Please note that this is BBC copyright and may not be reproduced or copied for any other purpose. RADIO 4 CURRENT AFFAIRS ANALYSIS WHO OWNS CULTURE? TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY Presenter: Kenan Malik Producer: Ingrid Hassler Editor: Nicola Meyrick BBC White City 201 Wood Lane London W12 7TS 020 8752 7279 Broadcast Date: 29.07.04 Repeat Date: 01.08.04 Tape Number: PLM430/04VT1030 Duration: 27.20 Taking part in order of appearance: Professor Jack Lohman Director of the Museum of London Baroness Young of Hornsey Cultural Consultant and Former Head of Cultural Policy for the Greater London Authority Michael Brown Professor of Anthropology at Williams College, Massachusetts, USA Robert Foley Professor of Human Evolution at Cambridge University Neil MacGregor Director of the British Museum Norman Palmer, Barrister and Professor of the Law, Art and Cultural Property, University College, London Adam Kuper Professor of Anthropology, Brunel University MALIK: Museums used to be dusty repositories of arcane artefacts. Today they are fast becoming sites of conflict and controversy. LOHMAN: I think it’s high time for museums to behave morally towards their collections and towards the communities that they serve. SEGUE YOUNG: The problem with some of those collections is not just about the way in which they’re collected, it’s about the motivation behind them. So if something is collected in order to, for example, demonstrate to the superior Europeans the inferiority of Africans or Indians or other peoples, then that is obviously highly problematic. SEGUE BROWN: The problem is that if you try and do an exhibit that doesn’t offend somebody, you end up with an exhibit that’s so uninteresting and insipid that it’s really of no use at all. MALIK: Jack Lohman, director of the Museum of London, cultural consultant Dame Lola Young and Michael Brown, Professor of Anthropology at Williams College, Massachusetts. What does it mean for museums to act morally? Should they become more socially relevant by promoting the cultural aspirations of the communities they serve? And is it right for museums to hold on to objects that belong to other cultures? The great museums of the West are largely products of Empire. In our more enlightened times, curators seem increasingly unsure what to make of their own collections. Robert Foley, Professor of Human Evolution at Cambridge University and former director of the University’s Duckworth museum. FOLEY: I think there’s certainly a crisis of confidence in many museum people, in the communities that work there; that museums have a particular image in relation to the places from which much of their material has come and they feel that in a way building relationships with emerging nations and communities is an important way of trying to restore the notion of museums. I personally think that museums, on the other hand, should not be ashamed of their past. I think if we look at what we find in the British Museum or we find in the great museums of Europe, we have saved there a history of the world which might otherwise have easily have been lost and which now acts to inform people in ways that can only be for the good. MALIK: But did the British Museum save the world or just plunder it? For many people, the critical question in judging a museum is how it acquired its collections. Among the British Museum’s most prized possessions are the Elgin Marbles and the Benin Bronzes. In the early nineteenth century, the British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Lord Elgin, removed some of the best statues and friezes from the Parthenon in Athens and sold them to the British Museum. Nearly a century later a punitive British expedition to Benin (in modern day Nigeria) looted the nation’s greatest art treasures. Today there are vocal campaigns for the Marbles and the Bronzes to be returned to Greece and to Nigeria. Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum, thinks, however, that both are better displayed in London. MACGREGOR: In the British Museum, you can see how that Greek art emerges from a whole tradition of the Eastern Mediterranean and then how it invigorates a different tradition in Rome, India and the rest of Europe. In the British Museum, they are clearly one of the great achievements of the whole of mankind. All great works of art are the result of borrowing from other traditions. MALIK: Would you say the same for the display of the Benin Bronzes, for instance? MACGREGOR: I would say very much the same of the Benin Bronzes. They completely transformed the way people in Europe thought about Africa. It was the presence of the Benin Bronzes and that extraordinary sophistication of making, that made it completely impossible for Europeans to go on thinking of Africa as not having its own culture, and a very great culture. The circumstances of the taking of the Benin Bronzes were violent, but if we look at what happened when they arrived, it seems to me that from then on it was totally beneficial. MALIK: But isn’t it unethical for museums to cling on to items that were originally stolen? Not necessarily, Neil MacGregor argues. The importance of the British Museum to the world today, he suggests, outweighs the dubious provenance of some of its artefacts. MACGREGOR: The purpose of the British Museum is to allow people to see that all the societies of the world and all the cultures of the world are interconnected. That’s the one big thing that the British Museum, better than any other museum in the world probably, can allow you to do – to see the oneness of humanity. MALIK: Is that what you mean when you describe the British Museum as a world museum? MACGREGOR: Yes, the British Museum is in a sense the memory of mankind, as Ben Okri said. The extraordinary thing about it is that it was set up in 1753 to gather together things from all over the world, but always to be held open free to people from anywhere in the world. So from the beginning, this very idealistic notion, if you like, of trustees holding for the entire world the means of understanding the entire world. MALIK: A cynic might suggest that ‘world museum’ is just a fancy phrase to allow the British Museum to cling on to its treasures. After all, the museum may be free to anyone in the world but most people in the world can’t take advantage of its largesse. Yet it’s not just rich tourists or white middle class Britons who benefit. Nearly a third of Londoners are non-white and the fastest growing population is African. In an age in which many museums are seeking to be ‘socially inclusive’, some curators believe that cultural objects from around the world should be used to attract groups – such as African-Caribbeans or Asians - that might otherwise walk right past their doors. Lola Young was until recently head of cultural policy for the Greater London Authority. Does she agree with this approach? YOUNG: It’s important for diaspora peoples from wherever can see those objects in their newly adopted homelands. I don’t have a problem with that. Where I have a problem is when the objects and artefacts themselves aren’t treated with appropriate respect. If we look, for example, at the so-called Hottentot Venus, Sara Baartman, who came to Europe in about 1810 - when she died in Paris in 1815, her body was subsequently put on display in the Musee de L’Homme and was on display until the middle of the twentieth century, until the late twentieth century actually, despite many requests for her remains to be returned. They were finally returned to South Africa to the Khoikhoi tribe in 2002, and this was after some negotiation between Jacques Chirac and Nelson Mandela. There is a symbolic value attached to the Hottentot Venus because she was held up to be something that was completely anomalous, sub-human, and that attitude towards Africans from Europeans became literally embodied in her body both alive and dead. MALIK: Exhibits such as the Hottentot Venus may be a thing of the past. But Western museums still hold tens of thousands of human remains – skulls, skeletons, bones. And even more than artefacts, such remains generate anger and controversy, and demands for their return and reburial - as the Museum of London’s Jack Lohman experienced first hand when he was living in South Africa. LOHMAN: I think I went through one of the most dramatic periods of my life living in South Africa. I was looking after the South African Museum, which is the oldest museum in Africa. It has seven hundred and eighty-eight human remains in boxes and I remember one day I had a delegation of thirty people storm into my office and say to me “we are not leaving your office until you release the human remains in the museum.” And we began a process of returning these various trophies, if you like, back to their communities. It was a very dramatic moment. It really influences, makes me think very hard about what we keep in museums. I’m not sure whether museums should be mass graves. MALIK: The debate about human remains has been especially fierce in America, Australia and New Zealand, where guilt about the treatment of indigenous peoples – Native Americans, Aborigines and Maoris – runs deep. Museums in these countries have thrown open their storage rooms, and returned thousands of bones to source communities for burial. In Britain the government-appointed Working Group on Human Remains recently published its report on what to do with the remains held by English museums. Its chairman is barrister Norman Palmer, Professor of Law, Art and Cultural Property at London University. PALMER: We to a large extent base our recommendations on the need to treat indigenous people in the same way or a truly analogous way to that in which other people are treated. Under English law certain people have the overriding right to the delivery up of members of their family for burial. Those are the personal representatives. This is an absolute right by law and no counter argument – for example the scientific value of research – can be allowed by law to defeat that right. The Department of Health has recently recommended and incorporated in the Human Tissue Bill the overriding principle of consent as the cornerstone for the continued retention of human remains by hospitals and kindred institutions. And in the report, what we are saying is what argument is there for treating indigenous peoples differently when their remains are in museums rather than in hospitals. What we propose is a fairly limited extension of the consent principle to those people who qualify under their own culture as family. So that if people have within their own community – and this would be the community from which the remains emanated in the first place – a relationship or responsibility towards the remains, which was akin to that under their own culture of close family or direct genealogical descendents – then we would say they too should have the right to say what should happen to their family. We are not so insular as to believe that our way is the only way. MALIK: Most people would understand if museums had to release human remains to close relatives. But does it make sense to insist that bones thousands of years old are off-limits for study or display because a particular culture views even remote ancestors as close kin? In any case who exactly are indigenous groups? And how do we know what they want? Michael Brown, Professor of Anthropology at Williams College, Massachusetts, and author of Who Owns Native Culture?. BROWN: Where indigenous peoples have formally recognized political organizations that are recognized by the state and are authorized to develop policies, then that’s the group that one deals with, those are the organizations that one deals with. Now internal to the community, of course, there may be great debates about whether elected political leaders or even traditional authorities of one sort or another have the power and the authority to make those decisions in particular contexts. Even the question of who is indigenous gets extremely vexed as indigenous peoples inter-marry with non-native communities. I mean right now American Indians have the highest rate of out marriage of any ethnic group in the United States, so over time it becomes increasingly difficult to define who is an American Indian. And that’s a problem that people are wrestling with in North America, they’re starting to wrestle with it in Australia, and that’s going to be the next battleground: trying to determine who qualifies as indigenous in the first place. MALIK: Indeed, some anthropologists argue, indigenous people are not just difficult to define, they’re a Western invention. Adam Kuper, Professor of Anthropology at Brunel University. KUPER: These are the people who in the 19th century were described by anthropologists as so- called primitive people. Hunters and gatherers living in far flung parts of the world – they were seen as being somehow at the bottom of the evolutionary chain. Today, a hundred and fifty years later, after anthropology has completely deconstructed these notions of hunter gatherers, of primitives, of racial exclusivity, all these Victorian notions are being reconstituted with the support of NGOs, the World Bank, the United Nations in order to construct a new category, the indigenous peoples of the world, who are identical – it turns out – to these primitive peoples. And they are thought to have some sort of stable culture which dates back before colonialism, which must be somehow reconstructed, handed back to these people. It’s phony ethnography; it’s mambo jumbo anthropology. MALIK: Mumbo jumbo anthropology it may be, but it has captured the imagination of many in the West. So much so that even when there are no claimants to bones or artefacts, museums insist on burying them. You might think that a government would only bother setting up a Working Group on Human Remains, and consider changing the law, if there’s a real issue to address. Think again. There have only ever been thirty-one claims for the return of human remains held in British museums. But some curators just want to do the moral thing. Jack Lohman of the Museum of London. LOHMAN: Thanks to a very generous grant from the Wellcome Trust, we are researching the plague pits. The greater part of the sample is male. The majority have come from local monasteries, generations of monks, etcetera. So obviously monks do play around, but the majority won’t have had ancestors as such and, therefore, to try and track down ancestors would be you know a very difficult task and probably a very expensive task and would involve DNA testing, etcetera, of the whole of London probably. We’ve got you know huge amounts of material, but there’s not enough information about them. I’ve got nine curators of human remains in the museum - more curators than possibly any other national museum in Europe working on human remains and possibly any other university department. We’re examining those. When we’ve finished, we plan to put them ideally in a catacomb where they can be sealed up. MALIK: Is that not just for your benefit and nobody else’s? After all, no one’s claiming those bones, so is it not a way of assuaging your moral guilt, if you like, about those bones? LOHMAN: If you have collections of male monks who gave their life to the church, I think there’s a moral obligation to place them in sacred ground and not keep them in the museum. I think culture is a sort of human right and, therefore, giving those cultures to whom those objects or artefacts belong to, I think is part of restoring human rights. MALIK: But surely museums have a responsibility not just to the dead but also to the living. And part of that responsibility is to use the dead to elicit knowledge that might benefit the living. Cambridge University’s Robert Foley is one of the world’s foremost researchers into ancient human remains. FOLEY: They’re an absolutely fundamental source of information about human history, especially global human history. One example is the way in which we now think of humans as having evolved in Africa probably about a hundred and fifty to two hundred thousand years ago; and of course because they’re the bodies of people that lived, they tell us about their life, their death, their diseases, whether they were healthy, whether they died in combat and so on. I think there are examples where human remains have been used for medical advances – various research done into orthopaedic surgery, obviously a lot of work done in forensics, in the ability to identify people and so on. So there is a utility to it, but I think it’s wrong to say that that is the primary driving force. It is in no doubt that this sort of work is basically curiosity driven in the sense we’re looking for knowledge for its own sake. The ideas we have today and the questions we want to ask are entirely different. Fifty years ago we weren’t thinking about an African origin. Fifty years ago, we were thinking in terms say of racial categories. We don’t think in that way now. So new questions come up and we need to re-examine material with those new ideas in mind. The absence of the material will mean in a way that our ideas become fossilised. MALIK: But there are tens of thousands of bones in museums. Do scientists really need them all of them? Michael Brown of Williams College. BROWN: There have been studies done of the percentage of human remains held by US museums that have ever been studied by anybody and it’s a shockingly low percentage. You know well under a quarter of them have ever been catalogued in the most elementary way, and we’re talking about as many as two hundred thousand individuals represented in these collections at the national level. So the question that Indians ask is well if these bones are so darn important to you, why is it that you haven’t done anything with them for the past hundred years? MALIK: What worries scientists, though, is that bones that might be vital to research may be lost forever. Robert Foley. FOLEY: If the Palmer Report in all its recommendations was implemented, I think it would have a major impact on our research. The onus would be on us as the holders of collections to as it were go out and find either biological descendents or cultural descendents or related groups or national or local institutions, which might want that material back. That would be a vast undertaking, which I think would absolutely devastate the resources that most collections have available to them. PALMER: The report says nothing of the kind. The report says that in certain circumstances museums should have an obligation to identify those people who are sufficiently closely related to the remains to be entitled to request them back. It makes it perfectly plain in the notes to recommendation 15 that identify means respond to a claim and try to verify whether that claim is justified or not. MALIK: Norman Palmer. Whoever is right in this – and even members of the Working Group disagree on the implications of the report – the final decision rests with the government. It’s just published a Consultation Paper asking for responses to the Palmer Report – but there is as yet no indication of its own views on the matter. And it’s not just bones that scientists fear losing. Artefacts too are disappearing as museums accede to the demands of indigenous groups. Harvard University’s Peabody Museum deliberately allowed a historic set of photographs to disintegrate because the Navajo tribe objected to non-tribal members viewing the rituals they depicted. There are other ways, too, in which objects are being lost, as anthropologist Michael Brown points out. BROWN: Well, it’s deeply problematic. Certainly when objects are returned to Indian tribes through the repatriation process, the tribes are free to do what they like with these objects and in some cases tribes have made it absolutely clear that their intention is to reintegrate them into ongoing rituals until such time as the objects are essentially worn out and discarded. So in that sense, I guess, there is a destruction of objects and of information associated with it. MALIK: ‘So what?’, you might say. It’s their culture, their artefacts, they can destroy them if they want to. For too long, argues Lola Young, Western nations have exploited non- Western peoples. It’s time we got used to the idea that we can’t do what we like with other people’s cultures, whether these consist of bones, artefacts or even symbols. YOUNG: If we look at the Olympic Games in Australia, in Sydney, it was very clear that the Australian authorities wanted to promote Australia as a country that had come to terms with its past and opened its arms, as it were, to diversity. Now the extent to which some of the Aboriginal people feel that that is actually the case and how that actually pans out on a day-to-day basis for them is another question altogether. So I think that that’s absolutely legitimate that that group of people should then say well we want to have some sort of control over how we’re portrayed and how our symbols and our symbolism are used. MALIK: In one current court case in Australia, Aborigines are demanding that the national airline Quantas stop using the kangaroo logo as it’s an Aboriginal symbol. In another case, they are seeking copyright over all photographs and paintings of the Australian landscape, which they say is central to their spiritual life. Where will this end? Must the British government approve every production of King Lear and Othello? Should only Jamaicans be allowed to play reggae? Professor Adam Kuper of Brunel University. KUPER: The notion of ownership is certainly meaningful and one could own objects which you might describe as cultural objects because you had made them or you’d designed them or you’d bought them. But to claim some sort of ownership on the grounds of descent from a group of people who might in the distant past once have invented those objects, seems to me to be bizarre, seems to me absolutely impossible. Are we going to, as English people, ask others to pay a copyright fee when they play cricket? It’s ridiculous. MALIK: Ridiculous it may be, but cultural bureaucrats seem hooked on the idea. UNESCO has suggested that ‘each indigenous people must retain permanent control over all elements of its own heritage’, including ‘songs, stories, scientific knowledge and artworks.’ It has even suggested the setting up of ‘folklore protection boards’. UNESCO’s push to protect every culture, Michael Brown argues, is counterproductive. BROWN: Every culture or every nation is supposed to have members of its culture provide inventories of all elements that are subject to protection, but of course that is protecting by making something public. That runs foul of the sense of many Aboriginal Australian and Native American groups that certain kinds of information simply should not be made public, should only be held and used by whatever sub group of the population, typically religious leaders, is empowered to use it safely and effectively. And so one of the ironies is at the local level indigenous peoples themselves are moving towards greater and greater secrecy. MALIK: Isn’t there also a case of a Native American group trying to dissuade outsiders from learning its language so as to be able to better protect its culture? BROWN: Well I was told that contract workers who work in Zuni, New Mexico, are specifically prohibited from learning the language of the Zuni people – the assumption being, as you mentioned earlier, that learning the language gives them access to ritual secrets and other forms of understanding that they simply should not have access to. MALIK: In a different context though, would we not call this xenophobia or racism? BROWN: Well it’s true – if the shoe were on the other foot, if Anglo Americans were forbidding Native Americans from speaking English, it would be considered a completely unacceptable racist policy. It really sets up a slippery slope at the end of which people are trying to create cultural divisions that never existed in the first place. MALIK: The campaign for the repatriation of artefacts and remains, and for the protection of minority cultures, is motivated by the best of intentions. Its consequences, though, can be deeply troubling. It presents an idea of culture as fixed and immutable, and as something that people own by virtue of their biological ancestry – an almost racial view of the world. Many museums, especially in America and Australia, now accede to demands from indigenous groups that in any other context would be seen as unacceptable. Some, for instance, ban women or non-tribal people from viewing certain parts of their collections. Others prefer to hide objects away in basements rather than risk causing offence. This confusion and insecurity on the part of museums needs to be sorted out, says Norman Palmer - particularly where human remains are concerned. PALMER: The existence of all these questions argues incontrovertibly for an independent resolution process. These questions must be examined. We do not say that one side is incontrovertibly right or wrong. What we say to each side is if you’ve got a good arguable case, submit that case to independent evaluation. MALIK: Do you think there should be binding guidelines on museums as to how they should approach the question of human remains that they possess in their collections? PALMER: Our position is that the position of human remains in museums is sufficiently important that it should be subject to regulation by a code of practice. The code of practice would be enforced, if you like, through a licensing system, and museums granted the license would depend upon its adherence to the code of practice. MALIK: Many museums are not keen on rigid guidelines, preferring a case-by-case approach to every dispute. But, says the British Museum’s Neil MacGregor, there is one area where binding international agreements are not only welcome but may defuse many of the current disputes over cultural ownership. MACGREGOR: We have in the last thirty, forty years, with the growth of international exhibitions, seen an unparalleled sharing of world culture. That has of course been focused overwhelmingly on the rich countries of the world. The next challenge must surely be to find ways of sharing the culture of the world with the less rich countries. The challenge is to allow as many of our objects as possible to be seen in different contexts, especially in the countries of origin, so what we need is a legal framework that will enable that to happen, that will ensure that objects can be lent to the country of origin and return so that they can be displayed again in the context here and indeed lent to other countries. MALIK: What you’re saying is that you’d like to build a series of universal museums across the world? MACGREGOR: Absolutely. I think what we need across the world are a series of the experiences of universal museums through temporary exhibitions and revolving loans. But we need a legal framework that would allow that to happen. MALIK: The idea of a universal museum may not be fashionable these days. But Neil MacGregor’s vision is surely highly commendable. We shouldn’t be ashamed of the treasures possessed by places such as the British Museum. Nor of the Enlightenment ideal of a museum as an institution that can help create more universal forms of knowledge by collecting from across ages and cultures. No culture should be private property. Each belongs to us all. 9