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The Modern Myth of the Brutish Museums with Prof. Dan Hicks - Episode 17 - Modern Myth
743 Plays3 years ago
This epsode of Modern Myth is all about repatriation, restitituion and the return of artefacts. The Brutish Museums is a new book from Professor Dan Hicks, of the University of Oxford and Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
In this episode we discuss the items that are currently in museums that were obtained during colonial times, under duress or through direct violence. In particular Professor Hicks has been working with the Benin Dialogue Group in order to have the Benin Bronzes returned to Nigeria. We also discuss what is meant by restitution rather than repatriation and its effect on more dialogue.
You can buy The Brutish Museums from Pluto Press - https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341767/the-brutish-museums/ or from your local bookstore
You can follow Dan on Twitter or visit his website
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Transcript
Accents & Podcasting Experiences
00:00:01
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:29
Speaker
I think this is a good part of content. So let's talk about these, my accent, which I will tell you now changes when I'm recording. I've got a podcast voice because I've been podcasting since I was 16 years old, which puts me at over a decade, actually an unlucky number of years podcasting. So
00:00:52
Speaker
I'm quite used to being in front of the mic here. So what do you think my accent comes from? So there's a bit of, I mean, there is obviously a touch of Northern Irish, I would say. Ah, okay, you got it. Well done. Have you spent some time in the States or is that just the source of, is that your podcast voice?
00:01:17
Speaker
I think that's my podcast voice. I think it's because I've listened to a lot of podcasts. And I did have an American pen pal when I was younger as well, who, well, I mean, phone pal, but you don't really say phone pal, do you? Like I would, I would sit and speak to her on the phone for an hour every week. Yeah. Okay.
00:01:37
Speaker
And so it's a Belfast accent, but you've been up top in the UK? Actually, there's a funny bit about this, which is actually how I wanted to introduce this. So if you allow me.
Introduction of Professor Dan Hicks
00:01:54
Speaker
So hello, everybody. Welcome to Modern Myth. The man I am speaking to is the wonderful Professor Dan Hicks, who's the Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, as well as the curator of the Pitt Rivers Museum.
00:02:29
Speaker
Okay, go ahead. I mean, I don't know the 18th century or maybe the 17th century, but yeah, okay, go for it.
00:02:38
Speaker
No, I was going to use that to scare you a little bit. You can ask all the questions in German if you want. When we have our meetings at TU, everyone speaks their own language, French, German, English, and we all get along with it.
00:02:57
Speaker
That's really interesting.
Why Tweet in German?
00:02:59
Speaker
So the reason I did that is because actually one of the really funny things that I saw you tweeting recently was in German. And I'm kind of wondering about why were you tweeting in German?
00:03:11
Speaker
So I was giving a lecture in Berlin, obviously, in these weird, you know, lockdown times. That meant I was sat exactly where I'm sat now in my office in Oxford. But I gave a named lecture, the Schöner lecture at the Technische University Berlin. When was it? Actually yesterday. Yeah, it's odd, these, you know,
00:03:37
Speaker
Yeah, time is operating in interesting ways under lockdown. Completely. Yeah, so it was a translation of the outline, which TU had done. And I mean, one thing we're learning, interestingly, I think, out of lockdown is that the audiences and the conversations you have, even though it's all on the internet, is always
00:04:03
Speaker
actually, you know, nuanced according to who's hosting you. So again, I mean, absolutely wonderful to be hosted by you today. I'm not quite sure where you are, though. I mean, where are you physically now? I googled this before. But yeah, well, I'm based. I'm based in Scotland because I studied.
From Chemistry to Archaeology
00:04:23
Speaker
I studied. I started out as a chemist at the University of Aberdeen. And in first year of my university, I
00:04:32
Speaker
Basically, I had to take an elective class and archaeology is an A in the catalogue. So I took that as an elective. And as with any kind of voracious infectious disease, I was consumed. And unfortunately,
00:04:52
Speaker
I made the decision with all this kind of archaeological, malignant archaeology on my brain, I actually changed degrees halfway through my third year. That became archaeology with chemistry. I haven't appreciated it until I'm talking to a scientist, right? That changes everything.
00:05:16
Speaker
Well, here's a bite to change again. The reason I got into archaeology was because of archaeological theory. Wow. Okay. Yeah, I remember that. That was great while it lasted, wasn't it?
Public Perception of History
00:05:29
Speaker
Well, that's a very interesting point because I think the discussions that we are now seeing off the back of what your new book is about seems to be the disconnect between the kind of discussions that are had in what I would call theory circles and what the general public thinks about history. And that actually, that
00:05:56
Speaker
that divide, that separation between public and past is where I'm actually really, that's where my kind of, that's my, that's the zone where I inhabit and I enjoy. That's why I call myself a digital public archaeologist because I feel that's the important role that archaeologists have as facilitators in managing and assisting
00:06:21
Speaker
the public in getting touch with the past. The problem is that I, in my opinion, is that there's a kind of a way of doing archaeology, a way of doing history and a way of doing museums that has been set as an archetype for so long that it's really difficult to help people almost unlearn it, you know? I mean, you
00:06:50
Speaker
Is the Pitt Rivers Museum the first museum that you've been a part of, or did you work in other museums as well?
Career Path: Field Archaeology to Museums
00:07:02
Speaker
Sure, OK. Well, that's a really good question. And yeah, I mean, I began, I spent the first 10 years of my working life as a contract archeologist, as a field archeologist, the sort of seasonality that one has in what we used to call commercial archeology. But yeah, I mean, rescue archeology, I mean, whatever you want to call it.
00:07:32
Speaker
that sort of seasonality where you moved in between outdoors and indoors, you know, you would have a period on a project, obviously, you know, unfortunately, the outdoors bit didn't always, you know, map onto the right season. So you could be doing a watching brief on a road scheme, you could be doing an evaluation on a
00:07:52
Speaker
On a housing estate, you could be undertaking an open area excavation in the middle of winter and then indoors, doing what was known as the post-ex in the summer. But certainly, that was my background initially. And in that work, of course, I also worked for
00:08:18
Speaker
regional museums, local authority museums, who had an archaeological wing, who had a part of them that was undertaking excavation.
00:08:34
Speaker
So, yeah, I guess, I mean, I sort of happened into museums, but I'm sort of definitely not a museum person. I mean, I still think of a museum as an enormous archaeological assemblage, as a sort of archaeological site in its own right.
00:08:53
Speaker
And I think that's the main career trajectory I've had, has been the movement from outdoors and learning my craft in terms of whether it's at landscape scale, the archaeology of buildings, the archaeology of subsurface archaeology, where, of course, as a rescue archaeologist, one has to deal with everything from the Neolithic into the modern.
00:09:20
Speaker
I've actually brought that set of skills, that way of seeing. It is a worldview. I really, really brought that indoors. And so I'm a bit unlike a lot of people in the museum world in that I'm an outdoor person who finds
Museums' Role in Society
00:09:39
Speaker
themselves indoors. So yeah, I think if we think about a museum, that means that I'm not the sort of curator
00:09:50
Speaker
who has one little box in the museum that has got all their favorite objects in it, and then they ignore the other hundreds of thousands of things that are there. And that happens a lot in museums, it turns out. And in world culture museums, it actually happens even more than it does in other forms of, if you like, more focused museums.
00:10:19
Speaker
So I'm a generalist, you know, and I can't help but...
00:10:23
Speaker
be as interested in the formation of this assemblage over the, you know, here, in the case of the museum in which I work now, over the past 140 or so years, you know, actually, I find that even more interesting and maybe, you know, actually, I mean, the most important thing to understand, rather than only the original, as it were, in inverted commas,
00:10:50
Speaker
meaning of each of these objects that we find ourselves up. So, yeah, I find myself, you know, I also, as an early point, I mean, I actually began my first job as an archaeologist, was a work experience, a job that then sort of turned into a paid job and into the first thing I did.
00:11:11
Speaker
for several years, which was a gardens archaeology. So I, you know, right from the outset, I was, you know, you know, looking at the post medieval and was being involved in heritage sites, including the National Trust, but other gardens as well, you know, sort of undertaking archaeology in advance of garden restoration. So for 30 years now, even over 30 years, I have been digging up the modern world.
00:11:42
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. And I quite like this kind of excavating the excavators, watching the watchmen, as it were, because I think that's one of the things that archaeologists really feel uncomfortable with is this idea of, you know, viewing their own work, not as an extension of, well, this is what we found. This is the information it speaks for itself, but rather it's a cultural process of sorts.
00:12:10
Speaker
you know, in the economy, in the world that we live in, the society we live in, archaeologists fulfill a certain role and so do museums. I mean, the thing about museums, however, is that
00:12:26
Speaker
they have and haven't really changed. I'll preface that a little bit. I believe that the fundamental structures of the museum and its place in society has not really deviated in the perspective of the public eye over the last 100 years. Even if within museums things have changed, what would you say
00:12:52
Speaker
The museum's role today is and maybe what should it be? Sure, okay, well that's a really good question. I mean, I find myself of course now, you know, working at the Pitt Rivers at a university museum and I, you know, I think that's an important, you know, point from which to be able to be aware that, you know, that is the angle on which I'm approaching museums.
00:13:18
Speaker
Also, it sort of reminds us that museums always were about, you know, knowledge. So for me at the Pitt Rivers, and I think there's a different answer for different sorts of museum. I think it's actually quite, you know, hard to make a general statement about all museums. I mean, a lot of my personal favorite museums are, you know, local museums, which are set up for completely different reasons for
00:13:47
Speaker
reasons of community history, for communities coming together, that's obviously enormously different to institutions that have existed over a longer period, that have had different rationales.
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, Dan, I don't want all this nuance in this conversation. That's terrible. Yeah, let me answer according to where I work. So I work in a university museum and for me, you know, at its best what the Pitt Rivers should and could be and indeed other anthropology museums
00:14:29
Speaker
you know, like it around the world,
Pitt Rivers and Modernization Needs
00:14:32
Speaker
because quite a lot of ethnological, world archaeological, anthropological museums were set up in institutions in universities in the later 19th century. I mean, we have these institutions in Ivy League,
00:14:46
Speaker
you know, colleges in, you know, Cambridge, Oxford, you know, a range of different, Manchester, Glasgow, you know, so even UCL has some museums, right? So, so, you know, from the university perspective,
00:15:05
Speaker
you know, at its best, what the Pitt Rivers should be is the public space for archaeology and anthropology. So in these days, it exactly has been the case in the past. You know, these are disciplines that, you know, by their nature, exactly the same as the history of art, you know, they have spaces in which their subject matter can be engaged with.
00:15:31
Speaker
So, you know, let's think of them as public spaces. Let's think of them as, you know, the public spaces of the discipline. But then let's realize which has, you know, something which has been the case certainly since, you know, the Second World War and arguably earlier than that.
00:15:48
Speaker
that these spaces have been out of step with actually where the discipline is. So they haven't, they've actually diverged, or even you could say, nevermind, they diverged. Actually, anthropology museums have ossified. They need to catch up with all of the changes we saw in anthropology and the civil rights movement.
00:16:15
Speaker
you know, in all the changes that anthropology is under, is actually, you know, having happened to it at the moment. I mean, anthropology is at its worst. It's a tool of empire. It's a way in which empire persists in terms of knowledge systems. But, you know, it is best. It's a way of, you know, looking at the world outside of a conventional Eurocentric
00:16:44
Speaker
Your mindset, it's a way of celebrating people above objects. It's a way of understanding different ways of being, of knowing, of living. So I love anthropology and archaeology as disciplines, and I love how they continue to evolve. I think they need to, in this moment, in the ongoing civil rights moment that we find ourselves in.
00:17:12
Speaker
But they're out of step. So that's the challenge for something like the Pitt Rivers, is to make it adequate for where anthropology and archaeology are going, even where they've got to in the 21st century, and to make these museums fit for the present moment.
00:17:29
Speaker
That's a very, very good place to situate where the museum ought to be. And actually, on this show, one of the previous episodes, I spoke to an archaeologist from Nigeria.
00:17:46
Speaker
And obviously, it came to a discussion about museums in Africa and also the kind of the dialogue that exists between museums and communities. And this kind of ties quite, this comes a lot to your work and to obviously your book, which we'll talk about a little bit later on.
African Communities & UK Museums
00:18:10
Speaker
I want to understand the relationship between
00:18:14
Speaker
communities in Africa and museums in the UK, maybe drawing upon examples of perhaps the work that you've been involved in about bringing these two stake holders together.
00:18:33
Speaker
Sure. So the relationship starts with the destruction of communities. So, you know, these objects from Africa find their way into museums through surprisingly chaotic routes. The book is about the Benin Blonses, which is one, you know, iconic example among, you know, many other examples of, you know, looting for the private
00:19:03
Speaker
you know, wealth for the for the personal gain of soldiers, administrators that were part of empire, journalists even who were part of this attack.
00:19:16
Speaker
But, you know, there's also a wider history of the taking of culture, which was a device which was put to use, you know, to dismantle, you know, the traditional systems of belief. So confiscations by missionaries, you know, sovereignty. So the taking away of royal objects by, often by force.
00:19:43
Speaker
you know, the the way so. So I mean, the idea of the relationship in between a museum and an African community starts with loss, with violence, with, you know, dispossession. There's also that that word community is often also problematic. So let's just be aware that a lot of the normal vocab that we use in the museum world
00:20:13
Speaker
and the way in which we have in the past framed restitution because returning things is actually business as usual in a whole set of different ways. For example, ancestral remains being returned to Mary or to First Nations communities.
00:20:36
Speaker
You know, but sometimes when we say community, that stands in for the technical museum idea of the source community. And that is an idea that comes very specifically out of the history of settler colonialism.
00:20:53
Speaker
So the important work and the ongoing work, which is happening in museums in North America and in the US, in Canada and of other systems, from European museums,
00:21:11
Speaker
And the Pitt Rivers Museum has been at the forefront, really, I think in the UK, it's fair to say, over the past 25 years or so of that sort of work with source communities. But, you know, that language of indigeneity, of source communities, it maps really awkwardly onto so many of the histories of Africa, which involved a different sort of empire.
00:21:40
Speaker
So this wasn't just settler colonialism. This was extractive colonialism. This was corporate militarist colonialism.
00:21:51
Speaker
And in those histories of empire, which were about the physical removal at first of your people, the expropriation of Africans, objectified as part of the Atlantic trade, the expropriation as well aware of your land,
00:22:16
Speaker
But then the taking of objects, it turns out in the 19th century and onwards, also turned out to be a very important form of dispossession. And so it's a dispossession that destroys communities.
00:22:33
Speaker
And it's one, therefore, in which actually restitution and the dialogues around it have to start with all these senses of loss of dispersal. In the case of the Bronzes, the Benin attack of 1897, the book sort of talks about how that sheer violence, the sheer moment of impact
00:23:03
Speaker
how much hardware, how many bullets were involved, how many rocket launchers and so forth, actually led to the physical movement of these objects in more than 150 museums around the world. So that's the destruction of a culture. That's the destruction of over half a millennium
00:23:27
Speaker
of a royal line. So in the case of urban, as with so many other examples of across Africa, when we talk about working with communities, we're talking about fragmented communities, we're talking about a diasporic
00:23:43
Speaker
this public community. We're talking about nation states and their relationships with the federal agencies and with the royal court as it continues. So it's always like the return of objects and the conversations that lead sort of to that in an action-oriented way have an important role at the rebuilding of the communities that were under attack under European empire.
Community & Restitution Dialogue
00:24:12
Speaker
We're going to take a quick break and afterwards we'll be talking about Dan Hicks' new book, The British Museums. And we're back, you're listening to Modern Myth, I'm speaking to Professor Dan Hicks about his new book, The British Museums. So we were just talking about deconstructing and reimagining what even community means in respect to where
00:24:40
Speaker
these calls for restitution are coming from and to whom do they return to. I'd like to kind of talk about maybe what was the kind of the impetus behind writing this book and I've noticed there was a Twitter handle that has been around for a wee bit beforehand. What came first, the idea for the book or the Twitter handle?
00:25:05
Speaker
So the idea for the book came first. And, you know, this, in many ways, is a book I've been thinking about since I arrived at the Pitt Rivers Museum more than 13 years ago. And it was a book that was hard, you know, that was impossible to write at that time. But especially with the changes that came with the Christmas for Oxford movement five years ago,
Motivations for Writing on Restitution
00:25:33
Speaker
you know, it felt like the time was right to try and write this book and it has become really, you know, because of the changing, you know, what I have learned from African led, you know, campaigns over restitution from, you know,
00:25:48
Speaker
listening to the protests which we've seen at the Pit Rivers and by understanding how the dialogue has developed in different ways in different locations within Europe. The book has really come out of a bit like something we said earlier, how appropriate,
00:26:19
Speaker
How can we address the mismatch in between what anthropology and archaeology claim to be in this sort of day and age with what the museum physically is?
00:26:32
Speaker
And that required me actually to dig into the history of the museum, into that second layer of the meaning of these objects that we mentioned earlier, that the source of double historicity, as I call it in the book, which I mean to cut across the jargon, is to say the history of these objects in the past century or more
00:26:54
Speaker
rather than only their original meanings, to see, you know, why did the Victorians and Edwardians, you know, want to display African objects in their museums? And that led me really into an understanding of the intersections in between white supremacy. You know, anthropology is a racial science in this period of sort of proto-fascism, in the
00:27:21
Speaker
1890s into 1910s. These are histories that we've addressed as anthropologists in sort of physical anthropology, where you've dismantled the displays of skulls.
00:27:33
Speaker
that, you know, that told the lie that there were different types of human. But we left, we ignored, you know, not the natural history, but the cultural history, you know, that was there actually to tell the same lie, the same lie of superiority, of what Augustus Henry Lenox Pitt Rivers called the evolution of culture. So it's been that sense that, you know, here I am in a museum that
00:28:01
Speaker
you know, when I got here, you know, continued to think it was okay, you know, to tell the story or to nuance the story, to apologize, that kind of allowed to persist that history of the evolution of culture and how in the present we aim, you know, now to dismantle as well as to repurpose actually what this anthropology museum is.
00:28:28
Speaker
So what was the process of bringing things together for the book? You said you've been thinking about this book for a while. How were you bringing things for the book together? What kind of gave you the opportunity then to start thinking, actually, I can now begin to write about this. What was that journey like?
00:28:53
Speaker
So the writing itself happened actually really quickly. You know, one of the things I learned from conversations with Nigerian colleagues in summer 2019 in Nigeria on my trip as a part of the Benin dialogue group, you know, I got a sense of how much is altering in the, you know, Nigerian lead.
00:29:23
Speaker
sides of this sort of conversation. So, you know, it felt that there was a real urgency to what has. Of course, I mean, let's, you know, remember that the, you know, the first claims for restitution happened in the 1930s. I mean, they're almost 100 years old.
00:29:46
Speaker
And the first returns to Nigeria after the Benin attack of 1897 happened, actually facilitated by the British Museum in 1938 with the return of the cobble crowns and the cobble work
00:30:13
Speaker
gown to the king, to the Ober of Benin. So even though it's a long-standing argument, it's a long-standing demand, it seemed to me that there was a real urgency and
00:30:35
Speaker
In this moment, there is an alignment of all of the important agencies locally, and so from the national and the federal governments to the rural courts and the wider community.
00:30:59
Speaker
But it's also a wider urgency for Africa, you know, as a continental level. So restitution is entering a new phase in a very, very exciting way, I think, at the moment. In terms of the interest, there's a whole host of nation states are having in this. And there's a joining up.
00:31:22
Speaker
of agendas which move actually beyond the nation-state to a regional level, but are also operating at a sub-national level with non-state actors. So here in Oxford, as a non-state actor at the European side, and there are many of them,
00:31:45
Speaker
You know, there are many of us who are at the moment holding African objects, but we're not. You know, the British Museum or the V&A, we're not the British government. We are a different source of entity. It seemed to me that I had to write from that perspective. So absolutely, the book is written from the perspective of the Pitt Rivers, but is inspired really by that.
00:32:11
Speaker
know, that African moment which is happening and aiming really to listen to and to amplify African voices. It is something very, very important and it's actually something that I was reflecting on after having a conversation with a Nigerian archaeologist as to how often, you know,
00:32:29
Speaker
I mean, the thing I know about is, you know, archaeology podcasts and I know that archaeology podcasts are very white, very European or US. And I think there's a whole host of voices that we're missing out by not engaging and not listening.
Repatriation vs. Restitution
00:32:45
Speaker
And I think it's going to be part of that kind of
00:32:49
Speaker
I want to emphasize it's not just about these situations with what you're doing with the museum, but it actually extends to all of archaeology and anthropology, the kind of discussions and dialogues and frankly actions that we need to have.
00:33:09
Speaker
I do want to kind of contrast that kind of conversation with the reception to your book at home and I kind of want to title this kind of like I want to get in space of like the the reaction to restitution. I think it'd be a good idea here to kind of talk about maybe
00:33:31
Speaker
the difference between things like repatriation, restitution, and like this whole kind of like adjustment in terms of like, you're using the word restitution, which kind of indicates not just
00:33:51
Speaker
let's say not just repatriating the items, but rather there's something more attached to that as well. What do you think in this kind of discussion, what are the meanings of these different words? Sure. So I think it's important, I think, you know, the language is absolutely crucial here.
00:34:13
Speaker
I think, you know, sending back is not what we're talking about. We're talking about giving back. And I think repatriation as a term sort of builds into it a sense of the nation state, which maybe restitution doesn't or returns doesn't. You know, I've learned in the media, you know, conversations I've had in recent
00:34:38
Speaker
you know, months and sort of years in terms of being involved in this sort of conversation and making this conversation a public conversation, which is such an important part of what this book does. I've tried, who knows if I've succeeded, but I've tried to write
00:34:53
Speaker
you know, the most accessible version of this book, in terms of it being read by, you know, a non-archaeologist and non-specialist. I've attempted to avoid too much jargon. And I mean, when there is any jargon, I've attempted to, you know, to say sort of why it matters.
00:35:12
Speaker
But that sense of a wider public conversation is absolutely central. So I know that a lot of people within the archaeology community probably see that book. I would say, I'll be frank, archaeology Twitter probably mostly agrees.
00:35:35
Speaker
However, you did kind of, you managed to get some of the right criticism, you managed to annoy the right people. I heard about you got into a wee bit tiff with the times or something like that. What happened there? So with the times, yeah, I mean, you know, it's been wonderful to see, you know, I like to see this, you know, this sort of movement at its sort of European end.
00:36:04
Speaker
as akin to the anti-apartheid movement in that, you know, this is absolutely, this is an African-led movement, but some of us on the left have been foregrounding those issues for some time. But what happened with the anti-apartheid movement is the knowledge of, you know, the facts actually, you know, began to be understood.
00:36:28
Speaker
This moved far beyond, you know, traditional political divides. This was about, you know, doing the right thing. This was about a new sort of layer in interactions and relationships in between Europe and Africa, you know, as a continent, in that case, South Africa, you know, as a nation.
00:36:56
Speaker
So what does that mean, you know, now? I mean, Isheel Mbembe has talked immensely, inspiringly about how, you know, a generation on from the end of apartheid, there's a new challenge he talks about in his, you know, the famous lecture he gave about the Rhodes waterfall movement in Cape Town.
00:37:22
Speaker
he talked about that notion of, well, he called it a negative moment. And there's a chapter in the book that talks about this. And he said the negative moment is one in which old
00:37:40
Speaker
you know, old antagonisms remain unresolved while new ones emerge. You know, that I think is a part of how we might see, you know, not only the calls for the falling of statues, but also not only the fallism movement, but the restitution movement, you know, the falling or the dismantling of, you know, these
00:38:08
Speaker
these objects in museums. So with the times, and with others, you know, we've seen, you know, I've seen
00:38:19
Speaker
You know, I've actually been amazingly inspired by the fact that the telegraph allowed me to write now two op-eds in as many weeks.
Media Reactions to Restitution Themes
00:38:37
Speaker
We've had obviously support from the left in the usual ways, but also increasingly a consensus. And among museum
00:38:49
Speaker
directors and others. With The Times, I think what we see, and that very odd review, that very uneven and rather, you know, rather, rather, rather chaotic review that we saw from the chief culture editor of The Times, I think there we see, you know, this may be an editorial line of The Times, I don't know, but I certainly know that is an editorial line in other
00:39:18
Speaker
you know, on other themes for the times, the idea of wishing to sort of display or to represent, you know, any conversation about how a museum or any other cultural organization might evolve itself as a kind of cultural war. So, you know, this was the culture war framing that was being applied. And of course, importantly, what we what we have to say, you know, is that the culture war is a framing of the right.
00:39:48
Speaker
you know, the idea of, you know, the declaration of a culture war is something which is being invented in certain, actually quite, you know, hard right circles, often, as a way to push back against the progress that has been made by the Black Lives Matter movement, you know, not only this year, I mean, most visibly in the year 2020, but increasing, but of course, over the past five years since
00:40:18
Speaker
Charlottesville over over really a decade. I do I do want to apologize I think they mistook me for you because I read this really interesting part they were like um what do you want to do empty the museum send it all back and I'm like no yes yes I actually do yeah give it all back yeah I want every single museum empty absolutely empty
00:40:44
Speaker
The thing is, I like joking about that, but I think this is maybe where I'm inserting a bit of my thoughts on restitution and repatriation, and you can tell me that I'm absolutely off the market with this or not.
00:41:00
Speaker
I've always tried to push the idea that these calls for repatriation restitution actually don't really have anything to do with the items being physically moving. It's not really the physical thing.
00:41:18
Speaker
It's rather giving the par and the control over what happens to those items, that needs to change. At the moment, and you can obviously correct me, I feel like museums are judge, jury and executioner in terms of deciding on what can
00:41:40
Speaker
be restituted, what can be repatriated, and there doesn't seem to be an external body that really says, actually, you know what museum, you're incorrect, you don't get to keep these. Museums seem to be holding all the cards.
00:41:55
Speaker
And it's almost like, well, hey, how can we frame this as something that makes us look good rather than framing as, well, we have to do this, you know? And it does sound really antagonistic, but I almost feel like the way museums set up, you have to almost be antagonistic with them. So what do you think?
Restitution as Standard Practice
00:42:17
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, I think importantly, we need to say that, you know, restitution is already a normal part of the job of museum curation. So, you know, there was a time where the return of Holocaust spoil was contentious. And in the 80s and 90s, you know, many of the arguments that we now hear deployed in the context of African
00:42:45
Speaker
cultural restitution were being made about objects that were taken in between 1933 and 1945. But of course, since the Washington principle of 1998, that moved absolutely crucially, moved the onus of the responsibility for understanding what was looted from the claimant to the institution.
00:43:12
Speaker
So if you're an art museum that has Holocaust loot, you need to know what you've got. You need to research who might be the rightful owner. And, you know, some people said.
00:43:25
Speaker
But what if these people, once these things are returned, what if these objects are not on display to the public anymore? What if they're sold? Who knows what happened? What if they're a shutaway in a private residence and no one can see it? And to which, of course, the answer was, it's their object. It's their artwork. They can do what they want with it.
00:43:49
Speaker
The same for human remains. There was a time at which it was argued that the return of human remains when they were identified and claimed by a descendant community that, well, we'd never know how could we be sure
00:44:15
Speaker
where does this end? All these arguments were put. But of course, that's now a normal part of our operation. So the third leg of the restitution stool. I mean, all of these histories are completely different. I mean, the history of African restitution, all African dispossession.
00:44:34
Speaker
is, of course, incredibly different to what happened in the Holocaust. But that doesn't mean that in the technical way in which you think about how, as an institution, you give things back, you know, you know, when they're asked for, we have these other precedents, we have
00:44:53
Speaker
you know, knowledge and institutional expertise about how, you know, you can make procedures work. So yeah, you know, I think it is right that the museums that the process remains, you know, as a part of the curatorial, you know, role, because it's important not to give things back to the wrong people. It's important to not just randomly edX everything to some somewhere else. So it's someone else's problem. I mean, that
00:45:22
Speaker
That seems obviously, I mean, no one is saying that. But this is I guess there were two sides to it for me in terms of African cultural restitution. I mean, one is to share the knowledge of what we've got so that the claims can be made.
00:45:40
Speaker
You know, because we say, actually, yeah, we have this royal throne from Uganda. We have this object that was this fossil that was taken from East Africa under these sort of conditions that we're that we're that we're honest, because under one percent of the objects that were taken from Africa, this arena, UK museums,
00:46:03
Speaker
you know, are actually on display, you know, more than 99% of them are hidden away in boxes, in some cases in a box that hasn't been opened for 100 years. I mean, that's how bad it is. So we have to share the knowledge. But then, you know, the second part of that is that you share the knowledge, but then but then but then actually importantly, that you listen to the claims in an open minded way.
00:46:27
Speaker
that you return things. And maybe, you know, let's not over focus on the Benin Bronzes because it's also an important maybe, you know, to lower the standards that we have of evidence and of, you know, knowledge and to say, well, actually, in some cases, if there's a whole load of Egyptian archaeology, let's say, that Egypt wants back,
00:46:50
Speaker
You know, why not? I mean, what's it doing in Britain? Why can't the archaeological work understanding these historic objects be undertaken in Egypt rather than in Europe? Of course. We're going to have a quick break and then we're going to be talking a bit more about museums and restitution.
00:47:14
Speaker
And we're back, this is Modern Myth, I'm Tristan, we're talking about museums, restitution, what is and isn't done and do you know what, I think this is one of the things, the statistic that I
00:47:29
Speaker
remember reading and it blew my mind was that a museum only ever has a fractional percentage of its stores out there on display. And I think people don't really understand the size of like museum collections. You were saying it was something like 99% of the African items that have been looted are probably in the museum stores.
00:48:01
Speaker
What do you think? Obviously, some of these items have not even been properly recorded. As you said yourself, some of the boxes haven't been open for 100 years. This is going to be a long-term project. It's going to be a big project. How do we even begin that kind of
Costs & Underutilization in Museums
00:48:25
Speaker
project? Because it almost seems like it's too big.
00:48:31
Speaker
Sure. Well, I mean, let's initially say that it costs money, you know, to keep these objects in the stores. So, you know, every year that goes by when regional museums and national museums fail even to put on the database, fail to catalogue, you know, what they have,
00:48:54
Speaker
you know, there are costs involved. And there are costs, of course, you know, to the African communities who have been sort of dispossessed. But, you know, the universalist sort of narrative, the, you know, the argument that's put that these things are safer in the West, they're safer in America or in Europe, fails to acknowledge
00:49:21
Speaker
not only that absolutely central argument from the Sa'a Sabwa report from two years ago now that says that 95% of Africa's heritage is outside the continent,
00:49:38
Speaker
But that observation, while that's the case, exactly as you say, there's under 1% of what's held here in the UK is actually on display. Of the estimated 900 objects that were looted from Bennett Instancy in 1897, which were in the British Museum, circa 100 are on display. We don't even have firm numbers.
00:50:07
Speaker
You know, because even the BM hasn't invested in African in understanding, you know, what's in the African African collections. You know, there are many regional museums in the UK that don't have a world culture specialist or a curator. They certainly don't have an Africanist, you know, but they have absolutely world's importance.
00:50:32
Speaker
you know, internationally important, you know, African, African collections, whether this is, you know, Liverpool or Manchester or Bristol or Birmingham, you know, Edinburgh.
00:50:45
Speaker
and so forth. But even, you know, Derby, you know, Belfast, you know, these are these are it's incredible. Once you look at the map of world culture museums, these objects washed up in every city in this nation, you know, you know, in the UK, you're never more than 150 miles away from a looted African object. But we don't know that we so there's a there's a really important new reckoning happening across Europe with
00:51:12
Speaker
the legacies of empire and the histories of empire in the later 19th century. And a central part of that reckoning and central sites for that reckoning to happen in are these really, really undiscovered archaeological stores.
Museums as Archaeological Sites
00:51:31
Speaker
The last great archaeological sites
00:51:37
Speaker
you know, one might argue, are our museums, which are filled with these layers of loss and of violence and of imperial, you know, loots. It's about time that we understood what's in them.
00:51:52
Speaker
And I think this is the good message out of all of this. It's about getting things moving, about making positive changes that actually help in the long run, not just, as you said yourself, holding these items costs money. The status quo costs.
00:52:16
Speaker
And not to make the argument about money, but obviously museums are finding it incredibly difficult at the moment. But I think that was even happening before the pandemic. I think that this is when I would step in and say, I think the formation of the museum as this cultural hold-all is perhaps part of the issue.
00:52:44
Speaker
you know, these items are being taken, they're almost, for want of a better word, almost hoarded in the UK, simply by the fact that the virtue that they're not really, nobody's been able to do anything with them. I would like to pick up on some of the arguments that are made, because
00:53:07
Speaker
I come across the attitude quite a lot against the idea of registration. And I can tell you it comes from a certain place, and a certain place that is most likely to vote one political party in the UK over another for some reason, or had a very good childhood, went to a fancy school, et cetera, et cetera. And I feel as if these arguments are always made from a place of
00:53:38
Speaker
unintentional kind of like almost like racism in the sense that like Britain is seen as the the place where things can be understood where well if it's in a British museum then it can be understood for the world over and everyone can fly to Britain and understand these things in their best view and all this and no we wouldn't want to give them back they'd be all damaged
00:54:05
Speaker
What argument annoys you the most? Because those are my two, those are my two, I absolutely despise the universal, oh, look how many people come to the British Museum every year, or the, oh, but I mean, look at ISIS. I'm like, I'm sorry, but just it annoys me to no end. So what are your, what's the most annoying ones there for you?
00:54:34
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, how long have you got? We need a whole separate podcast for that for me to give you the full answer. So let me give give you the expugated version. You know, you know, and I mean, let me just preface that by saying that the Universalist angle, the idea of the Universal Museum, you know, the book says was a very, you know, very, very much an invention.
00:55:01
Speaker
of 2002. It's not this great, it doesn't have this sort of long history. The idea that we are in the West looking after universal heritage is an incredibly recent idea. It comes out of the Blairites,
00:55:22
Speaker
you know, notion of a multiculturalism as a melting pot, that you're going to see museums as healing rifts in the presence between, you know, different cultures while ignoring the past. The book argues it also sort of came out of an attempt the last time that we were in a, you know, sort of crisis for destination tourism.
00:55:49
Speaker
to say here's a reason to get on an aeroplane to New York or London, to come and see some culture. Culture was instrumentalised under the sort of history of the world in a hundred objects sort of ideology of the Universal Museum. It was instrumentalised both for a certain model of multiculturalism that I don't think many would hold onto today,
00:56:18
Speaker
but also actually to support the oil industry and to support the airlines, you know, in a way that I think also is equally unsustainable. But the arguments that annoy me most probably now are the disingenuous ones. You know, Africa cannot look after its own artifacts. I mean, that is just pure racism when you read it. I mean, you know, today we
00:56:42
Speaker
heard in the news that you know a Darwin notebook has been lost from Cambridge you know library and I have no desire to criticise Cambridge University. Oh I will I will honestly they can't even look after their own stuff. This is why this is why Africa should get Darwin's books honestly
00:57:03
Speaker
Well, that's right. But the reality of working in archives and museums is that things do go missing at times and the processes break down. But the idea of what's fascinating is that a tiny number of examples of African museums, not
00:57:24
Speaker
performing to the supposed high standards of the Western museums completely misses the reality that our Western institutions are constantly not fessing up to. We don't notice the fact that objects get nicked from museums on a periodic basis here in Britain. You've only got to Google, you know, actually what, you know, ivory being stolen.
00:57:50
Speaker
from some museums. I mean, you know, we could tell that story for ourselves. So that's the one that annoys me most is that somehow, and also, frankly, I mean, when we return human remains, we take no interest in what happens to it next.
00:58:08
Speaker
we would normally yeah we don't say you've got to display it in a museum this skull of your ancestor that was taken as part of race science of course normally these objects are buried and are destroyed so why on earth would we want to take an interest in what happens to an object next this is this is really um you know not only are we not looking after them here but the the sheer arrogance of saying
00:58:35
Speaker
That they can't be looked after in Africa is just that's the thing that gets totally totally I just finally I actually wanted to talk about a project that you've been working on called museums unlocked.
Museums Unlocked Project
00:58:51
Speaker
on Twitter. So can you like, I must say that obviously, I am very big on public engagement with archaeology. It's kind of something I think about every day. And obviously, I'm on Twitter, spotting my nonsense. So I'm kind of wondering, museums unlocked, tell me a little bit more about this.
00:59:20
Speaker
So it links really to the conversation we were just having, because, you know, Museums Unlocked came out in the first sort of days of lockdown, the first lockdown here in the UK, as something I've been thinking about for a long time, which is how we co-correct, how the role of the curator is not about, you know, the single lone voice, the lone scholar, you know, Neil McGregor, who has a story to tell you,
00:59:50
Speaker
you know, 100 times over where the object just illustrates it and is the only voice. He probably didn't even need the object to tell the story. He could have just sort of told it anyway, you know, but it makes it look pretty. That's the opposite of where I think we are now in a new paradigm, if I could use that word, of curation, which is not about
01:00:17
Speaker
yourself as the curator, but it's about, you know, co-corration. It's a more sort of a generous moment for museums. It's about humans rather than things. And so when the museums unlocked thing happens, which was where I said, let's just, okay, the museums are shut. You know, why don't we just try to visit them? You know, from the images we have of them on our cell phones, in our
01:00:44
Speaker
you know, online, on our laptops, on our clouds, let's share some images, but let's also just share some knowledge of, you know, you know, the museums, the institutions we love. And then over time, that turned into different themes. But absolutely crucially, each of those days is about a, you know, not a, you know, not a desire
01:01:13
Speaker
you know, to, you know, to just, you know, ask people to contribute for some central purpose, you know, to crowdsource. This is about community building. This is about the interaction of a group of people who have incredible expertise. A lot of them are on furlough. Some are artists, some are
01:01:36
Speaker
you know, museum people, some are members of the public that just have incredible knowledge and passion about the subjects that they're interested in. And there's a pace sort of to it as well. So there's a generosity to it about sharing. There's a temporality to it because it's about, you know, remembering and sharing the places that you visited. But it's also about looking forward, you know, you know, to the
01:02:03
Speaker
the museums and the sites and landscapes that we love, that we may have learned about from others, or that we know ourselves, that we want to visit after all of this horrible time is over. So fundamentally, Museums Unlocked came out of very much the same impulse as the British museums.
01:02:26
Speaker
It's about a human centered approach to museums. It's about, you know, looking outwards from our institutions and not inwards. It's a reaction to the fact that the digital offer of our museums is so fundamentally, you know, universally naff. And the way to solve that is by letting go.
01:02:52
Speaker
We don't have to own the narrative anymore ourselves as our institutions. We can allow other voices to take over, and that's the joy of it. I mean, I come up with a theme or others suggest the themes, and then what happens is people interpret that in all sorts of ways. And they read it, and it turns into something else. Also, an important part of that process is I archive it.
01:03:18
Speaker
So I've been using the Twitter moment, the function to archive. I don't really know why I'm archiving them, but they are turning into quite interesting archives. So archiving, it seems important from the start. We're hoping now to go into a new phase into December 2020, where we're just going to trial
01:03:45
Speaker
you know, this is a research sort of tool. So I'm talking to doctoral students at Leicester University here in Oxford, I'm talking to some other organisations who may want to use, you know, the Museum's unlocked approach to understand their own subject a bit better. So they'll set the agenda, they'll kind of host that day, you know, they'll offer their own content and share their own content, but also have an opportunity to
01:04:14
Speaker
have things disseminated that way, but also learn from others. So yeah, it's a new sort of sharing, you know, it isn't, and I, I hope, and, you know, I, and I think actually, you know, the really museums unlocked is the sort of grassroots approach to understanding heritage, you know, that we need in a, in a whole host of other
01:04:41
Speaker
sort of context. And I think restitution, how do we join the dots in between the museum's unlock project and restitution? One day we will, I have no doubt. Excellent, excellent. So if people want to grab a copy of the book, how can they do that?
Supporting the Book & Social Media
01:04:58
Speaker
So the best way is to go on to PlutoBooks.com and to buy from the publisher direct. If they do so before
01:05:10
Speaker
December 9th, they will get half price off. So you get in the UK, the British museums is £10 in hardcover with a free ebook. That's their holiday offer. But in general, I think if you don't buy it from the publisher, ensure that you support your local bookshop.
01:05:34
Speaker
order it there while also using Amazon's review and rate function so we can counteract some of the narratives that we've already heard are out there from some of our national papers. Excellent, excellent. And if people want to follow your work, like Museums Unlocked, which is the best way to kind of follow that?
01:06:00
Speaker
So you can follow me at, which is at Poff Dan Hicks. You can also follow at Museums Unlocked, or just Google me. I mean, I'm fairly Googleable. Yeah, just search for Dan Hicks. There was a, you might get the psychedelic rocker from San Francisco from the sixties and seventies, but at the time,
01:06:28
Speaker
I'm managing to get a bit of an edge on him. So yeah, you know, your Google search for Dan Hicks.
01:06:39
Speaker
Yeah, well, links will definitely be in the show notes below as well. Well, thank you very much for spending an evening talking to me and sharing all this wonderful information and all the best to you.
01:07:05
Speaker
Why can't you see that the truth was under free? Expose this modern myth with me! A myth! Modern myth! Modern myth! Modern myth! It's a modern myth, oh yeah!
01:07:27
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.