“In January 1897 a small party of British officials and traders on its way to Benin was ambushed. In retaliation a British military force attacked the city and the Oba was exiled. Members of the expedition brought thousands of objects back to Britain, including many of those shown here.” - Label from the Court Art of Benin Case, Lower Gallery, Pitt Rivers Museum
This label is illustrative of the colonial legacies rooted in the Pitt Rivers collections. Not only is this notion of ‘bringing back’ objects a euphemistic description of a large scale loot of artefacts, but by using a positive term such as ‘expedition’ it also obscures what was in fact a colonial mission. Such a label obscures the violent colonial context in which these objects were extracted.
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| A variety of labels from the Pitt Rivers Museum illustrating the use of offensive terminology. Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum. |
Institutions like the Pitt Rivers Museum are in the middle of a deconstructionist shift. The 19th century objective to bring cultures together for the purpose of the creation of a universalist epistemology is no longer considered a tangible project. It has come to light that the colonial context in which such appropriation of cultures took place has uprooted rather than established harmonies between cultures and their respective epistemologies.
The museum’s commitment to create an inclusive and welcoming space for all goes beyond the use of words, yet it is through language that one can start to build an adequate ethics of representation. It is within the realm of language that a course of action towards a morally equitable space for the preservation and production of knowledge is revealed.
In line with this, the Labelling Matters project seeks to revise the language used to describe objects as well as to re-conceptualize the prescriptive nature of its labels by rethinking what and how labels in the museum should relate to its readers. Such a self-reflexive project plays an important role in the process of decolonisation of the Pitt Rivers collections. Through identification of derogatory, Eurocentric, euphemistic and exclusionary language, a new vision towards fairer cultural exchanges is established. By reconsidering the power and function of language, new spaces for more pluriverse and inclusive narratives emerge.
The colonial model pushed ‘outside’ cultures through a process of one sided hermeneutical interpretation. Here, the ‘European’ served as the measure against which to compare and contrast others. As a result it rooted the Eurocentric idea that Western culture signifies something absolute, universal and is itself free of social differentiation. The legacy of this project is a set of misleading norms and axioms that are wrongly regarded as the universal principles that lead to human understanding.
Such mechanisms of coloniality remain an obstacle to impartial dialogue between cultures. The current reactionary movement, of which the Labelling Matters project is constitutive, works to address and tackle such problematic legacies in order to establish fair dialogues and promote rich exchanges of knowledge amongst peoples.
Although the museum has always been part of a process of change and revision, cases of inadequate representation remain multifold. To illustrate, these include instances of unjustifiable hierarchical rankings of cultures, misrepresentations of the ritual functions of objects and Eurocentric claims to interpretive agency. The study of such cases takes a pivotal role in this series of blog posts.
Thus, the Labelling Matters project seeks to tackle the colonial foundations that stand in the way of the healthy relations and interactions between peoples that it wishes to create. The project envisages a rich field of interplay between cultures in which all peoples are regarded equally valid players in the production of knowledge. In this way the museum works towards new relevance in the contemporary world. It is through the formation of a pertinent ethics of representation that the museum wishes to create an inclusive space in which the plurality of narratives that make up human reality are rightfully valued.
By Jip Borm
Labelling Matters project Intern
Masters Student, University of Leiden