On Decoloniality and Restitution: Invoking Ganesha in Cambodia Today

Among the colonial institutions that Singapore inherited with independence on 9 August 1965 was the Raffl es Museum, established in 1849. It moved to its present building with its iconic dome (now a gazetted historic building) in 1887 and became a repository of colonial knowledge of the natural history, ethnography and archaeology of the Malay world especially the peninsula. But the People's Action Party government had other more pressing priorities for Singapore's economic, political and security survival in 1965 than deciding on the future of an old colonial museum. It was only in 1984, with Singapore's survival assured, that the government started to refl ect with confidence on Singapore's past in a major exhibition on 25 years of nationhood since 1959. Concurrently, the old Raffl es Museum, now renamed the National Museum, started installing a new series of exhibits tracing Singapore's journey to nationhood. A Long-Term Vision for the Museum In December 1986, then minister for community development Mr Wong Kan Seng appointed a task force to draw up long-term plans for the development of the museum. This task force was chaired by Mr Tay Kheng Soon, a pioneering architect deeply concerned with Singapore's urban heritage and history. The task force's primary recommendation was that the museum should make a radical break from its traditional image of being a treasure house full of butterflies, stuffed animals and strange smells, and especially the whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.

The aim of this paper is to compare the ways in which some of Europe’s most important colonial museums displayed their exhibits—how colonial territories and colonial subjects were represented through visual exhibition, how the display cases were arranged, which objects and artefacts were presented and in what sequence—as the clearest possible representation of the biological, technological, and cultural superiority of Europe with respect to the populations on display. The paper will therefore emphasise both the differences and different histories as well as the similarities between colonial museums in Europe. In fact, while acknowledging that there are special features linked to the differing conditions of both the motherland and her overseas territories, a common cultural horizon can be found in the different national museums taken into consideration here and in the interpretation of the inherent propaganda such institutions promoted.

This essay builds on the emerging (museum) decolonizing perspectives to (i) explore the biographical details and modes of curation and classification to which “ethnographic”1 objects collected during the colonial era have been exposed; to (ii) foreground the complexities of inherited colonial museum processes embedded in African urban contexts; and, to (iii) consider alternative modes of engagement with ethnographic objects and local Indigenous communities to challenge the embedded regimes of care and the marginalization rendered to Indigenous epistemologies. One of the biggest questions facing museums in the world today is how to deal with the hordes of objects collected from various Indigenous communities and placed in museums far away from the communities who made and used them. Using the case of an “ethnographic” collection in a former colonial museum, we call for a paradigm shift in museum practices, and challenge the present state of affairs of museum curatorship. We then briefly suggest possible ways in which such museums can confront their imperial histories and unsettle their inherited regimes of care and representation. We call for museums to enter into conversations with communities, listening to them and effecting curatorial activities that re-center local ways of knowing, while embracing the complexities associated with such engagements.

The movement of the late nineteenth century resulted in the creation and expansion of museums throughout Europe and North America and stimulated institutional development in far-flung quarters of the globe. From Melbourne to Montreal, museums were founded and revitalized. By examining the development of natural history museums in Australasia, Canada, and South America, Susan Sheets-Pyenson shows how colonial museum directors mobilized resources from reluctant provincial legislators, national governments, and college trustees. Local architects were often hired to realize the visions of glittering palaces to science that danced in the minds of colonial curators. Museums in the hinterland managed to assemble large and significant collections which included prime materials obtained from abroad. Using either cash or rare treasures as barter, curators entered a complicated system by which natural history specimens changed hands. The growth of collections overseas always remained subject to particular individual and cultural aspirations. Reigning opinion about the educational function of museums, proper methods of displaying specimens, and the use of research materials was tailored to fit particular circumstances. Colonial natural history museums were an important and previously neglected feature in the developing landscape of big science. Although the movement died at the turn of the century, it left a legacy of cathedrals of science as monuments to remarkable intellectual visions.

<i>Cathedrals of Science: The Development of Colonial Natural History Museums during the Late Nineteenth Century</i>. Susan Sheets-Pyenson

This book is by a prominent New Zealand geologist and science historian about one of the leading 19th century scientists, James Hector (1834–1907). His influence on New Zealand’s science in the second half of the century was so dominant that one science historian called this period “Hector hegemony”. But contrary to his contemporary, the German-born scientist Julius Haast, the full story of Hector’s achievements for New Zealand’s science had never been told and his name survived mainly in connection with the Hector dolphin, an endangered endemic species that he was the first to describe. But as of now, Nathan’s book will fill this gap. This is a well written, aptly designed and richly illustrated chronological biography of Hector’s life and work. It is remarkable how many details were unearthed from a large number of archives and libraries and especially from the letters Hector exchanged with friends and colleagues, mostly with Julius Haast, director of the Canterbury Museum at Christchurch, and Joseph Hooker, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, UK; Nathan had previously edited the correspondence of Hector and Haast and a bibliography of Hector’s publications prior to the book under review (Nathan et al., 2012, 2015). James Hector was born in Edinburgh; he graduated from his home university in 1856 as a doctor of medicine and developed a strong interest in geology, biology and tramping. Consequently, his first involvement in a major scientific exploration led him to Western Canada, where he joined an expedition into the Canadian Rockies with the aim of finding a suitable pass for the railway to connect the western Prairies with the Pacific. The pass discovered by this expedition is still in use; its name “Kicking Horse Pass” recalls an incident which almost cost Hector his life. His reputation as a keen and successful explorer reached the distant colony of New Zealand. In the 1860s, the Otago Provincial Council at Dunedin initiated a geological survey of the province with the aim of detecting new mineral and coal deposits and a suitable route linking the province of Otago to the remote west coast. Hector was appointed as government scientist and arrived in Dunedin in 1862. After an effective exploration on land and sea he served as one of the curators for the New Zealand Exhibition in Dunedin in 1865. In the same year, he arrived in Wellington as a government employee. Nathan’s book marks the 150th anniversary of Hector’s appointment as New Zealand’s first government scientist, the year when the seat of government was moved from Auckland to Wellington. From this year on, Hector was the great organiser of New Zealand’s science. At first he was involved in the foundation of a colonial museum, the forerunner of Te Papa, which is now New Zealand’s National Museum; he organised the central New Zealand Institute, which included the publication of the annual and influential Transactions and Proceedings. He masterminded the first comprehensive New Zealand Geological Survey (now GNS Science), which resulted in the publication of the first Geological Map of New Zealand. Hector also became the conductor and supervisor of the Colonial Botanical Gardens, the Colonial Observatory and was director of the meteorological stations. He used the expanding telegraph network to establish a nationwide recording system for the location and intensity of earthquakes. Hector was a foundation member of the Council and Chancellor of the University of New Zealand, and he was knighted in 1887. All these and a number of various other achievements are the topic of separate chapters in Nathan’s book, and they underline the outstanding importance of a scientist whom a newspaper once called “a man who knows everything” (p. 12).

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how node three national museums in Germany are dealing with colonial objects in their spaces. It also explores the German government’s recent rapprochement with scholars in its ex‐colonies on how to deal with its colonial past within a discourse of evidence and sankofatization. Sankofatization is defined as a Ghanaian‐Akan ideology that signifies the selection of past ideas for retention within a type of renaissance paradigm. In December 2015, the German Federal Foreign Office invited delegates from Togo, Ghana, Namibia, Tanzania, and Cameroon to take part in a unique program dubbed “A Themed Tour of German Colonial History.” Reporting on this tour, the paper assesses the activism of German civic organizations and museums in their ongoing attempts to decolonize colonial cityscapes, street names, and exhibits. But this discussion is much more than an ethnographic report. The implications of this rapprochement policy for discourses on the archaeology of German colonialism and the anthropology of colonial museums denote significant changes in transnational cooperation. Overall, the themed tour recalled that silencing of negative past experiences and past misdeeds is never permanent. Generational change often influences a renaissance, or sankofatization, of past realities to serve emerging postcolonial needs.

In this article, we look at collections of Zulu beadwork at Manchester Museum and Ditsong National Museum of Cultural History tracing their provenances and social biographies. We present these two institutions as colonial museums founded on similar ideals of presenting objects as cultures of the “other” in absence of object and community agency. In rethinking colonial contexts associated with processes of collecting beadwork, we look at how these museums can be decolonized by collaborating with communities. Decolonization is deployed here as both a theory and a method toward the integration of Indigenous ways of knowing and doing in museum practices. Methodologically, the article highlights decolonial strategies in the form of open, democratic, inclusive, and multivocal engagement that we embraced undertaking the research.

This chapter focuses on how museums reshape their colonial heritage using the museum as a space for recognition and historical reconciliation. The postcolonial turn has been accompanied by the claims of cultural minorities for identity recognition all around the world, subjecting ethnography museums to new critical perspectives in terms of their goals and roles. The iconic image of the Queen Mother India that is reproduced at the exhibitions entrance, a coveted piece in the British Museum, sets the tone for a presentation that takes a global point of view, in as much as it is relative on the one hand to the museums own collection. The Colonial Theatre offers an inversion of how the world was visualised in colonial museum culture by adopting the use of the diorama to stage anew the layout introduced into the museum in 1938 to celebrate the forty-year reign of Queen Wilhelmina.

THE final report to the Carnegie Corporation of New York on the activities of the Empire Grants Committee appears in the Museums Journal of May. It is a stimulating document. On April 1, 1934, the Committee was set up to administer a fund of 54,000 dollars granted by the Carnegie Corporation of New York for Colonial Museums, with an addition of 9,000 dollars for expenses, £12,550 in all. All museums in the British Colonies, and in Newfoundland and Southern Rhodesia were invited to submit applications for grants ; forty applications were received and twenty-five grants were made. They ranged from £60 to Kandy Museum and Bermuda Historical Museum to £1,000 for Nairobi, Cyprus, Barbados, Singapore, Zanzibar, Jamaica. Various strict regulations had to be made as to the conditions upon which grants could be made ; but the Committee is satisfied that the ffect of grants has been in nearly every instance most stimulating to the local museum movement. At Buelawayo and Salisbury, the museums have been elevated to the dignity of national museums ; in Cyprus, Barbados and Antigua more attractive premises and added Government recognition have been gained ; but in most cases grants have been given for cases and equipment, so that museum interiors have been brightened and organized on modern lines. The success of the experiment leads the Committee to suggest that there are good reasons for continuing so promising a first effort.