I’ve not touched my blog for the past week, so apologies to family and friends eager to hear more about our adventures. Tara and I spent Thanksgiving in Dublin, Ireland. This was our first time in Ireland. It was a pleasant, relaxed trip. During our first two days we hit all of the “greatest hits” of Dublin: Dublin Castle, Temple Bar, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, etc. On Saturday we took a day trip out of the city into the countryside on one of those cheesy Ireland bus tours. It was a lot of fun. The high point was the time we spent in Kilkenny, a medieval Irish town that we really wish we could have spent more time in. Bus tours are sort of like a “tapas” version of sightseeing. You spend just enough time to get a taste of a place before moving on. Kilkenny was hosting a Christmas festival at town center during our time there. The small town feel of the place was a nice reprieve from the hustle and bustle if Dublin. [Note to family and friends: a complete set of pictures from our Ireland trip may be found here.]
It is hard to believe that we are just two weeks away from our return to the States. Yesterday we had a group of students in our apartment for dinner. It’s clear that many of our students have moved into the final stage of a Study Abroad semester: the one where you realize that you have so much you still want to do, and so little time to do these things in. This feeling is mixed with a level of excitement about returning to your true home, the one where you are surrounded by the family and friends you left behind. I’m feeling this right now. This semester has been extraordinary, and yet I’m ready to get home.
One of the advantages of teaching at a Study Abroad site is that you have ample opportunity to provide students on-the-ground experiences that contribute to their learning. A few weeks ago I reached out to the Pitt Rivers museum in Oxford. The museum is an important Victorian-era anthropology museum. In 2012 when I visited the museum with my kids, I remember feeling completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of “stuff” in the place. When I was preparing to teach my ethics course this semester, I got to thinking about how much time our students spend in museums when studying abroad. In my applied ethics section of the course I decided to devote some time to exploring with students “museum” ethics. There are some important moral questions that museums encounter when creating displays. What voices are included and excluded when museums interpret the meaning of their displays? What implicit and explicit messages do museums convey in the narrations that accompany visual artifacts? What responsibilities do western museums have to grapple with the legacies of colonialism? What about artifacts in western museums that were acquired through plunder, coercion, or deception? What about the display of human remains in museums—mummified corpses, shrunken heads, and the like?
Pitt Rivers is a museum where a viewer is confronted by these questions in nearly every display. Yesterday we met with one of the Pitt Rivers education staff who primed the students on the history of the museum and the problematic legacy that staff members are wrestling with in their work. Historically, many of the displays were premised on socioevolutionary premises that perceived western culture as the pinnacle of technological achievement and scientific knowledge, treating non-western communities as “primitive” or “savage” (words that one can still find on some of the 19th century labels in the collection). The museum charter constrains what staff are permitted to do with the collection, so decolonizing the space is not as simple as it first appears. When staff discover that an artifact in their collection was acquired illicitly, the desire is to return the artifact to whom it rightfully belongs. But how does one determine who should get the artifact when the chain of ownership is not obvious? It is to the credit of the museum staff that they directly acknowledge some of the moral problems that plague the museum’s history; the staff has been quite proactive in raising these moral questions directly for museumgoers. An increasing number of displays include narration that draws the viewer into a more critical assessment of what they are seeing. The shrunken heads that were once on public display in the museum section on death rituals has been removed, replaced with a sign that details the reasons why the museum has made this change to the display. In recent years the museum has invited representatives and scholars from non-western communities to contribute to the reinterpretation of displays in ways that capture the voice of communities that historically have been represented through western eyes.
The visit to Pitt Rivers was a great opportunity to get students outside of my ethics classroom in a way that I really believe will contribute to their learning. It’s one of the greatest benefits of studying abroad, where the world outside of the lecture hall becomes the classroom.
Return home…