The Age of the Museum is over

Sep 1, 2023 by

By Aris Roussinos, UnHerd.

Identity politics has delivered a killer blow to anthropology.

A decade ago, I spent more months than originally desired living in the bush of Sudan’s remote and war-torn Blue Nile state with SPLA-N rebels from the Uduk tribe, whose 20,000 odd members had found themselves stranded, by an accident of British imperial cartography, within an Arab Muslim state they despised. It was a strange and formative experience for a young journalist who had only recently left graduate studies at Oxford’s Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology — an institution whose ethos, as a result of the apostolic succession unique to the discipline, derived from the foundational texts on Sudan’s tribal culture and political order written by British Social Anthropology’s 20th century giants.

After weeks of growing intimacy, the most bookish of the rebel commanders confided in me that only one westerner, more than a century previously, had ever learned the Uduk language and mastered their ancient belief system, since hidden beneath a light veil of Christianity. That long-dead westerner had written a book on the Uduk, which was now their prize possession, he told me. Retrieving it, wrapped in a cloth like a sacred text from within a thatched tukul hut, he showed me the well-thumbed work, now devoid of covers and binding: it transpired to be an ethnographic text published in 1979 by the very-much-alive Oxford anthropologist Wendy James, whose seminars on Sudan I had eagerly attended just a few years previously.
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Yet this ambiguous record of cultural engagement and preservation is threatened by today’s moralising postcolonial discourse, and it is anthropology’s outward-facing showpiece, the ethnographic museum, that is its fiercest contemporary battleground.

Read here.

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