The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford reopens
Rachel Campbell-Johnston
This week, after almost a year of building work, the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford reopens to the public. On Friday, the results of a £10 million revamp will be revealed.

Was it worth it? For many the Pitt Rivers feels rather outmoded. This ethnographical collection, tucked away at the back of the natural history museum in Oxford, can at first glance be dismissed as a dusty jumble of relics. Certainly, to step into its gloomy neo-Gothic spaces has always felt, to the few who could actually find it, a bit like stumbling into the attic of some mad Victorian collector. You stepped into the mindset of an outdated world.

Here, slung from the ceilings, dangling from walls, piled up in cabinets and crammed into cases and drawers, is what must surely count as one of our country’s most unabashedly eccentric collection. It was founded in 1884 by Lieutenant-General Augustus Pitt Rivers who, after developing an insatiable enthusiasm for ethnic artefacts while serving overseas in the Army, bequeathed his collection of some 18,000 objects to the University of Oxford on condition that a building to house it was constructed and a lectureship in anthropology established as well.

The Pitt Rivers expanded steadily from then on, incorporating anything from the Cook collection, garnered during the explorer’s second great voyage of discovery, to hundreds upon hundreds of church-bell marks recorded in plaster by an aficionado who pursued this particular musical fascination all her life. The museum now incorporates some 300,000 objects, of which about a third are at any time out on display. And yes, it all looks like an an incredible jumble. But this, to its many enthusiasts, was precisely its point. And what they will be fearing, as they finally return to the Pitt Rivers, is that it will have been ruined.

This museum is a fantastical cabinet of curiosities. Here, in the words of its director, Michael O’Hanlon, “you can learn about anything from cows to colonialism, from feet to Fiji��?. This is the place you can visit if you want to study anything from Etruscan fetishes to Nigerian circumcision practices to snuff boxes from Nepal. This is where you come if you want to discover how the Ancient Greeks played jacks with the knucklebones of sheep; where walrus intestines work as cosy cagoules; why an Indian man cut off the tip of his finger in court; when a thornimpaled bullock heart can cast a powerful spell, or what you should roast in a fire to bring about an enemy’s death.

The longer you stay there, the more it starts to feel far less like some weird heterogeneous clutter than a holistic monument to the wonders of the human imagination. This is a museum to inspire you. Writers from Penelope Lively, for whom it inspired a short story, to Philip Pullman, who included it in The Subtle Knife (young Lyra visits the museum — unnamed but clearly distinguishable — and uses her alethiometer on several of the skulls), to Colin Dexter, who included it in a Morse plot (a Zambian knife from the museum was the murder weapon). James Fenton wrote a poem about it. The Harry Potter film-makers went there to pursue their researches. Eduardo Paolozzi paid homage to it with his quirky Pop Art collections. The Chapman brothers visited it before carving their collection of fictional ethnographic fetishes dedicated to the great fast-food god McDonald’s.

Clearly the Pitt Rivers is a treasure trove of ideas to be raided. So why change it? What has the overhaul done? Has the museum world’s equivalent of the Biba boutique been transformed into a bland department store?

I am delighted to report that, at first glance, the architectural firm Pringle Richards Sharratt doesn’t seem to have done much more than a bit of dusting perhaps. Here, on tier after tier, are the objects in their maze of glass cabinets. Here are the original little inked labels that identify them. And here is the same old way of organising the artefacts.

One of the most delightful quirks of this collection is that objects are assembled by type. Visitors can see artefacts from the farthest-flung corners of the globe side by side. They can compare across space and time, anything from wedding rings to bagpipes, from fire-lighting techniques to ways of treating dead enemies.

It is in the display case that deals with this last subject that some of the museum’s most potentially controversial objects can be found: painted and impaled human skulls and clusters of shrunken heads hanging on their thongs like bunches of shrivelling grapes. There were rumours a while back that these were to be repatriated out of a sense of ethical duty and cultural respect. But, though a few human remains have indeed been returned, there are no outstanding or unresolved requests for the repatriation of objects, the director assures me. That will be good news for lots of gawping children, as well as for a local author who apparently offered the museum his own head for shrinking purposes: an offer that, perhaps not surprisingly, was refused.

Nothing has changed, the aficionado will be pleased to discover, beyond a far more welcoming entrance way to the museum which will actually entice people inside, rather than, as previously, deterring them or even turning them back. There is not a single interactive screen in sight. Not a beeping push-button display or a light-up panel to be spotted. “We teach through artefacts, the objects are always centre-stage,��? O’Hanlon says. “They are not there to be like illustrations to a text. They are the original material.��?

So what precisely has the £10 million been spent on? “We have radical innovations,��? O’Hanlon tells me. “Lifts and lavatories for instance.��? His eyes are smiling, but beneath the humour lies a serious message. It is not that curators are unaware of the museum’s innate drama. Sometimes, for instance, special evenings are held when the lights are turned off and visitors are handed torches to light their weay as they explore. But the director wants to stress that the museum is far more than some Miss Havisham’s house. It is not merely a repository of dusty relics. The artefacts are still living, still relevant. A shirt, for instance, made by the Blackfoot people, will soon be returning on loan to Canada for handling sessions by the Native American tribe, who will be able not only to talk more about its significance but will also make contemporary copies into which the powers invested in the old shirt will be transferred.

“A museum is a big collection of people drawn together by the artefacts,��? O’Hanlon explains. We are not wandering through some long-since-lost historical world of far-off “savages��?. We are seeing things that are intimately related to our own lives. Western artefacts are laid alongside those of foreign cultures. They are directly compared. And the shared relevance of objects is explored.

“We did a huge mapping exercise,��? O’Hanlon says, “that plotted the relationships of all the people drawn together by one artefact — those who made it, used it, collected it, transported it, interpreted it, catalogued it, etc.��? An object, it seems, can become the focus of a new trans-national family. The visitor to the museum is taking part in a continuing process. You don’t have to be one of the visiting shamans or the women who stare hopefully at fertility totems to understand the power of the objects. It is in exploring this more deeply that the project money has been spent: replacing a clutter of corrugated-iron-roofed sheds and crumbling lean-tos out the back with an elegant and spacious new reasearch centre and comfortable facilities (including those lavatories and lifts) for students and indiginous peoples and interested locals who make appointments to come and research their culture.

Too often museum overhauls merely amount to a contemporary repackaging. But the Pitt Rivers does not aim for such easy consumption. It is not interested in push-button answers. Rather it tries to open up ever wider questions. And its overhaul helps to encourage the discoveries that keep its collection endlessly relevant.

The Pitt Rivers Museum, South Parks Road, Oxford (01865 270927, www.prm.ox.ac.uk) reopens on Friday

The Pick of the Pitt - items to look out for

Shrunken heads (tsantas) - From several tribes from the Upper Amazon region, between Peru and Ecuador. Yes, they are real people — the skin was removed from the skull then boiled briefly, and reshaped with hot pebbles while drying. The practice was meant to trap and use the power of the captor’s soul.

Phantom shield - Dates from around the 1980s, made by the Wahgi people, Papua New Guinea. The comic book character the Phantom was morally upright and thought to be indestructible, making him the ideal image to adorn this battle shield.

World’s smallest doll - At 1.3cm, less than the height of a 5p piece, with little red painted shoes, a yellow suit, and jointed arms and legs. Lives in an egg with the legend “The Smallest Doll in the World��?.

False fringe of curly hair - The Ancient Egyptians loved wigs, which made the hair look thicker and guarded against lice. This elaborately curled fringe piece was found in the tomb of a king and is made from human hair — the lowest orders would have used vegetable fibres.

Witch in a bottle - Ancient English, a small glass flask, silvered on the inside, corked and secured with wax, reputed to contain a witch. The former owner, an old lady from Sussex, said: “They do say there be a witch in it, and if you let ’un out there’ll be a peck o’trouble.��? No one has dared to open it.

Link: The Times 29 April 2009

© The Times 2009