Jeremy Harding
speaker
341 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 2 Jul
Jeremy Harding’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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No, with pleasure.
It's great to be speaking with Kevin.
It's great to have you all here.
Thanks to the LRB, thanks to the bookshop.
Yeah, I was thinking about the return of anti-colonialism now.
I mean, it's never really quite gone away, but it's emerged, setting it with a greater vigour and greater energy over this debate about the museums.
And I couldn't help thinking that
If I was going to tackle museums, which I have done over the past 15 or 20 years in pieces that I was commissioned to do, I was going to have to say something about ethnography.
And the book that came up was this book by Michel Larisse called Phantom Africa, L'Afrique Fantôme, in which he tells the story of this kind of royal progress across Africa in the 1930s put together.
by the French state and the Museum of Man, Museum of Mankind, the Musée de l'Homme, in which they would start in West Africa and move their way over two years or more to the Red Sea and come out with a lot of artifacts, a lot of documents of their own ethnographic recording.
And these would form the basis of a new wave of materials in the museum.
and it struck me and it would strike anybody who read this book phantom africa that there are kind of two sciences which are tied up inextricably with the colonial project one is anthropology and then there's this not not entirely a subset because part of it is autonomous autonomous ethnography ethnography appears to be a subset but actually it's got some autonomy of its own
I call it ethnography as opposed to ethnology because ethnography is about writing about ethnicities.
And the key part, the key point of ethnology is actually to produce the field report, to produce the monograph.
And so it's become generally known as ethnography.
What happens with these two sciences, or one science and it's kind of a monotonous, is that they consolidate the colonial project really, particularly the anthropology known tautologously as human anthropology, which was immensely popular.
from the late 19th century up until actually the end of the Second World War, which mainly involved collecting human bits and pieces, human remains, human skulls, to kind of put together a physical anthropology of, in this case, the African.
So you've got this human anthropology on the one hand, which goes right out of fashion in 1945 for obvious reasons, because we're trying to turn a new leaf
get beyond the idea of a kind of race anthropology, race theories, and then you have ethnography, which is about the behavior of other peoples, behavior of cultures with which we're unfamiliar.
But even these cultures with which we're unfamiliar, I think are subsumed in the great project of putting together an account of as much of it is that we can possibly understand, ascertain, and collect.
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