Featuring Dr Arunima Bhattacharya and Mike Rutherford.
A transcript for this episode is available on the episode webpage.
Recorded, edited and produced by Charis Sandison, Eva López-López and Hollie Wade.
Featuring Dr Arunima Bhattacharya and Mike Rutherford.
A transcript for this episode is available on the episode webpage.
Recorded, edited and produced by Charis Sandison, Eva López-López and Hollie Wade.
Curating Discomfort Podcast Episode 1 – Arunima & Mike discuss zoology collections in museums
Zandra
Hello and welcome to Creating Discomfort. This podcast comes to you from The Hunterian, University of Glasgow. I am Zandra Yeaman, Curator of Discomfort. On today's episode we will hear Arunima and Mike discussing an elephant tusk found in Kenya.
Arunima
Hi. This is Arunima Bhattacharya. I'm a postdoctoral research assistant at the University of Leeds. The current project that I'm working on is kind of attempting a historiography of anthropology as a discipline in South Asia from around the early 1900s to about 1970s and 80s. Towards the tail end of the project, and because of the pandemic, a lot of the work that the project has done is in relation to museums, particularly Indian museums. So that's how I got interested in museums, and this was a project that Zandra was involved in and she told me about it and was really interested to see if I could contribute. So I thought, yes, let's have a try. And it was really interesting. And I could, you know, I could see that, yes, there was something that I could actually do and contribute to and learn from as well. So I got involved and it has been quite a journey.
Mike
I'm Mike Rutherford. I'm the Curator of Zoology and Anatomy for The Hunterian at the University of Glasgow. So obviously in this project I have spent a fair bit of time picking out zoological objects for the Curating Discomfort Project, and it's one of those things where the more you start digging into the zoology objects, you find more and more connections with all the topics we're going to be discussing later. So it's been a very interesting project so far.
So what we're looking at today or starting to talk about is a small elephant tusk. This is from an African elephant. There's not a huge amount of information that came with it. We know that it was found near Lake Baringa, which is in Kenya. And we've got a rough date, possibly 1931, based on the hand-written label. But beyond that, there's not really any definite information about who collected it, whether it was collected from a freshly killed elephant or whether it was a tusk found in the ground. A more archaeological side of things. The tusk is quite small, about 50 centimetres long. It's quite worn. It's not like a fresh white colour, like many people would expect ivory to look. It's brown and darkened and there's a lot of hatching and roughened parts on the tusk. There's a lot of questions about how it came to be collected, the function of it, the use of it. Obviously, the animal itself used it in life for a tool. But I think the wear and tear on this one suggests that a little bit of the wear and tear came after the death of the animal. Yeah, and that's pretty much what we know.
Arunima
So when we did selecting objects for the display, for the intervention. We were trying to look at it as people who, you know, from our communities or backgrounds going to the museum and what would stand out to us and the reasons why they would stand out to us, not particularly always, because one is taken aback by the beauty or the size or the, you know, the context of a particular thing. Sometimes it's just because of the way it's displayed, because you know it in a different context. And in the museum you see it in a very different setting. The elephant tusk is something that's, you know, like an ongoing problem with a lot of countries which have elephants as part of their wildlife. So a part of India where I come from, you know, the train journey that I take to one of my close relatives, to my in-laws house, actually, it goes through the elephant corridor. So the train stops like it's just a 7 or 8 hours journey by a very slow train, but it stops. And if there's an elephant and you wait until they have fast and that goes on and everyone kind of accepts that fact, like, you know, that there are going to be unplanned delays because this will happen. And that has come after a lot of tussle with the railways and the government and the elephant wildlife supporters as to make space for them. So this is a part of like the life I live in the sense that I know and I'm aware that this happens. Also, there are problems with tourism, which I get to know of as a part of my daily life. Like when you know that these other times you cannot go into these areas because these are the times that elephants migrate. And I also know about poaching as an everyday conversation thing, not like an issue that I'm looking into. So when I saw the elephant tusk, it's an ongoing problem, right? But when you see it in the museum, first of all, it kind of distances it in the past, like it's a problem that happened during colonialism. I think that's a big problem because a lot of people assume that colonialism is done in over with, so we need to move on and look at it in a different light, get on with other problems in life. But it is an ongoing problem. It's a legacy in countries which have had colonialism as a part of its history, and it has sort of continued. Of course, it has changed and morphed and adjusted to times and everything and of course, it's not the same kind of power structure and hierarchies, but the traces of race, of power still exist, and particularly in terms of wildlife and the way we deal with the ecologies and the way we are thinking about conserving forests and plants around environmental preservation are very colonial in their approach. And I'm not the first person saying it. A lot of it has been said in popular media, it has been researched. You can find research papers on this about how the whole perspective on environmental conservation in in this case, Africa, The approach is something that's built on the money that's coming on from outside of the country, built on ideals that are thought of as correct but taken from outside of the country. So it's not an indigenous it's not a local approach which they talked about or which was taken from the way the people who live with these animals deal with them. It's more like an imported strategy that's kind of imposed, and then those people are expected to just do it and understand because they are not educated enough or they are not refined enough to, you know, form their own strategies. So it's the perfect colonial discourse. Like I'll tell you how to live your life.
Mike
And yet so many things to be going on from there. First one, I just have to say though, is I love the idea of your train journey being stopped by an elephant, and thinking in Scotland it's pretty much yeah, a sheep on the road is as exciting as it's going to get. So yeah, but it is I think ivory in particular and elephants tusks that are symbolic of so many issues. You know, the value of it obviously attracts a lot of people from the poachers to the middlemen to the artisans using it. And then ultimately all, you know, the end consumers of it, the ones are really, you know, the ones to blame for the ivory trade. It’s easy to sort of blame the guy with a gun walking through a wildlife reserve shooting elephants but he's only doing that because he gets paid for it and the artisan and really do it because they get paid for it or work on the end consumer. Then you can sort of hopefully cut down the trade.
Arunima
Think you, you know, that's the word, “land”. That's the most problematic aspect that connects all of these together because most of these people on these lands, they had their own, you know, from the reading that have done for this particular object. I think it's similar in most cases that most people living on these lands have their own way of sustaining themselves. But when there is an industrial approach to ivory trade, then these ways of life get co-opted like they get abolished, erased. And so what they have to do is to get some sort of role in that trade circuit or that trade network in order to sustain themselves. So they become, as you said, middlemen, people who would show hunters around and stuff, like people who are engaged with that trade in some way or the other. So it's a way of life that would be then perpetuated. It would be a self-sustaining mechanism. Then you would not have to go and force the people to help you. It would be that they would be ready to help you because that is what they have got as their way of life now - they don't have an alternative.
Mike
Yeah. People who grew up in the land and know the wildlife should be the ones who are sort of first there to kind of show it to other people. If it's shown to them to be something of value, then instead of looking at as if that's just a piece of ivory walking around, it's like that's an elephant that, you know, is more valuable as a living animal for people to come and see, but also for the kind of the ecosystem benefits that a healthy ecosystem has for everyone around them. It's for everybody. It's better to have these in living animals.
The other thing is I want to pick up on was just the sort of the use of ivory throughout history. I was in York Minster a few months ago and saw this ivory tusk that had been worked beautifully inscribed and this was a gift to one of the long past kings of a small king of England from, I think, some Viking connection. Wherever it was, it showed that elephant tusks ended up in Britain a thousand years ago, obviously coming up through trade, through various African kingdoms and countries into sort of the Mediterranean and probably worked in kind of Rome or at least part of that area and then traded up through Europe and is showing this fascinating long term interest in ivory and how, although the animals are generally only found in in Africa and in Asia, their products have spread everywhere. And that's just been going on throughout history because of the appeal of them.
Arunima
Because so many trade routes have been traded up north and it has been traded across Asia through the Indian Ocean trade circuits like for years. So it's not just that it happened in the recent 1900s. It's been happening for years and years. But I think the drastic change in the elephant population after 1900s came because of course there's a trade and regional trade (any kind of trade requires some sort of exploitation of land or labour) but if you industrialise it on a multinational, which is what empire does, the level of exploitation and the level of market, the stature of the market, the expanse of the market and the way you are trading it, the different trade networks, it's kind of multiplies into a huge sort of impact on whatever, if it's land, it's animals or people.
Mike
Yeah. And it's that in the past it would have been, you know, a few elephants being hunted by a few people, maybe talking a hundred years ago, obviously, before guns were invented it took a lot more effort to hunt down an elephant.
Arunima
Yeah I mean, we have seen animals being hunted in the cave paintings like it’s as old as that.
Mike
… at that level it takes a lot more effort, whereas one person can now go out with a gun and take down an elephant and then, you know, move the tusks in a truck or vehicle easily. And so, yeah, that industrial process of exploiting them certainly causes major decline in elephant population throughout the 1900s to the last century.
Arunima
And of course, the populations of those countries and those places are also involved in this. Like we discussed earlier, it's not like this one man going no bringing it back. It's a whole network that you create around the trade and other by-products and the sellers and their markets. It's a huge sort of chain of events and people and labour.
Mike
Yeah. And it’s that sort of long term … colonialism and the money to be made from exploiting, you know, the wildlife in a country. A big part of colonialism as well as, you know, the mining and the kind of human labour and crops and so on, but also exploiting it in the way of bringing in, like you said, big game hunters, people paying a lot of money to go and shoot rhinos and lions and leopards, buffaloes and elephants, the big five.. And it's still going on. And it's interesting how that's changed over the years. And now many African countries have, you know, legitimate programs of game hunting, and they make quite often good money from it. And then you have the conservationists coming along and saying, if you keep hunting these, there are going to be no more left.
Arunima
And just morally, it doesn't make sense to say that, you know, a few wealthy people who can pay for the licences can kill. But the people who were original owners of the land and can’t show papers for that ownership, and therefore they do not belong to the land and have to be shot on site or have to be taken out of the land by force. And if they hunt the elephants, then it's poaching. Yes, it's just a very big power imbalance.
Mike
And you've also got problems as well in some parts of Africa to be very successful at conservation. And now you've got too many elephants in too small an area of land. And so it's causing an unnatural level of the populations from very small areas. And then those governments who own and control those lands, saying we've got too many elephants now, we should legitimately be allowed to shoot some. But then that kind of increases the availability of ivory and increases how many people still want it.
Arunima
So their feeding the market and the demand is being sustained.
Mike
So it's one of these very complicated arguments in all directions. And then you’ve got people who have maybe some ways managed to get back control of the land from colonial times. And then they decide, actually we want to exploit these elephants, we want to exploit the ivory.
Arunima
Because they're looking at development progress, and they want roads and electricity and schools and hospitals. Yeah, I think it’s the same argument everywhere.
Mike
Yeah. You can't say black or white, this is wrong or right. It's like there is such a legacy in in the whole story.
But the other thing I want to touch on just because of the more have been investigating this tusk in particular is the possibility of it being more an archaeological object, of it being something that whether it was used by humans thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago, and then got half buried and left, you know, there’s that legacy of taking archaeological items out of countries during times of colonialism and them ending up in museums in the Western world and not being there for the people who live in those countries to look back and go, you know, this is our heritage. And not just current wildlife, but also past wildlife. What would you think about that?
Arunima
You know what you'd say about in context of the elephant tusk? I felt the same when I was looking at the fossils, particularly ones in Morocco. And I know that one of the texts that we're putting up says that in Morocco, trading of fossils is illegal, but then we have fossils from Morocco in The Hunterian. But a fossil is also a testament to history that ancestors of this land is old and therefore you have a history and the sense of belonging then alters. It's not like you have come here and now you need to own the land and you have to make you sort of build your belonging to the land. It's not like that in the sense that you have, you are given a sort of history, you know, that there has been life and you kind of feel a connection to the environment in that sense. So it's also like it should, if it's from Morocco, it should be in the museums of Morocco. For those people to be able to have an effective relationship with their land and their culture and their geology. But if it is here, then first, I think what it does is the thing that if you see a fossil from a distant, you know, like from Morocco or from some place in India, from some place in Africa, then it immediately clicks into the whole discourse of empire and modernisation about those areas of land, of those countries being backward. So it's a kind of a historical perspective where you always see them as past old busts, empires and stuff. That is the classic sort of discourse of colonialism starting out that these countries are. And because I work on India, I can say about that place with more confidence that the main discourse was that these empires or these places are in ruin. They are not being able to manage themselves, and therefore they need intervention. And that intervention was first through trade, and then that turned into a full blown administration and government. So it's kind of connected to this discourse of pushing an area or a time or place backwards into history, old in a sense of like not modern enough, not advanced enough, not progressive enough. And there are also moral associations to that time argument that it's traditional, so therefore it's backward in the sense of like how they treat their women, how they treat their children, how they treat the societies. And the whole discourse is not only just in terms of objects, it's also in terms of people. It's also in terms of how communities develop, or the communities that you think of when you think of those areas. So it's a more psychological thing. You know, it's just a fossil in the showcase. Yes. But when someone from here would see that you would associate it with a land, faraway, like one would think of, Baghdad you know, flying carpets and things like that. It's not like that – Baghdad is a proper city if you go there.
Mike
Yeah, it, it's kind of looking at Morocco and Kenya and parts of India saying these are just places where fossils come from, where old things come from, where museum specimens come from.
Arunima
Yeah. Because even when I'm saying that, you know, there are elephant corridors and elephants come to the city does not mean that the cities have don't have malls and so on. They do have all of that, but they also have those elephants. And I think the simultaneity is quite inconceivable in this context. Like if you were to, you know, a person in the Glasgow Museum who has walked in on a Sunday to have a look at those specimens. Probably they don't have that context like of the immediate circumstance of that area and what this object means to that current sort of place right now..
Mike
I’ve just been thinking of thinking as well, you know, you were saying you know more about India, and we have other elephant specimens in the collection, including several Indian elephants, or Asian elephants. You know, we know we have a lot of Asian connections in the zoology collection. And I think when you start digging into where these came from, a lot of them were from menagerie animals, animals that were part of travelling circuses coming around the UK. Again, that was a large part of sort of colonialism. One of the fruits of empire was bringing exotic animals to show to people of Britain, and they were very popular. People loved seeing these troops of elephants and rhinos and camels and big snakes from the jungle all being brought into a town.
Arunima
You remind me of the Empire exhibitions, right? And Glasgow has had like four of them. Yeah. And I remember that on the, you know, a walk across the city that's organised by CRER in the Black History Month took us around Kelvingrove Park and they also told us that as part of these displays, which included, as you said, exotic animals, there were also entire villages that were brought in to Kelvingrove Park of people, of tribal people, and they were put on display as well along with them. So there's this whole connection between animals and people of a particular region or land, which of course to the discourse of colonialism is remote and “exotic” . It's this whole correlation between people and animals. As you know, it makes a lot of these problematic areas of how you think about animals and therefore you think about the people related to those animals like Eskimos and, you know, like displays in Kelvingrove Museum are of, you know, a lot of displays in the main hall are from these, you know, people living in ice.
Mike
Yeah - empire exhibitions in the past. Yeah. And it’s now it's become… all the kind of the objects we've built up, all the dead animals from these menagerie in the past have ended up in zoology collections. Now they are put on display and it's ultimately the same desire of showing exotic things but it's a century later and done in a different way. Teasing them apart is difficult because they are so interconnected.
Arunima
I was going to ask you like then I was thinking about it. I was going to ask you about the drama of staging an elephant or other big animal remains. Bones are the taxidermy form of it, like most of the time it is… If it's an elephant, it will have that posture. Or if it's a tiger, it's crouching. And all this drama that's around these.
Mike
It's something that's changed in taxidermy over the years. And you have obviously early on going back to Victorian taxidermy, some of them...just because they're sort of the people who wouldn't have had the opportunity, the person doing the stuffing wouldn't have had the opportunity to see those animals in the wild, as it were. So it was very much just four feet plunked down on the ground type pose model. But then people have started getting more feedback from people who travelled and seen these things as old adventure stories, describing fights with elephants and so on. And they got a bit more adventurous in posing with these animals. And then you had obviously the desire to be more realistic and the dioramas that were created in museums, the backgrounds painted up to look like the habitat and the animals posed to look like they were actually doing something rather than just plonked there changed over time. But yeah, trying to make the animals look lifelike, even if it's a skeleton (it's kind of ironic trying to make a skeleton look lifelike), you want the skeleton to be in a dynamic pose, whether it's a monkey climbing a tree or a snake wrapped around a branch or something, it's kind of like a frozen moment. Makes it a bit more appealing to the viewer.
Arunima
Yeah, I was reading up on museums and in zoology and there was this one particular museum, I think it's the D'Arcy Thomas [Thompson] Museum, which talks about this animal, which is a relative, I think, of a platypus, and the pose of it is made to look comical, but it is not, like it's not supposed to be arranged that way and there's now a sort of effect around that object which says that the people who had staged and arranged it, have done it with the intention of making it look comical and approachable and cute. But it is not. So they have now the text explaining that, explaining the context of, as you said, you know, making it more entertaining but not perhaps sometimes true to the actual reality.
Mike
Yeah. It's something that just came up yesterday in a tweet - There's just been a long history of – you were mentioning the platypus, the marsupial, monotreme animal from Australia - and platypus skins are very popular in museum collections everywhere because they're such strange animals and the vast majority of them are overstuffed. The skins are big fat things. In life, a platypus is quite small, you know, smaller than a typical house cat or smaller than a rabbit. They're quite sleek little creatures, like a really mini otter swimming around in the streams. But the ones you see in museums have all been inflated with a football pump and they're all sort of swollen up. It's like this swallowed a melon or something. And it's so much so that, you know, actually wanting to have a challenge for natural history museums to see who's got the fattest platypus. Again, it's totally unnatural look. It's partly because when they originally came over, it was just a skin and the people who stuffed them, mounted them, wouldn't have seemed a real animal in the field living, doing things. So they didn't really know what size it is.
Arunima
So this disconnect in the museum process is quite like you told, you know, in the initial part of your conversation, you said that there is very little information on where the object…, and I have seen this and most of the objects that were given to us like to write about. When I tried to research them, …there was so little information on who gave them to the museum; what context they were collected from; when it came into the actual museum. So it's this whole disconnect with, you know, like, museums are also supposed to be… It's of course, giving you the impression of being objective information, which has been verified as history, as concrete facts. But when you actually look into how it works and which is this is my first experience of doing it at a UK museum, because the previous encounters I've had where curators have done the work and then I was there as a sort of a respondent to it. So but this was the first time where I was involved with all of you. Seeing how this is done, I was just shocked at the lack of information because believe me, if I were to write a paper without citations, I mean, I would be called up for it. So it is very surprising to me that what comes across is projected as objective information knowledge. Museums are also pedagogical too, right? for your community. You also teach them about history, about culture. So how can a pedagogical tool be that….
Mike
… flawed?
Yeah, it is a big thing. I think natural history suffers from it a bit more, especially older natural history objects because a lot of them are just curios picked up by people in their travels. They're not given the same level of detail as maybe some art objects, as some more recent historical objects. You know, the items end up in natural history collections, you get “we have found that in, [I don't know], Kenya. There we go. That's enough information for that”. And people didn't really care as much about the precise details of where these things came from and there is a lot more information retained by human made objects. And it is that as well, the idea that museums are all-knowing, all-seeing places, yet a lot of the stuff, we have no idea where it came from. It just ended up in our collections, ended up in our cupboards and you find it there and you go, “Right. What do I write on this label? I don't know!” Yeah, making people aware that we don't know everything I think is a good direction to go.
Arunima
..a good place to start I think.
Mike
We want more information to come into us as well. So we're going to put this out there saying “This doesn't have much information. Can you help?” I think it's a good direction for us to be going.
Arunima
That would be a very good direction because I think that would indicate a shift in the way museums as a institution work for a community or a city or wherever they are placed. Because then we would also think of the other things on display with a sort of approach like,
I don't need to take it at face value. I might perhaps go back and look into it if I'm interested in it and find out the nuances of, you know, information availability and what the communities to which it actually belongs have to say about it.
But if you… first of all, I think that a museum has a lot of stuff. So personally when I go to a museum, I'm looking at certain stuff that I'm really interested in. But after the point, I'm only reading the text as like it's there's a point to which you can actually retain information and remember. So I think that it's part of the museum's job to make the people who are looking at the objects aware, that this is not the exact information. There is more to it. And if you are interested, you can look for more. Those suggestions should be there on the label instead of just like assuming that people would be, you know, thinking about such stuff.
Mike
But it is one of the problems that all museums have is how much information can you put out? You end up with a sort of 10,000 word label.
Arunima
It's just that if a tusk is from Kenya, then the very, the very first question is how did that does come here? So just to answer that that much, after all, it's a cultural institution, right? Like that's how it's staged, even on funding documents, everything. So if it's a cultural institution, it should be transparent about the impact it's having on local and international cultures. And even if it's not there in every display, perhaps it can be there in a place where people have to go through to get to the displays so that they have somewhere where you clue in people who are coming to the museum that this is something that you have to keep in mind when you see this. You have to question that very first question, like, why do they come here to look at these things?
Zandra
Thank you for listening to the Curating Discomfort podcast. This episode was brought to you by The Hunterian at University of Glasgow.
Production, sound and editing were done by Charis Sandison, Holly Wade and Eva Lopez Lopez.
The Hunterian, 2022