Review of The Museum of Other People by Adam Kuper

*The Museum of Other People* by Adam Kuper (2024). Published by Pantheon.

If you’re new here and found this blog through the mysterious powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I’m a dedicated reader and movie watcher who thought to turn this website into a little digital archive of sorts.

I was watching and reading so much that I wanted to keep track of it all, so I began blogging as a way to keep these books as memories somewhat forever.

That said, I recently fell into a period of unemployment, and this blog was a solace for me. Not only was it a way to make a little bit of money when there was nothing else coming my way really, but I found, after getting my finances in order, that I enjoyed sitting down to write blog posts when I had nothing else to do in my day.

If you like this review in the end, feel free to click around. This is my digital home, so I’m happy to have you here. This blog post is probably coming out a few months after I wrote it due to the sheer nature of the backlog I have right now.

Anyways, I had heard about this book long before I checked it out. I always keep tabs on the publications that track upcoming and “exciting” (aka: probably have the most marketing budget and belong to a somewhat decent sized press) books are coming out. That’s how I first heard about this book, although I had not had the chance to figure out where I exactly found this one from.

Regardless, this book was on my radar fairly early on, but because I am a master procrastinator, I didn’t actually get around to reading it until I was wandering my local library. I saw it on the new nonfiction shelf and decided to give it a chance, even though I had five million other books to read at the time.

It took me a bit to get through this one though. It’s very academic language, which is hard to sort through if you’re not used to it.

Let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much.

A look into how museums and cultural spaces actively othered minorities and the communities not in power.

As someone who went to graduate school and read quite a bit about the plight of museums, and how their collections are basically full of pilfered artifacts, even if they bought them legally, I am no stranger to how museums are seen as a controversial space nowadays. I do love going to museums, but I think we need to critically engage with them in order to see how exactly they are spaces of power and dominance, as well as how they could help these communities more.

Anyways, in this book, Kuper dives deep into how exactly museums were set up in the West and were spaces that actively looked down on people that weren’t in power (i.e. we’re clearly talking about colonialism here). He goes through the history of the museums and the struggles to even get them built and funded.

He then transitions into how exactly these museums got their artifacts. Back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, even earlier than that sometimes, there were people actively taking and buying cultural heritage from colonized lands.

I think we can easily see that in how museum halls are named nowadays. The Sackler controversy comes to mind, as I live near Washington D.C., and the National Asian Art Museum used to be called Freer and Sackler because a lot of the collection came from these guys. The original Sackler was huge on Chinese art, which you can read about in books like Empire of Pain.

So while these museums were being set up in the world, Kuper goes a bit deeper to show how exactly these museums are more nuanced takes on imperialism and colonialism. Not only are places like the Smithsonian collecting body parts, bones, and heads, but they still continued to capitalize on the suffering of others in order to keep their business intact.

This is a good chunk of the book. The other chunk that I found to be really interesting in the context of museum studies is how Kuper examines repatriation. I’ve seen so many arguments for and against it, especially when it comes to artifacts and cultural heritage taken from places that are active war zones.

Questions of will the artifacts still be able to exist in these spaces and why should we give it back when we paid for it are common ones when it comes to repatriation. I don’t think we’re going to get an easy solution in the near future, but I find discussions of it in books like these to be very interesting.

Overall Thoughts

I’m glad I read this book, but because it is so academic, I would probably only use sections of it in the future. Something I learned in graduate school is how to get through texts like these, especially considering I was reading about 600 pages a week of similar kinds of readings. You learn to get really good at these in grad school for the humanities.

I can see how the average reader, who is not historically or anthropologically trained, might struggle with the language and how Kuper presents his information. It can feel like walls of texts at times, and it is quite dense, so if you don’t know how to deal with these kinds of books and space it out, then you’re most likely going to get bored and not finish it.

I think this is an important book, although limiting in some ways. I would love to see a scholar from Africa put out a book like this and on interactions between the communities nowadays. Hopefully someone publishes that, or can recommend me a book in this vein in then near future!

I say go read this though if you’re interested in the subject matter. You’ll probably find it worth it.

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