The Brutish Museums By Dan Hicks

Abstract

What is the role of a museum “curator”? To take care of and safeguard the objects in the museum’s collection? Or to cure the misdeeds of the past? Increasingly, it seems that those in charge of museums see themselves not as guardians of their historic treasures, but as the shameful and reluctant custodians of ill-gotten booty. The great collections of the world are falling over themselves to disembarrass themselves of anything that might be associated with a disagreeable part of history. In 2010, Yale University agreed to return a collection of antiquities to Peru, following a court claim by the Peruvian government; the items in the collection had been taken from the Inca site of Machu Pichu in the 1910s. In February 2019, the City of Stuttgart announced that it was returning to what is now Namibia a whip and a bible that were looted in 1893. Most recently, the French National Assembly voted in September 2020 to return 26 artefacts, currently in the Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac Museum, that were taken from the Kingdom of Dahomey following its defeat in the Franco-Dahomean Wars of the 1890s.1 The most famous, and controversial example is, of course, the claim by Greece for the return of the ‘Elgin’ or ‘Parthenon’ (depending on whether you are a ‘keeper’ or a ‘returner’) Marbles from the British Museum. But in every case, there is the same pattern: the wrongs of the past should be righted by repatriation of items of cultural, or totemic, significance.