Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-995ml Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-30T04:45:23.302Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
This chapter is part of a book that is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core

Introduction: ‘Multidirectional Memory’

Get access

Summary

Over 100 days, BBC Radio 4 set out to present, in a series of short programmes broadcast from 18 January to 22 October 2010, ‘a history of the world in 100 objects’. What was noteworthy about this enterprise was the use of the indefinite article – ‘a’ history – as it would nowadays indeed be a little presumptuous to embark on the history of the world, a bold project which has nonetheless tempted historians in the not too distant past. Interestingly, all the objects selected to testify to this notional ‘history of the world’ come from the British Museum, a much-admired institution and seat of knowledge which was like its European and North-American counterparts in Paris, Brussels, Berlin, and New York closely associated with the many ethnographic ventures that accompanied the colonial expansion of the West in Asia, Africa, Australia, and the Americas. However ethically sensitive the museum may have subsequently become, the fact remains that many of the artefacts exhibited were dubiously acquired – indeed, some are known to have been stolen from their places of origin. I do not intend though to apportion blame here as I believe that the relation between ethnography as a discipline and the development of colonial projects in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is not absolute. Early ethnographers and travellers had also, as Johannes Fabian argues, to be ‘out of their minds’ and reach a type of ‘ecstasis’, which in many respects negated the strict positivist foundation of their nineteenth-century upbringing and its ‘regime of hygiene’, in order to connect with hitherto completely foreign environments:

in their first or early contacts with unfamiliar cultures, the emissaries of imperialism […] permitted themselves to be touched by lived experiences. […] those instances involved them in […] moral puzzles and conflicting demands. What I find striking […] is that explorers frequently overcame these intellectual and existential problems by stepping outside […] the rationalized frames of exploration, be they faith, knowledge, profit, or domination. This ‘stepping outside’ or ‘being outside’ is what I call the ecstatic.

The British Museum, as any other museums created in the midst of the colonial age, bears witness to the troubled legacy of a discipline which was complicit in the essentialism of imperial projects and their pretention to classify non-European cultures along rational criteria.

Type
Chapter
Information
V. Y. Mudimbe
Undisciplined Africanism
, pp. 1 - 15
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Print publication year: 2013

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×