Johanna T Zetterstrom-Sharp

University College London, Institute of Archaeology, Faculty Member

Horniman Museum, Anthropology, Faculty Member

University of Cambridge, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Post-Doc

Goldsmiths, University of London, Anthropology, Faculty Member

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I am Associate Professor in Heritage Studies. Prior to this, I worked as Senior Curator of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum (2012-2022), and Lecturer in Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London (2019-2022).

My research focuses on how heritage professionals and institutions navigate and understand ethical work. This has included Pentecostal Christian heritage work in Sierra Leone, as well as the development and articulation of post-colonial museum practice in the UK.

I have over 10 years of experience curating and researching colonial era collections from the African continent in the UK museum sector. This has led to a deep interest in how professional best practice reinscribes colonial oppressions and inequalities. My work explores how community-led research and access is fundamental to building future practice that is relevant, useful and serves the people it needs to.
I am currently developing a collaborative project on the colonial history of milk. For this I am exploring the intersection of mid-century global planning, regulation, development and policy relating to global diary. I am interested in what milk can tell us about the ways in which colonialism impacts on the production of science, the entitlement to land, ideal motherhood, and racialised notions of purity and hygiene.
Address: Horniman Museum and Gardens
100 London Road
Lewisham
SE23 3PQ

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Dan Hicks

University of Oxford

Ferdinand de Jong

Freie Universität Berlin

Samuel Aylett-Streitberg

Adiva Lawrence

University of Hull

Noémie Etienne

University of Vienna

Charlotte L Joy

University of Southampton

Susan Dine

Vanderbilt University

Ekaterina Golovko

ELEONORA VRATSKIDOU

Athens School of Fine Arts

Magdalena Wróblewska

University of Warsaw

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Papers by Johanna T Zetterstrom-Sharp

The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Review.

Public Archaeology, 2021

Hicks, Dan. 2020. The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitut... more Hicks, Dan. 2020. The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. Pluto Press. The Brutish Museums by Dan Hicks is both an intellectual and theoretical engagement with an academic discipline, and a work of public activism and consequential intent. It is the latter that has underwritten the books success and popularity, picking up on the long-term campaign to return material heritage and precious belongings taken under colonial-era duress, at a time when the urgency of this long-term campaign has been reenergised. In this review, I wish to explore what the theorisation of this intent does, and has the potential to undo. The intellectual encasing of consequence has a very real power. It enables the production of moral and intellectual capital from the envelopment of the historical harm associated with collections in a cocoon of theory and self-declared allyship. As so eloquently put by Azoulay, "the pursuit of the new defines imperialism" (2019: 18). A defining feature of the last 30 years of Museum Anthropology is the pursuit of a new ethics; a newness branded through metaphorical vocabularies that enclose the same vital questions about repair, relevance, return, and ongoing harm within theoretical frameworks. I do not wish to judge the moral integrity of this work, or the genuine desire to build an intellectual scaffolding onto which we might pin a different kind of practice, and imagine a better, more humane, future for our museums. What I would like to think through however are the limits of theory as groundwork for engaging the terrain of individual, institutional, and legal responsibility and change that are required to bring about the transformation that is necessary within our institutions. A change that has never transpired-yet has repeatedly provided discussion points in conference papers, journal articles, books, twitter feeds and lectures-is for the processing of requests for the return of material heritage taken under duress to become a normal, everyday part of museum work. I spend a lot of time trying to understand why this has been so difficult, and what my professional responsibilities as an academic and museum practitioner are in order to get to where we need to be. Hicks' The Brutish Museums is anchored on the idea that academic activism has a role to play in not only driving this change, but leading it. The author self-declares this book as part of a wave of public activism in 2020, catalysing the return of looted property from Africa held in Europe's World Cultures museums. "The answers lie" Hicks concludes, "in the hands of those who, after reading this book, will put it down, stand up from their chair, walk out the door, and take action to make the 2020s a decade of restitution" (2020: 242). It is in these terms that I have chosen to frame this review; in what this book has the potential to enable, over and above its integrity as an intellectual project. Hicks rightly points out how the many of the present generation of curators and museum decision makers were introduced to repatriation as a matter of debate; as an ethical, practical and intellectual question, something to think with before acting on. This highlights how it is within academic or other professional spaces, and not personal experience or communal memory, that many of those who now manage collections first engage in a sustained way with questions about the futures of collections: through MA programs, traineeships or collections-based PhD research. Hicks focuses on two strands of this theoretical training.

Johanna T Zetterstrom-Sharp

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