The Museum of Mankind: Man and Boy in the British Museum Ethnography Department

INTRODUCTION

When I began working in museums more than fifty years ago, I didn’t think about their role in Western culture or their social purpose, and I don’t think most of my elders and betters did either. During my years at the Museum of Mankind I found opportunities and responsibilities to shift public understandings of cultures around the world that the British still viewed from a colonial perspective and museums treated as ‘ethnographic’. Some of my colleagues had similar ambitions, but we were not informed by any debate on museum history, theory or practice. In the meantime, ‘museum studies’ was developing into a discipline in its own right, providing a retrospective academic background for our personal experiences in an ever increasing literature. This memoir’s contribution is the history and ethnography of an important museum experiment, capturing institutional and personal memories and airing opinions. It does not engage in the complex theories that can make museum studies such hard work, but it offers material for others to theorise, as well as some relief from the theory. That said, it may be useful to begin with an overview of developments in museum ethnography during the lifetime of the Museum of Mankind.

The Museum of Mankind was founded as an offshoot of the very conservative British Museum, inheriting a culture of collecting, preserving, classifying and documenting artefacts as ‘specimens’ as an end in itself. With this came an ethos of public service in making collections and curatorial knowledge available through exhibitions and consultation. In time there was a shift towards self-critical reflection on museum practice, revealed by certain curators in their exhibitions and publications, and a developing sense of responsibility to explain the societies that the Museum represented. But there was little discussion about the role of museums in cultural reproduction, whether in maintaining or challenging the prevailing values of our own society or in supporting the source communities of our collections in such endeavours.

The Museum of Mankind’s most notable achievement was its very active exhibition programme, particularly the reconstructions that presented artefacts as introductions to places and peoples rather than simply as collections of objects. Some of the education programmes that accompanied particular exhibitions took this further to actively engage visitors with the cultures concerned. This was what the Museum of Mankind was remembered for by its visitors, but it depended as much on the initiatives of individual curators and educators as on any concerted policy. The stored collections were accessible to researchers as a longstanding public obligation, as was the Library, but under bureaucratic procedure rather than active outreach, so their cultural potential was seldom realised. Despite its hierarchical administration, the Museum seemed to proceed under a vague general consensus, masking various disagreements and contradictions, rather than by a shared set of principles and policies. The result was a mixture of great achievements, routine mediocrity and a few embarrassing mistakes, under ambivalent leadership.

The most persistent contradiction in curatorial policy, in the Museum of Mankind and elsewhere, was between employing collections as ‘ethnography’, to interpret exotic culture and possibly reflect on Western values, and as ‘art’, for the appreciation of exotic forms in terms of Western aesthetics with its associated values of authenticity and markets. These tendencies, widely debated in museums from the 1980s, sometimes complemented each other in the Museum of Mankind’s exhibitions and both inherited the colonial taint of primitivism and a denial of history. Ethnographic projects challenged these problems more effectively than art ones, but over the history of the Museum of Mankind, art eventually gained ascendancy as intellectually and practically expedient within the increasingly dominant culture of the Western art world, encouraged by commercial sponsorship as it replaced public funding.

The art–ethnography debate ran parallel with another major issue that developed during the lifetime of the Museum of Mankind: how to respond to claims on the collections by the communities they originated from. The questionable means by which many ethnographic collections were acquired and the way in which they were curated were first drawn to public attention in the settler colonies of North America and Australasia by indigenous minorities who had gained enough experience of the majority societies to make their voices heard. It took longer for these groups to gain the attention of the distant museums of Europe, but in the meantime former colonies in Africa and their diaspora communities were also questioning the ownership of colonial collections, and advocates for more remote indigenous minorities were seeking to engage museums in cultural issues. As the cost of global travel decreased and communications improved with digital technology, these political pressures increased and ethnography curators responded, sometimes defensively but often positively and creatively. The Museum of Mankind welcomed indigenous researchers, craft demonstrators and educators and worked increasingly on collaborative projects with members of source communities, even as it warded off claims for the repatriation of collections, according to British Museum policy. It tried to address indigenous concerns for both cultural heritage and participation in the art world even as it neglected questions of Western cultural hegemony.

These issues represent one way of looking at the history of the Museum of Mankind. Another is the story of the scores of men and women who worked there, many of them quite unconcerned with curatorial policy. Most were focused on the practicalities of preserving the collections, departmental administration, building exhibitions and caring for the public that came to see them, all of which allowed the senior curators to make museum history. Again, they seem to have developed their methods and practices as much by personal initiative as by management policy, often creating their own jobs and working with limited resources. They also showed how an interest in museum work and a sense of useful public service could compensate for poor wages and limited career opportunities. As a memoir, this book gives them credit for their essential contributions through the personal relationships that sustained them in their work and made the Museum of Mankind the achievement that it was. Maybe their personalities and experiences also hold lessons for more academic museum studies, which seldom touch on the influence of junior curators, technical and service staff in shaping the institutional culture and ethos of museums.

Most of these people have since moved on, retired or died, leaving me as the oldest and longest-serving member of what was the Ethnography Department and is now the Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas of the British Museum. But my memory is personal and partial. Some colleagues have shared their recollections with me but others have not, so there is plenty of scope for further studies to complement or correct this memoir of the Museum of Mankind.

ONE

FROM BRITISH MUSEUM TO MUSEUM OF MANKIND

The monumental facade of the British Museum was an awe-inspiring sight when I walked through the gates on the morning of New Year’s Day in 1968. I was nineteen and going to start work as an assistant conservation officer in the Department of Ethnography. Coming from a farm on the other side of Bristol as a country boy, my new colleagues soon began to tease me as a ‘hayseed’, parodying my Somerset accent with expressions such as ‘Cor, buggerrr me!’ I had my own stereotype of them as Cockneys and I enjoyed their quick wit and urban sophistication. I soon learned that for all the grandeur of the British Museum, ‘Ethno’ was a homely and amusing place to work, as well as a source of fascinating knowledge to feed my imagination about faraway people and places. It did not occur to me that I might still be working for the British Museum fifty years later, and writing about it.

At the time I wasn’t too concerned with what ethnography meant, and nor were my colleagues. Curious acquaintances might make guesses like ‘Is it something to do with insects?’, but we accepted it as technical jargon that went with the job. I was excited to be working on artefacts from Africa, Oceania, the Americas and Asia and it was some years before I had to explain ethnography to visitors, after the Ethnography Department had become the Museum of Mankind and I was its Education Officer. Then I would say that it really meant the description of culture and, since this evidently applied to the whole of the British Museum, go on to explain that it usually covered the cultures studied by anthropology (which was hardly less ambiguous). Over the years one or two senior curators in the Department attempted to redefine ethnography as a distinctive academic methodology, and I tried to confront the unpleasant historical truth that in museums it really meant no more or less than the colonial world’s savages and barbarians or, as they were more politely called, ‘primitive cultures’.

Ethnography in the British Museum began among the ‘artificial curiosities’ of its founding collections in the mid-eighteenth century, which included items like blowgun darts from Borneo; ‘w.ch being try’d had no effect on a wounded pigeon’, and ‘A piece of flowered weaved stuffe made of grasse leaves from Angola worth there one shilling’. In the course of the nineteenth century, the Museum’s artefacts were separated from the Library and the Natural History collections, paintings were sent to the National Gallery, the Museum was rebuilt and then the artefacts were divided into Departments of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Coins and Medals, and Oriental Antiquities. Oriental included all those cultures not regarded as part of the Classical heritage of Europe, including British and Medieval, Egyptian and Assyrian, as well as Ethnography, which emerged as a kind of dustbin category for everything else. However, as the British Museum’s Handbook to the Ethnographical Collections explained in the early twentieth century: ‘the great ancient civilizations … even that of Greece, arose gradually from primitive stages of culture; the instruments and utensils of savage and barbarous peoples are therefore not without interest to the study of antiquities’ (British Museum 1910: 1). That more or less summed up what ethnography meant to the British Museum at that time.

Those who still confuse the British Museum with the Natural History Museum may like to note that the natural history collections moved to the new ‘British Museum (Natural History)’ in the 1880s. This made more room for a growing number of new acquisitions, including massive quantities of ‘ethnography’. As the British Museum continued to reorganise, the Ethnographical Collections were shifted between several new departments – British and Medieval, then Oriental, then Ceramics and Ethnography – as if the Museum didn’t quite know where they belonged – until they were given a department of their own in 1946. What ethnography meant during the latter twentieth century is shown by the things that department did not include. It covered Africa (except ancient Egypt, the ancient Greek and Roman and urban Islamic societies of north Africa, and later European and Asian immigrants); the Americas (all native peoples and ancient civilisations but not European or African immigrants); the Pacific Islands and Australia (again, indigenous peoples only); and contemporary peasant societies of Asia and eastern Europe (but not the ancient or elite cultures of the major civilisations to which most of them belonged).

When I began in 1968, no one seemed to question this institutional structure or the academic world view it represented, and I had already assimilated it from a year of voluntary work for Bristol City Museum, which had qualified me for the job at the British Museum. I had been interested in ancient history and archaeology since I was small and, after demonstrating my inaptitude for engineering during six months as a stores assistant for a tractor company, my father agreed to pay for my keep while I tried something different. An archaeology curator (and future Director of the Museum of London), Max Hebditch, happened to live in our village of Clapton-in-Gordano and he gave me a lift in and out of Bristol each day. After a couple of weeks stuffing envelopes for the Secretary of the Prehistoric Society, Egyptologist Leslie Grinsell, I began to get my hands on the collections. I helped pack the Oriental collections, which they were selling off, then redisplayed the whole Ethnography gallery, which no one else had the time or interest for. It wasn’t beyond even a beginner to improve on the jumbled displays I had gazed at in wonder as a child. There was the grimacing cut-out face added to a Plains Indian shirt and leggings, spread flat on the wall as if waving a tomahawk, under the heading ‘The American Indian at War’, and the chain of Australian boomerangs, strung from each other on wires through holes drilled in the edges. I went through the drawers underneath the tall window cabinets to discover many more marvellous objects and mounted whatever I could fit into the new display on hessian-covered backboards. Much of the remainder I was able to re-store in new wooden cabinets in the basement, with plenty of mothballs to prevent further holes in things like Waiwai feather headdresses from Guiana and red-tufted Naga ornaments from Assam.

That was how I discovered ‘ethnography’, as the works of faraway exotic peoples whose recent existence made them so much more fascinating than the threadbare past of archaeology which had interested me till then. Not only were the artefacts complete rather than just imperishable buried fragments, but there were photos and books describing the people who had made them, resonating with the colonial folklore of my upbringing. I had been an Indian in games of cowboys and Indians, with chicken feather headdress and a tipi with bamboo poles which later served for homemade bows and arrows and even an African spear. My father had all Rider Haggard’s novels of adventures in Darkest Africa and was an admirer of the adventure novelist Jack London. When I read London’s books based on a voyage to the Pacific I was fascinated by his portrayal of savage Solomon Islanders and incredulous that people could be as brutal and degraded as he described them. Just as I had questioned my Church of England primary school teaching that heathens were condemned to Hell before they had even the opportunity to choose Christian redemption, so I could not accept that ‘natives’ were ordained to be so savage and subhuman. I think my parents’ ideals of social justice led me to idealise the natural order of the world as essentially moral and they certainly encouraged me to question the Christian dogma of that school. I knew that when we were separated into the sheep and the goats on the Day of Judgement, I would be one of the goats, as a non-believer. My childhood cry of ‘But it’s not fair!’ continued to resonate long after my belief in God was destroyed by reflecting on the amorality of the natural world. Eventually I was able to refute the savage stereotype as an anthropologist who got to know these Solomon Islanders personally, but in the meantime I found beautiful Solomon Islands artefacts and read Smithsonian Institution studies of Native Americans as I burrowed through the Bristol collections.

Then I went on to work in the conservation workshop in the basement. I learned to repair and restore shattered Medieval and Roman pots (and a Roman-period skull which I accidentally dropped from a six-foot shelf), to clean corroded bronze and make resin casts of coins and stone tools, some good enough to be confused with the originals. I took the chance to clean a New Guinea over-modelled and painted skull and an Austral Islands Polynesian feather headdress. It was all this, with photos to prove it, that convinced the British Museum to employ me. But at the same time I got involved in the fun and games between the two archaeology conservators and the two taxidermists in the workshop next door, all young men. What started with water-pistol fights between the two