Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the Horniman Museum’s transformation into a disciplinary institution under the guidance of A C Haddon as advisory curator. With that in mind, I emphasise instances of deviance and refusal amongst both objects and visitors in order to think beyond and against discipline(s).

Paper long abstract:

In 1901, tea merchant and avid collector Frederick Horniman donated the newly-constructed Horniman Museum to ‘the people’, “as a place of public recreation and instruction”. Under the guidance of anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon, the museum was transformed into a space where visitors could learn about empire and the world beyond it according to Euro-centric, racist logics. This paper focuses on the museum’s evolution into not just an educational institution, but also a disciplinary/disciplining body in three separate yet related respects. (1) During this period, curation and collecting strategies were heavily influenced by the increasingly formalised discipline of anthropology, which in turn required (2) disciplining objects to rid them of their alterity so that they could be rehabilitated as tools for learning about, and ultimately governing, colonised peoples, and (3) disciplining visitors by restricting the ways in which they looked at, engaged with and learned from objects.

With that in mind, this paper is interested in the radical potential of un-disciplining and unlearning. I turn my attention to the deviant, the recalcitrant, and the unruly to argue that objects contain multiple deviant meanings that frequently elude the imperial surveillance of the museum. I suggest reading this as a refusal of objects to conform and an inability of the museum to represent and contain all meanings. If, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang suggest, colonialism is the entitlement to ignore or transgress frontiers, then un-learning requires acknowledging that which is unknowable within the confines of the anthropological museum.