Pitt Rivers Museum from an Anthropologist

By Ethan Christ

The Pitt Rivers museum of Anthropology left me feeling very conflicted as I exited the exhibit Sunday afternoon. My initial reaction was that it should be shut down immediately, and is causing more harm than good by being open to the public. The Pitt Rivers felt like an embodiment of colonization as a museum, with artifacts and relics that were pillaged from people all around the world. As you enter the museum from the natural history museum, you feel like you are entering a cave as you walk in surrounded by artifacts in glass display cases and lit with dim lighting from above. It’s almost claustrophobic walking between displays that are labeled as “Asian Religion” and inside are quite literally a hundred or more figurines from all around Asia having to do with religion, with very little context. The Pitt Rivers tries to cram in as many artifacts as it can without giving apt descriptions and context as to what you are looking at, and absolutely no information on where it is from. I will give the Pitt Rivers credit for hiring Dan Hicks as their curator, who is an outspoken critic of museums like the Pitt Rivers and British museums’ history of imperialism and colonialism. The museum also has a few displays that acknowledge that many of the artifacts were stolen, and people who donated to the collection believed in racial eugenics. That being said, I think the Pitt Rivers display is almost destructive. By providing little to no context in labels of most of the displays, it really takes away from the cultural, religious, and historical significance of a lot of the objects they have there. They even keep on some of the labels with harmful language that you would never imagine to see in a museum today.