“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
I totally agree with what you're saying but in a blog about language I question your use of academic vocabulary and concepts. Maybe you are only addressing academics... but if not why not use more inclusive language?
ReplyDeleteI'm not an academic and may not have fully understood what you are saying but I've tried rewriting what you said in more everyday language to see if it could be done. I don't think this is a very successful rewrite but at least it will help to illustrate what I mean.
“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
ReplyDeleteThis label illustrates colonial-era attitudes. There are many examples like this in the collections and displays at the Pitt Rivers Museum.
Using the phrase ‘brought back’ avoids saying these objects were looted. ‘Members of the expedition’ is a very neutral way of describing soldiers attacking a civilian target. The label completely ignores the wider colonial context in which the bronzes were taken – at this time this part of West Africa was controlled by the British Empire and that control was underpinned by military occupation.
The Pitt Rivers Museum and other similar museums are taking a fresh look at their work and aim to pick apart embedded colonial attitudes like those in the label above.
In the 19th century museums were seen as a place where objects from all around the world could be studied and compared in one place. Today many museum curators and academics think there is no longer a need to bring objects together in one physical location [because there are alternative ways of studying other cultures?]. They also believe that the violence with which many objects at the Pitt Rivers were taken from their original setting makes the relationship between the museum and the culture that the object comes from weak and problematic.
ReplyDeleteThe Pitt Rivers Museum wants to be a space where everyone feels welcome and finds displays, messages and stories which they can understand and relate to. This can’t be achieved with words alone but words are important. Accurate language allows curators, academics and museum visitors to get closer to the truth.
The Labelling Matters project is looking at how language is used to describe objects and unpick the attitudes embedded in the labels. It is looking at what the labels say and how they say it. This is part of ‘decolonising’ the Pitt Rivers collections (breaking the link with the colonial past so the objects can be seen for what they meant in their original setting and not through the eyes of the people who took them). We are learning to recognise language that insults other cultures, assumes European culture is somehow superior and brushes violence and discrimination under the carpet so that the objects displayed are presented give voice to the cultures they are from.
Colonial attitudes compared ‘outside’ cultures with European culture, assuming that European culture was ‘best’ or ‘normal’. This made it impossible to build a genuine understanding of non-European cultures. This outlook still makes it hard to have genuinely open and impartial dialogue with other cultures. Labelling Matters is part of a wider movement to restart the conversation, have more equal dialogues and promote rich exchanges of knowledge amongst peoples.
The Pitt Rivers has always been developing and changing but there still are many examples of non-European cultures being wrongly described at the museum. Cultures are ranked as ‘better’ or ‘worse’, objects with religious meaning are wrongly described, and there is an assumption that European academics and curators understand other cultures and their objects better than people who are actually from those cultures. This series of blogs will spotlight many more examples, like the label quoted above.
So… the Labelling Matters project aims to tackle the colonial background that prevents the museum from facilitating healthy relations and interactions between peoples – which is what it would like to do. We look forward to a rich dialogue between cultures in which all peoples are treated as equal partners in the production of knowledge. The museum will become more relevant to the contemporary world. It will develop an ethical framework for representing all cultures that allows the museum to become an inclusive space in which the true complexity of the world’s cultures and a full spectrum of attitudes and beliefs are rightfully valued.