The Museum of Other People (Adam Kuper, 2023)

 

Anyone who believes the world of museums was staid and unchanging needs only read a few pages of Adam Kuper’s book to realise the civil wars that have broken out in recent years, most notably around museums of anthropology – which were typically founded as “museums of other people”, or as part of a cabinets of curiosities. It all began with terms like “civilization” in the 18th century:

Museums of civilization [such as The British Museum and The Louvre] embodied the Enlightenment theory of history. All human societies progress from a lower to a higher condition … the goal toward which all must travel is what French philosophers in the late C18 began to call Civilization.

At this point, you remember how, while most museums seem to have existed forever, some have closed, and you ask yourself why. There was once a Museum of Mankind in London, and a Musee de l’Homme in Paris. Both were in the tradition of collections of the artefacts of “primitive” people. Over time, questions began to be raised, and today, any collection with an ethnographic angle reveals a fundamental uncertainty, a defensiveness, towards the displays, as the museums have been caught unawares that their current treatment of “other people” is inadequate – we no longer call them “primitive”, for a start. This was very visible, for example, from a recent visit to the London National Maritime Museum Pacific gallery, which had many glass cases, and looked to me as if it had been set up forty or fifty years ago, but which now has signs prominently displayed at each entrance, stating something like “we recognise this collection is presented with colonialist assumptions, but we haven’t had time to fix it". That is the quickest, and most unsatisfactory, way to deal with the problem.

Kuper’s book makes for gripping reading, as museum after museum struggles to rethink its collection policy, its view on returning objects (return to where?), and lurches from justifying its collections on artistic, then on ethnographic grounds, and then changes track again.

The issue of how many of the famous objects came to be held in European and US museums, such as the Benin bronzes, is described in horrific detail – looting, or via a dealer after looting, is the usual route. Nonetheless, however compelling the reading, the problem remains for the anthropologists: how do you hold a collection that represents a people? Is it possible to build such a collection without being patronising? I don’t think the first chapter, “Faraway people”, quite matches the coverage of the subsequent chapters. A recent visit to the Museum of Manchester suggests one idea increasingly seen in museums: information boards featuring a living person, who is interviewed for the display.

This isn’t the first book to describe a problem without identifying a successful solution. Nonetheless, Kuper has a gift for narrative, and brings the unexciting subject of founding and managing museums to life. His narrative skilfully combines fascinating background details about pioneers whose name we know but whose background we don’t – who, for example, knew about James Smithson, the illegitimate son of an English duke and his lover, christened Jacques Macie, and subsequently founder of the Smithsonian? The breezy style makes for compulsive reading, and the reader doesn’t (usually) notice when the narrative drifts off to something unrelated but a good story, such as how Jeremy Bentham’s body came to be preserved at University College London. Kuper is such a fluent writer that he keeps your attention throughout, and we don’t worry too much that he is better at describing what has gone wrong rather than suggesting better solutions. He points out, for example, that the modern concept of providing “closure” by reburying skeletons dug up for experimental purposes in the 19th century may well be inappropriate, in that it was in many cases unlikely that these dead people were buried in the first place. In other words, we are still imposing our ideas of what the civilization might have been like.

I recommend the book highly, if for no other reason than as a corrective to the way that some museums claim to have solved the problem of their collections of skulls and artefacts by stating the provenance – back to the white European (usually) who acquired the objects in not very clearly stated deals.