ICOM Voices Exhibiting Colonialism: reflections on ethnographic museums

Ethnographic museums, also known as anthropological museums, contributed to the definition of ‘culture display’. This practice became very popular in the 19th-century Western world, along with the habit of classifying, categorising and institutionalising objects and identities from different cultures.

In her book Decolonizzare il museo, anthropologist Giulia Grechi asserts that the majority of ethnographic museums were born as a consequence of colonial looting, which means the collections come with a ‘dirty baggage’ of genocide, pillage, and death. Despite this, many museums decide to remain silent on the origin of their collections and do not provide a narrative that opposes the knowledge that has been constructed around their representation.

Between 1878 and 1889, both the Universal Exposition of Paris and the Colonial International of Amsterdam presented individuals as part of their exhibitions that came from non-European cultures, mostly from colonised countries. Men and women were ‘displayed’ inside pavilions that recreated indigenous villages which weren’t particularly accurate from an ethnographic point of view and were made more ‘exotic’ for the eyes of the western spectator.

By the end of the 19th century these types of expositions were regular in Europe, and most visitors, having no knowledge on indigenous cultures, blindly accepted the reality of the proposed narrative.

This issue has been addressed by many contemporary artists and these so-called ‘human zoos’ inspired the performance The Year of the White Bear (1992) by Cuban American artist and writer Coco Fusco and Mexican performer and artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena. The two of them invented a fictional ‘undiscovered’ land, the island of Guatinau, and pretended to be two native people from that land, called Amerindianics.

The two artists dressed up in animal skins and stood behind bars covered in body paint. The performance was a social experiment and its aim was to show how as a society we are not past these stereotypes and how exotic representations are still being carried out.

Later on, in an interview, Coco Fusco revealed how the public had sexualised them during the performance. There were men asking her to show her breasts for money and people who crossed the lines of common decency. On this subject, Coco Fusco said: ‘I think that was provoked by us being presented as objects, by their sense of having power over us’.

She also explains that they had no intention of convincing people that they were Amerindians, but that it happened anyway:

We understood it to be a satirical commentary both on the Quincentenary celebrations and on the history of this practice of exhibiting human beings from Africa, Asia, and Latin America in Europe and the United States in zoos, theatres, and museums. When we got to Spain, more than half the people thought we really were Amerindians.

They staged their show in historic sites and institutions, condemning the abuse of aboriginal people, replicating the notion of ‘savageness’ associated with colonialism and the exotic, as something fascinating that was up for spectacle, like a museum display.

Museums, as European historical establishments, institutionalised a general perception that is now under scrutiny, which emphasises the act of showing rather than watching. The public is not an active one, as the purpose of these exhibitions was to stimulate the public’s imagination on the so-called ‘rising’ or ‘wild’ nations. This theatricality, which leaves no space for personal interpretation, is what made human zoos and Freak Shows extremely popular at the time. The monstrous, the deviant, the racially classified body turns into a pleasing object.

Giulia Grechi defines the performative nature of this practice as mostrazione: the repetitive display of stereotyped bodies in shows, postcards, cabinet cards. Having no other narrative, most people just blindly accepted what they saw.

Consequently, racism and race are not a direct consequence of the system but stand at the very base of a hierarchy disguised as progress.

On the other hand, this kind of display also impacted its public by making people feel like it was them against ‘the monstrous/exotic’, reinforcing their sense of nationalism. Artistic currents such as Exoticism and Orientalism increased the ‘colonial spectacle’ and it’s important to keep this in mind when we talk about colonial museum displays.

In the overall historical narrative, it’s important to note that Europe hasn’t looked back on colonialism, but has focused on other difficult memories like the Shoah and the two world wars instead. Giulia Grechi calls this ‘selective oblivion’ quoting Paul Ricœur, who believed that collective memory is organised into archives that define what to remember and what to forget.

This prioritisation of certain historic events over others helps reinforcing a twisted narrative, along with the existence of ‘trophy museums’^[1]:

The Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum in Paris for example holds 70,000 pieces of sub-Saharan African art, which represents roughly 80 per cent of African art in France.

In the 19th century, museums like the Quai Branly provided material cultural heritage of the societies studied by anthropologists. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that scholars started to criticise this type of display that consisted in exhibiting decontextualized objects. As Johannes Fabian (1983) famously put it, one effect of such elisions in the past was to deny agency and coevality to those who were the subject of anthropology.

From the beginning of the 2000s the term ‘ethnographic’ was replaced by ‘World Culture’. Changes in vocabulary also often denote changes within society. Many important institutions such as the British Museum for example no longer have a separate wing for ethnographic collections.

The recent discussions and studies on the decolonisation of museums have led many institutions to rethink their collections, by either creating a new narrative or by replacing some items with new acquisitions.  On the other hand, some museums across Europe are choosing to repatriate artefacts that were either looted or of dubious origins, and despite the lack of an international law on restitution, the latter is central to the reconciliation process and to the reconstitution of identities.

In fact, restitutions play an active part in the new narrative of the colonial past, along with a thought-out storytelling inside museums, which can help create new bridges and connections.

Stuart Hall believed that Colonialism should be studied as a form of global ‘trans-culturalism’ without it being legitimised or forgetting about the violence it brought. I believe that instead of being abstract spaces of expertise, museums should serve as cultural spheres where to debate these issues.

References:

Fabian, Johannes. 1983. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object.

Grechi, Giulia. 2023. Decolonizzare il museo. Mostrazioni, pratiche artistiche, sguardi incarnati.

Hall, Stuart. 2000. The Multicultural Question.

Interview ‘Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gómez-Peña by Anna Johnson’, 1993, Bomb Magazine.

Mitchess, Timothy. 2004. ‘Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order’, in Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (eds Donald Preziosi, Claire Farago).

 

^[1] 19th century museums have “theatricalised” colonialism by displaying objects out of their original context. Scholar Timothy Mitchess (2004) defines this presentation of objects and bodies as an “exhibitionary order”.