Blog Post 1: Assessing the Brief
The brief:
- How might we tell the complex stories of the Skull Collection from a museological perspective while engaging seriously with decolonial thought and struggle?
- What strategies can be employed to address knowledge and metadata gaps in small museums?
Prior to coming to the UK, I was very unfamiliar with the term decolonization. It is not something that had made its way to my part of the South yet. The most important thing for me was to understand what decolonial thought is and how we can apply it. How were museums around the world implementing this? And how was it being received? I used the list of resources that Kirsten gave us as a starting point but then began to explore on my own. My favorite of the articles I read was titled The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised by Sumaya Kassim. I found it to be a critical look at the concept of decolonization. The quote that stuck out to me the most was “Museums are not neutral”. This sentence has stuck with me as I navigated the course and the planning of our event. As my previous degree is in anthropology, I have a lot of experience with the concept of neutrality. As anthropologists, we are supposed to be third-party watchers, completely objective in what we write, say, and observe. This, however, cannot happen. Humans are inherently biased in everything we do. Our own experiences shape us whether we want them to or not. In this way, the quote “Museums are not neutral” is reminding us of decolonization and that no matter how objective we strive to be, something or someone is getting left out of the narrative. Decolonization aims to change that. One way is by understanding our own personal biases as well as institutional biases. A colonial institution will be resistant to change and decolonization attempts to destroy that resistance.
Bibliography
Kassim, Sumaya. 2017. “The Museum Will Not Be Decolonised.” Media Diversified. November 15, 2017. https://mediadiversified.org/2017/11/15/the-museum-will-not-be-decolonised/.
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