Skeletons – Collectors ought not to neglect to preserve the skeletons of the different species of animals. Of man, the skull is the most interesting part, as it varies in the different races of the human species, and is also frequently singularly altered by the practices of savage tribes. The best way of cleaning bones, is to expose them to the air, and allow the insects to eat off the flesh. This being done, they ought to be washed with sea water, and afterwards freely exposed to the sun. The best skulls are obtained by putting the whole head in rum or whisky, or a strong solution of alum; both male and female heads ought if possible to be preserved1.

 

Charles Darwin considered Robert Jameson (1774-1854), professor of natural history at Edinburgh University, to be “incredibly dull”2. He nevertheless played a leading role in the expansion of the Edinburgh museum of natural history, whose core collection dates back to 1697, doing much to enhance its reputation and improve access to its holdings. The position of keeper of the museum, initially linked to the chair in medicine, was transferred to that in natural history once it was established in 1767. It was in this capacity that Jameson wrote a Set of Instructions for Collectors in 1817 – an excerpt from which is quoted in the epigraph above – to give “ministers and public servants abroad” detailed indications about how to preserve various types of specimen, a topic he also addressed in his lectures3. To his mind, it was self-evident that “of man, the skull is the most interesting part, as it varies in the different races of the human species”. The works of the Dutch anatomist Peter Camper (1722-1789), who developed the facial angle theory, and those of Johann Frederick Blumenbach (1752-1840), a physician in Göttingen, who classified humankind into five “races” based not on skin color but on craniometry, were key references by Jameson’s time. Their own collections of skulls had become models to be emulated4. Jameson also warns against the bizarre alterations that “savage tribes” practiced on skeletons and skulls. This propensity of “savages” to modify their own nature, emphasized by a vast body of scholarship throughout the early modern period, was included by Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778) in his classification as a “monstrous” variety of homo sapiens5.

But it is the explanation of the requisite stages in the proper handling of skulls that is most worthy of attention for our purpose. The practice of conserving specimens in rum (or whisky, in its Scottish variant) was widespread on transoceanic voyages to bring the “curiosities” of the natural world back to Europe. Less typical was the description of the technique of cleaning bones by flesh-eating insects. In his “An instructive note on the researches to be carried out relative to the anatomical differences between the diverse races of man” (1799), drawn up for “naturalists” on captain Baudin’s expedition to the Australian Lands, Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) had explained how simple it was to prepare anatomical “objects” for transport to Europe: “boiling the bones in a caustic soda or potassium solution and removing their flesh only takes a few hours”. Or to “bring back heads with flesh” still intact, which were also very useful for “observers of man”, “it is simply a matter of placing them in a solution of corrosive sublimate”6. Like Jameson subsequently, Cuvier insisted on the fundamental importance of “gathering anatomical pieces in a single locality and comparing them there in all their relations”. For the naturalist could not rely on drawings of “modern voyages” which “reflect the rules and proportions that the artist learnt in European schools”. It is thus in museums that one may conduct “observations on the physical and moral characteristics of each race”7. These instructions of Jameson and Cuvier reveal the process transforming how European societies related to dead bodies: in the early nineteenth century, desacralization and objectification were becoming general.

Jameson’s instructions were furthermore part of the Linnaean tradition of natural history at the University of Edinburgh, where students were invited to embark on colonial expeditions and learn how to travel and classify the natural world - including humanity and its “particularities”. In the past few decades, a growing number of studies has focused on the disciples of Linnaeus who were sent out across the globe armed with precise instructions (Instructio peregrinatoris, 1759), while much attention has been paid to the material techniques and marketing strategies forming the “Linnaean tradition”8. These studies show that eighteenth-century naturalists relied extensively on all sorts of amateur and professional collectors to gather specimens and skeletons from the four corners of the globe. They were indispensable to fill what have been called “bone rooms”, places where bones were amassed to study and classify humankind9.

The first step was to procure and conserve the raw material. By the eighteenth century, however, it was the “method of ordering” objects via classification and presentation systems (such as catalogs or labels) – rather than the “act of possessing nature” – which mattered most10. The approach was that of the natural sciences. Initial collection/description was followed by classification, then generalization and the extrapolation of laws. The museum was to account for this undertaking. The ordered display cases in its galleries laid out the process for visitors.

The status of objects – skulls, casts, embalmed bodies, anatomical preparations, drawings, or other items – changed once they entered a museum open to the public. They were henceforth part of ordered, learned discourse about the history of humanity, as narrated by their installation. Their meaning depended on what was in their immediate vicinity, on how they were exhibited, on the objects surrounding them, and on the accompanying paratext. Returning to Jameson, the objects he exhibited acquired the status of tangible scientific “proof” of the classification of man into distinct “races”. The display cabinets were there to show this to visitors, whose active role as cultural consumers has been emphasized by historiography since the late 1990s11. This was a worldwide phenomenon, whose development and chronologies varied from one country to the next.

The purpose of this digression is to explain what motivates our special issue. It arises from an encounter between joint interests developed in various fields of research and rooted in two main types of reflection: the first on public uses of the past, the second on the construction of racial categories. Anthropology and ethnology museums are at the center of shared preoccupations about the continuing presence of race in public spaces. This seems to have become an ever more topical and visible issue. From this perspective, the editorial board of Passés Futurs thought it possible and worthwhile to reflect on a particular category of museum, namely anthropology museums, or more specifically ethno-anthropology museums, as they are nowadays the central (but not sole) place where humanity is placed on public institutionalized display. To this end, colleagues working in different disciplinary approaches have been solicited. For this reflection needs to be conducted at the intersection between history, sociology, anthropology, epistemology, the history of art, and the history of science.

The ambition of this introduction is circumscribed, as it cannot give a full account of the complexity and richness of the issues raised by the papers published here. My aim is rather to sketch out some general reflections and highlight a small number of questions, as seen from my own field as a historian engaged in researching the conceptions of humanity that took form during the Enlightenment.

In the long history of museums, which it is not relevant to reexamine here, may we clearly distinguish when anthropology museums emerged? May we apprehend their specificity? While distinctive for focusing on human groups, anthropology museums have a multi-stranded genealogy. One would be misguided to try to simplify this genealogy, for that would eclipse the significance of the historical complexity characterizing how societies have related to the category of “humankind”. Objects representing distant cultures, even humans themselves, were to be found in curiosity cabinets, a characteristic feature of the history of Western collecting since the Renaissance12. It would nevertheless be a gross distortion to see these as the sole origin of anthropology museums. Human “curiosities” were exhibited prior to becoming an established museum practice, as Pietro Corsi points out in his conclusion (“From the Museum pictum to the specimen in Museums”). The list of human “monsters” exhibited in princely courts, markets, coffeehouses, and fairs is a lengthy one: hairy men and women, dwarfs and giants, bicephalous and macrocephalus individuals, and man-fish beings, or mermaids, were part of the attractions13. Some have become notorious, such as Saartjie Baartman (1789-1815), the “Hottentot Venus” who was bought in South Africa in 1810, and displayed during her lifetime as a fairground attraction in Britain, Holland, and then France, before being measured, dissected, and embalmed by Georges Cuvier. Finally, she was placed on display in the brand-new museum of natural history in Paris14.

Furthermore, the exploration and exhibition of the human body acquired a new and central dimension with the development of anatomy15. Eighteenth-century anatomy museums, among which the reputation of the Specola in Florence is still paramount due to the artistic quality of its anatomical waxworks, sometimes gave way to museums of pathological anatomy, in the penumbra of modern hospitals, or to army museums whose anthropological collections were built up in step with the conquest of vanquished or dominated peoples16. This diverse range of exhibition places raises another aspect of analysis, though it may only be mentioned in passing: the generic appellation “anthropology museum” should not blind us to the development of variants, such as ethnology or ethnography museums, or to the fluid contours these institutions may have depending on the country in question and the changing relationship between these three fields in disciplinary and organizational terms17.  

For a historian of the eighteenth century, there is no clear-cut boundary between “learned” and “popular” places, a distinction which would also need clarification. Displaying humanity predated anthropology museums. It occurred in many places, and was almost omnipresent in religious spaces, where relics and skulls were part of daily life18. It was in the eighteenth century that museums started systematically exhibiting human bodies, either whole or in pieces, even though the earliest anthropology, ethnology, and ethnography museums were only founded in the mid- or late nineteenth century. The ethnography museum of the St Petersburg academy of science (1836), the national ethnology museum in Leyden (1837), the Peabody museum of archaeology and ethnology at Harvard (1866), the Berlin museum for ethnology (1873), and the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford (1884) inaugurated “the great period of museum anthropology”19. In France, the Trocadéro ethnography museum (1882) was the antecedent to the museum of man (Musée de l’Homme) created in 1937. The new site received the anthropological collections from the museum of natural history20.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was an increasing number of anthropology museums in Europe, the United States, and the rest of the world (as evidenced by this issue). They echoed each other21, opened their doors to many different publics with varying motivations, and, depending on the museum, combined research and popularization. Nowadays they are increasingly called into question for their role as “display cases of humanity”, and are at the heart of public debate whenever they are open, close, or are restored. One of the most recent instances in France was that of the Musée Jacques Chirac, Quai Branly in Paris, plans for which sparked much controversy22. Where and how has humanity been – and continues to be – exhibited? In what ways have skeletons, skulls, embalmed bodies, photographs, casts, and artefacts been used to account for human diversity? And what is the case now? These questions, that this issue addresses from specific historical situations, echo transformations in research fields – ethnology in France, and cultural anthropology in the English-speaking world in particular – whose development tracks that of museum “displays”.

These museums are, at one the same time, “places of knowledge”23, “contact zones”24, and “forums”25. They propose public accounts of history that are never neutral, be it in their preservation or in their exhibition of the past. Everything counts. Where does the object come from? How and why was it obtained then transported? What path brought it to the museum? How was it transformed into a “scientific object” then positioned in the museum space? How is it described, catalogued, and exhibited? What is shown, and what remains hidden? How does it show what is shown? These questions, which are pertinent for all objects, are equally so for human remains. Nevertheless, with remains, ethical and ontological issues take on greater substance and complexity, to which is added a particularly pressing moral and political dimension nowadays.

The anthropology museum has become one of the places most explicitly associated with racial theories, due to its role in expressing differences. Do they reinforce racial differences? What have been the technical procedures used to make differences appear? Are they the privileged place of legitimization for human diversity as an object of learning and knowledge? This is also linked to the question of the dividing line between “museums of the Self” and “museums of the Other”, as suggested by Benoît de L’Estoile26, raising still further questions: how have the populations represented been involved in staging their representations? What links are there between these populations and the bodies displayed in museums?

The question of who these particular items belong to, and of their restitution – to whom? how? – has fueled a growing number of legal cases involving anthropology and museography specialists together with citizen movements, law firms, and ministries27. Since the late 1980s, the legitimacy of collecting and showing “different humanities” and “human remains” has been a matter of increasing debate, both from the point of view of international law and from that of public opinion, which is increasingly sensitive to such issues. As Irina Podgorny and Laura Miotti sum up, the past has been turned into a “battlefield”28.

An ever larger number of papers, monographs, multi-authored volumes, and special issues of journals engage with these questions, increasingly questioning colonialism and the “collecting of the indigenous dead”29. “Decolonizing” anthropology museums is a key term in this debate, whether presented as a need or as a project (first but not solely because all forms of museum have come in for criticism). In the shift from the post-colonial to the de-colonial, the issue of the political role of anthropology museums and their public usages has risen up the agenda of scholarship on museography throughout the world30. The key point to emerge from these works is the complexity of any attempt to categorize humanity and account for how each society relates to its past and its ancestors. But what this special issue also highlights is that questions pertaining to how “races” are represented are not solely a matter of relations between former colonizers and colonized. Alice Berthon’s article on the Japanese national museum of ethnology, the Minpaku, which opened in 1977, is a telling illustration of this (“Denying empire: the national museum of ethnology in Japan”).

It is not our purpose, in any case, to go over all the matters foregrounded by this abundant scholarship. This issue does not seek to be exhaustive or to build up a linear narrative based on existing scholarship. On the contrary, it takes due note of the heterogeneous domains in which exhibitions of humanity are studied, but without trying to hierarchize them. It also notes the variety of questions they explore. But it further sets out to show how important it is to tackle the matter collectively and from an interdisciplinary perspective. This issue seeks to enquire into anthropology and its history, confronting it with the history of science, of techniques, and of art. We believe it is impossible to think about how anthropology museums originated without taking their visual dimension into account. Otherwise we lose sight of part of how a museum functions, and we would fail to apprehend its fundamentally performative and aesthetic character31. The casts discussed in Lucia Piccioni’s paper (“Duplicating and hierarchizing humanity”) provide an excellent illustration. In the mid-nineteenth and early decades of the twentieth century, anthropologists seeking “proofs of authenticity” employed the technique of facial casts, initially perfected in Ancient Rome to produce funeral masks for votive purposes. Photographs by Lidio Cipriani (1892-1962) illustrate the smug arrogance of anthropologists taking the cast, who cared little about the invasiveness of the procedure, and depict the dominance introduced over a model obliged to remain in an uncomfortable and dominated position. While a photograph cannot recount the historical context – in this instance, fascism, heightening the symbolic power of this bodily confrontation –, it brings out a type of violence which, though hardly new, was presented in anthropology museums as objective evidence, assisted by the handmaidens of science, technique, and art32.  

It thus strikes us as crucial to stress the historical dimension of the topic, starting with consideration of the European colonial enterprise. For, it is within this framework that museums of natural history, anatomy, and subsequently anthropology arose. They then became an expression and a tool of such an undertaking. Recent research on the eighteenth century, specifically its second half, when slave trading peaked in Europe, confirms this aspect. It is thus not possible to speak of “neutral collections” for this period either. The curiosity displayed in cabinets may no longer be viewed as innocent, with scholarship focusing on the links between curiosity and merchandise, empire and slavery. Recent works have shown how the underpinnings of slavery informed every aspect of European metropoles, filtering into their cultural life and circles of learning33. This perspective underscores the central role played by transatlantic slave-trading networks in expanding European collections of natural “curiosity”, be they plant specimens or human skulls. We thus address the question of whether curiosity imposed an order on the trafficking in goods and human beings in the Atlantic world, or was rather a means of collecting the world without ordering it 34.

The founding of the British Museum was based on the collection of specimens built up by Irish-born physician Hans Sloane (1660-1753) during his time in Jamaica (1687-1689), where he made a fortune by profiting from the labor of African slaves on sugar plantations. Over and above his direct connection with slave trading, which lasted long after his return to England, the exotica in his collection displayed in his house on Bloomsbury Square in London included objects issuing from the trade, such as collars, whips, and chains. Their presence in the natural history cabinet of the future president of the Royal Society attests to a factual interest in matters of slavery as a “curiosity”, in which a taste for the rare was combined with an appetite for the monstrous35. Adopting the naturalist approach of deriving facts from observation, he built up a repertoire of slavery practices that the abolitionist movement of the end of the century subsequently used to prove another form of monstrosity, namely that of the Europeans towards Africans36. 

The circulation of objects, ideas, and humans through slave-trading networks thus shaped the new scientific knowledge of the Enlightenment, influencing in turn the development of the slave trade itself37. In Britain, museums emerged as one of the places via which the question of slavery became established within the public sphere. The British Museum has recently recognized this issue on its website38. The case of France, analyzed here by Anne Lafont, also shows this link between curiosity and exhibition, between fair and museum. Lafont particularly emphasizes the major contribution made by the graphic arts – alongside accounts and anatomical dissections – to knowledge about and representation of humanity, reduced, as she puts it, “to the form of still lifes in museums”.

The second point to be emphasized is that of how items were exhibited. What are we to do with this legacy today? How may we think about it constructively? If museums were invented as a colonial technology, is it possible to conceive of decolonizing museums? What does it mean to “decolonize” anthropology museums? The works presented here do not purport to provide a unique and unanimous answer to such important questions, but rather to share doubts and questions arising from the singular histories of each of the museums under consideration. Is it possible to historicize “anthropological” objects, to integrate the political and economic context of their production into museum practices? How are we to account for the historicity of modes of exhibition in modernizing and conserving these types of museums? What are the practical, legal, and scientific consequences of “decolonizing” anthropology museums?

In recent years, museums have changed their way of exhibiting items. The articles about the Lombroso museum in Turin show that in changing how things are exhibited, the meaning of the display changes. As Maddalena Carli observes (“Patrimonializing deviance”), while in the original museum as founded by Lombroso spectators were plunged into what was intended to prove and express human deviances, in the present-day museum visitors are separated from the objects on display. They thus acquire a “testimonial value”. The distance between the spectator and the object comes from the display cases, the detailed comments, the explanatory video clips, and by the decision not to exhibit certain items (which are however available to researchers in the depositories). On other occasions, such as the anthropology museum in Florence studied by Lucia Piccioni, collections are stored in boxes that neither the public nor researchers may access.

In a now classic book on the origins of public museums, Tony Bennett suggests they be understood as places not only for teaching but also for reforming regulated social performances and routines. The public, didactic, and reforming dimensions come together in the presentation and exhibition of the past39. Yet it remains an open question whether it is still possible to exhibit human remains. How to cope with the ever greater number of requests to restitute objects? And who is to decide and settle such questions?

Shortly before the third millennium, Jean Jamin published an article with the provocative title: “Faut-il brûler les musées d’ethnographie ?” (“Should we burn down ethnography museums?”). Fifteen years later, Benoît de L’Estoile asked “can French anthropology survive the loss of its museums?”, making the important point that “however rhetorical the question may seem, it is of key importance for an entire generation of anthropologists in France”40. For in France – unlike other countries, such as Britain, for example – it was museums that drove the institutionalization of social anthropology, particularly the national museum of natural history which developed into an institution specifically for the study of “man”. This is what is emphasized by the key concept of a “museum laboratory”41. Yet despite its exemplary track record of commitment to the unity of humankind, it is no better able to resist calls for restitution than other museums.

Paul Rivet (1876-1958), who held the chair of anthropology at the national museum of natural history, was the first director of the museum of man, which opened to the public in 1938, propelled by the Front Populaire government. Wishing to “save the science of mankind from fragmentation”, its mission was to respond to Nazi anti-Semitism and its ideology of race. The museum was thus founded with the civic purpose of displaying the unity of human nature to the general public. While rejecting any hierarchical vision of the human races, Rivet and his colleagues did not thereby question the legitimacy of the French Empire. This is what Alice Conklin refers to as the “colonial paradox of the musée de l’Homme”: “the musée de l’Homme was meant to be simultaneously universalist, colonialist, and antiracist”42. The ambiguity of this legacy resurfaced in public debate when the musée de l’Homme reopened to the public in 2015, after a seven-year renovation campaign.

This edition is deliberately not centered on France or Europe, voyaging instead through time and space. Alongside France and Italy, Japan, Mexico, and Argentina offer specific case studies bringing out singularities as well as common perspectives. The presence of two articles about the Lombroso museum may seem redundant, yet it reflects what initially motivated this special issue. The public attacks against it, which were particularly fierce in 2010 during the 150^th anniversary of Italian unification (but still continue today)43, seemed to our minds symptomatic of the complex ties between politics, ideology, and public debate. Silvano Montaldo’s article (“En finir avec Lombroso?”) brings out the vicissitudes of the Lombroso myth in Italy, and summarizes the heated dispute surrounding a figure who catalyzed criticism (as well as praise for several decades) from all quarters. This echoed the political, ideological, and scientific choices Cesare Lombroso made during his lifetime, which took on very different meanings after his death, and are still evolving today.

The museum experiences analyzed here, drawn from specific, situated historical contexts, often associated with forms of nation-building, may ground considerations about more general topical questions. Other museums could have been examined - possibly more telling or significant. But once again, our concern has not been to set out an exhaustive or linear account. The countries studied here as samples are such as to partake in a common reflection, particularly on the irony in thinking of nation-building in tandem with creating a museum as a way of legitimizing this undertaking. Several articles opt to go over the confused and arbitrary process for fabricating a museum. Such is the case of the La Plata museum examined by Irina Podgorny (“Du Musée au Panthéon”), which shows “the constitutive disorder of its physical layout”, highlighting the ambiguities of a project described by Philippe Descola as an “excellent image of the world as long conceived”44. Nevertheless, what transpires is the construction of the scientific reputation of the founder of its collection, Francisco Moreno, described by Podgorny as a man who, though little respected by his contemporaries, became emblematic of what it is to be Argentinian.

As for the creation of the national museum of anthropology in the city of Mexico examined by Johannes Neurath (“Temple de la nation et lieu sacré wixarika”), it is without doubt one of the first achievements of the government of independent Mexico, being founded by presidential decree in 1825. Nevertheless, its origins and initial development, recently studied by Miruna Achim, were most tumultuous. The process of nation-building that the museum was meant to embody resulted from complex and often paradoxical negotiations and from a non-linear history45. Its more recent history - the focus of Neurath’s article - shows the museum to be “a place of disputed power”, tugged in different directions by political centralism, the neo-evolutionism of archaeologists, and references to a mythical Aztec-Mexican history. Drawing on a surprising example, he shows how one of the country’s many “indigenous groups”, the Huichols (or Wixáritaris as they call themselves) from Ocota de la Sierra to the north of Jalisco, have managed to reclaim objects from their traditions and culture displayed in the museum.

The national question is also addressed in Alice Berthon’s article, which looks at the Minpaku to explore how a museum without collections may be produced. She shows that opposition to the Western museum model served a discourse that denied colonial imperialism and the Japanese Empire. Using the example of the Ainus, an “indigenous minority” in Japan subjected to a policy of assimilation, Berthon explores what she identifies as the “a-colonial” rhetoric used by the founders of the first ethnology museum in Japan. What is there in common between the two extremities of Eurasia, and between Mexico and Sapporo? This may seem a rhetorical question. However, joint consideration of the articles by Neurath and Berthon suggest a latent tension between state centralism and resistance by indigenous populations seeking to reassert control over a part of their history which has been “stolen” – as Jack Goody puts it – to be displayed in museums where they go to reclaim it46.

Irina Podgorny adds to this debate, showing how these questions lie at the heart of political action and discourse. She compares the arguments put forward in the United States and Australia for restituting the bones, skulls, and funereal objects of indigenous cultures, with the very different ones deployed in Argentinian discourse seeking to relocate them to the Mapuche pantheon in the town of Trenque Lauquen. Taken together, these articles emphasize the complexity of the relationship between these museums and European museums, which serve both as models and as anti-models.

As a historian of racial questions in the Enlightenment, I am puzzled and concerned by attitudes that seek to solve a problem by hiding or silencing it. Racism does not disappear because we abolish the word “race”, and nor does it disappear if we hide the signs of racial classifications which have shaped the history of Western anthropology. Quite the opposite, in fact. Yes, anthropology museums come with a history in which, slavery, aesthetic prejudice, and many other types of violence are an integral part. We need to be aware of this. But examining the ambivalences and contradictions in building knowledge is, in my opinion, a key element for thinking about our past and present-day societies. It is a matter of continuing the endeavor to find the right ways to address our contemporaries and to confront shifting problems.

All these articles, based on studying in different ways the history of a particular museum, illustrate the links between ethnography/anthropology, museums, and colonial policies. They all bring us back to the role that the social sciences play in the public manufacture of history, and to our individual and collective responsibility in defining the contemporary world and how humans relate to one another47.