There are two very different kinds of monumentality at play here. The book traces how they have unfolded in real time. On the one hand, there are the dead white men whose memory is preserved for posterity with a bronze or marble figure on a plinth or a name above a door. On the other hand, there are the people who are not just forgotten but whose existence has been actively diminished, silenced, erased, redacted, dehumanized even.
The book pieces together the untold history of how a woman’s skull was turned into a kind of chalice and ended up being used to drink out of at Oxford college dinners. When the wear and tear got so much that it leaked, they used it to serve the chocolates — until as recently as 2015. For years it was a sort of open secret at the university. Many find that shocking and disturbing, myself included.
The story is that she was a Caribbean enslaved woman, and the book examines what can and can’t be ascertained about her life. What’s certain is that her memory was not venerated with a statue; instead, her anonymized body was posthumously abused. Indeed, part of the violence took the form of the destruction of her identity, and that violence is also seen in countless numbers of human remains still held in museum collections. In slowly reconstructing the story, the book tells a history of humanization and dehumanization, subjectification and objectification.
The aim isn’t just to consider how such an obscene tradition could become established (in this case as recently as 1946), but to ask how it is made to endure. The ways in which such endurances happen take many different forms. I talk about the old Althusserian idea of “interpellation” to try to understand the role of personal participation and training.
The skull was donated to the college by the fascist eugenicist grandson of the man who founded the museum I work in, General Pitt-Rivers. The grandfather had purchased it in 1884 at Sotheby’s. In 2025 in the UK, buying and selling human remains is still entirely legal. The sale of ivory has been outlawed, but if the soldier-anthropologist Pitt-Rivers were alive today, he could still purchase a human skull at an auction. In the UK in March 2025, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Afrikan Reparations and Restitution, chaired by Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy, published an important report about human remains called Laying Ancestors to Rest. The report makes fourteen recommendations, including a ban on both the sale and the public display of ancestral remains.
Every Monument Will Fall looks outward from the story of the skull cup to these issues of policy and practice, from outlawing the sale of human skulls to the ethical, cultural, and historical treatment of ancestral remains in museums and universities. How near are you right this moment from one of those cardboard boxes in some museum storeroom containing human remains? Is there a descendant somewhere who would wish the remains to be returned? And if the violence was such that any knowledge of who that person was, where they lived, or what their name was has been destroyed, what should be done now with the skulls, bones, hair, skin, teeth, or nails? And what of objects or artworks understood to constitute ancestors because of their sacred or royal status? These are questions of monumentality too. Inaction can be one way the brutality endures.
I learned a great deal from the work of Sylvia Wynter when looking at these questions — particularly her 1994 essay, No Humans Involved. Wynter explains how this phrase was used as a code by the Los Angeles Police Department in the 1990s, indicating incidents in which no white people were involved. Her account of “liberal monohumanism” offers a crucial frame for the history of who has counted as “human,” questioning what this reveals about the category of “man” and the ideas of “the human” itself. These questions have never been more urgent for the bundle of historically interconnected fields across which the book operates, which I call the “four As”: anthropology, archaeology, art, architecture. And also for what I’ve come to call the “four Ms”: museums, memory, monumentality, militarism.
Great Job Dan Hicks & the Team @ Jacobin Source link for sharing this story.
