Human Objects, Object Rights: from Elgin’s Marbles to Bullock’s Laplanders

Abstract

ABSTRACT This essay probes the question of rights along the porous boundary between persons and things. Its broader framework is the rapid expansion of museums – and museum collections – in the Romantic period, but it examines in particular two episodes that in different ways mingle and merge bodies and objects. The first is the still-controversial acquisition of marbles from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, and their subsequent sale to the British Museum. The complex debates surrounding this transaction are ethical, political, and aesthetic in nature, but what is of interest here is the emphasis, on the part of contemporary commentators, on the uncanny life-likeness of the fragments. The second part of the essay considers this problem from another angle by examining William Bullock’s temporary exhibition, at his London Museum in 1822, of a family of Laplanders, their reindeer and sleds, and examples of their cultural and domestic artifacts. Body-object, object-body: this inversion, so resonant now in a critical climate engaged by thing theory and object oriented ontologies, takes on additional force in the emergent cultural economy of the Romantic museum, where the right to (and of) the object, and the place of the body, are provocatively on display.