The Brutish Museums by Dan Hicks

Author:Dan Hicks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pluto Press

The transformation of sacred and royal material culture into not things, but objects, through the twin devices of the market and the museum, constitutes a further dimension to the processes of colonialism in its most modern and violent fin-de-siècle forms as seen in the Benin-Niger-Soudan Expedition.

The Euro-American anthropology museum constitutes a further space of containment, in Fanon’s terms, of chosification in Césaire’s terms, of mummification, statuefication and fetishisation in those of Mbembe. In this transformation of life and substance museums became a key regime of practice through which Africans were dehumanised. Here brutish museums like the Pitt Rivers where I work have compounded killings, cultural destructions and thefts with the propaganda of race science, with the normalisation of the display of human cultures in material form. An act of dehumanisation in the face of dispossession lies at the heart of the operation of the brutish museums. A major part of what is involved here, I want to suggest, can be described as chronopolitics. This involved more than being denied a place in the contemporary world, as was the thesis of Johannes Fabian in his crucial book Time and the Other, although the early modern practice of the nascent anthropological gaze, which collapsed space into time so that it appeared that the further from the metropolis the European travelled, the further back in time they went, until reaching the Stone Age in Tasmania, or Tierra del Fuego, etc.,4 is certainly one element. But more than just the denial of what Fabian called ‘coevalness’ – a verbal assertion that two living human groups were living in incommensurable time periods – there was a double process of material change that was effected through which whole cultures really were stripped of their technologies, had their living landscapes transformed into ruins – and had these moments of violence extended across time, memorialised, through the technology of the anthropology museum.

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The origins of Pitt-Rivers’s idea of the typological museum were militarist.5 It is not just that his first collection began in the 1850s as a museum of arms: more than that, it was ‘his classification of the museum of weapons, etc.’, wrote Edward Burnett Tylor after seeing its first public display in Bethnal Green, that led Augustus Pitt-Rivers ‘to form his theories’.6 Pitt-Rivers’s account of how to extend a Darwinian conception of the evolution of nature into the much messier, more complex, world of material culture, began with three lectures he gave on ‘Primitive Warfare’ at the Royal United Service Institution in 1866 and 1867.7 Pitt-Rivers’s interest in arranging weapons by ‘type’, and then each ‘type’ into hypothetical ‘series’, was to demonstrate – through public displays in Bethnal Green from 1873, in South Kensington from 1878, and in Oxford from 1884 – how small innovations in design have incrementally significant effects when taking place at scale. Central to Pitt-Rivers’s vision of what he called ‘the evolution of culture’ was what he called ‘the degenerate descendants of people in a higher phase of culture’, where a

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