On Not Showing Scalps: Human Remains and Multisited Debate at the National Museum of Denmark

Abstract

Museums are increasingly taking the cultural values of source communities into account in their representational strategies, and that means that they now face the challenge of explaining to their publics how social responsibility toward distant source communities informs the choices each museum makes. This article examines how the National Museum of Denmark attempted to inform and discuss with the Danish public the museum's decision to not exhibit scalps in their temporary exhibition on Native American culture, Powwow: We Dance, We're Alive. Building on the new, contingent museum ethics proposed by Janet Marstine, the editor of the Routledge Companion to Museum Ethics, I show how the museum succeeded in engaging users in questions of museum ethics. However, this specific debate on human remains in museums developed into an encounter between a global, museological discourse on the responsibility of museum institutions toward indigenous groups and a common discourse in Danish political debates that views consideration toward the sensibilities of specific ethnic groups as a threat toward free speech and rational knowledge.

Personal Albums and Cultural Encounters: The Photo Albums at the Dutch National Maritime Museum

“…While anthropological museums have critically examined the use of colonial and ethnographic photographs from their collections, recent research has stressed an urgent need to address these issues in other types of museums (Edward and Mead 2013; Edwards and Lien 2014;Finch-Boyer 2014;Bessel 2015). Again, it is only fair to point out that these texts have been published after the creation of The Photo Albums, which testifies to the importance of an increased focus on new museum ethics and appropriate museology across different parts of the museum sector (Marstine 2011;Kreps 2015;Marselis 2016). As argued in this article, maritime museums need to take up the challenge of representational ethics in relation to their photographic collections, since their maritime heritage typically includes photographs that represent cultural encounters on foreign coasts.…”

“…Martha Langford has argued that the transfer of a private album to a public collection cut 'the performative cord ' (2006: 227), but that the visual narrative created by the compiler can, so to speak, be interpreted by examining an album closely. Langford's methodological strategies for how to 'reopen an album through conversation' (227) have inspired a number of studies into the role of compilers and the photo album as a narrative genre (Langford 2001(Langford , 2006Wright 2013;Thomson 2011;Tinkler 2011;Marselis 2017). However, transferring this notion of photo albums as an oral/visual genre into museum exhibitions remains a curatorial challenge.…”

“…Research in anthropological photographic collections has examined the use of degrading and outdated captions and reviewed how photos of quite diverse origin, such as anthropometric photography, family photographs, and commercial portraits produced for postcards, have been deployed in order to support hierarchical race theories (e.g., Edwards 2003;Edwards and Mead 2013;Morton 2014;Sassoon 2004a;McCredie 2015). Furthermore, private photo albums from the colonial period often depict the privileged life of the colonizing classes (Pattynama 2012(Pattynama , 2014Marselis 2017). Since such colonial photographs may be experienced as offensive or nostalgic depictions of lost empires, curators have often found this photographic heritage difficult to use in contemporary exhibitions.…”

From Pots to Pan Pipes: Specimen Exchanges between Paul S. Martin and Harold Gladwin

“…Though they are usually not considered to be artifacts of a singular and spectacular nature, their use in exchange points to the commodity potential of museum objects (Foster 2015), and that preservation is contingent on an object's value. As repatriation now represents a substantial portion of the permanent movement of materials out of anthropology museums, the bottom line in many of the contemporary discussions of cultural patrimony center on an object's value, and how possession circumscribes interpretive prerogative (Marselis 2016). Consideration of specimen exchange, as a form of deaccessioning, is well positioned to contribute to these contemporary conversations (Nichols 2014a).…”

Exhibiting Refugee Routes: Contemporary Collecting as Memory Politics

“…In 2012, however, the National Museum did experience a media storm when the politician Alex Ahrendtsen, who represents the DF, criticized the decision of the museum to exclude Native American scalps in their temporary Powwow: We Dance, We're Alive exhibition. On this occasion, the Minister of Culture, Uffe Elbaek, from the Danish Social Liberal Party, stressed the importance of the arm's-length principle by expressing his confidence in the professionalism of the museum's staff (Marselis 2016). However, local museums have since experienced media storms initiated by politicians when exhibiting other contentious topics, including blasphemy in art and Danish colonial history.…”