Rotten Foundations, Dangerous Footholds

Slought and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania are pleased to announce "Rotten Foundations, Dangerous Footholds," a series of demonstration projects confronting Scientific Racism in institutional spaces and the process of (un)becoming human, on display at Slought from December 9, 2021 to December 21, 2021. An opening event will take place on Thursday, December 9, 2021, beginning with a screening of "The Controversial Carleton Coon: Legacies of Scientific Racism in American Anthropology," a short film directed and produced by Aleia Manning and Jesus Pallares. This will be followed by informal remarks by Deborah A. Thomas and members of her introductory class "Anthropology, Race, and the Making of the Modern World."

Emerging in the early 19th century, scientific racism served to legitimate the white supremacy that undergirded European exploration, Indigenous dispossession, and African slavery. By the late 19th century, this ideology came to be institutionalized at what is now the Penn Museum, and in the department of anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Penn was only one of several scientific institutions across Philadelphia where the so-called science of race and theories of polygenesis were elaborated. These theories, promulgated by physicians like Samuel G. Morton, and Penn anthropologists Daniel G. Brinton and Carleton S. Coon, were built on the bodies of Indigenous and African descended peoples, who were collected, researched, and exhibited as objects among other objects. This exhibit tackles this history, and explores how it lives today. It seeks to lay bare the contemporary legacies of Scientific Racism in our institutional spaces by probing the problems of classification, dehumanization, misrecognition, and disavowal.

Modern museums originated as "curiosity cabinets," a collecting practice that emerged soon after 1500 AD, alongside European exploration overseas and their contact with people with different cultural practices, beliefs, and material cultures. These curiosity cabinets were often quite random collections of objects, but they were nevertheless important for the early development of geology, biology, and archaeology, and for the generation of civilizational hierarchies among peoples worldwide. While these early kinds of collections were often privately held, the beginnings of anthropological collections in museums, and the separation of these collections from natural history collections, dates from about 1840. By the late 19th century, university anthropological museums were established at Penn, Harvard, and Columbia (which was affiliated with the American Museum of Natural History). The collections in these museums grew to hold thousands of ancestors. This is because the measurement of skeletons – and crania in particular – was used by anthropologists to solidify a racial evolutionary hierarchy that was ultimately used to support slavery, Indian removal, and, later, segregation.

This exhibit is designed to be a series of demonstration projects, experiments in how we might challenge conventional ethnographic modes of looking, and visualizing culture and otherness. If capitalist modernity is grounded in conquest, expansionism, and genocide, then how do we account for the ways Enlightenment science continues to structure our thinking about race and difference? How can institutions reckon with these histories, and how might we create the conditions to confront our complicities with these histories? If we understand that the way we treat the dead reflects our value of the living, then how must we be accountable, both to the dead and to the living? How do we work toward repair and justice?