{"id":3578,"date":"2019-03-26T17:20:44","date_gmt":"2019-03-26T17:20:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/?p=3578"},"modified":"2019-03-27T11:48:26","modified_gmt":"2019-03-27T11:48:26","slug":"paris-anthropological-museums-trip-2019","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/sac-news-events\/2019\/03\/26\/paris-anthropological-museums-trip-2019\/","title":{"rendered":"Paris anthropological museums trip 2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

It has become a tradition for first year students at the School of Anthropology and Conservation to go on a field trip to the principal ethnographic museums of Paris: the Mus\u00e9e De L\u2019Homme<\/em><\/a>\u2014a general anthropological museum concerned with human diversity and evolution; and the Mus\u00e9e du Quai Branly<\/em><\/a>\u2014a museum of non-European art that features one of the world\u2019s richest collections of the arts of Oceania, Africa, America and Asia. This offers a unique opportunity for students to gain first-hand insights into the work an anthropologist could do after they graduate and addresses some of the major issues of the subject and how they relate to the history of anthropology.<\/p>\n

\"A<\/a>
A selection of aboriginal art at the Mus\u00e9e de Quai Branly<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The relationship between museums and anthropology dates back to the earliest stages of both. When museums, in the form of exhibition halls open to the public, came into being in the early 19th<\/sup> century, they had predecessors dating back centuries known as \u2018cabinets of curiosities\u2019. These displays were normally owned by the aristocracy and contained collections of notable and unusual objects from across the globe, the world\u2019s diversity gathered into one space.<\/p>\n

The items collected were not seen as everyday objects, but rather as examples of the extraordinary, especially regarding other peoples\u2019 ways of life. In the 19th<\/sup> century, as museum spaces became more formalised, their collections corresponded to the dominant idea of anthropology, which was one of primitivism, an interest in non-Western, \u2018exotic\u2019 cultures informed by the emerging nationalisms of Europe.<\/p>\n

Anthropology\u2019s early scholars did not themselves go\u00a0into the field, as is now the accepted practice. They stayed at home and let the \u2018world come to them\u2019: they were thus called \u2018armchair anthropologists\u2019. What they did was to study stories, documents, records and objects that were brought to them by such people as travellers, missionaries, traders, or colonial administrators. On the basis of that, they conceived a supposed genealogy of human life on earth. They compared objects of all kinds across different cultures, such as spears, axes, canoes, pottery etc. Their aim was to identify the \u2018first\u2019 prototype, that is, the most \u2018primitive\u2019 example, and then come to understand how the artefact spread around the earth as the practice of usage became more commonplace (there is an excellent display of this at the Pitt-Rivers Museum<\/a> in Oxford).<\/p>\n

\"Senegalese<\/a>
Senegalese bus at the Mus\u00e9e de l’Homme<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As research moved toward spending time in the field to study the modes and practices of indigenous cultures up close (ethnography) in the 1920s, anthropology became more critical and a split began to occur between the discipline and traditional museology. Later still, many anthropologists came to oppose the colonial ideologies that were implicit in most of the museum collections.<\/p>\n

This led to a complete break between museology and academic anthropology. When colonialism finally came to an end in the second half of the 20th<\/sup> century, the museums contained a lot of history that needed to be recontextualised. At this point, a new, postcolonial approach emerged. Since the late 1980s, academic anthropology started to be interested once again in material culture and a reconciliation began. As a result of this, a complete rethinking of the role of anthropological museums took place throughout Europe and North America, often increasingly in dialogue with the global south.<\/p>\n

\"Indian<\/a>
Indian shadow puppet at the Mus\u00e9e de Quai Branly<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One event that caused much debate in academic circles was the solution adopted by the French government, led by the then-President Jacques Chirac. He proposed to gather all ethnographic collections of the country and re-divide them between three main museums: the Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019Homme<\/em> (dealing with the evolutionary history of mankind), the Mus\u00e9e du Quai Branly<\/em> (dealing with non-European art) in Paris, and the Mus\u00e9e des Civilisations de l\u2019Europe et de la M\u00e9diterran\u00e9e<\/em> (dealing with the art and cultures of the Mediterranean basin) in Marseille.<\/p>\n

Today, each of them hosts absolutely distinctive collections and presents exhibitions of the greatest human value. In particular, the Mus\u00e9e du Quai Branly<\/em> is a great learning experience for students of anthropology who gain first-hand contact with ethnographic objects from all over the world. Yet the French approach separates off Middle-Eastern and European cultures from all \u2018Other\u2019 cultures\u2014which precisely is something that most academic anthropologists see as a source of concern. This division was, and still is, seen as a way to reproduce a division of the world into developed or \u2018civilised\u2019 parts, and underdeveloped or \u2018primitive\u2019 parts; into the \u2018West\u2019 and the \u2018Rest\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"Fist<\/a>
Fist year students at the Mus\u00e9e de l’Homme<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

However, these museums still constitute an enlightening experience, providing first-year students with a unique opportunity not only to experience material culture from around the globe, but to engage critically with the way, rightly or wrongly, European cultures have taken it upon themselves to catalogue and exhibit artefacts that once belonged to other communities around the world. And it was also great to see the Eiffel Tower from the elevated plaza where the Mus\u00e9e de l\u2019Homme <\/em>stands!<\/p>\n

I hope that many future generations of Anthropology students at the University of Kent continue to get the chance to visit these museums in Paris as part of their training as anthropologists.<\/p>\n

Text provided by Moritz Zielinski (University of Kent\/University of Mainz).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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