By Melaina Leung
As both an Anthropology major at the University of Chicago and a lover of museums, I am highly aware that my chosen academic discipline and this specific type of cultural institution both lay claim to problematic histories. While both have significantly contributed to our understanding of the world and the people living in it, it is important to also recognize that anthropology and museums must be open to criticism. When the former becomes an area of research for the latter, further issues and points of critique arise. The development and maintenance of anthropology departments in museums have often led to the exploitation of indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups and have further reinforced already highly unequal power relations. In the West, such departments are frequently found in natural history museums due to the antiquated and wrong belief that indigenous and marginalized cultures represented the early “uncivilized,” obsolete stages in the social “evolution” of humanity. In comparison, the pinnacle of human development was symbolized by the “civilized” cultures of the museum’s white founders and staff.
With this in mind, I am especially interested in museums’ current efforts to address their pasts as institutions founded by people in power who perpetuated cultural imperialism over indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups. While I have some previous experience working in museums, my internship with the National Taiwan Museum is the first time I have worked in a museum focusing on natural history. My time so far has been illuminating in demonstrating how the museum has grappled with its own relationship to the indigenous peoples whose objects it has held in the museum collections.
Two major practices that have emerged at museums are repatriation and representation. For this article’s discussion, I will define repatriation as the practice of returning objects of cultural heritage and/or human remains to their cultural group of origin. While there are a variety of approaches to this practice, repatriation aims to restore cultural property to address past injustices (including how objects and remains may have been obtained unethically) and acknowledge that community members are the rightful custodians of their own culture. Representation makes a similar claim: the individuals that can best convey the meanings and messages of a particular cultural community are those individuals that come from that same community.
In this article, I discuss the repatriation and representation efforts of three different museums. I first will highlight the National Taiwan Museum’s own experiences with its anthropological collections. Next, I will explore a recent example of representation in Chicago: the Field Museum’s exhibit Apsáalooke Women and Warriors, guest curated by Apsáalooke scholar Nina Sanders. Lastly, I will examine the National Museum of Australia’s approach towards repatriation and collections management. While I am far from an expert on these museums and their efforts, I hope to raise some awareness and interesting points of discussion about the museums’ different approaches to allow readers to make connections and comparisons.
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Part 1: National Taiwan Museum (Taipei, Taiwan)
Part 2: Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago, Illinois, United States of America)
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