Thread by @profdanhicks

every now and then working at a museum like the @Pitt_Rivers means that you experience a moment of sheer terror and shock

I had one of those moments, a truly M.R. James winter night kind of moment of revelation, while working yesterday evening

(THREAD)

I was working through some historic photographs of museum curators to send to a colleague as part of a current artist collaboration

Most of the photographs were from the first decade of the 20th century, shared with a designer we're working with for details of dress

for example I sent her this photo taken “on the occasion of the first practical examination in anthropology in 1908″, showing Beatrice Blackwood, Sir Francis Knowles, 5th Baronet, James Harley, and their tutor the curator Henry Balfour

and I sent this group portrait of the Diploma in Anthropology Class of 1910

and I also sent her this classic 1895 image of Balfour on the Upper Gallery

and then I remembered we had an earlier photograph, a posed graduation group taken in the Natural History Museum in 1884. A bit too early for the date-range the designer is interested in, but I thought I might dig it out

so I downloaded the image from our online database databases.prm.ox.ac.uk/fmi/webd/Photo…
and started writing the email describing the photograph

"Members of the Human Anatomy and Physiology Class, Oxford University Department of Morphology, Oxford University Museum of Natural History"

taken just before the students in it took their final "examinations. People included: Henry Nottidge Moseley, Henry Balfour, Walter Baldwin Spencer, Walter Edmund Roth, Henry Wentworth Dyke Acland, William Hine, Gilbert Bourne, J.G. Ogle. Rev D. Johnston", etc

"Henry Moseley is standing in the centre of the group, holding his mortarboard; Henry Acland is seated to the right of him. Henry Balfour, then one of Moseley's students, is standing at the back holding a rabbit; Walter Baldwin Spencer seated second from the left"

and then I looked back at the photograph

it's a well known image around the museum, and has often been reproduced in books as a quirky bit of Oxford's history.

for example it's on the Oxford Medical Division's webpage here medsci.ox.ac.uk/about/the-divi…

and on the Pitt Rivers website here web.prm.ox.ac.uk/rpr/index.php/…

and I looked back at the photograph

not at the men posing with the specimens this time

but at what's behind them

shelf upon shelf of skulls staring out

displayed at the height of anthropology's fake "race science"—behind the living bodies of the students and dons

[ENDS]

a little more context, threads we have failed to untangle, ongoing violences, all the horror of human remains on display for the purposes of supremacist ideology at the heart of the academy, here >> web.prm.ox.ac.uk/sma/index.php/…

terror and shock as I said, but yes let’s be clear also very definitely profound shame for our museums today