In recent years, there has been much talk about British universities and museums unlawfully displaying stolen artefacts. Jokes have been made about how if you lost something once, the British Museum probably has it. This kind of discourse reflects society’s demands for colonial institutions to take accountability of their past.
Now that the colonial ideals that drove the displacement of many artefacts are, in theory, no longer upheld, it would be only natural for these institutions to take these artefacts back to their places of origin. Through repatriation, powerful institutions aim to separate themselves from the previous values that characterised them, a step in the right direction to becoming certified self-aware and progressive establishments. Let’s take a closer look at the University of Edinburgh’s artefact collection and more significantly, at the role repatriation can play in this apparent transformation of core values.
The university’s medical school holds an anatomy museum containing hundreds of skulls. Amongst many other objects from Edinburgh’s collections, these skulls are indicators of the institution’s inseparable bounds to colonialism and slavery. The skulls still stored there today were collected to serve the work of the Edinburgh University Phrenology Society around the 1820s. Phrenology was a pseudo-science that aimed to point out skull variations across races to justify a biological hierarchy of races. This discourse was a driver for many pro-slavery and colonialism arguments. The society at Edinburgh was the first of its kind in the UK, but many followed in its wake.
This adds several layers to how we can understand the significance of the medical school’s artefacts. The university is not only responsible for the material loss and theft of a community but for the creation and propagation of a racialised system of thought that drove slavery and still affects racial minorities today. The responsibility is much wider than the tangible artefacts of the anatomy museum. Repatriating artefacts seems like merely the tip of the iceberg in a journey of true accountability and redemption.
This year, a Race Review was published about the university, investigating its colonial past and links to enslavement. This report delves into phrenology, amongst other things. It also discusses the university’s links to the state of Israel, what Arthur Balfour did as chancellor of the University, and the racial ideologies he upheld. Balfour signed a declaration in 1917 to establish and maintain settler colonial rule in Palestine. He believed in the right of white Europeans to govern and dominate non-Europeans, and it was this belief that influenced his signature in the declaration.
To this day, the university continues to support the Israeli government’s international and human right law violations against Palestinians. Not only that, but according to the UN, it is amongst the most financially involved universities in the UK. This begs the question, is the university really trying to change its identity from its past if it continues to aid settler colonialism? Or is it merely trying to change its surface-level public appearance, through things like the repatriation of artefacts?
The day the report was published, Peter Mathieson issued an apology to all those that the university had affected. He discussed the recently published Race Review, saying he found much of the information unveiled in the report, especially the medical school’s history, “deeply shocking and discomforting.” He further acknowledges that something must be done, and that it would be unethical to cherry pick from history what we wish to remember.
Nevertheless, this seems to be exactly what the university is doing: repatriating some artefacts and changing the name of the David Hume tower to 40 George Square. These actions are not enough to prove they care. They are enough to make it seem like they do, to those that do not look close enough. Artefacts ought to be repatriated, and names ought to be changed, but this is not a priority: divestment is.
Image by Elisa Vincent for The Student