Ethics & Human Remains Collections
The Museum
Museums as entities have long been the focus of critique for perpetuating colonial, imperial, and national ideologies (Bennett 1988; Anderson 1994; Chiwaura 2015; Azoulay 2019). Museums purported to transcend geographic influence, acting instead as encyclopedias with orders that remained globally consistent- part of this consistency was that of the audience. This objectifying ideology, brings about an emergent normative ideology (Stoler 2009) as displayed in museum contexts (Chiwaura 2015; Sibley 2010). Certain elements of how objects came to be deracinated, and by whom, leave critical archival silences (Trouillot 1995) that can nevertheless be made apparent.
As Sibley explains, “an ideology “can be thought of as a ‘comprehensive vision,’ as a ‘way of looking at things’ as in “common sense”[…]or a set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society to all members of society (Sibley 2010:116). The museum was a hegemonic device that rigorously figured in the subjugation in what the empire deemed as “other”(Mataga 2015: 167). Perhaps put more simply, we can see that “museums are constitutive rather than reflective of their fields; museums do not simply show art but by doing so define its nature”(Whitehead 2009).
How then to move past these imperial frameworks in which the “normative” , the “tasteful” and “true” are problematized? One answer may be that the first step is simply accomplished through making these frames apparent, such that even if collections are still “housed” within museums, their categorizations are made fluid and ruptured. Vogel (1991) has called for a similar recontextualization, in which “museums should allow the public to know that [museums] are not a broad frame through which art and culture of the world can be inspected, but a tightly focused lens that allows the visitor a particular point of view” (1991:201).
Erasures
Museums disconnect objects from their human and social relations, and make claims about linear social change over time that foreclose the possibility that objects still hold social salience now, rather than an “other” time (Fabian 1983; Tayyab 1988). Museums create their own bubbles of time, or as Shannon Dowdy refers to them as, “chronotopias” that entomb objects. She explains, “Museums have been accused of being a form of entombment for objects-killing them by stopping their biographical journey through time. (Dawdy 2016:110). The way that we experience objects in museums is rarely, if ever how objects were actually meant to be used and make meaning. In many cases, and in particular with the Penn Museum, the museum quite actually becomes a non-consensual tomb for individual people.
One of the most powerful erasures that museums conduct is turning not just practices, but also people into objects. Purported to be for the false premise of a “greater good” of scientific inquiry, “researchers” like Samuel Morton used people and their bodies for eugenic measurements to make claims about social and cultural progression that fit constructed racial and geographic lines, in which European ancestry was placed at the pinnacle of human progression to uphold white supremacy. Through these violent practices, people were claimed, stolen, disinterred, and had their names and their identities largely erased in favor of constructing false data. In some cases, their new labels denoting constructions of geographic origin or race were written directly on them. Most of the people within the museum are still trapped here. They have been held in classrooms, in storage, handled as ‘teaching tools’ and been put on display, demonstrating the inertia of colonial thinking, or the “internal colonialisms” (Cusicanqui 2012) that still dominates the museum and the academy. Despite the fact that these acts bolstered and fueled white supremacist claims, the idea of whiteness in museums might be seen as an extention of Charles Mill’s argument about the “racial contract” in which “whiteness is ‘so ingrained that we don’t even see it as political”(Mills 2016). Because of the transformative technology of the museum, any sense of a white “folk science” is erased by the false notion that white western science is the universal (Tsing 2000). People and people’s ancestors have been held by the Penn Museum due to white western notions of property as created by “law” or more aptly named, “lawfare” (Merry 1991; Comaroff 2001) and the false prioritization of science above worship, respect, and notions of belonging and citizenship in, beyond, and against national borders (Simpson 2014).
Begin →