Museum directors and curators are wondering whether these items should continue to be exhibited in the same way as works of art, or whether it would be better to store or even return such items, mummies in particular
Issues surrounding the conservation and exhibition of human remains are a subject of debate in the museum community.
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The museum world is increasingly questioning the thorny issue of human remains in some of the world's leading art institutions. Museum directors and curators are wondering whether these items should continue to be exhibited in the same way as works of art, or whether it would be better to store or even return such items, mummies in particular.
The British Museum houses the largest collection of Egyptian antiquities in the world, outside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. This collection includes about a hundred mummies, or rather "mummified remains" or "mummified persons."
Indeed, the London museum has decided to avoid using the term "mummy" in the future, so as not to dehumanize these bodies preserved beyond death, reports the Daily Mail. An initiative followed by the various institutions that make up the National Museums of Scotland, as well as the Great North Museum: Hancock in Newcastle upon Tyne. "The word 'mummy' is not incorrect, but it is dehumanizing, whereas using the term 'mummified person' encourages our visitors to think of the individual," a spokesman for National Museums of Scotland told the British tabloid.
This change in terminology comes at a time when issues surrounding the conservation and exhibition of human remains are a subject of debate in the museum community. The Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford announced in September 2020 that it would no longer exhibit the shrunken heads and other human relics featuring in its collection of more than 500,000 anthropological objects. "Our audience research has shown that visitors often saw the museum's displays of human remains as a testament to other cultures being 'savage,' 'primitive' or 'gruesome.' Rather than enabling our visitors to reach a deeper understanding of each other's ways of being, the displays reinforced racist and stereotypical thinking that goes against the museum's core values," museum director, Laura Van Broekhoven, said in a statement at the time.
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