Dan Hicks, your professor of contemporary archaeology at the University of Oxford.
Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum. And Philip Cross College, Oxford.
Welcome to some college shorts. OK. Thank you. Lovely to be here.
It's now just over a year since the start of the covered 19 pandemic.
Can you describe your everyday research at Oxford? Before Kofod 19?
Sure. Absolutely. So, you know, like a lot of academics in Oxford.
I have a joint. Well, so I'm half in the museums and I have another foot in archaeology and an academic department.
So my everyday life moves in between really the public sphere, the, you know, the parts of Oxford which are normally open to the public.
The Rivers Museum, you know, where I am, curator of the world archaeology.
I look after objects. And every part of the world and objects that relates to the history of anthropology and archaeology and empire,
as well as to the other knowledge of, you know, non Western indigenous lives and cultures and in archaeology.
I'm professor of contemporary archaeology.
So I teach those aspects of archaeology that relate to the material world in the most recent sort of phases of the human past.
So the modern world, the 17th century, 18th century, but also right the way up,
you know, into the 20th century and into the material worlds around us in the present.
So those two institutional roles overlap in really interesting creative ways.
And they're both really all about. Fundamentally, I guess, about the relationship between objects and people,
how important things of landscapes, you know, buildings and and art ways in our everyday lives.
How did your world of research change when the pendant took hold? So in the Museum World Museum, Shutz hands,
as I as I'm sure you've heard from other academics and you you know yourself on the teaching side and the research sides.
Yeah, everything went online, I think, for the museum sector. It was that Beaubrun of Berlo colleagues who were unable to do their job in the museum,
which led to all sorts of questions, you know, challenges for us about not asking too much of people.
The challenges.
So, you know, mental wellbeing over coping with children at home, which we're certainly, you know, we and our households had to deal with,
but generally had to support colleagues in the museum for, you know, it was a funny moment, wasn't it?
And the other, you know, the first weeks of lockdown. I mean, here we are talking in Italy.
Twenty 21, you know, when it's unclear, you know,
as of when these sort of lockdowns really will be over and you know, how this ends or when this ends at least.
But certainly it was an orderly both to Will Abda, not the visual Bogues.
It was a sense that the temporal lives that we were living, you know, things I mean, oddly, something seemed to happen faster than others.
Some processes in the museum sector were speeded up while other things, you know,
just took forever and not the visual moments that we were suddenly unable to be there to each other.
The new rellenos, an anthropologist, one would say a new set of taboos upon, you know,
physical proximity were introduced, but suddenly a whole set of new regimes for looking at each other.
We've been staring at each other on screen, you know, looking into each other's houses for months now.
So that fundamental recalibration, which is one that's affected all parts of society about time, about vision,
about our human human connexions to our friends and colleagues, has, I think, been most visible in the museums.
There's been obviously for teaching, supporting research students.
You know, most of my work is with post graduate students, as is often the case at St Cross support,
saying those students helping researchers to help each other to build new communities has been a part of this as well.
But lots of looking at screens. I'm sure you've got the same. Can I follow up with a question which is you mentioned taboos created.
I covered 19. What can you say anymore about that?
Well, you know, taboos created and taboos lifted. You know how old it is that there was such sort of pushback for some of the hard rights against,
you know, the wearing of masks that sense that virtually any other parts of the body can be covered.
Indeed. You know, many parts of the body web where one is where it would be would be would be inappropriate not to be covered.
That's something about the face and the nose. That was a step too far for some people to think that this might be, you know,
even though it was so important for public health that might be, you know, wrong to do.
I was really astounded by the anthropologist. And me was also upset, really by how little.
We were in our public sort of dialogues thinking about the fact that this was only
this was only a set of social mores that needed to evolve into a changing situation.
You know, there are some. And, of course, all those wider arguments, you know, both visible in funds.
But certainly one is it from our own prime minister or has done in the past over the politics of facial coverings for other reasons,
you know, veils and so forth. You know, that they went to the heart of of a question of kind of dress of of comportment of,
you know, I'm sure someone will white at some point a great,
you know, account deficit and a ethnographic account of, you know, what we covered,
but also what we uncovered, the fact that our faces have been so visible.
I've never looked at my own face more. I think in my life that I have having it in the little corner of the zoom screen.
And I'm sure lots of people listening to this will also have had that same experience.
Can I ask you about the public health merchant system folded and how that affected the Pitt rivers?
And the extent to which that affected museums more broadly? Yes.
I mean, you know, the museums were shut to the public that they meant that some functions occurred.
Indeed, in many cases adds to, you know, to carry on the basic sorts of processes of conservation, you know, security and so forth are inevitable.
I think across the museums sector, there was this kind of your directorial kind of panic that somehow, you know, everything had to be moved online.
How do you move a museum online? What? The biggest thing that was revealed was how NAF and how out-of-date, how under invested it.
Most get a museum digital content is.
So I was very aware in the early days of locked out the you know,
managers were calling upon the digital teams who themselves were coping with all the things that, you know, they were under.
They were locked down in their houses. They had the kids with them.
They had all of all the challenges, the physical and the mental.
So the challenges that lockdown brought and were being asked suddenly to get supplies of the hearts, you know, digital concept.
That was part of the context, I guess,
for the Museums on Blocks initiative was to try and take a bit of the Eakes off my colleagues that I saw on social media.
I heard Heard's from who were well, look, if you don't have it now, you're not going to meet under these conditions.
You're not going to suddenly create some amazing digital content for museums.
Now, let's say you, director of those projects is museums and loved those is being curated.
So I guess the first the initial idea was if the colleagues who are running the digital content of under such pressure,
if the content is so weak at the moment in terms of what has been your digital creation,
how can we make the digital match up to something more generally that's happening already in the museum sector,
which is the model of curation is really evolving.
So look back to the I guess, one of the most, you know, high profile sort of public engagement projects from a UK museum in recent years.
Yeah. Neil MacGregor's History of the World at Hodgett Objects. That's the project that took place, sir, 10 years ago or so is completely out of step.
It's incredible how how quickly that aged in terms of how it was conceived, in terms of its approach.
Because, you know, that model was the expert who writes the male whites British voice who tells you a hundred histories that we already know,
but we're illustrating with objects the objects that necessarily inform that story, but they're there to illustrate it.
That's precisely the opposite of where these museums have undergone a radical change since then, whereby we talk now not of curation, but calculation.
We don't just share knowledge or or you give knowledge, inform the public.
We cooperate. We co creates. We don't just engage the public.
We create with the public, we stakeholders and audiences and our partners.
So the museums unlock project was really like based on that idea. Well, what if we just make the content ourselves?
Let's have a series of themes. So in early days it was individual museums and cities and then it's over time it turned into themes.
You know, we already have you know, the museums may be shot, but on our devices, on our laptops, our phones, in our high clouds, we have.
Photographs that we took in museums, all of us do, lots of us do.
So what if we share those and your bills, your part?
This was a building, our bio existing, you know, social media following and community over Twitter.
Let's you know, there are only such experts, whether they are furloughed, museum curators, whether they are artists,
whether they're just really thoughtful local historians, you know, you know, thoughtful people.
But we would have called members of the public in the past.
They became so the participants, you know, so share share what you know, went where were you last, the DNA?
When were you lost in Birmingham. What are your favourite, favourite artworks in, you know, Leeds in the south west of England and so on outdoors.
What's your favourite ancient monument? What happens when we look at Egyptian archaeology?
You know, internationally, we paid some visits to Venice and to New York.
You know, it became great fun. But at the heart of how I think museums unlocked works even work to the point at which it got called out in a debate
in the House of Lords is a good example of the resilience of the adaptation that museums saw over this time.
Know it's successful, sort of twofold. It was both a kind or maybe threefold.
It was there was a kind of memory side to it. Here are some places I've been I miss these places.
I miss this artwork. I wish I could stand in front of this object or this painting again and I'll share it with the world.
It was a sort of forward looking thing. I can't wait to go back.
There is my itinerary for after this is all over, you know, and especially sharing knowledge was what an amazing museum.
I've never been that that I've seen someone else share. I'll go there and then holding them together.
The third thing, a source of competitive nature is showing off.
Look at these great places I've gone. Look at how much I know about this. So it was sharing expertise as well.
And I think that was what for me that became many came out of obviously existing curatorial practise that I, you know, undertake in my normal day job.
But it translated very interestingly, I think, into digital content. And I certainly learnt a lot from it.
And I'm indebted to all of the, you know, the thousands of people that contributed to the hashtag.
All of the days are archived. First hundred days we ran and then we ran another twenty five at the end of the year.
But largely this was a project from the night of April to the 9th of July in 2020.
And yeah, I learnt a lot. I think it will inform my abusive practise as I move ahead, hopefully under different conditions.
But who knows? Past years, a new attention paid to the politics of museums and heritage.
No, no. This is something that you've been deeply involved in. Could you describe what's been happening,
especially in relation to Koven 19 Lockdown's The Temporal Dimensions of Down
served in part to speed up processes that were well that were already happening.
And, you know, amongst those processes are what some people have called the decolonisation of museums.
What I sort of prefer to see is an emergence of a kind of anticolonial, anti-racist, you know, set of tasks that music,
you know, Victorian museums are increasingly having to carry out in order to make them themselves fit for the 21st century.
You know, this is a process that already has happened.
As any anthropologist or archaeologist will know that these are questions that have been colon's for two generations,
Guiteau since the civil rights movement within our disciplines, although there's a lot more work to do there intellectually.
But they haven't had the same purchase.
They haven't seen the same change in the physical environments of museums, largely because it's very difficult to take an exhibition down.
It's very difficult to dismantle or the physical infrastructure of what's.
I think we're increasingly aware at times has been white infrastructure has been white supremacy,
which has in the history of anthropology and archaeology, had a role to play in relation to Empire,
in relation to the stories that are told and the objects that are displayed in spaces like the Pitt Rivers Museum.
So long that has served.
You know, when people saw the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer after one of the most recent of the racist murders in the United States.
This, of course, was only the most recent or long term struggle for the Black Lives Matter movement in NetLogic from North America,
which which which hasn't commonalities and kind of converge very interestingly in, you know, European museums.
They have some commonalities with African led movements for fall ism and for restitutions.
They fall isn't the falling of icons and statues of colonial power and the restitution movement,
the physical dismantling of objects that were part of the cultural dispossession,
often of the violence, dispossession of African civilisations and African nations.
But the heart of that, we think back to 2015 16 with the beginning.
Of the BLM movements in North America.
As my colleague Dick Deciphers, you know, Ritson, this was a fundamentally visual movement,
was the technology of dash cam footage and cell phone footage that could
suddenly make visible Lanzi black violence that had been going on for decades.
For centuries, it could suddenly be seen and sheds. That created a political movement.
And and moments and ongoing a new phase in anty race in anti-racist work.
I think in museums we're beginning to see something similar as collections come into focus.
And the violence inherent in some of them comes into focus, too.
So the work is the work of the curator to document, to list, to make visible over social media,
over digital, which was the only way people could encounter, you know,
the museum for the time that the doors were shot so that Europeans were in
the same position as Africans not being able to see yet any of these objects.
They were locked away from everybody apart from the caretaker. That has led to a very, very interesting moments,
which has really pushed forwards these agendas of WG and cultural restitution, the permanent Dunns conditional,
you know, return of objects that were taken under duress or with violence, some whose returns are being demanded, but also more generally.
Questions about how to address it.
Is it institutional racism in museums and more widely in the academy under representation, the share whiteness of these institutions?
You know, these are these are your life conversations.
That lockdown has simply increased the pace of I think some museums have had to change and adapt to the circumstances associated covered 19.
Many of these changes were already underway starting two decades ago.
Which of these changes do you think are going to become permanent? You think they're going to be the ones that were already being considered?
Changes were happening and will continue. So hopefully new phenomena that you might think are in process.
So I used to tell my students for years that Thomas Ku, you know,
has it all wrong that when he wrote the structure of scientific revolutions, he overestimated the fact that science, you know, gets better.
The idea of normal science, a giving way to stoats.
Was he. He famously called the paradigm shifts. He was just you know, that's not how you look at the history of ideas.
The history of science there. It's all much more complicated than that.
I've got to say, the time that we're living in now has never felt more revolutionary intellectually.
So I'm having to rethink how I think about Cuba.
And I think we are in the middle of a fundamental change.
You know, as we're talking, we dug that how and where this ends. We don't know it here in 10.
But since a lockdown's. We don't know, have we?
My guess is we've got another 10 months. We're about halfway through.
But who knows? I mean, to some degree, some of the measures that affect the practise of the academy, the practise of museums may be here forever.
Certainly, if we see the cove it crisis as not the dress rehearsal for, as some have argued, but the first moments of environmental crisis.
You know, this is partly caused by the sheer movement's height.
You know, the excess, the the the incredible movement by air travel.
You know, people around the world, which we know is hurting us, hurting the planet and so many other ways, you know, through as has things warm up.
We know that that bottle of international travel is over or will be over soon.
If it's not over now, it's over a 10 year time so far for museums.
Of course, that means that the art, the older they're not so old.
But the current dog days are now outdated of that just sort of justify the hyper concentration of culture in certain locations.
You know, all the global south. So the culture should be in the global north in so-called.
So the universal museums, even within the U.K., all all these objects should be in London, in the British Museum, rather than in the regions.
Those are where we're going to see the change, that sense of justice, that sense of redistribution of finance, as well as a sort of physical object.
When we come to the after times of this lockdown, we're still going to see the old destination, sir,
is a bottle that so much of my sector has been based on, the blockbuster bottle of, you know, the ticket sales and get loads of people into one place.
That's going to be more dispersed, I think, without a doubt, because of these other factors involved.
We're going to move this. There'll be a kind of degrowth, I think, for a cultural degrowth,
which could be an incredibly exciting time, because we're going to we're going to hear other voices.
We're going. Foreground social media will be a central part of that, that the hope is for more equitable,
for more human approach to see, you know, two objects, museums, I expect.
I hope my work seeks to make sure and to help the idea that museums need to care more for people than they do for theft and that more human face.
And my most recent book that the Ben in Bombs is the British museums that just came out say no November.
That looks at the brutality, the brutishness of, you know, the British museums.
That's one step. That was one example of thinking, honesty.
This reckoning with the colonial past, Bittles symbol, generally with how important arts and culture are,
how significant these things are for world history, but also for for the future.
So I'm very optimistic. I think so much will have changed out of these times, largely because existing processes will have been accelerated.
But we'll also have seen a loss of loss, the loss of loss of debt for lots of personal sadness.
And I think I hope that in their role as public spaces that that museums will also in the way in which they display art,
in the way in which they encourage us to reflect on who we are and where we came from and where we're going.
I really hope that that's, you know, that the cultural sector, especially museums,
will have a role to play in helping us all to hear after these times, because it's been it's been horrible to everyone.
But let's be hopeful.
Furbys aims for full archaeology, for anthropology and for the sort of teaching and research undertakers across and at the Pitt Rivers.