is far from over, then we must surely attend to the places that were created to make it endure. Museums are one such place. Abolition of course was never about destruction but about countering destruction. For these reasons this paper asks: for those who find themselves working in legacy institutions, with legacy thought, legacy practice: What would it mean to abolish the museum?
References
Hall, S. 1996. When was “the post-colonial”? Thinking at the limit. In Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (eds) The Post-Colonial Question: common skies, divided horizons. London: Routledge, pp. 242-260.