He is often ready with a counter-argument or a minority report. Kuper, an academic anthropologist of some distinction and currently a professor at the London School of Economics, steers a pragmatic course through these perilous waters. Or it might turn identity into a cage from which there could be no escape. Later, putting some serious public-sector muscle into collections devoted to “other people”, as in Mexico and more recently the US, might cement complex national identities and make othered people in those nations feel valued. Many Western anthro/ethno collections were explicitly presented to the public as a 19th-century counterpart to the “Triumphs of Caesar”: trophies of conquest. To say that many such collections are intimately bound up with the Western imperialist project, tainted by bogus race science and, in some cases (though not as many as might be supposed), steeped in blood, is to state the obvious. “Decolonisation,” says the philosopher Frantz Fanon at the start of his 1961 book, The Wretched of the Earth, “is always a violent phenomenon.” In The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions, a roomy and level-headed book, Adam Kuper surveys one specific theatre of conflict: the rise and fall of the anthropological or ethnographic museum (these terms, along with much else, have long been the subject of some dispute) in Western Europe and North and Latin America, and the conflicting approaches-historicist, evolutionary, comparative, universalist-that shaped them.
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