A view on nationalism and race at the Moosgard Ethnographic Museum
A view on nationalism and race at the Moosgard Ethnographic Museum
by Emmanuel Molding Nielsen
Situated in the bucolic hills of Aarhus bay in Denmark the Mosgaard Museum cuts a striking figure in the landscape. Its pre-history exhibition, the most prominent item currently on display, is interactive, immersive, and deeply informative. Yet, for all its laudable, and for the most part successful attempts at chronicling East Jutland’s prehistory and bringing anthropology to the lay public, the museum’s uncritical engagement with nationalism is naïve and at worst racist.
The good
At its best the Mosgaard Ethnographic Museum successfully conveys anthropological debates – that usually wouldn’t find their way off the dusty shelves a university library – to the lay public. For example, in a part of the exhibition entitled ‘Voyage with the Vikings’ the museum presents a stunning array of artefacts from all over the world that had been found in East Jutland the main peninsular of Denmark.
In a nod to world-systems analysis like Braudel (2007) and Wallerstein (1991), the museum effectively argues that if we’re to construct a history of a region – in this case Jutland – then we need to look beyond the retrospectively imposed horizon of the nation state and see the world from the pre-nationalist perspective the region’s inhabitants. By examining objects found at local archaeological sites in the region, we see that inhabitants’ cultural horizons extended anywhere from present-day York to Greece.
Such object centred histories help to decentre ethnocentric
histories and reminds visitors to the exhibit that East Jutland, rather than being the centre of the world, was instead somewhat of a backwater in a far larger ‘world-system’. Despite occasionally unfortunate phrasing like “artefacts from remote corners of the world”, which encourage a view of Denmark as the world’s navel with the rest of the world relegated to “remote corners”, the museum otherwise succeeds in destabilising Eurocentric approaches to history by drawing attention to Jutland’s marginal role in one amongst many world-systems.
The bad
Despite historically self-aware titles like ‘the first immigrants’, and the curators’ nod to world-systems analysis, Mosgaard museum fails to take these insights to heart. We see this failure in its ongoing projection of Danish national identity into the area’s pre-history with phrases like ‘the first dane(s)’. At first this might seem benignly misguided, but this projection of national identity into the past is taking place in the context heated anti-immigrant sentiment in Denmark.
In 2018, Denmark introduced the so called ‘immigrant ghetto laws’. These laws – targeting primarily Muslim communities – require children above the age of one to spend at least 25 hours a week away from their parents being instructed in ‘Danish values’. Whilst changes are being made to omit the term ‘ghetto’ after international condemnation, the laws are nevertheless supported by a broad coalition in government including the governing Social Democrats.
Central to anti-immigrant rhetoric in Denmark are appeals to protecting amorphous ‘Danish values’ that are believed to have endured throughout time due to the ethnically and culturally homogenous integrity of Denmark. In light of these debates, exhibitions like that at Mosgaard, and their attitudes to national identity and values, speak directly to contemporary politics.
The exhibit’s historicisation of national identity portrays Denmark in a static light and omits the basic fact that the residents of Jutland in the Stone Age are as far removed from contemporary Danes as can be. In fact, the islands and peninsulas that we today associate with Denmark bear remarkably little resemblance to the geographic features of this area in times gone by. The area today know as Jutland, was, until less than 9,000 years ago, part of a landmass known as Doggerland that connected Jutland, present-day Holland, and the British Isles.
By presenting history in such a way, recent changes brought to Denmark by mass migration are presented as an unprecedented assault on a tradition that stretches back to the stone age. This, of course, is spurious and part of a broader discourse where right-wing populists are able to distance themselves from claims of racism, under the cover of historically justified cultural-nationalism.
A final noteworthy point for consideration is that the residents of the fictional Denmark represented in the beginning of the ‘pre-history’ exhibit are all portrayed as white despite the fact their contemporary Cheddar Man – the equally misleadingly named ‘First Brit’ in a recent Channel 4 documentary – was recently revealed to be black. Seeing as the British isles and Jutland were connected back then, it would at least be worth entertaining the idea that ‘the first immigrants’ were a little more diverse than we make them out to be. For an indication of the amount of, albeit qualified, guesswork involved in exhibits like that at Mosgaard consider the fact that there still remains doubt about the sex of one of the central characters of the Museum’s exhibit, let alone their race.
As an ethnographic Museum and academic institution, Mosgaard should not be sleepwalking into these nationalist tropes, but instead commit to extending the much hackneyed anthropological maxim of making the “familiar exotic and the exotic familiar” (Erikson 2017. pg. 3) to the lay public. For a start, they should commit themselves to denaturalising the nation as a cultural unit by drawing the attention of visitors to the transience of cultural formations. Unfortunately, they seem to be imposing a comforting but ultimately fictitious immutability on them.
And the ugly …
Occupying the central auditorium of the Museum is the impressive evolutionary staircase. Descending this staircase you stand side by side with uncannily realistic life-sized models our fellow hominids. The staircase starts with Lucy (cir. 3,2 million years) descends to Sediba (cir. 2 million year) and eventually ends at a model of a modern human known as Koelbjergkvinden (cir. 9000 thousand years).
This staircase, however, for all of its impressive design, presents a curious and telling chronology of our evolution. Whilst the figures stand in chronologically descending order from Lucy to the fully dressed human, the evolutionary chronology is somewhat flawed. On the middle of the stair case standing between Homo Ergaster (1.5 million years) and Homo Neanderthalensis (41,000 thousand years) is a Homo Sapiens (300,000 years), biologically identical to Koelbjergkvinden in every possible way. Then why is this wax figure placed alongside Homo Ergaster and Homo Neanderthalensis?
Ostensibly it could be argued that this is because the staircase is solely chronological and on the basis of this criteria the placement of the figures is technically correct. However, I would argue that evolutionary timelines are distinctly different to conventional ‘timelines’. First, evolution is not merely temporal, it is biological and therefore designed to reflect degrees of genetic relatedness. Second, evolutionary discourses have historically been rooted in enlightenment notions of both moral and civilisational progress.
This conflation harks back to the days of E.B. Tyler (2010) and Social Darwinism where Europeans, it was argued – due to their technological superiority and undeniable whiteness – were believed to be at the apex of an evolutionary hierarchy which included early hominids and other non-European races. Whilst Social Darwinism as espoused by Tyler is today recognised to be wrong and lacking in any analytic purchase, elements of this discourse still linger on in public discussion and even amongst academics who ought to know better. Bearing this in mind, why does opting for a timeline, rather than an evolutionary staircase, have troubling stylistic implications? First, the evolutionary staircase leaves one with the impression that we have evolved towards greater whiteness. This is because the modern human, standing alongside the early hominids, on the middle of the staircase is black whereas the modern human at the end of the staircase is the only fully white and clothed person there. One cannot avoid the impression that the figures on display, almost without exception, get progressively whiter.
Furthermore, it’s the white modern homo sapiens at the bottom of the staircase who is most recognisably human sporting both cloths and an impressive array of tools. By contrast, the other human, both older and black, but also undoubtedly an avid user of tools, is naked apart from ritual body paint on one leg.
As such, the evolutionary staircase may not be as good a tool to think with as it initially appears. Rather than providing a biologically accurate account of evolution it inadvertently encourages a dangerous – and ultimately racist – conflation of cultural and racial notions of progress and evolution. This conflation confirms, rather than destabilises the Social Darwinism that still lingers on in our accounts of history.
A better way to present this otherwise impressive exhibit would have been to place the 300,000 year old replica of a homo sapiens besides the other homo sapiens at the bottom of the staircase, this would have rendered the exhibit evolutionarily accurate, and exorcised the exhibit’s racist biases. The covertly racist presentation of this exhibit is clearly not conscious, but at a time when we’re slowly beginning to have a more nuanced conversation about race that recognises the importance of unconscious biases, this is a conversation that needs to be had. If even anthropologists are sleepwalking into racist evolutionary tropes and failing to challenge inaccurate and uncritical national narratives, then who will?
References
Braudel, F. 2007. The Mediterranean in the Ancient World. Penguin Books, Limited. Tylor, E. B. 2010. Primitive culture: Researches into the development of mythology, philos- ophy, religion, art, and custom.
Wallerstein, I. 1991. Braudel on Capitalism, or Everything Upside Down. The Journal of Modern History.
Eriksen, T. H. 2017. What is Anthropology? (2nd. Edition.) London: Pluto Press, pp. 3-19.