Abolishing the Museum?

The attack on displaying human remains and the Western idea of museums

“Putting human remains on display is unethical, especially when no consent has been given,” she added. “I think removing the display of these items ultimately changes the culture, goes some way to look at them with some form of respect.”

-MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, chair of the the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations.

Museums, and especially museums of archaeology are undergoing a silent revolution. Unbeknown to most of the public, a new generation of curators and activists are rapidly dismantling the very idea of ‘the museum’ and how they handle and display human remains. Many people have memories of the first time they saw a dead body at a museum, perhaps mummified or preserved in a bog, perhaps the skull or an unidentifiable piece of bone. It can be a shock for modern people who very rarely see death in any form, and the contexts of archaeological death and burial can also be very alien and sometimes disturbing. It is certainly a W.E.I.R.D thing to do - to coldly display human bodies for public consumption - hence why it is being attacked by groups representing indigenous Americans, Australians, Africans and from elsewhere.

In a recent report entitled Laying the Ancestors to Rest, the British All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations laid out policy recommendations to amend legislation surrounding the purchase, sale, storage and display of human remains - in particular those remains from African or descendent peoples. Amongst these suggestions was this:

The act should be amended to expressly make an offence of the public display of human remains, except if appropriate consent is obtained or for religious or funerary purposes.

Whilst this sounds incredible, the authors are very serious that nobody should be able to display human remains except for religious/burial purposes. At a stroke this would re-imagine the entire concept of the museum. They are not alone however.

Over the last decade at least, the question of the ethics of displaying human remains has bubbled up from blogs, essays and journals to serious policy proposals. In particular the energy has come from the surging anti- and de-colonisation movements, ideas which went into overdrive during the summer of 2020. Almost all Western museums have now had ‘conversations’ about how to decolonise their collections and move towards repatriation and public education. These include:

• The removal of the ‘shrunken heads’ exhibit at Oxford’s Pitt-Rivers anthropological museum

• The removal of a Guanche mummy from Spain’s National Archaeological Museum display in Madrid

• The Smithsonian has removed all human remains on display from the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian

• The repatriation of Tasmanian and Australian human remains from museums in Britain and Germany

In the main the impetus to remove human remains comes from the unease and unhappiness that museum collections contain bones and artefacts from the colonial period. Some collections were explicitly curated in the name of racial science, such as the 1915 San Diego ‘Museum of Man’ which presented the largest number of human bones from all around the world ever seen to date. Books like the 2016 Bone Room: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums by Samuel J. Redman have helped underpin the new push to remove these remains and send them back to their original peoples.

Such repatriation efforts in Australia has led to the approval for burying large numbers of priceless fossils from around Willandra Lakes, including the Lake Mungo fossils and the enigmatic WLH-50 cranium. The Australia Minister for the Environment said:

“I have found that while it is important that we are able to document history, it is equally important that we respect the cultural intent of the burial process and the heartfelt views of the descendants. Forty-two thousand years ago Aboriginal people were living - and thriving - on the edge of what was then a rich lakeside. In the last four decades their remains have been removed, analyzed, stored, and extensively investigated in the interests of western science."

Of course, burying such fossils is a perfect way to never confirm whether they are the ancestors of modern Aboriginal peoples. Now we must simply take it on faith.

The Chau Chak Wing Museum in Sydney decided that it needed to consult Egyptian people living in Australia about how it should proceed with its ancient Egyptian artefacts and human remains:

To date, the topic of human remains has formed part of a weekend of intensive focus groups held with 17 members of the Egyptian community from Sydney, Melbourne and Adelaide, a co-written discussion piece for Egypt’s largest online media platform in English, 'Egyptian Streets', and a meet and greet followed by a survey with people identifying as Egyptian from the local Sydney area. We also have an Egyptian museum professional on staff, and a community Whatsapp group.

After this and other consultations, the museum decided to remove all the body parts of the Nicholson Collection, a huge loss for future and current generations who want to learn about and experience ancient history.

Australia does seem particularly sensitive to these concerns, as John McDonald recent noted, saying ‘mummies make museums nervous’. I also think that part of this squeamishness is the resentment academics have for anything particularly popular with the public. What the public enjoys is always up for suspicion, that they aren’t enjoying it ‘the right way’ or they are reinforcing their own popular Orientalist and Indiana Jones stereotypes.

We have also moved into a phase of rhetoric about rights and consent which extends to the dead. In a piece for The Conversation, Classics lecturer Georgia Pike-Rowney writes:

The collection and display of human remains is a complex topic. Around the world, some museums are choosing to remove human remains from display, with some arguing those who have died cannot consent to being displayed (let alone being collected).

Its not hard to see how this argument moves from ‘the dead didn’t consent to being displayed’ to ‘the dead didn’t consent to being dug up/analysed/DNA tested’. Without a robust defence of the impartial scientific gaze, archaeology could easily crumble to dust within our lifetimes. Some detractors would no doubt like that, arguing that European colonialism and science need to be torn down anyway.

The Western museum is not only a place where looted artefacts and human remains are exhibited behind glass, it is “a powerful tool of domination (…) which has succeeded in being presented as the sacred Temple of Beauty, a space for meditation, protected from the chaos of the world.” In writing A Programme of Absolute Disorder: Decolonising the Museum, Vergès aims to put an end to the Western museum’s delusion of neutrality by exposing its aim — to “perform the grandeur of the nation-state”, and promote the white European ‘civilising mission’ in which their museums would be best equipped and more legitimate to become “a depository of riches from all cultures” where the ‘history of humanity’ would be preserved…

“Currently, there are around the world numerous experiments with forms of ‘museum’ that eschew the Western model of accumulation, toxic conservation and appropriation, reject the injunction to separate the object from its environment and seek to answer the diverse needs of a community and to remain dynamic.”

-Can Western museums ever be truly decolonised? (2024) H. Bechiche

Discussions like those of the above quotation are no longer totally fringe. It would not be fair to characterise all museum curators as rabid abolitionists, but the conversations and actions of the decolonisation movement, and now explicit calls to ban the display of all human remains, opens the door to the destruction of the archaeological heritage sector altogether.