Dan Hicks

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1:44Hello and welcome to Headliners with Nihal Arthanaika. Today's guest is the archaeologist, curator and author, Professor Dan Hicks. And it's a deep one. His new book is called Every Monument Must Fall. And it's an exploration of how museums, universities and other cultural institutions are deeply connected with colonial violence and racism. The book examines how such institutions have deep conflicts over art and heritage, connected to the building of statues, the warehousing of stolen art and disciplines like archaeology and anthropology. It's so weird that in art and culture and heritage, we're told that things can't ever change, not least because if you just look out of your window, you will see applications for listed building consent and the buildings changing and the ideas shifting in the seminar rooms all the time.

2:32So the world is always changing. And that's really why the book is not called All the Monuments Must Fall. It's called Every Monument Will Fall because we choose which monuments are going to remain and which are going to be removed over time. Things change. And of course, things that can count as a monument are ideas as much as they are physical things. And as a professor of contemporary archaeology at Oxford University and as curator of world archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, Dan Hicks certainly knows what he's talking about.

3:13Professor Dan Hicks, it's great to see you and thank you so much for agreeing to be on my Headliners podcast. I want to start by asking you, what are the foundational principles of two academic pursuits? Firstly, what are the foundational principles of archaeology and how have they changed in your mind over time of perhaps what you thought they were and what they've kind of become? And the second one would be the foundational principles of anthropology. And if indeed those have changed in your mind over time. So let's start with archaeology. Sure, absolutely. And so nice to be here now. So yeah, so I work across the four A's, what I call the four A's.

4:10And so that's archaeology, anthropology, art and architecture. And those disciplines are interrelated in certain ways. And those interrelations have a history. so I'm interested in how they formed as you know subjects in the later 19th century when I started out in archaeology in the 1990s I was you know digging holes in advance of you know roads being built and so you know houses being built and so forth and I guess I started off originally I think a lot of us thought that we were doing environmentalism that we were trying to mitigate the sort of impact of how holes were being dug and things were being lost and you know destroyed but then it was always well how do we you know tell a history with that is this history is this are these resources for writing history and over the years I guess I sort of came to see archaeology as the opposite of history because in history often what we do is we think ourselves back into the past and we move sort of forward from that moment of time.

5:18It makes sense. It's how a narrative works. But archaeology is something that begins actually in the present and with the most recent layer, and we dig down. So what that means is that archaeology in some ways is all about what survives. It's the science of human duration. It's about what is left from the past. And that really gives it a different nuance as compared with history. It's about how things survive, who survives, what histories or what voices can. And actually, sometimes when you're working with the recent past, because I work on archaeology in terms of the recent past and the near present, that's about whose histories are not in the history books, but they are there in the fragments that sort of survive.

6:07And how do you piece those histories sort of together? Or how do you understand the fragmentation as a part of that history? And then foundational principles of anthropology. And if your ideas changed. So anthropology, obviously, at the heart of that sort of name is this word anthropos, the idea that it's about man or about humanity. So in some ways, over the years, ever since the discipline that was invented in the 1860s, 1870s, it was all about really, you know, ever since then, it's about, well, who is that figure? Who is that figure of the human? And is it man with all of the sort of heteronormative and the patriarchal and the inherited imperial sort of framings that maybe, you know, come with that image?

7:00Or is it something wider? So really anthropology today is about all of the possibilities of humanity, but also who counts as human. That's a part of it as well. So it originally in the 19th century was all about documenting other cultures that were being colonised. Now, really, if you put the two together, archaeology and anthropology, that's what's so amazing about these subjects, is it's about the whole of the human past and every culture on the planet as well. So at their best, these are disciplines that are able to celebrate the diversity of ways of seeing, ways of thinking, ways of understanding that are outside of a Eurocentric lens.

7:43Are there foundational lies in both disciplines or did both disciplines become infected by a kind of myth making that then became fact? So I'm really interested in, you know, how these disciplines or actually more generally art and culture as ideas were put to work in a fairly, you know, tight sort of timeframe for the purposes of forms of cultural supremacism or ideologies of empire that are out of step with our time. So, yeah, over the years, you know, in between, let's say, the 1870s, 1880s and the early part of the 20th century, these are disciplines that were, you know, put to work. I mean, most famously, you know, we think of how the Nazis used archaeology in order to tell the lies about Aryan culture.

8:41But there are other sort of aspects of that as well that were a bit earlier that relate to the relationship in between archaeology and anthropology and empire. So in our museums and in our monumental cultures in this country, but around the world, some of those ideas sort of persist and some of those attitudes persist. And so in the book, what I really wanted to do was to try to understand those histories. And they're histories that sometimes, you know, we're told is part of a culture war. But, you know, where does that idea come from and what's the prehistory of that idea? That was at the heart of the idea of writing it.

9:18So there are two humans that thread their way through this book. One is Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers, who has a huge amount written about him. We know a lot about him. Lion eyes celebrated. And then there's another human who has been reduced to a skull. And we know nothing about this person other than potentially they were a slave in the Caribbean. just tell us about why these two humans form in very much sense the spine of this book and start with Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers so he's the man whose name is above the door of the museum in which I work the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford he was a soldier and he was the founder of archaeology he was the first in spectre of ancient monuments in the UK.

10:18So he has this critical role in terms of how we think about monuments like Stonehenge, but also other forms of how we save the past. He was a key individual in the history of anthropology as a discipline. He was a Yorkshireman. He lived in London for most of his life. He inherited a vast amount of money in the 1880s. And with that money, he inherited this name, Pitt Rivers. And so at one point he was understood as the richest man in England outside of the normal landed gentry. And he had a big estate on the Wiltshire Dorset border in the south of England. What I'm interested in, or what I have to be interested in really, because I have worked in that museum with his name above the door for 18 years now, is how his militarism intersected with his ideas about objects and cultures, which is what we teach in that museum and in our disciplines of archaeology and anthropology in the present.

11:23So his name's also, in order to come to the second person, that human skull, which was being used at an Oxford college over dinner until as recently as 2015,

11:41that skull has been sawn off and lacquered and polished and sort of turned into a sort of a goblet. And around the silver rim, there is somebody's name, but it's not the name of the person whose skull that is. It's the name Pitt Rivers. And it's not even the name of the man that we've just mentioned. It's the name of the grandson, who also inherited the name, who was a fascist in the war. He was incarcerated in the 1940s. And he gave that item, that person, if you like, the part of somebody's body to the college in 1946. It was the first thing he did after he was legally allowed to return to Oxford after the war.

12:29So I was very interested in really, you know, who is this person? I was asked in 2019 to look into this history for the college and it seemed to me right from the first instant you know that this is about a history of who gets remembered and who doesn't whose name is above the door whose name is erased and anonymized who is actually not only their names are raised but their body is sort of posthumously dehumanized in this way that I think is a metaphor for things that are happening in our institutions and museums, art and culture, academic fields all the time. So I'm really sort of trying to tell these histories and these intertwined lives in order to try and make a wider point, which is about who we remember and who we don't, who gets remembered, who decides who is remembered, and how we think about, you know, what the Germans call memory culture, Erinnerungskultur, they call it in Germany.

13:29We don't in the UK, I mean, I guess we have a memory culture, but we don't actually call it memory culture. And so thinking about memory in those ways. Talking of German, and I'd like to thank my son's friend who's doing A-level German for helping me with the pronunciation on this. Vorall sei Lander gehorsam. What does that mean? Vorall sei Lander gehorsam. Anticipatory obedience, I believe. Yeah, that's right. I mean, there's a lot to be learned from the conversations that are happening on these issues in France, Germany, North America, the continent of Africa, India, around the world. And I think moving between those sort of debates is really important for us in the UK to get outside of, you know, how other cultures, other ways of thinking about these paths.

14:21And in the German case, yeah, this idea of how people can be obedient to what they imagine is going to be a problem around sort of culture or around memory. It was a word that was sort of put forward in the context of the Nazis. that people in some ways, it wasn't that all of the things that happened were direct, you know, edicts from Himmler or whoever, from Goebbels, that often actually this was about the idea that we mustn't upset people, the idea that we have to agree with an idea that hasn't even quite been said. What that sort of leads to often is a sort of a freezing of any change, a holding holding on to the, you know, sort of a, how to put it, like a worry that your institution is going to be next up.

15:11And so you keep your head down and maybe you don't do something that you would have done otherwise because of a fear of putting yourself in or your institution in the line of fire. And I think there are, as you're implying, I guess this is why you ask about it, you know, at the end of the book I do sort of talk a little bit about how that might be something that's happening in the present, whether it's in a sort of Trumpian era or in terms of the rise of the far right elsewhere in the world. But also as well, of course, the vitriolic attacks that took place on the National Trust when they had the temerity to actually look at the history of these grand edifices that came under their care.

15:56and what kind of shockwaves did that send through the community that you're part of, which is about memory? So it was awful for many people and for the people involved at the National Trust and for many of the people who were working with them. But it was awful for society at large as well because it was the first shot above the bow in a new phase of the so-called culture war, or what I would rather say is a war on culture, an attempt to weaponise culture, which has a long history, which is bound up with ideas of the National Trust and sort of monuments and the past. And I think that thing about memory is central, because when it was being said that to write these histories or to be open about the links in between the National Trust houses and histories of empire and enslavement and so forth, that this was an attack upon individuals or families.

17:00That was a mixing up of the man and the monument. It was a mixing up of history and memory in such interesting ways. Because in many ways, this is about what stories we wish to tell in those spaces. Who are the audience? Who gets to tell these histories? What was weird about it was that there was an attempt to say that by understanding more about this history, it was a cancellation of other narratives, of other histories, which, of course, actually it never was. It was about understanding the full histories of these institutions. So, yeah, I think what we're seeing in those instances is the same mixing up of the man and the monument or the site and the family as you see when people talk about, you know, the removal of Edward Colston in, you know, Bristol, where so often it was all about, well, sort of Edward Colston right or wrong, remembering that, or actually not remembering, that he was a man who lived in the 17th century, early 18th century, and that image was from 1895.

18:08It was from he'd been dead longer at that point than he had ever been alive. And so it was about the memory of Colston. It was about an image of Colston, an object, rather than himself. So we often end up having to say, and of course, I mean, these monuments were designed to mix up the man and the monument in those ways so that they would seem to be eternal. It's the same in some ways for the way in which the National Trust sort of can be weaponised or can be thought about. But yeah, that work was never about attacking the trust. It was undertaken by the trust in order to understand those histories better.

18:50Why is it, Professor, that I should be denied the right to see the skull? The right to see the skull. That's an interesting phraseology. so the skull you know you know is owned by the college at the moment and we can go into the history of you know actually how it is that you know people or people's body parts can be not only owned but actually bought and sold under the law at the moment and one thing the book does is it calls for an end to the sale or the trafficking in our auction houses and elsewhere in sort of dead bodies. It's amazing that we have banned the sale of ivory in this country, but you can still, you know, go down to Sotheby's and you can bid on a skull in exactly the same way that Augustus Pitt Rivers did in 1884, which is how it ended up in Worcester College.

19:47Worcester College themselves are not a museum and they're trying to do the right thing. You know, they eventually, after 70 years of this abuse rightly ended the use of this individual, of this person over dinner, and they put the skull into a box. But then it becomes a question about sort of what happens next. So part of the dehumanisation of this person is that we don't know where they came from. We can make some interpretations, and there's some evidence that helps us understand what that history might be and the physical anthropologists have advised that it was a woman in terms of the form and the shape of the skull we know from a radio carbon date that was undertaken by the college that the person's died sometime around 1790 to 1800 that sort of time frame and so there's a bit there are these little fragments of evidence about who this person is but what happens next I mean, that's up to the college.

20:53And their sense, I think absolutely rightly, in terms of the ethics of this, was that after so much abuse over the years, over more than 200 years of being used in this way, that to put their image out there or to invite people around to look at this sort of person's body really isn't actually going to help anybody. there is a set of sort of wider issues in our museums over whether any human remains ought to be on display uh and there are different opinions there i mean my opinion is that it's a case-by-case basis and that actually is a very different conversation about you know sort of ancestral remains that were dug up from the neolithic in the uk that's a decision for you know british people thinking about prehistory as compared with sort of let's say other other ancestors where it might be something where somebody, where there is a group of descendants somewhere in the world who want their ancestor back so they can rebury them.

21:50So there's a whole set of issues there. But fundamentally, a part of how this violence works is visual. There's a visual culture that goes with that sort of dehumanisation of people. And so I think absolutely rightly what the College have said is they're not issuing photos, they're not inviting people around to have a look. You know, I wonder whether we can do better as a society when there are human remains in boxes in museums or universities or indeed infirmary collections in hospitals, if we can do better than just saying we're going to leave them in the box forever. But right now, that's where the sector is and that's where the ethical guidance lies.

22:37So does this buy into an argument that those on the right would have, which is that there are people who are trying to erase history? so we are unlikely to ever know the identity of that skull that became a cup with silver and Latin attached to it that Oxford Dons would firstly drink wine from and then after it was leaking they used it to pass chocolates around but one thing that it could be is a very public symbol of the dehumanisation, the barbarity of colonialism and supremacism placed not as an ornament, but as a warning from history of what happens. And that, you could argue, would be a useful way of displaying with context what that skull represents.

23:42Exactly. Well, that would be the retain and explain argument, wouldn't it? So we keep things exactly the same as they are, just add a little label at the bottom or we contextualize ongoing sort of dehumanizing sort of practices so you could imagine a version of that in an oxford college where you would just read out a little yeah maybe in latin you would read out a little account of you know why what we're about is wrong and then just keep on doing it right i mean that's where the logic if we're not careful that's that's where the logic might lead uh but more seriously you know uh when i wrote my last book, which was about restitution, the British museums, I started to give mottos to my books and to use mottos in them.

24:24And this book's got two mottos. One motto is to stay with the fragments. Sometimes these histories are so fragmented that that attempt, that absolutely natural attempt to try to piece everything sort of together and to make the dead living and to put things right. Actually, sometimes that's not possible. And the second motto is sometimes the gap is the monument. And sometimes if you remove a practice or a statue, or even you remove something from the reading list, which is out of step or just wrong in terms of our times, that isn't a loss. It can be a gain. The space, it can be the exact opposite.

25:07The gap can open up. So you've got more space for other voices, other conversations. You're not forced to have the same memories, the same attitudes as some people who were living in the 1890s or the 1930s who had a particular worldview that may not be your own or may be out of step with our time. So yeah, I think in that sense, we need to be, you know, this is what the book really tries to do, to say that there are conversations over ancestral remains in our institutions. There are conversations over monuments in the streets. There are conversations over how we shape our academic sort of disciplines in the library or the classroom.

25:51All those actually can come sort of together in different ways. And we can ultimately argue for culture and art, something that would be entirely non-contentious for so many other fields. Imagine that there was a practice that was inherited by an institution or a profession that was hurtful from the 19th century. Let's imagine this was in criminal justice. And someone comes along and either says, look, that's wrong because the science shows it's wrong. Or they say, as you know, this is hurting people. This is out of step with our times. Imagine if they were told, no, you can't change that because that's how we've always done it.

26:30It's so weird that in art and culture and heritage, we're told that things can't ever change. Not least because if you just look out of your window, not least in a city like Oxford, you will see applications for listed building consent and the buildings changing and the ideas shifting in the seminar rooms all the time. So the world is always changing. And that's really why the book is not called All the Monuments Must Fall. it's called every monument willful because we choose which monuments are going to remain and which are going to be removed over time things change and of course things that can count as a monument are ideas as much as they are physical things

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28:28What is a successful way of marketing to people the idea that they have to have a more nuanced and deeper understanding of history when so much of what binds us, Professor, is collective storytelling. And that collective storytelling can often be built on myths. and people need those myths in order to tether them to a sense of identity. Absolutely. So there's a section early in the book about an anthropologist, a French anthropologist called Lévi-Strauss, who wrote an article once called How Myths Die. Because myths do die. We don't hold the same myths now as the ancient Greeks, you know or in the medieval period or whatever myths exactly like science are things that change all the time and so managing how myths change is actually surely a central part of how any society operates so we tell myths to ourselves about war about empire about who we are and where we came from and where we're going and that's obviously a good thing you know but it's only a good thing if myths are able to change and we can retell them.

29:54So that's why in this book, even though it's a book that comes from archaeology and anthropology, there's a lot more in it than you might imagine of Ursula Le Guin and of writers like Maggie Nelson, who are interested in the relationship in between nonfiction and fiction. There's the work of African-American writers like like Sadia Hartman, who have introduced what they call fabulation. And they're using the critical fabulation, as they call it, in order to write histories that seem impossible. So of course, a part of academic work is something that can not only, well, number one, you can recognise that the past is filled with silences.

30:42And those silences are not simply gaps. They're often silences that have been made. But also sometimes you can fill that silence with your imagination. You can fill it with a good myth, but you can make sure that that myth is actually fitting for its time. So this isn't a book about science in some ways, in a very boring way, but it is instead about what I'd call the science of human duration, how ideas and people survive. But the changes that academics are asking people to make are changes that it feels are asking them to recalibrate quite often very simplistic ideas of good. versus evil, Churchill good, Empire good.

31:44These kinds of stories and myths that we were brought up on. And academia, when you say change, it sounds neutral, but it's not neutral. The change is undermining some of the pillars, the foundational pillars that we use to make us feel patriotic and proud. Yeah, it's interesting in that list that it was, as you pointed out, you know, Churchill good, empire good. It's hard to find the bad. It's hard to say, oh, we have a collective myth that X is bad, maybe wars that we've sort of defeated. I mean, maybe fascism, one hope, would be on that list. but still what that tells us is that a part of the myth making or the mode of mythology or the mode of what in the book I call monumentality because there are many many ways of building monuments or thinking about the past and many different memory cultures that's the whole whole point we can remember in a whole load of different ways the one we have at the moment in the UK is just relentlessly positive about certain figures and then just silent on others so i'm often told by people oh god why can't you just be a bit more positive why can't this why does this all have to be so why can't you tell a good all the good things about about the university of oxford and the pit rivers museum and archaeology and anthropology and art for god's sake and statues why would you you know you know why would you attack why are you on the attack and of course That is the mistake.

33:16That is at the heart of this framing of a culture war from the start, because that idea that we've all got to be upbeat about everything or that there are two sides to everything. There aren't two sides to some things there. We don't want a balance sheet approach to racism. We don't want a balance sheet approach to massacres in the colonial past. What then happens when you've got a discipline that was put to use in order to try to build myths that made it seem like those massacres were OK? And so in the book, I talk about the ideologies that came about in anthropology and archaeology, that indigenous people were just going to die out because of the superiority of European cultures, because we had machine guns and they had sort of bows and arrows.

34:05That is the logic of it that's at the heart of it. So we have to, you know, I'm not going to say that that is part of our inheritance or our heritage, which is good or bad. And I think that whole framing of is it good or bad, that whole idea that this is about morals is entirely wrongheaded. Ultimately, this is about understanding the past, but it's about doing so in the present. It's about the present. I mean, I'm currently writing my second book and I came across this term, which was linked to Brexit, about collective narcissism and the British sense of collective narcissism. And that feels relevant to a conversation about people who refuse to accept that there are aspects of British history which are incredibly problematic and need further investigation.