“We care for extraordinary things from the past, but what matters most is what can be done with them in the present”, says Nicholas Thomas, the director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) at the University of Cambridge.
Thomas also works as a professor of historical anthropology at Cambridge, which is hosting this year’s University Museums Group (UMG) annual conference. He is the co-chair of the UMG, alongside Nicola Kalinsky, the director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at Birmingham University. It’s Thomas’s first conference as co-chair, though he’s been involved with the organisation for a number of years.
The conference takes place in July – the theme is Foreign Exchange? – and aims to interrogate university museums and international engagement during a period when the sector is very concerned about the effects of Brexit. It also comes at a time when those working in university museums see academic and cultural collaboration as more urgent than ever, but also more difficult, because of growing threats to global peace and security.
With his academic background as a researcher in cross-cultural issues relating to anthropology, history and art history, the subject of international working should suit Thomas perfectly.
“Museums are profoundly international, not only in the sense that the artefacts, specimens and artworks they hold come from many nations – more importantly because we can only interpret those collections through global conversations, which may involve experts and stakeholders of many kinds,” Thomas says. “I’ve always thought that academic research should be out there and publicly engaged.”
The issue of world collections has been under the spotlight recently with Tristram Hunt, the director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, promising to set up a long-term loan of his institution’s Maqda hoard to where it originated in Ethiopia, and the Parthenon Marbles hitting the news again with Jeremy Corbyn saying the UK would engage in “constructive talks with the Greek government about returning the sculptures” if the Labour Party came to power. As the director of a world museum, how does Thomas view repatriation?
“Some visitors walk into MAA and ask, ‘Don’t all these people want their stuff back?’ The answer is that a few do and we have had rewarding negotiations and partnerships with them: there have only been four serious claims in the last 20 years,” he says. “The debate around the issue is intense, but many people in Africa, Oceania and elsewhere are – perhaps surprisingly – affirmative about the representation of their cultures in museums they see as prestigious, and as places in which works are respected.”
The works the MAA repatriated included a sacred shaman’s drum from Sapmi (the territory of the indigenous Sami people of Scandinavia, Finland and Russia). The drum went back to an indigenous museum for 10 years, then brought back to Cambridge where it now forms part of a display co-curated with that museum. The MAA has also repatriated tattooed Maori heads.
Thomas believes that longer-term loans can enable museums to make artefacts and collections accessible in nations of origin, and provide a context for continuing collaboration. “Of course, every request is different and needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis. But the paramount consideration should be public benefit, now and in the future, rather than historic redress.”
He feels that the public debate fails to represent the variety of indigenous attitudes towards historic artefacts. “Some people are indifferent or ambivalent, for example, because objects are associated with ancestral religions that they have rejected. Or, they may consider them important, but feel that their repatriation is not a priority, given other challenges they face.”
Cultural influences
Thomas trained across anthropology and history, with interests in cross-cultural issues and colonial legacies, doing a BA in anthropology at the Australian National University and then a PhD there in anthropology and Pacific history.
“I grew up in Sydney and was very aware, as a child, of the city’s Aboriginal past,” he says. “You would see rock engravings and shell middens in the parks around the harbour. It was thought-provoking. Aboriginal people weren’t visible in the neighbourhood, but it obviously had both a relatively recent and a deep indigenous history.”
Thomas moved to the UK in the late 1980s on a research fellowship in cultural anthropology at King’s College, Cambridge. He then returned to Australia for 10 years, where he worked in research positions for the Australian Research Council Special Research Centre and the Australian National University. Returning to the UK in 1999, he became the professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London until 2006. He became the director of the MAA in 2006.
His specialism in antipodean and Pacific anthropology has led him to be involved in curating various exhibitions over the years, including Tapa, at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, in 2013. This year, the MAA will lend works to the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London.
“The MAA lends extensively, particularly to shows such as the RA’s Oceania, which take collections to wider audiences, but also puts specific artefacts into contexts that enable a deeper understanding of them.”
The museum boasts a huge collection, “two million years, one million artefacts” as its branding states, but with every pro there’s a con. “We struggle with space – there is just not enough to reveal the dialogue to the extent that we would like.”
There’s a big external store and there are on-site stores: “We are very committed to making our reserve collections available to researchers and communities,” he says.
This aspect of the museum’s work has grown a great deal over the past 20 years, so Thomas is keen to expand the existing facilities, following the museum’s last redevelopment in 2012.
“We have ambitions to create better public space, a dedicated education room, more gallery space and new external collections facilities.” Alongside all this capital work, Thomas says the museum will sustain its exhibition programme and continue to host artists’ residencies, showing an ongoing commitment to contemporary art in response to its collection.
Changing perceptions
The way museums approach the items they look after is evolving, reflected by the recent launch of Collections 2030, a Museums Association research project looking at the long-term purpose, use and management of museum collections.
“The ways that collections are seen has changed radically over the last 30 years,” says Thomas. “There was a point where people would have seen material from different cultures and thought that’s ethnography. Collections are not defined by particular disciplines. Our collections speak to history, the environment, to education and to art, among many other fields.”
Thomas is an advocate of dedicated, collections-focused scholarship, but nevertheless celebrates the sheer diversity of people’s responses to objects. “That individual visitors can make their own associations on their own terms matters. Museums can’t be, and shouldn’t be, prescriptive about what works and artefacts mean.”
The museum is fortunate to have a trust fund that enables graduate students to create collections while pursuing their research. “A student might be looking at clothing in Indonesia or artisanal teapots in China, and has the chance to assemble a well-documented, contemporary collection, often one that’s co-produced with local support and expertise.”
This level of detail matters because the human story is one of great complexity –Thomas is attuned to such subtleties. From representing a multitude of diverse cultures, colonialism, the stories of collectors, identity, and the debate about repatriation, there’s a lot to keep him busy.
“From the earliest implements made by hominids from east Africa to contemporary art made now, we hold an eclectic sample of everything from everywhere ever.”
Thomas did a BA in anthropology and a PhD in anthropology and Pacific history at the Australian National University. He became a research fellow in cultural anthropology at King’s College, Cambridge in 1986, then pursued research in various roles in Australia for 10 years.
He returned to the UK to become the professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, before moving to the MAA in 2006.
He is the co-chair of the University Museums Group.
A redevelopment in 2012 included the building of a new entrance and refurbished ground-floor galleries.
Nearly 30 staff run the museum, with help from up to 60 volunteers.
The MAA is one of the eight museums that form the University of Cambridge Museums Partnership. The University of Cambridge provides core funding of around £1m a year.
Thomas also works as a professor of historical anthropology at Cambridge, which is hosting this year’s University Museums Group (UMG) annual conference. He is the co-chair of the UMG, alongside Nicola Kalinsky, the director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts at Birmingham University. It’s Thomas’s first conference as co-chair, though he’s been involved with the organisation for a number of years.
The conference takes place in July – the theme is Foreign Exchange? – and aims to interrogate university museums and international engagement during a period when the sector is very concerned about the effects of Brexit. It also comes at a time when those working in university museums see academic and cultural collaboration as more urgent than ever, but also more difficult, because of growing threats to global peace and security.
With his academic background as a researcher in cross-cultural issues relating to anthropology, history and art history, the subject of international working should suit Thomas perfectly.
“Museums are profoundly international, not only in the sense that the artefacts, specimens and artworks they hold come from many nations – more importantly because we can only interpret those collections through global conversations, which may involve experts and stakeholders of many kinds,” Thomas says. “I’ve always thought that academic research should be out there and publicly engaged.”
The issue of world collections has been under the spotlight recently with Tristram Hunt, the director of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, promising to set up a long-term loan of his institution’s Maqda hoard to where it originated in Ethiopia, and the Parthenon Marbles hitting the news again with Jeremy Corbyn saying the UK would engage in “constructive talks with the Greek government about returning the sculptures” if the Labour Party came to power. As the director of a world museum, how does Thomas view repatriation?
“Some visitors walk into MAA and ask, ‘Don’t all these people want their stuff back?’ The answer is that a few do and we have had rewarding negotiations and partnerships with them: there have only been four serious claims in the last 20 years,” he says. “The debate around the issue is intense, but many people in Africa, Oceania and elsewhere are – perhaps surprisingly – affirmative about the representation of their cultures in museums they see as prestigious, and as places in which works are respected.”
The works the MAA repatriated included a sacred shaman’s drum from Sapmi (the territory of the indigenous Sami people of Scandinavia, Finland and Russia). The drum went back to an indigenous museum for 10 years, then brought back to Cambridge where it now forms part of a display co-curated with that museum. The MAA has also repatriated tattooed Maori heads.
Thomas believes that longer-term loans can enable museums to make artefacts and collections accessible in nations of origin, and provide a context for continuing collaboration. “Of course, every request is different and needs to be considered on a case-by-case basis. But the paramount consideration should be public benefit, now and in the future, rather than historic redress.”
He feels that the public debate fails to represent the variety of indigenous attitudes towards historic artefacts. “Some people are indifferent or ambivalent, for example, because objects are associated with ancestral religions that they have rejected. Or, they may consider them important, but feel that their repatriation is not a priority, given other challenges they face.”
Cultural influences
Thomas trained across anthropology and history, with interests in cross-cultural issues and colonial legacies, doing a BA in anthropology at the Australian National University and then a PhD there in anthropology and Pacific history.
“I grew up in Sydney and was very aware, as a child, of the city’s Aboriginal past,” he says. “You would see rock engravings and shell middens in the parks around the harbour. It was thought-provoking. Aboriginal people weren’t visible in the neighbourhood, but it obviously had both a relatively recent and a deep indigenous history.”
Thomas moved to the UK in the late 1980s on a research fellowship in cultural anthropology at King’s College, Cambridge. He then returned to Australia for 10 years, where he worked in research positions for the Australian Research Council Special Research Centre and the Australian National University. Returning to the UK in 1999, he became the professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London until 2006. He became the director of the MAA in 2006.
His specialism in antipodean and Pacific anthropology has led him to be involved in curating various exhibitions over the years, including Tapa, at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, in 2013. This year, the MAA will lend works to the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) in London.
“The MAA lends extensively, particularly to shows such as the RA’s Oceania, which take collections to wider audiences, but also puts specific artefacts into contexts that enable a deeper understanding of them.”
The museum boasts a huge collection, “two million years, one million artefacts” as its branding states, but with every pro there’s a con. “We struggle with space – there is just not enough to reveal the dialogue to the extent that we would like.”
There’s a big external store and there are on-site stores: “We are very committed to making our reserve collections available to researchers and communities,” he says.
This aspect of the museum’s work has grown a great deal over the past 20 years, so Thomas is keen to expand the existing facilities, following the museum’s last redevelopment in 2012.
“We have ambitions to create better public space, a dedicated education room, more gallery space and new external collections facilities.” Alongside all this capital work, Thomas says the museum will sustain its exhibition programme and continue to host artists’ residencies, showing an ongoing commitment to contemporary art in response to its collection.
Changing perceptions
The way museums approach the items they look after is evolving, reflected by the recent launch of Collections 2030, a Museums Association research project looking at the long-term purpose, use and management of museum collections.
“The ways that collections are seen has changed radically over the last 30 years,” says Thomas. “There was a point where people would have seen material from different cultures and thought that’s ethnography. Collections are not defined by particular disciplines. Our collections speak to history, the environment, to education and to art, among many other fields.”
Thomas is an advocate of dedicated, collections-focused scholarship, but nevertheless celebrates the sheer diversity of people’s responses to objects. “That individual visitors can make their own associations on their own terms matters. Museums can’t be, and shouldn’t be, prescriptive about what works and artefacts mean.”
The museum is fortunate to have a trust fund that enables graduate students to create collections while pursuing their research. “A student might be looking at clothing in Indonesia or artisanal teapots in China, and has the chance to assemble a well-documented, contemporary collection, often one that’s co-produced with local support and expertise.”
This level of detail matters because the human story is one of great complexity –Thomas is attuned to such subtleties. From representing a multitude of diverse cultures, colonialism, the stories of collectors, identity, and the debate about repatriation, there’s a lot to keep him busy.
“From the earliest implements made by hominids from east Africa to contemporary art made now, we hold an eclectic sample of everything from everywhere ever.”
Nicholas Thomas at a glance
Nicholas Thomas has been the director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, for 12 years.Thomas did a BA in anthropology and a PhD in anthropology and Pacific history at the Australian National University. He became a research fellow in cultural anthropology at King’s College, Cambridge in 1986, then pursued research in various roles in Australia for 10 years.
He returned to the UK to become the professor of anthropology at Goldsmiths College, University of London, before moving to the MAA in 2006.
He is the co-chair of the University Museums Group.
The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (MAA) in Cambridge was founded in 1884, and has been on Downing Street since 1913.A redevelopment in 2012 included the building of a new entrance and refurbished ground-floor galleries.
Nearly 30 staff run the museum, with help from up to 60 volunteers.
The MAA is one of the eight museums that form the University of Cambridge Museums Partnership. The University of Cambridge provides core funding of around £1m a year.
About 70,000 people visit the MAA annually.
