Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum (courtesy of the museum’s website)
Last spring, while studying abroad at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford, I decided to pay a visit to the Pitt Rivers Museum—one of the largest remaining monuments to Britain’s history of violent subjection and extraction of cultural artifacts from imperial territories. The site, named after Augustus Pitt Rivers, an English soldier, aristocrat, ethnologist, and avowed racist, is home to hundreds of thousands of masks, spears, pieces of jewelry, clothes, guns, figurines, works of metallurgy, and until recently, a collection of shrunken heads and other human remains.
Gruesome stuff. But it’s a stunning collection. So much cultural history, packed in a mind-bogglingly dense but entirely intelligible space. My hour-long visit was a fertile mixture of discomfort and reticent awe.
The museum tends to have that effect on people. In recent decades, Pitt Rivers has stood at the center of international debates over responsibility and restitution in the museum sector. After removing “120 human remains from open display in 2020,” in response to a years-long internal review process, the museum began “reaching out to descendant communities to find the most appropriate way to care for these complex items.” They instituted a new policy which mandates the removal of “all human remains from the exhibition floor unless and until consent could be obtained to display them.” Pitt Rivers now hosts a website where those interested in repatriating their cultural artifacts can petition the museum to do so. Members of the Naga ethnic group, indigenous to northern India and Myanmar, recently visited the museum to discuss the restitution of 41 human remains and 178 objects “that contain or may contain human hair.”
Beyond repatriation, the museum has also collaborated with various indigenous groups to improve the sensitivity and accuracy of its programming. With the Living Cultures Project, members of the Maasai ethnic group—native to parts of Tanzania and Kenya—were invited to visit the museum and comment critically on how over 200 of their artifacts were displayed. An initial wave of visits in 2018 was followed by another in 2020. After lengthy discussions, some of which raised the possibility of repatriation, Maasai leaders decided to allow the museum to retain several sensitive artifacts, on the condition that they improve documentation processes and commit to an ongoing and productive relationship.
These efforts haven’t been uncontroversial. Some argue that the museum has pursued a political agenda at the cost of historical accuracy. Others have suggested that ‘decolonizing’ museum displays is a symbolic and radically insufficient response to the persistent legacies of colonialism.
Why should any of this matter to you, young research padawan? What the Pitt Rivers Museum teaches us is that reconciliation with the past can be a long, difficult, and uncomfortable process—especially for established institutions that have plenty to lose. In the face of significant logistical and ethical challenges, the Oxford institution has made several admirable steps in the right direction. But these are fragile and fraught with consequences. They must be approached with great care. As an artifact of the history of colonialism in its own right, the museum’s continued accessibility to the public—with proper signage and culturally-sensitive displays, of course—has great value. Without it future generations might just forget the scope of the British Empire’s regime of plunder and conquest.
The broader lesson is that research is never entirely neutral or unquestionable. Ethical risks abound. The many anthropologists and archaeologists who conduct research at Pitt Rivers have had to ask themselves hard questions. One day, you might have to as well. And when you do, learning and appreciating how others have approached similar dilemmas—and done so with great thought and care—might just show you the way forward.
Joseph Karaganis, CC’26