THE MUSEUM OF OTHER PEOPLE

How to exhibit humankind.

British anthropologist Kuper brings an authoritative perspective to his vigorous examination of ethnography and anthropology museums, which emerged in Europe and the U.S. in the mid-1800s. These venues displayed “an exotic world of ‘primitive’ or ‘tribal’ peoples who lived far away or long ago.” As European nations expanded their empires into Oceania and Africa and the U.S. extended itself west of the Mississippi, collectors made off with all manner of artifacts. Early British, French, and German museums often reflected a collector’s vision and the sheer abundance of their discoveries. Museums presented not only cabinets of curiosities and pillaged souvenirs, but evidence of the superiority of civilized cultures—evidence, that is, of Western progress from savage origins. The advent of evolutionary theory, though controversial, led some museums to reconsider that idea, organizing collections into cultural or geographical areas rather than on a timeline. Gradually, museums came to rely on anthropologists and ethnographers, although experts often clashed over the meaning of artifacts and the mission of a museum itself. Kuper’s deeply researched history is enlivened with sharply delineated profiles of figures such as anti-Darwinist Louis Agassiz, naturalist Jeffries Wyman, and James Smithson, the illegitimate son of a British aristocrat who willed his small fortune to the U.S. for the establishment of an institution devoted to “the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” After much haggling, Congress agreed to fund the Smithsonian Institution. The intellectual and political debates that roiled museums grew heated by the 1960s, when a “cauldron of controversy” arose “about race, colonialism, cultural appropriation and the very nature of scientific authority.” Claims for restitution of artifacts and debate over scholarship versus native expertise continue to vex curators. Strongly on the side of scholarship, Kuper advocates for cosmopolitan museums that can transcend “ethnic and national identities” and “challenge boundaries.”

A vibrant cultural history.