5/8/2021 Decolonising museums isn’t part of a ‘culture war’.

ure war’. It’s about keeping them relevant | Dan Hicks | The Guardian

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Decolonising museums isn’t part of a ‘culture

war’. It’s about keeping them relevant
Dan Hicks

Fri 7 May 2021 10.30 BST

T
he dead don’t bury themselves. This is one of the first lessons that every
student of archaeology must learn. A grave is never evidence of some
Pompeii moment, a freeze-frame of someone as they were in life. It shows
how that person was treated in death and by posterity.

This was thrown into relief with the publication of the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission’s report on historical inequalities in commemoration. Entrenched
prejudices, preconceptions and pervasive racism of contemporary imperial
attitudes, the document explains, led to hundreds of thousands of instances of the
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unequal commemoration or non-commemoration of African, Asian, Middle Eastern

and Caribbean people who fought for Britain in the first and second world wars.
Claire Horton, director general of the commission, responded, “We will act to right
the wrongs of the past.” “I welcome the fact that the commission … will make
amends wherever possible,” chimed in the prime minister.

As the report was published, in the US a national debate about the human remains
of Black people – in the context of not war memorials but the storerooms of
museums – was gathering momentum. In July 2020, the University of
Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology apologised for its
“unethical possession” of more than 1,300 skulls assembled by Samuel George
Morton in the century for the pseudo-science of craniometry. Then, in mid-
February, a report by doctoral student Paul Wolff Mitchell revealed that the Morton
collection includes the grave-robbed skulls of 14 African Americans – dug up in the
1840s from a burial ground adjacent to the site on which Penn Museum now stands.

The ethical treatment of human remains is hardly a new topic, but as this debate has
spread to Harvard and Princeton, it’s clearly one where public dialogue is quickly
shifting. When Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (where I work) reopened after the first
lockdown in September 2020, all human remains were removed from display, and
the famous “Treatment of Dead Enemies” case was dismantled. That 100-year-old
exhibit promoted the racist myth that “headhunting” represents a coherent type of
“savage” culture, while suggesting that the purpose of a “world culture” museum is
to display what was taken from opponents of the British Empire.

Since the 1990s, the return of human remains has become a normal part of
curatorial practice in UK museums. London’s Natural History Museum returned the
human remains of 37 Indigenous people to South Australia’s Narungga community
in March 2019. But this is a tiny proportion of what is held. Precise numbers are hard
to come by, and little progress has been made since 2003, when a scoping exercise
undertaken for the Ministerial Working Group on Human Remains indicated that
England’s museums contain the remains of more than 60,000 people across 132
institutions, including perhaps 18,000 from overseas.

Questions about human skulls, bones, and specimens of hair and skin have
gradually expanded to encompass ancestral cultural objects taken under
colonialism. Today, restitution is as likely to involve artefacts as human remains. In
November 2019 Manchester museum returned 43 secret ceremonial Indigenous
Australian items. Mangubadijarri Yanner, representing the Gangalidda Garawa
Native Title Aboriginal Corporation, observed that this return was “important and
necessary for the purpose of cultural revitalisation – because locked deep within
these items is our lore; our histories, our traditions and our stories”.

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Britain’s museums sorely need such cultural revitalisation right now, and the
question of human remains and artefacts offers a position from which to see debates
around museums in a clearer light. Some may seek to marginalise these acts of
transparency, return and repair, or to denigrate museum colleagues seeking to
advance professional ethical practice, dismissing them as “activists”.

The outdated view persists that curators should restrict themselves to writing
history while keeping collections preserved in amber. There’s a palpable nostalgia
among some board members, directors, and museum friends’ associations for the
reassuring voice of curatorial authority. For evidence of how that particular ship has
sailed, consider the swift backtracking on plans to impose a chronological structure
on the art and design collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum. This retrograde
step would have integrated sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas into the Asian
department, redolent, as craft historian and author Tanya Harrod points out, of a
“west and the rest” framing.

The conservative position is that to “decolonise is to decontextualise”. But anti-

racism in museums isn’t about pretending that colonialism never happened. It
begins with not pretending any longer that colonialism and its consequences are
wholly in the past. Some of Britain’s colonial-era museums may try to keep on
simply displaying, narrating, and thus reinscribing histories of dispossession,
violence and atrocity. Others will be open to dismantling colonial infrastructure
where it’s making outdated worldviews and institutional racism endure. Sometimes
the context changes without you.

Acting to right wrongs in the treatment and commemoration of the dead is not
unpatriotic or iconoclastic, but an urgent task of truth and repair among the living.
For museums, this demands a new openness to transformation, driven by equitable
partnerships with the audiences, stakeholders and communities that museums
serve, and from whom they derive social legitimacy. At present, the gap between
London’s largest national museums and those people with the closest ties to world
culture collections, both internationally and in the city, is widening. How can this
gap be addressed?

One precedent here is how professional standards for managing and caring for
Britain’s historic built environment have evolved over the past three decades.
Values-led conservation decision-making is displacing entrenched, elitist art-
historical accounts of value based on connoisseurship and the architectural canon,
with approaches that centre the significance invested by people in the places that
they love. We need this ethos in our museums, replacing hierarchy and traditional
authority with civic values driving change. Museums have transformed themselves
before, for instance, through free access. In these changed times, how can we

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address what Arts Council England’s Let’s Create strategy document names as its
investment principles of “inclusivity and relevance”?

Let’s be transparent about the tens of thousands of human remains taken under
colonialism that languish in our museum storerooms. Let’s be open to the return of
stolen cultural objects, remaking international relationships with credibility and
honesty. Let’s dismantle structures of inequality, exclusion and racism where these
endure from the colonial era in our institutions. These aren’t iconoclastic attacks on
museums, as some will claim, or part of some “culture war”. They are overdue
measures to keep Britain’s global museums in step with an ever-changing world.

Dan Hicks is professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford

and author of The Brutish Museums

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