KENAN MALIK Museums used to be dusty repositories
of arcane artefacts. Today they are fast becoming sites of conflict and controversy.
JACK LOHMAN I think it's high time for museums
to behave morally towards their collections and towards the communities that
they serve.
LOLA YOUNG The problem with some of those collections
is not just about the way in which they're collected; it's about the motivation
behind them. So if something is collected in order to, for example, demonstrate
the superiority of Europeans, the inferiority of Africans or Indians so called
other peoples, then that is obviously highly problematic.
MICHAEL BROWN The problem is that if you try
and do an exhibit that doesn't offend somebody, you end up with an exhibit
that's so uninteresting and insipid that it's really of no use at all.
KENAN MALIK Jack Lohman, director of the Museum
of London, cultural consultant Dame Lola Young and Michael Brown, professor
of anthropology at Williams College, Massachusetts. What does it mean for
museums to act morally? Should they become more socially relevant by promoting
the cultural aspirations of the communities they serve and whose artefacts
they display? Is it right for museums to hold on to objects that belong to
other cultures? The great museums of the West are largely the products of
Empire. In our more enlightened times, curators seem increasingly unsure what
to make of their own collections. Robert Foley, Professor of Human Evolution
at Cambridge University and former director of the University's Duckworth
Museum.
ROBERT FOLEY I think there's certainly a crisis
of confidence in many museum people and the communities that work there, that
museums have a particular image in relation to the places from which much
of their material has come and they feel that in a way building relationships
with emerging nations and communities is an important way of trying to restore
the notion of museums. I personally think that museums, on the other hand,
should not be ashamed of their past. I think if we look at what we find in
the British Museum or we find in the great museums of Europe, we have saved
there a history of the world which might otherwise have easily have been lost
and which now acts to inform people in ways that can only be for the good.
KENAN MALIK But did the British Museum save
the world or just plunder it? For many people, the critical question in judging
a museum is how it acquired its collections. Among the British Museum's most
prized possessions are the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes. In the early
nineteenth century, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin,
removed from the Parthenon in Athens of some of its best statues and friezes
and sold them to the British Museum. Nearly a century later a punitive British
expedition to Benin (in modern day Nigeria) looted some of the nation's best
art treasures. Today there are vocal campaigns for the Marbles and the Bronzes
to be returned to Greece and to Nigeria. Neil MacGregor, director of the British
Museum, thinks, however, that both are better displayed in London.
NEIL MACGREGOR In the British Museum you can
see how that Greek art emerges from a whole tradition of the Eastern Mediterranean
and how it invigorates a different tradition in Rome, India and the rest of
Europe. In the British Museum, they are clearly one of the great achievements
of the whole of mankind.
KENAN MALIK Would you say the same for the display
of the Benin bronzes, for instance?
NEIL MACGREGOR I would say very much the same
of the Benin bronzes. One of the extraordinary things about the Benin bronzes
is that when they arrived in London, they completely transformed the way people
in Europe thought about Africa. It was the presence of the Benin bronzes and
the extraordinary sophistication of making that made it completely impossible
for Europeans to go on thinking of Africa as not having its own culture and
a very great culture. The circumstances of the taking of the Benin bronzes
were violent, as we all know, and there's a great deal to be said and debated
about what happened there. But if we look at what happened when they arrived,
it seems to me that from then on it was totally beneficial. It changed the
way Europeans thought of Africa and it enriched a worldwide cultural tradition.
KENAN MALIK But isn't it unethical for museums
to cling on to items that were originally looted or stolen? Not necessarily,
Neil MacGregor argues. The importance of the British Museum to the world today,
he suggests, outweighs the dubious provenance of some of its artefacts.
NEIL MACGREGOR I think the purpose of the British
Museum is to allow people to see that all the societies of the world and all
the cultures of the world are interconnected. That's the one big thing that
the British Museum, better than any other museum in the world probably, can
allow you to do – to see the oneness of humanity.
KENAN MALIK Viewing the interconnectedness of
cultures and peoples, is that what you mean when you describe the British
Museum as a 'world museum'?
NEIL MACGREGOR I think the British Museum is
in a sense the memory of mankind, as Ben Okri said. And the extraordinary
thing about it is that it was set up in 1753 to gather together things from
all over the world, but always to be held open free to people from anywhere
in the world. So from the beginning, this very idealistic notion, if you like,
of trustees holding for the entire world the means of understanding the entire
world.
KENAN MALIK A cynic might suggest that ‘world
museum’ is just a fancy phrase to allow the British Museum to cling
on to its treasures After all, the museum may be free to anyone in the world
but most people in the world can't take advantage of its largesse. Yet it's
not just rich tourists or white middle class Britons who benefit from the
Museum's treasures. Around 30 per cent of Londoners are non-white and the
fastest growing population is African. In an age in which museums are seeking
to be socially inclusive, some curators believe that cultural objects from
around the world should be used to attract groups - such as African-Caribbeans
or Asians - who might otherwise walk right past their doors. Lola Young was
until recently head of cultural policy for the Great London Authority. Does
she agree with this approach?
LOLA YOUNG It's important for diaspora peoples
from wherever can see those objects in their newly adopted or more recently
adopted homelands. I don't have a problem with that. Where I have a problem
is where that is wheeled out as a reason or an excuse when the objects and
artifacts themselves aren't treated with appropriate respect. If we look,
for example, at the so-called Hottentot Venus, Sara Bartman, who came to Europe
in about 1810. When she died in Paris, in 1815, her body was subsequently
put on display in the Musee de l'Homme and was on display until the middle
of the 20th century - until the late 20th century actually - despite many
requests for her remains to be returned. They were finally returned to South
Africa to the Koikoi tribe in 2002 and this was after some negotiation between
Jacques Chirac and Nelson Mandela. There is a symbolic value attached to the
Hottentot Venus because she was held up to be something that was completely
anonymous, sub-human, and that attitude towards Africans from Europeans became
literally embodied in her body both alive and dead.
KENAN MALIK An exhibit such as the Hottentot
Venus may be a thing of the past. But Western museums still hold tens of thousands
of human remains - skulls, skeletons, bones. And even more than artefacts,
such remains generate anger and controversy, and demands from source communities
for their return and reburial - as the Museum of London's Jack Lohman experienced
first hand when he was living in South Africa.
JACK LOHMAN I think I went through one of the
most traumatic periods of my life living in South Africa. I was looking after
the National museum in South Afruca which is oldest in Africa. It has 788
human remains in boxes. And I remember one day I had a delegation of 70 people
storm into my office and say to me: 'We are not leaving your office until
you release the human remains in the museum'. I'm not sure whether museums
should be mass graves. For me there’s an issue whether museums are the
right place to be holding on to this material. We began a process of returning
these various trophies if you like back to their communities. It was a very
dramatic moment. It really influences and makes me think very hard about what
we keep in museums. I think culture is a sort of human right. And therefore
giving those cultures to whom those objects or artefacts belong to. I think
it's part of restoring human rights.
KENAN MALIK The debate about human remains has
been especially fierce in America, Australia and New Zealand, where guilt
about the treatment of indigenous peoples - Native Americans, Aborigines and
Maoris - runs deep. Museums in these countries have thrown open their storage
rooms, and returned thousands of bones to source communities for burial. In
Britain the government-appointed Working Group on Human Remains recently published
its report on what to do with the remains held by English museums. Its chairman
is barrister Norman Palmer, Professor of Law, Art and Cultural Property at
London University.
NORMAN PALMER We, to a large extent, base our
recommendations on the need to treat indigenous people in the same way or
a truly analogous way to that in which other people are treated. Let me give
you some examples. Under English law certain people have the overriding right
to the delivery up of members of their family for burial. Those are the personal
representatives. It might be the executors if there is a will or administrators.
If there isn't, this is an absolute right by law and no counter argument,
for example of the scientific value of research, can be allowed by law to
defeat that right. In the report what we are saying is what argument is there
for treating indigenous peoples differently when their remains are in museums
rather than in hospitals. If we're going to adopt notions of family, kinship
and ancestry, we should be careful not to confine these in any insular or
arbitrary or discriminatory way to Western notions or paradigms of kinship
and ancestry and family. So that if people have within their own community
- and this would be the community from which the remains emanated in the first
place - a relationship or responsibility towards the remains, which was akin
to that under their own culture of close family or direct genealogical descendents,
then we would say they too should have the right to say what should happen
to their family. We are not so insular as to believe that our way is the only
way.
KENAN MALIK Most people would understand if
museums had to release human remains to close relatives. But does it make
sense to insist that bones thousands of years old are off-limits for study
or display because a particular culture views even remote ancestors as close
kin? In any case who exactly are indigenous groups? And how do we know what
they want? Michael Brown, Professor of Anthropology at Williams College, Massachusetts,
and author of Who Owns Native Culture?.
MICHAEL BROWN Where indigenous peoples have
formally recognised political organisations that are recognised by the state
and are authorised to make and develop policies, then that's the group that
one deals with. Now internal to the community, of course, there may be great
debates about whether elected political leaders or even traditional authorities
of one sort or another have the power and the authority to make those decisions.
Who do you talk to? How do you get the consent that you feel you need before
you can move forward? Even the question of who is indigenous gets extremely
vexed as indigenous peoples inter-marry with non-native communities. I mean
right now American Indians have the highest rate of out marriage of any ethnic
group in the United States. And that's a problem that people are wrestling
with in North America, they're starting to wrestle with in Australia. And
that's going to be the next battleground - trying to determine who qualifies
as indigenous in the first place.
KENAN MALIK Indeed, some anthropologists argue,
indigenous people are not just difficult to define, they are a Western invention.
Adam Kuper, Professor of Anthropology at Brunel University.
ADAM KUPER These are the people who in the 19th
century were described by anthropologists as so-called primitive people -
hunters and gatherers living in far flung parts of the world. They were seen
as being somehow at the bottom of the evolutionary chain. Today, a hundred
and fifty years later, after anthropologists completely deconstructed these
notions of hunter gatherers, of primitives, of racial exclusivity, all these
Victorian notions are being reconstituted with the support of NGOs, World
Bank, United Nations in order to construct a new category - the indigenous
peoples of the world - who are identical, it turns out, to these primitive
peoples. And they are thought to have some sort of stable culture which dates
back before colonialism, which must be somehow reconstructed, handed back
to these people. It's phoney ethnography. It seems to me mumbo jumbo anthropology.
KENAN MALIK Mumbo jumbo anthropology it may
be but it has captured the imagination of many in the West. So much so that
even when there are no claimants to bones or artifacts, museums insist on
burying them. You might think that a government would only bother to set up
a Working Group on Human Remains, and consider changing the law, if there's
a real issue to address. Think again. There have only ever been 31 claims
for the return of human remains held in British museums. But some curators
want to do the moral thing anyway. Jack Lohman of the Museum of London.
JACK LOHMAN Thanks to a very generous grant
from the Wellcome Trust we are researching the plague pits. The greater part
of the sample is male. The majority have come from local monasteries. Generations
of monks etc. So obviously monks do play around but the majority won't have
had ancestors as such, and therefore to try and track down ancestors would
be a very difficult task and probably a very expensive task, and would involve
DNA testing the whole of London probably. We've got huge amounts of material.
But there's not enough information about them. I've got 9 curators of human
remains in the museum. It's more curators than possibly any other national
museum in Europe working on human remains or possibly any other University
department studying human remains at the moment, and that is because we’ve
got such a large volume of them that we need to go through them. When we've
finished, we plan to put them in a, ideally in a catacomb where they can be
sealed up. Once we've done them then the time will be to place them somewhere
beyond the museum.
KENAN MALIK Is that not just for your benefit
and nobody else's. After all nobody is claiming those bones. So is it not
a way of assuaging your moral guilt about those bones?
JACK LOHMAN If you have collections of male
monks who gave their life to the church and you have 10 thousand of them let's
say, I think there is a moral obligation to place them in sacred ground not
keep them in the museum.
KENAN MALIK But museums have a responsibility
not so much to the dead as to the living. And part of that responsibility
is to use the dead to elicit knowledge that might benefit us. Here's Robert
Foley of Cambridge University.
ROBERT FOLEY They're an absolutely fundamental
source of information about human history, especially global human history.
And of course because they're the bodies of people that lived, they tell us
about their life, their death, their diseases, whether they were healthy,
whether they died in combat or from some other illness and so on. So it's
a rich history from which we have really learnt so much about humans not just
as European history but as the whole global phenomenon. There are examples
where human remains have been used for medical advances - various research
done into sort of orthopaedic surgery, obviously a lot of work done in forensics
in the ability to identify people and so on. So there is a utility to it,
but I think it's wrong to say that that is the primary driving force. It is
in no doubt that this sort of work is basically curiosity driven in the sense
we're looking for knowledge for its own sake. One example is the way in which
we now think of humans as having evolved in Africa. Fifty years ago we weren't
thinking about an African origin. Fifty years ago, we were thinking in terms
say of racial categories. We don't think in that way now. So new questions
come up and we need to re-examine material with those new ideas in mind.
KENAN MALIK There are, though, tens of thousands
of bones in museums. Do scientists really need them all? Michael Brown of
Williams College.
MICHAEL BROWN There have been studies done of
the percentage of Native American remains, held by US museums that haven't
been studied by anybody and it's a shockingly low percentage. Well under a
quarter of them have never been catalogued in the most elementary way, and
we're talking about as many as hundred thousand individuals represented in
these collections at the national level. So the question that Indians ask
is 'Well, If these bones are so darn important to you, why is it that you
haven't done anything with them for the past hundred years?'
KENAN MALIK What worries scientists, though,
is that bones that might be vital to research may be lost forever. Robert
Foley.
ROBERT FOLEY If the Palmer Report in all its
recommendations was implemented, I think it would have a major impact on our
research. The onus would be on us as the holders of collections to as it were
go out and find either biological descendents or cultural descendents or related
groups or national or local institutions which might want that material back.
That would be a vast undertaking which I think would absolutely devastate
the resources that most collections have available to them. The return of
material would mean that the collections would lose a very significant part
of human diversity.
NORMAN PALMER The report says nothing of the
kind. The report says that in certain circumstances museums should have an
obligation to identify those people who are sufficiently closely related to
the remains to be entitled to request them back. It makes it perfectly plains
in the notes to recommendation 15 that 'identify' means respond to a claim
and try to verify whether that claim is justified or not.
KENAN MALIK Norman Palmer. Whoever is right
in this - and even members of the Working Group disagree on the implications
of the report - the final decision rests with the government. It's just published
a consultation paper asking for responses to the Palmer report - but there
is no indication of its own views on the matter.
And it's not just bones that scientists fear losing. Artifacts too are being
lost as museums accede to the demands of indigenous groups. Harvard University's
Peabody Museum deliberately allowed a historic set of photographs to disintegrate
because the Navajo tribe objected to non-tribal members viewing the rituals
they depicted. There are other ways, too, in which objects are being lost,
as anthropologist Michael Brown points out.
MICHAEL BROWN Certainly when objects are returned
to Indian tribes through the repatriation process, the tribes are free to
do what they like with these objects and in some cases tribes have made it
absolutely clear that their intention is to reintegrate them into ongoing
rituals until such time as the objects are essentially worn out and discarded.
And so in that sense, I guess, there is a destruction of objects and of information
associated with it.
KENAN MALIK 'So what?', you might say. It's
their culture, their artifacts, they can destroy them if they want to. For
too long, argues Lola Young, Western nations have been exploiting non-Western
peoples. We've got to get used to the idea that we can't do what we like with
other people's cultures, whether these consist of bones, artifacts or even
symbols.
LOLA YOUNG If we look at the Olympic Games in
Australia in Sydney. It was very clear that the Australian authorities wanted
to promote Australia as a country that had come to terms with its past and
opened its arms, as it were, to diversity. Now the extent to which some of
the Aboriginal people feel that that is actually the case and how that actually
pans out on a day-to-day basis for them is another question altogether. So
I think that that's absolutely legitimate that a group of people should then
say well we want to have some sort of control over how we're portrayed and
how our symbols and our symbolism are used.
KENAN MALIK In one current court case in Australia,
Aborigines are demanding that the national airline Quantas stop using the
kangaroo logo as it's an Aboriginal symbol. In another case, they are seeking
copyright over all photographs and paintings of the Australian landscape which
they say is central to their spiritual life. Where will this end? Must the
British government approve every production of King Lear and Othello? Should
only Jamaicans be able to play reggae? Professor Adam Kuper of Brunel University.
ADAM KUPER I think the notion of ownership is
certainly meaningful and one could own objects which you might describe as
cultural objects because you had made them or you had designed them or you
had bought them, but to claim some sort of ownership on the grounds of descent
from a group of people who might in the distant past once have invented those
objects seems to me to be bizarre, seems to me absolutely impossible. Are
we going to, as English people, ask others to pay a copyright fee when they
play cricket? It’s ridiculous.
KENAN MALIK Ridiculous it may be, but cultural
bureaucrats seem hooked on the idea. UNESCO has suggested that 'each indigenous
people must retain permanent control over all elements of its own heritage',
including 'songs, stories, scientific knowledge and artworks.' It has even
suggested the setting up of 'folklore protection boards'. UNESCO's push to
protect every culture, Michael Brown argues, is counterproductive.
MICHAEL BROWN Every culture or every nation
is supposed to have members of its culture provide inventories of all elements
that are subject to protection, but of course that is protecting by making
something public. That runs foul of the sense of many Aboriginal Australian
and Native American groups that certain kinds of information simply should
not be made public, should only be held and used by whatever sub-group of
the population – typically religious leaders – is empowered to
use it safely and effectively. At the local level indigenous peoples themselves
are moving towards greater and greater secrecy.
KENAN MALIK Isn’t there also a case of
a native American group trying to dissuade outsiders from learning its language
so as to be able to better protect its culture?
MICHAEL BROWN Well I was told that people, contract
workers who work in Zuni, New Mexico, are specifically prohibited from learning
the language of the Zuni people, the assumption being – as you mentioned
earlier – that learning the language gives them access to ritual secrets
and others forms of understanding that they simply should not have access
to.
KENAN MALIK In a different context though, would
we not call this xenophobia or racism?
MICHAEL BROWN Well it's true - if the shoe were
on the other foot, if Anglo Americans were forbidding native Americans from
speaking English, it would be considered a completely unacceptable racist
policy.
KENAN MALIK The campaign for the repatriation
of artifacts and remains, and for the protection of minority cultures, is
motivated by the best of intentions. Its consequences, though, can be deeply
troubling. It presents an idea of culture as fixed and immutable, and as something
that people own by virtue of their biological ancestry - an almost racial
view of the world. Many museums now accede to demands from indigenous groups
that in any other context would be seen as unacceptable. Some, for instance,
ban women or non-tribal people from viewing certain parts of their collections.
Others prefer to hide objects away in basementS rather than risk causing offence.
This confusion and insecurity on the part of museums needs to be sorted out,
says Norman Palmer - particularly where human remains are concerned.
NORMAN PALMER The existence of all these questions
argues incontrovertibly for an independent resolution process. These questions
must be examined. We do not say that one side is incontrovertibly right or
wrong. What we say to each side is if you’ve got a good, arguable case,
submit that case to independent evaluation.
KENAN MALIK Do you think there should be binding
guidelines on museums as to how they should approach the question of human
remains that they possess in their collections?
NORMAN PALMER Our position is that the position
of human remains – again similarly to those in hospitals – the
position of human remains in museums is sufficiently important that it should
be subject to regulation by a code of practice. This code of practice would
be enforced, if you like, through a licensing system and museums granted the
licence would depend upon its adherence to the code of practice.
KENAN MALIK Museums are not keen on enforced
guidelines, preferring a case-by-case approach to every dispute. But, says
the British Museum's Neil MacGregor, there is one area where binding international
agreements are not only welcome but may defuse many of the currents disputes
about cultural repatriation.
NEIL MACGREGOR We have in the last thirty, forty
years, with the growth of international exhibitions, seen an unparalleled
sharing of world culture. There has never been such universal access to the
culture of the whole world as there has in the last thirty years because of
the phenomenon of exhibitions. That has of course been focused overwhelmingly
on the rich countries of the world. I think the challenge is to allow as many
of our objects as possible to be seen in different contexts - in the contexts
of our own museums and in other contexts round the world - including, of course,
and especially, the countries of origin. So what we need is a legal framework
that will enable that to happen.
KENAN MALIK What you're saying is that you'd
like to build a series of universal museums across the world?
NEIL MACGREGOR Absolutely. I think what we need
across the world are series of the experiences of universal museums through
temporary exhibitions and revolving loans, but we need a legal framework that
would allow that to happen.
KENAN MALIK The idea of a universal museum may
not be fashionable these days. But Neil MacGregor's vision seems to me highly
commendable. We shouldn't be ashamed of the treasures possessed by great institutions
such as the British Museum. Nor of the Enlightenment ideal of a museum as
an institution that can help create more universal forms of knowledge by collecting
from across ages and cultures. Cultures are not private property. They belong
to us all.