From Places of Homage to Political Controversies

Contemporary museums are the product of the social, political and cultural developments of the last few centuries, and this book provides an important insight into the way they were established, the problems they faced, but also of some very present (and very public) modern issues and dilemmas that surround them. In many cases, what seems to be obviously ‘right’ tends to get complicated, because facts (or history or culture) get in the way. There are also important political ramifications for some discussions – especially when it comes to repatriating some very famous works of art. This is especially true for the objects that were brought to the West as a result of colonial expansion.

Despite cautionary tales about smuggling, theft, iconoclasm, censorship and neglect, the force is with those who demand the restitution of colonial collections. The director of a major European museum told me that her younger curators are convinced that every questionable piece in the collections should be ‘returned’. Yet it may not be a simple matter to restore antique works of art, or even to identify who might be their rightful owners, or reliable custodians. Do people who share a ‘culture’ (whatever that might mean), have collective rights in historical artefacts that date back centuries? Do museums that preserved and displayed foreign artefacts for a century or more retain no legitimate claim to them? (25-26)

Kuper continues, discussing some of the most famous examples:

There have been bad arguments on both sides when it comes to Lord Elgin's Athenian booty, in the judgement of [British Classicist] Mary Beard. ‘Politicians have leapt on and off the bandwagon. Successive Greek governments have found the loss of the Parthenon sculptures a convenient symbol of national unity, and demands for their restitution a low-cost and relatively risk-free campaign’. Difficult questions of principle are at stake: ‘to whom does the Parthenon, and other such world-class monuments, belong? Should cultural treasures be repatriated, or should museums be proud of their international holdings? Is the Parthenon a special case – and why? (26)

Another well-known example concerns the return of the remarkable works of art that were taken by the British following their punitive expedition against the West African kingdom of Benin in the late nineteenth century and that are now held in different museums throughout the world. This particular case has been a major issue in museum studies, but also in the political arena. It also looked like an obviously moral thing to do – for, if we know that something was stolen (the pillaging of Benin is well documented – see, for example, Hicks 2020), it is obvious that it should be returned, right? Kuper presents some of the most recent events in this debate: ‘By the 2020s pressure was building. The Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC and the Horniman Museum in London announced that they would return Benin Bronzes to Nigeria’ (26). However, things seemed to get more complicated with the case of Elgin Marbles, as they also involved local politics and even opinion polls:

There may even be a deal in the making to settle Athens's claim on the Parthenon Marbles in the British Museum. At a meeting of UNESCO in May 2021, ‘every country there ganged up against the UK’, The Times reported. A poll published by YouGov in November 2021 revealed that 59 per cent of British respondents believed that the Parthenon statues should be returned to Greece (18 per cent wanted them to stay in Britain. 22 per cent were don't knows). However, while Greece wanted acknowledgement of its ‘ownership’ of the marbles, Jonathan Williams, deputy director of the British Museum, preferred talk of loans. ‘There are many wonderful things we'd be delighted to borrow and lend,’ he said. ‘It is what we do’. (26)

Representing Others: Whose Museums?

The whole idea about representing others has been questioned in recent decades, because it also connects with other recent debates, including those around accusations of ‘disseminating racist and imperialist propaganda’ (27). Kuper continues:

Can we (Europeans, let us say) grasp the world view, the rituals, the customs, the arts of people with whom, it may seem, we have little in common, and who have reason to suspect us of racism, or at least condescension? Can we, should we, translate their ideas into our own terms? Some argue that the very act of observing and classifying others is a power play. If that is so, it may be impossible, in good faith, to undertake ethnographic research. But would you accept a stranger's self-representation on trust? After all, how many English people are able to provide reliable information on their country's history, literature, arts or religions? (27)

Of course, there is also the broader question of the purpose of museums that are supposed to represent other peoples and their cultures. How much do they represent the societies where they are located, with their own (‘non-other’) characteristics? And who are the actual consumers of the goods that museums are offering on display? Kuper is very clear in expressing his own view about the distinction between ethnographic and ‘non-ethnographic’ museums:

What is the Museum of Other People about? What is it a museum of? In 1988, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London commissioned six posters that advertised the V&A as: ‘An ace caff, with quite a nice museum attached’. One poster asked: ‘Where else do they give you £100,000,000 worth of objets d'art free with every egg salad?’ What slogan might be blazoned on a poster to advertise the Museum of Other People in the twenty-first century? (Under a different name, it goes without saying.) (27)

Kuper takes his readers on a journey through different projects of establishing museums. For example, when referring to French geographer Edme François Jomard, who was crucial in establishing the first ethnographic museum in Paris, in the early nineteenth century:

All human beings share certain common needs, Jomard began. Even ‘savages’ make tools that help them to satisfy these needs (for food, shelter, defence and so on). At a more advanced stage, the arts, sciences and religion develop. Objects of the same ‘genre’, which perform similar functions, should be placed together. So, for instance, Jomard proposed to exhibit weapons from around the world – antique or ethnographic – in a single display, arranged in a series from primitive to civilised. And there would be virtually no limit to the geographical range of the collection. ‘With the exception of civilised Europe, practically the whole of the inhabited globe furnished suitable materials’. So there, in plain sight, was the Other: the whole world beyond ‘civilised Europe’. (38)

The first two parts of the book are dedicated to the establishment of museums in Europe and the Americas. The roles of some key figures in both the history of anthropology and history in general are also mentioned. There were also more general influences as new theories were being developed and new discoveries being presented, so Kuper also discusses the important impact that Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–1833) had on young Darwin, who took the books for his voyage on the HMS Beagle (64). The new intellectual currents of the nineteenth century gave rise to the founding of early museums in Britain, so

in 1884, Pitt Rivers persuaded Oxford University to take the bulk of his collection and to exhibit it in perpetuity, on the typological–ideological lines that he had developed, in an institution to be called the Pitt Rivers Museum. He added a clause in his deed of gift that ‘a Lecturer shall be appointed . . . who shall yearly give Lectures at Oxford on Anthropology’. Edward Burnett Tylor, Christy's old travelling companion, was appointed, and he held the post of ‘reader in anthropology’ from 1884 to 1895. This was the first position in anthropology in a British university. (70)

In Germany, there was an interesting combination of an enlightened ruler and one of the greatest world explorers of all time, who also happened to serve on his court:

The king of Prussia took great pride in his reluctant courtier, Alexander von Humboldt, who combined scientific expertise, humanist sensibility and the glamour of an explorer. Humboldt was a friend of Goethe. The young Charles Darwin was inspired by his travel writing. Thomas Jefferson said he was ‘the most scientific man of his age’. Yet whenever Humboldt was back home from his travels, he was expected to be in attendance at the palace, the Berliner Schloss, dressed in court uniform, and prepared to read to the king after dinner.

It was not only the courts that looked to the sciences and the arts to confer prestige. Good taste, intellectual sophistication and artistic connections were marks of caste for the rising educated bourgeoisie. Societies sprang up to support causes ranging from Richard Wagner's music festivals in Bayreuth to art galleries, aquariums, zoological gardens – and rival ethnographic museums in Berlin, Dresden, Hamburg, Leipzig and Munich. (73)

With all the different personalities and their roles in museums and other types of collections, Kuper also explores the history of anthropology from a unique perspective. For example, he writes about the librarian from Leipzig Gustav Klemm (74–77) – the key figure for the development of anthropology in Germany – whose ideas about culture influenced Tylor (Bošković 2010: 76; 2021: 86) but who remains poorly known outside academia. There is also an important mention of Adolf Bastian, probably the most important scholar for the establishment of the discipline in Germany and the man who hired Boas to work in the Berlin Museum in 1885, sending him later to do research in North America:

Bastian's signature contribution was his notion of ‘elementary ideas’ (Elementargedanken). The basic proposition here was that if indeed all human beings have a similar mind set (the ‘psychic unity of mankind’), then they must share some fundamental ideas. This was, after all, a fairly orthodox reading of Immanuel Kant's theory of knowledge. Kant argued that intuitions about space, time and causation were innate and universal. (80)

Kuper also discusses the role of museums in the professionalisation of French ethnography after 1928. The question of political positions taken (or not taken) is very important, and here he quotes another brilliant (and not very widely known) scholar and writer, Michel Leiris, who was writing in his diary about the times when the Musée de l'Homme was established:

What was going on was a rebellion against Western civilisation, plain and simple. I truly thought that so-called primitive societies were superior to ours. It was a kind of inverted racism. You might say that it took me a very long time to realise that within these splendid societies that ethnographers study there could be idiots and assholes exactly as in ours . . . But in the end, what matters and what is, I think, really important is that our first political position was an anti-colonialist position . . . we were concerned about the situation of colonised peoples well before we were concerned about the situation of the proletariat . . . We were much more inclined to be solidary with ‘exotic’ oppressed people than with oppressed people living here. (96–97)

The Musée de l'Homme was formally opened on 20 June 1938 by the last president of the French Third Republic, Albert Lebrun. The museum's director, Paul Rivet, organised a parade of colonial troops, because, as he put it, ‘our museum is first and foremost a colonial museum’. An ethnographic museum, he wrote, should be ‘an instrument of cultural and colonial propaganda’, one of its functions being to serve as a ‘precious and indispensable centre’ of documentation for colonial officials (98). Of course, Leiris (1996) wrote extensively about the French colonial exploits and phantasms, starting with ‘Phantom Africa’ in 1934, and the whole history of French ethnographic museums was already explored in great detail by de L'Estoile (2003, 2007, 2008). In recent decades, the inauguration of the brand new Musée du Quai Branly – Jacques Chirac has been a source of pride (for the French state), awe (for some segments of the public), but also of disappointments, for people like me, who still believe that, with all its imperfections, the Musée de l'Homme was much better organised and presented its ethnographic collections in a more accessible way for the public.

Kuper's book offers a unique perspective not only on the history of the discipline, but also on the practitioners’ views of the world and themselves. As such, it is also a kind of a history of anthropology with many fascinating details. Some lesser-known figures from anthropology's history get the credit that they deserve (for example, Frank Hamilton Cushing's work amongst the Zuni and Hopi, 1879–1884 [131–134]), and Kuper also continues the lines of enquiry that he already developed in some of his earlier works (Kuper 2005) – for example, when quoting Regna Darnell about a ‘foundation myth about Franz Boas’ in Chapter 7. Contrary to the popular image of very distinctive developments of anthropology on two sides of the Atlantic, Kuper points to important points of convergence and continuities between British and American anthropological traditions, especially since Tylor's 1884 visit and his lecture to the Anthropological Society of Washington (144–148).

Kuper shows, with great skill and expertise, how museums are not only ‘good to think’, but also important places for the (re)production of knowledge, for dialogues between societies and their cultures, and key points for communicating cultural differences. In doing so, it is important to note that he also presents a kind of an ‘anthropology of anthropology’ – he refers to numerous scholars (some of them his colleagues) and takes full advantage of the insights they were willing to share. This is a remarkable work, one of the most important books for understanding the debates about conflicting identities that are becoming so pervasive in the first decades of the new millennium.

Aleksandar Bošković

E-mail: aleksandarbos@gmail.com

ORCID: 0000-0002-5411-6848