Editors’ Picks

Arion is pleased to add a web feature which will appear here from time to time: Editors’ Picks. We’ve asked the members of our editorial board to share their thoughts on books, plays, lectures, podcasts, and other media relevant to humanistic studies and the ancient world about which they are excited. Our newest pick comes from Raymond Geuss:

Adam Kuper’s The Museum of Other People treats the history, rationale, organisation and future of the traditional ethnographic museum, that is of institutions like the Musée de l’homme in Paris, the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, but many of the issues he raises in his treatment arise in a similar form for other institutional displays of collections of artifacts.

In particular Kuper discusses two major problems museums face in the modern world. First, there are historical questions. Many of the museums we know arose out of collections of loot accumulated by official military expeditions or by freebooters, or from the greed and need for ostentatious self-aggrandisement of unscrupulous aristocrats—classicists will recognise the type from Cicero’s portrait of Verres—predatory entrepreneurs and robber-barons.

This is not just a story about the hoary past, but in the contemporary world, too; many of the objects offered to museums have a highly unedifying history of acquisition and transfer by force or fraud or some combination of both. To the extent to which museums were not just great treasuries of booty, they were purportedly `scientific‘ institutes consciously designed to give Imperial administrators knowledge that could be used to control subject populations or to give commercial interests knowledge that could be used for economic exploitation. We don’t by and large find any of this acceptable any more.

Kuper’s second point is connected with this conception of a museum as a `scientific´ research tool: the collections in most established museums are organised around a complex of theoretical assumptions—many of them having to do with hierarchical theories of evolution—which we no longer find plausible. If museums wish to survive and thrive, they will need to find convincing solutions to both of the two problems.

I found this book to be theoretically astute, erudite, and written in such an engaging way that it is a pleasure to read.