I read with great interest the article “Totems and taboos”, taken from the series Restitution d’oeuvres, by Stéphane Baillargeon, published in The duty. I am an anthropologist, I have collaborated on several occasions with the Musée de la civilization de Québec, and the dissemination of representations that our society has constructed about other cultures has interested me for a long time.
Beyond the questions of ownership of the artefacts that our museums present, I think that there would be a lot to do regarding the representations of foreign cultures that we continue to convey and which do not seem to have changed much since the colonial conquests.
For example, the Musée de la civilization last year presented an exhibition on the Mayas. The (borrowed) artifacts were splendid, but the explanatory texts struck me as an eyesore. Visitors could only leave with the conviction that the Mayans were creatures closer to extraterrestrials than to human beings equipped with the same brain as ours.
I enclose two examples of these explanatory texts. The first is called “Some 8000 gods”. To arrive at such a figure, archaeologists seem to have assumed that any human-made object that had no technical function was the representation of a god. Let’s imagine what figure we would arrive at if archaeologists of the future compiled the list of symbolic objects that are part of our lives, such as children’s toys or our trinkets.
Coming out of the exhibition, the only possible conclusion was that the Mayans were really very, very, very religious beings…
In addition, the presentation of the beliefs attributed to the Mayas proceeded as a statement of facts presented as being perfectly real in the eyes of the Mayas. For example, “every animal can turn into a god”. Or, their rituals “ensure the order of the world, guarantee good harvests and protect the people”.
This way of presenting things obviously has a perverse effect. For example, our historians have long claimed that when the Aztecs saw the first Spaniards, “they took them for gods.” Such a statement is presented as an authentic historical fact whose foundations would be found in the minds of the Aztecs and in their myths, whereas we know almost nothing about them.
Similarly, our history asserts that the Aztecs were “very religious” people and that only their beliefs in bloodthirsty gods explained their rituals of killing large numbers of “sacrificed” captives. Such a portrait rules out any idea of political motives: for example, the fact that these spectacular rituals could arouse the terror necessary to maintain the power of the Aztecs over the conquered peoples, and this, with great efficiency and at a cost much lower than those the maintenance of military and police bodies throughout their empire.
In other words, by excluding any possibility that the Aztecs could have, like us, a brain endowed with reason, in accordance with the definition of the human being that we officially profess (a rational animal).
If I developed these examples a bit long, it is because they seemed to me to better communicate the idea that the decolonization of museum communications seems to me to go far beyond questions of property. I think that the path of negotiations with the Aboriginal peoples of Canada or with foreign governments is essential, but I am not totally convinced that the decolonization of minds is automatically more advanced among the latter than among us.
Such a change in mentalities will take a long time, but for museums to participate in it, it would surely be useful for their leaders to be made aware of it.