Pitt Rivers Museum

When passions are aroused, all of us are liable to overstate our case. Dan Hicks, a curator at Oxford’s extraordinary Aladdin’s Cave of anthropology, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, is perhaps a case in point. A Swedish academic, Staffan Lunden, has convincingly argued that Hicks is guilty of ‘distortion’ when writing about the British raid on Benin in 1897, which brought several thousand objects, including finely wrought brass statuettes, to museums across the world. Hicks published his uncompromising views in 2020 in a prize-winning book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. His opinions about the Benin bronzes – which have been instrumental in the restitution movement –

I have a soft spot for specimen jars and skeletal remains. Museums of natural history, surgical pioneering or anthropological oddities have always struck me as equally suitable for lunch breaks and first dates as for serious study and research. As far as public and casually accessible encounters with mortality go, these kinds of museums are the most straightforward way of confronting the realities of human nature. But whether we should have this kind of casual access is now increasingly being questioned. Telling history through displays of human remains presents a challenge for curators. They are responsible for contextualising exhibitions to ensure that the remains don’t become a dehumanised spectacle, while