The Museum of Other People — who owns history?

Starting in Europe around the 1830s, they flourished mightily in the second half of the 19th century as colonial powers swept across Africa and Oceania: museums displaying the exotic world of remote peoples who lived far away or long ago. Their main purpose, in all its enlightenment arrogance, was to demonstrate what Europeans and then Americans saw as the long upward path to civilisation — and the more “primitive” or grotesque the objects on display, the better.

These were what Adam Kuper calls “the museums of other people”, and in an enjoyable narrative he tracks their development across the western world, from Copenhagen to Berlin, from Paris to Washington DC. But in today’s very different world, he suggests they may be heading towards terminal decline. They began to lose their way in the period of decolonisation after the second world war, and the mood has darkened in more recent years, when empire guilt and the impact of Black Lives Matter have raised big questions about the very existence of such institutions.

Pressure has mounted for the return of objects that are seen to be an important part of the identity of countries in Africa and beyond, such as the Ethiopian treasures in the V&A or the Benin Bronzes scattered across the museums of the west. New institutions like the wonderful National Museum of African American History & Culture in Washington have told stories in a different way, focusing on particular peoples rather than attempting some kind of universal narrative.

Should we care? Kuper, visiting professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics, says that we should, and whether you agree or not, the argument he makes in The Museum of Other People is important precisely because just about no one else is making it. He asks questions that others are too shy to pose, such as why are Nigeria’s museums unable to display the 500 Benin Bronzes in their collections, or do people who share a culture (whatever that might mean) have collective rights in historical artefacts that date back centuries? Don’t museums which have preserved them for a century or more have any legitimate claim?

And he doesn’t pull his punches when it comes to a good number of institutions he thinks have sold out in one way or another. He deplores the “slew of vapid New Age platitudes” in Washington’s National Museum of the American Indian, and he criticises the British Museum for how it swallowed up the Museum of Mankind in 2004 and the heavy-handed way in which it closed the department of ethnography.

But he reserves his special scorn for Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum, mocking its approach to restitution and to decolonising the collection. Pitt Rivers, home to Oxford university’s archaeological and anthropological collections, refused to let him have a photo for his book of its famous display of shrunken heads: “The image you suggest is of the display which was removed last summer out of respect for the people involved,” he was told.

“The people involved!” thunders Kuper (deploying his own italics). “Who were they, who consulted them . . and why were they . . . given the right to determine the policy of a famous and long-established university museum?”

The great question now is about what purpose these museums serve today. Can they do more than offer empty generalities about the human condition, or tell dark stories about empire?

Kuper’s response is to ask us, in his words, to “imagine a Cosmopolitan Museum, one that transcends ethnic and national identities, makes comparisons, draws out connections, tracks exchanges across political frontiers, challenges boundaries: a museum set in the shifting sands of the past and the present but which is informed by rigorous, critical, independent scholarship”.

Such museums would need to make room for challenging perspectives and contrasting points of view, and to create partnerships that place equal value on different cultures. They would have to rethink their sclerotic permanent exhibitions, and to re-examine their massive reserve collections to see what new stories could be told by objects that have spent too long in the darkness. They would establish lending libraries to service other museums and build alliances to support collaborative touring exhibitions.

The good news is that a number of institutions are already adapting to this way of thinking. The CSMVS museum in Mumbai is collaborating with museums across India and beyond to tell new stories to its audiences. Belgium’s Royal Museum for Central Africa has been through a major refit to reflect in a very different way on the racist legacy of King Leopold II’s Congo. And the British Museum is well advanced in radical plans to restructure its permanent exhibition spaces in the years ahead.

Kuper’s provocative book may not make him many friends in today’s museums of other people. But it should be required reading for the trustees of big museums everywhere.

The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions by Adam Kuper, Profile Books £25, 432 pages

Richard Lambert is a former chair of the British Museum

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