Dániel Balogh
Google
I visited this museum for the ethnographic collection with a group of South and Southeast Asia scholars. I have not seen the Applied Arts section, which I hear is great. The ethnographic section was rather disappointing, as it is (as of September 2024) in the process of being converted into a sort of meta-museum and a post-colonial guilt trip. Instead of having the ethnographic collection on display they now have rooms full of woke posters about how sad it is that many artefacts were acquired immorally and unfairly. I'm not saying that these details should be suppressed and forgotten. I'm all for bringing them out into the open. But... on the one hand, their presentation should not take the form of one-sided self-flagellation but also acknowledge the tremendous contribution of ethnographic museums to preservation and knowledge dissemination. How many of those collection pieces, whether fairly or unfairly acquired, would by now have been lost to war, decay and deliberate iconoclasm, and how many would have been sold unscrupulously to private collectors on the black and grey market, if they hadn't been carried to those bad-bad colonial museums? And on the other hand, an ethnographic museum is not the place to house exhibitions addressing colonial guilt. That is like closing down a library and converting it into a guilt trip because it used to house many works by ancient Greek authors who had slaves to cook their dinner (so let's forget about their timeless philosophy and plays), by people like Rudyard Kipling brimming with the white man's superiority (so let's forget about his astute psychology and engrossing narrative), etc. No, please let's keep the library and find a different venue to address the questionable moral background, and even there, let's address it with a fair view of the entire context.
That said, there were still a few rooms of the old, actual, ethnographic collection, which was great to see. They included a village hut from India, built on the site by authentic artisans invited for the purpose, with many of the materials also brought from the region of origin. Other materials were sourced locally, for instance cowdung for the wall plaster came from a German organic cattle farm, where the craftspeople first made a visit to check if the material is really suitable for their purpose. I hear that there used to be several other traditional buildings in the museum, presumably built with the same devotion and care, and enjoyed by countless children and adults as tangible reminders of how other people live and settings where they could hear about other cultures. Too bad that they are gone.
