In 2013 a conference was held at the Pitt Rivers Museum titled The Future of the Ethnographic Museum, which challenged with the provocation that ‘the ethnographic museum is dead’. Papers offered a reinvention of the museum that was at once historically aware, open to critique, and welcoming to dialogue with descendants of those whose lives were transformed as a result of colonial occupation, past and present. Yet, as has been particularly evident since 2020, this self-affirmation of ethical arrival is fragile and incomplete. In this paper, I contend with our crisis: what is occurring when a sector that has historically defined itself as pioneering in post-colonial ethics, finds itself perpetually falling short in public?
Taking inspiration from Stuart Hall, we will trace this crisis with a focus on the historical, cultural, and political conjuncture of post-nation Britain. We will look at the 1970s, 80s and 90s as foundational decades for the determination of public purpose and best practice within Britain's museum sector. Caught between the rise of the National Front and Tony Blair’s new liberalism, this was also a national context beset with moral panics and community resistance, papered over by policy reform and funding initiatives. Museum Ethnographers were at the same time scrambling to carve a coherent disciplinary identity where there was none, establish community value where they were rarely needed, and find consensus in the face of mounting repatriation claims. I argue that it is the convergence of Britain’s national crisis formed in the aftermath of the loss of Empire, and the sector’s own crisis of purpose, that has laid the groundwork for the professional structures, anxieties and possibilities that make up the crisis of the present.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2025
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Paul Basu and Elizabeth Hallam.
