‘Regular readers will know that I’m interested in both public misunderstandings of archaeology and heritage and ‘Wunderkammer‘ style museums. So I was interested when on 17 June 2024, the Telegraph newspaper published an article critical of the Pitt Rivers Museum. The reaction to this on Twitter and in this rebuttal by the museum revealed that the article demonstrated both significant misunderstandings about the nature and purpose of museums, and how those misunderstandings are politicised.
Repatriation?
As an aside, it’s worth noting that I am not going to engage here with the question of repatriation of objects. That is a very complex and important issue and there’s insufficient space here to do it justice. My focus here is public understanding of what museums do and are, where misunderstandings lie and how those misunderstandings can be corrected or exploited.
Hiding masks?
The Telegraph article was entitled “University of Oxford museum hides African mask that ‘must not be seen by women’”. You can find an archived version of the original Telegraph article here. It asserted that the museum had removed a Nigerian Igbo mask from display, and photos of it from the online catalogue because the culture of origin forbade women from seeing it. The article then linked these actions with a ‘decolonization process’ (the quotation marks are original to the article), that involved removal of the museum’s tsantsa (also known as ‘Shrunken heads’) and the addition of cultural sensitivity warnings, all resulting from the museum’s response to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Truth or fiction?
This swift rebuttal from the Pitt Rivers Museum and some investigative tweeting by Madeline Odent (@oldenoughtosay) revealed that the core claims of the Telegraph article were largely misunderstandings of both general museology and specific museum policy. To summarise, the Igbo mask in question has not been removed from display because it never was on display; a large proportion of the collection has yet to be photographed; some photographs have sensitivity warnings (image above right from Madeline Odent’s thread) and a very few are not available to view online; but researchers are welcome to visit and no one has ever been denied access to the mask.
Madeline Odent followed up her initial thread with this live-tweeted visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum, to test the idea that significant changes had been made, sensitivity warnings were obtrusive, or large numbers of artefacts had been removed from display. What she found, is illuminating. Five! cases had been altered during re-displays after 2020 and the BLM movement. One of these was the addition of a large text panel explaining the history of the museum, where the objects came from and how they came to be there. Only one of the remaining four cases had had artefacts removed from it, the tsantsa! Boards in the tsantsa’s former case explain that the tsantsa were removed because Indigenous peoples have argued against the remains of their ancestors being on display, and research showed that displaying them reinforced racist stereotypes amongst visitors. Researchers can still make appointments to see objects in the collection, including the tsantsa. Two of the remaining cases had updated panels describing how the original labels reinforced colonial ideas. The final change was the addition of a curtain around one case, that the visitor can easily pull aside. In this tweet (above left), the Pitt Rivers later confirmed the suggestion that the curtain was installed for conservation reasons, to protect the artefact from the light. So much for the accusation that the Pitt Rivers Museum is hiding artefacts, removing artefacts, or preventing people accessing artefacts!
Explicit consent
The Pitt Rivers Museum does not prevent anyone who truly wants to research an artefact from seeing it, but it has changed its overall policy to what we might call ‘opt-in’ or ‘explicit consent’. This is made clear in the initial content warning on the online catalogue of objects, where you can choose to opt-out of cultural sensitivity warnings altogether, or opt-in and click past them on a case-by case basis (image left).
The removal of the tsantsa comes from the same underlying policy. Because of the nature and history of these objects, it was felt appropriate to remove them from public display. The new board in the tsantsa’s old display case explains this quite clearly (image from Madeline Odent’s twitter thread right). Nevertheless, like all the museum objects, they remain accessible to researchers – the ultimate ‘opt-in’. This ‘opt-in’ culture has developed for three main reasons, to identify for visitors objects that are sensitive in their original cultures (such as the Igbo mask); to manage objects that have been used in the past to create negative associations about their cultures of origin (such as the tsantsas); and to ensure viewers/visitors have a choice about what they are seeing. As with many changes to the public realm and public museums the purpose is to give the visitor the choice to see or not see something, to ensure people do not accidentally view something they would find distressing or inappropriate.
Acknowledgements
Huge thanks to Madeline Odent for giving her explicit consent for me to use her tweets in this piece. Do please go and check out @oldenoughtosay on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
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Scribe in the House of Life: Hannah Pethen Ph.D. 
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