FRANCE-CULTURE: Museums Clash Over Pre-Colonial Archives

By Julio Godoy Reprint | | Print |

Julio Godoy

PARIS, Mar 14 2002 (IPS) - French museums have engaged in a war of words over the control of archives containing material relating to the pre-colonial heritage from Africa, Oceania, Asia and America.

Until 1998, all documents relating to pre-colonial societies were preserved at the country’s Museum of Anthropology. However, President Jacques Chirac recently announced the setting up of a new exhibition centre to house what he called “first arts” or relics belonging to non European pre colonial societies.

The new centre, to be called the French Museum of First Arts, is expected to officially open its doors in 2004. A brochure on the new building says it will concentrate on cultural material from the so called “primitive peoples” before the advent of colonialism.

In the leaflet on the new museum President Chirac says it was set up after “a number of artists and intellectuals, from Claude Levi-Strauss to Pablo Picasso, expressed their wish that France recognise the forgotten civilizations from Africa, Oceania, Asia, and the Americas.”

However, critics have dubbed it “Museum Chirac” saying the President has an unusual interest in the organisation.

The establishment of the new museum has also set off a dispute over where the government intends to get the material to store in the new building.

The already existing structures, such as the French Museum of Anthropology, which was founded in 1937, says it plans to continue displaying the pieces it has in its custody but is willing to organise the exhibits in a way that they do not clash with the theme of the new museum.

Critics have also criticised the need by government to establish a new museum as they say the existing ones were fulfilling the needs.

Pierre Delannoy, a journalist who has researched on the subject, says by setting up the museum and from his statements Chirac “suggests that in the past the French museums did nothing to honour pre colonial civilisations, which is completely false…The employers of the Museum of Anthropology have reason to be offended,” he adds.

Bernard Dupaigne, professor of ethnology and curator at the Museum of Anthropology says existing museums are not against the inclusion of aesthetic standards in the study of human societies. However, he complains that the government should not pretend that they have access to extraordinary scientific “crutches” in the study of pre-colonial cultural heritages.

Sources at a third French museum, of African and Oceanic Arts, have expressed fears that they will be expected to give up at least two thirds of their collections to the new museum. Curators at the Museum of Anthropology have gone on strike to protest against what they call “the destruction” of their venerable house.

According to Dupaigne the Museum of Anthropology spends only 12 000 Euros a year in the purchase of new pieces. At the same time, the state has allocated 230 Million Euros to buy material for the new museum. “There is no better proof of the injustice they are doing to us,” Dupaigne says.

However Stéphane Martin, director of the new Museum of First Arts, has dismissed the criticisims as being unjust and unfounded. He says the new museum will display the material in a modern and unusual way aimed at attracting audiences. “A museum is necessarily a place of artifices – we want to put these artifices at the service of the pieces exposed in our galleries, to enhance their beauty and their artistic value,” he says.

Martin also rejects the accusation that the Museum of First Arts will expose the pieces out of their cultural context. “For example we will show a mask from Alaska, from the kwakiutl people, donated by Claude Levi-Strauss to the Louvre many years ago,” Martin claims.

“When you open the mask, you will see an old film, shot in 1914 by the great photographer Edward Curtis, and that shows natives, clothed with bears ‘ skins, dancing in preparation for the chase of the whale,” Martin adds. “Wonderful! Such things the knee jerk ethnologists at the old museums cannot do.”

However these arguments have not stopped the disputes and the “knee jerk ethnologists” have even accused the new museum of “illegal trafficking” of pre-colonial materials.

In 1999, in a letter to the prime minister Lionel Jospin, André Langaney, director of the laboratory of biological anthropology, complained that the new museum had triggered “a frenetic purchasing in the market of so called primitive art, provoking the intensification of the pillage of anthropological sites in Africa, America and Asia.”

Langaney directly accused “several promoters of the Museum of First

Arts,” who until 1999 had spent some 80 million Francs (around 12 million Euros), in buying new pieces. “Half of that sum (was spent) buying pieces from a Swiss collector, officially named ‘scientific counsellor’ of the museum,” Langaney said.

He said at a preliminary exhibition at the Louvre in June 2000 the new museum had on display three statues of Nigerian origin bought from a Belgian collector. He said these pieces were put on display despite the fact that they had been smuggled from Africa.

The Nigerian government accused France of pillage of the country’s cultural heritage. After several months of arduous negotiations, France agreed to recognise Nigeria’s rights on the pieces. As a compromise Nigeria agreed to allow the French museums to display the statues for 25 years before returning them to their origins

In an attempt to end the controversy surrounding the museums the government has suggested transforming the Museum of Anthropology into a Museum of Natural History. However this has been slammed and ridiculed by critics.

“The ethnologists in France are a very small elite who are about to (become extinct). Asking the Museum of Anthropology to forget exotic things and occupy itself with nature is like asking for a permanent ban on genetics,” journalist Pierre Dellanoy wrote.