Richard J. Evans, Can the Museum Survive?, The New Republic, 1 July 2024
From looted artifacts to rogue employees, a series of crises have beset some of the world’s most visited collections.
Museums, as the anthropologist Adam Kuper notes in his new book, The Museum of Other People, have never been more popular. There are more than 50,000 of them in existence across the globe. The Louvre, the world’s most popular museum, registered more than 10 million visitors in 2018, up by a quarter over the previous year. The 20 most visited museums in the United States hosted nearly 50 million visitors in 2019. The Covid-19 epidemic cut visitor numbers by over three-quarters, but they bounced back quickly once restrictions were lifted. In 2021, the turnover of the museum business in the United States reached $15.4 billion, up nearly 20 percent on the previous year.
And yet, museums are experiencing a rapidly spreading crisis, sparked to begin with by ever-louder demands for the restitution of treasures seized in the era of colonialism. The museums under most pressure are what Kuper terms “museums of other people”—ethnographic or cultural museums established specifically to cover non-European or non-Western cultures—but what he has to say has important implications for others with a wider, more general coverage, such as the British Museum in London or the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
Museums were mostly conceived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, driven by a curiosity about other peoples and other parts of the world, signaled by the creation of learned societies of anthropology and ethnology as part of the new bourgeois public sphere, the spread of education, and the emerging belief that European and North American culture was superior to cultures in other parts of the world. Western collectors sallied forth into Africa, Asia, and Latin America, sending millions of objects back to the newly created public museums. For many nineteenth-century directors of ethnological museums, the obvious way to organize a collection was chronological, illustrating humankind’s progress from barbarism to civilization. The display would begin by showing artifacts from “primitive” or “savage” societies and proceed onward up to the “civilized” and the “advanced.” Thus bourgeois culture in Europe could convince itself of its superiority.
In the nineteenth-century United States, ethnographic interest focused particularly on Native American “Indians” whose culture was investigated by anthropologists during the long penetration of the West by white settlers. They confirmed the rightness of this internal colonization by concluding, in the words of Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 book, Ancient Society, that “savagery preceded barbarism in all the tribes of mankind as barbarism is known to have preceded civilization.” The Native Americans were fated to be assimilated or exterminated, their savage culture to be superseded by a more advanced one. By the late nineteenth century, the rise of “scientific” racism was inspiring collectors to amass large quantities of human skulls and other remains in the belief that these would illustrate crucial physical differences between the races. In 1987, it was reported that the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., held some 34,000 bones and skulls, 42.5 percent of which were American Indian, and a little less than 12 percent of which were Alaskan Native.
After World War II, most European institutions turned away from scientific racism, having seen its use in Nazi Germany as the basis for programs of mass sterilization and extermination. Anthropologists, not surprisingly, now agreed that “race” was a cultural construct, not a biological phenomenon. With the wave of decolonization that swept the globe in the postwar era, newly independent nations in Africa and elsewhere began to raise the demand for the restoration of the cultural artifacts taken from them by colonialism. These demands have mountedin recent years, both as activists have brought wider attention to the legacies of colonialism, and as research has identified growing quantities of cultural objects acquired under questionable circumstances. (One group has even begun to offer “stolen goods tours” of the British Museum.)
The first part of Kuper’s book goes through the process by which museums were founded, stocked, and arranged, and while those details are illuminating, it is in the book’s second half that he really gets to grip with today’s crises. How much of a threat do growing demands for the return of cultural objects pose to museums? Beyond particular items in its collections, is the universal museum itself a product of colonialism that expresses an implicit belief in the superiority of Western culture over Indigenous cultures in the areas the West came to control in the age of imperialism? Indeed—a question Kuper might have considered more—is the very idea of a museum outdated in the digital age?
A classic example of the shape of disputes over looted cultural objects is provided by the thousands of intricately worked sculptures, busts, plaques, and reliefs known as the Benin Bronzes. They were comprehensively looted in 1897 by a British military force sent to punishthe precolonial West African kingdom of Benin for its actions in massacring a trade expedition. The scale of the pillage was extraordinary. Back in Europe, the loot found its way into a host of major museums; 580 were collected for the Ethnological Museum in Berlin alone. Some 950 were acquired by the British Museum. Sold at rapidly escalating prices on the open market, many others found their way into smaller provincial museums in Europe, but the Metropolitan Museum in New York also acquired 160, mostly donated by private individuals over the decades.
The demand for their restitution seems unstoppable. Already museums in a number of European countries, including Britain, France, and Germany, have begun to return Benin Bronzes in their possession to the countries where they originated. Yet the moral balance sheet of their restitution was not without controversy. What, for example, was the moral right of the successors of the obas (or kings) of Benin to get back the bronzes? Defenders of the looting, beginning with the looters themselves, pointed out that they had engaged in human sacrifice on a considerable scale: As British forces approached in 1897, the oba of the day had hundreds of slaves and captives sacrificed to his ancestors, and, on arrival, the British troops literally had to wade through blood to reach their objective. Their commander reported from the town that “this place reeks of sacrifices and human blood, bodies in every state of decay, wells full of newly killed, crucified men on the fetish trees (which we have blown up), one sees men retching everywhere.”
Moreover, the precolonial kingdom of Benin practiced slavery, along with its neighboring states such as Asante, whose king boasted in 1824 that following a successful military expedition, he “brought more than 20,000 slaves to Coomassy,” or Kumasi, the capital town of Asante. “Some of these people,” he went on, “being bad men, I washed my stool in their blood for the fetische. But then some were good people, and these I sold or gave to my captains.” Along with another precolonial kingdom on the “Slave Coast” of West Africa, Dahomey, these powerful and well-organized states were a major center of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, supplying more than two million slaves to the British ships that brought them to the Americas. The present-day heirs of these states have apologized for their ancestors’ practice of owning and trading in slaves, and the current government of the Republic of Benin has opened a museum of slavery and is building what has been called a “theme park” with artifacts, including a slave ship, in the hope of bringing African American tourists to the area. Organizations that have been campaigning against restitution, such as Britain’s History Reclaimed, a conservative pressure group, have underlined the blood-tainted origins of the bronzes and argued that this invalidates any claim to moral superiority put forward by their original owners as a reason to get them back.
To add to such moral reservations, European museums sometimes argue that the restitution of cultural objects endangers those objects because there is no guarantee that they would be properly cared for. They can point, for example, to the political instability that is endemic in twenty-first-century West Africa, with its frequent military coups, uprisings, and jihadist incursions from the north. In 2012, Islamist extremists destroyed the majority of mausoleums in the Malian city of Timbuktu, all of them inscribed on the UNESCO list of world heritage sites, and as French troops approached the following year to restore order, the extremists torched a library housing irreplaceable manuscripts, some of them dating back to the thirteenth century. The national museum of Iraq was lootedduring the war of 2003, and the sweeping victories of the Taliban in Afghanistan left local mobs to pillage heritage sites and collections following the U.S. withdrawal. The global market for artworks, ancient cultural remains, and other cultural objects has been flooded with illegally acquired material as a result. Corruption in Nigeria and other countries has added to the toll: Writing in 2009, the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah reported, “hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of art has been stolen from the museums of Nigeria alone, almost always with the complicity of insiders.” Nigerian Minister of Culture Walter Ofonagoro warned in 1996, “We are losing our cultural heritage at such an alarming rate that … we may have no cultural artifacts to bequeath to our progeny.”
