Malcolm McLeod in his office (photo courtesy of British Museum).
Malcolm McLeod has since 1974 been Keeper of Ethnography at the Museum of Mankind, the Ethnography Department of the British Museum. Among his publications are the The Asante (1980),Treasures of African Art (1980) and Ethnic Art (with J. Mack 1984).

His early background was not in museums or even in anthropology. Born in 1941 in Edinburgh, in 1965 he completed his first degree in history at Oxford. He took up an interest in anthropology, in which he completed a BLitt two years later at the age of 26, also at Oxford. From 1967-69 he was lecturer at the department of sociology, University of Ghana. Upon his return to England in 1969, he accepted a post as assistant curator at the Museum of Archaeology ad Ethnology in Cambridge, which was the beginning of a career in museums. In 1974 he was appointed to his present post at the Museum of Mankind.

Recently, New Society (1 May 87) has published an article overviewing trends in British museums. In the last 20 years the number of museums has more than doubled from around 800 to more than 2,000, and the article notes the blurring of the distinction between museums and other forms of entertainment, as well as emphasizing museums as ideas rather than buildings. Visitors have also changed: `In the past, when museum exhibits had the status of religious relics, visitors were treated like supplicants. Today, now that museums have been "desanctified", visitors are treated like shoppers.' With this emphasis on `shopping', museums have begun to pay attention to the movement of visitors much as in the supermarkets.

What would you consider to be your major achievements here at the British Museum, and what were the major difficulties you faced?

First I would emphasize that anything we have achieved has been done by all of us working as a group. When I first joined the Museum in 1974, one of our first priorities was to make the collections more accessible. There is now a computerized record of the collection, and with this convenient speedy index the collections have become much more easily available to researchers than ever before.

Also, we now have a very active collection policy. The whole British Museum has an impressive programme of research and collecting, and the Museum of Mankind has in the last ten years added 23,000 items to the collection from bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, North America, Madagascar, Ghana, Sulawesi, all over the world. This has been done either by our own staff or by fieldworking anthropologists who we will fund to make a collection. I don't think that there is an anthropological museum in the world that comes anywhere near the range and extent of our current collecting.

We also now employ a large number of social anthropologists. In fact, we are as large an employer as most university anthropology departments. Not only our research assistants, but even some of our museum assistants have anthropological qualifications. I am also pleased that the number of publications of staff has been going up considerably, and that we are publishing more and more mainstream anthropology. For example, there is Shelagh Wei's book on Q'at, which could have been produced in any anthropology department in the world, but actually came from this museum. No longer can one separate museum work and anthropology, the two are now closely interconnected.

One initial difficulty I had was convincing the British Museum that senior staff had to carry out fieldwork for purposes of general research and collection for the Museum, which for some reason was not considered here as important as it should have been, particularly by some people in the British Museum administration who felt that that was a bad way of spending museum funds. Collecting cannot be done in a matter of five or six weeks, and I thought longer fieldwork absolutely essential. But fieldwork is now accepted as a requirement by the present Trustees and Director.

Personally I greatly enjoyed putting on the Asante exhibition as I'd done fieldwork in Asante and this helped me repay an obligation. We had a lot of very good Asante material here, including the earliest stuff ever scientifically collected, by Bowdich in 1817. I was particularly pleased that the King of Asante came over to open it, and that Meyer Fortes, who had done much fieldwork in Ghana and had no chance of going there himself, came to the opening shortly before his death, and met many of his old friends form the court whom he had never expected to see again.

The Museum of Mankind is dedicated to research and conservation as well as general education; what are their relative weight?

It is difficult to separate these activities from each other. The Museum of Mankind is a publicly funded institution serving both the general public and the world of scholarship. When I read anthropology, material culture studies were `ethnological' and without much theoretical content. But today such an approach is not good enough for museums. Here one does require a sense of anthropological theory to guide display, and one must do research and fieldwork. As for the proportion of staff time spent in these two areas - an assistant curator would every five years on average organize one major exhibition, do one major piece of fieldwork research of two or three short periods, and one major publication, and the rest of the time would be dealing with the public and scholarly enquiries, and working on the collections and administration.

Do you agree that a fundamental rule for any museum is `to know its public'? To what type of public does the Museum pitch its exhibitions, and how does it ensure dialogue with them?

Ours has several distinct sections. One of the most clearly identifiable is made up of artists, art students and designers. We also have much to do with school children. Over the last seven years our work with schools, particularly from the London area, has increased enormously. In dealing with such groups, with scholars, and the general public, through direct contact, through letters and reviews, we do get a fair idea of what many would like to see in the Museum. But it is always very difficult to establish exactly how exhibitions affect viewers. As we have limited resources it would be helpful to able to carry out detailed visitor surveys periodically.

The Museum of Mankind puts on display a variety of exhibitions ranging from `aesthetic' displays such as the recent Paolozzi exhibition, to more `technological' and `conceptual' oriented displays, such as on Amerindian life in the Amazon. What criteria must exhibitions meet? How is the decision made to exhibit a particular collections in a particular way?

Exhibitions must be accurate, be understandable by someone of average intelligence and education, be stimulating and attractive and complement the other displays on at the same time. The basic subjects are chosen after discussion within the Department and approved by the Director and Trustees. But the details, the particular approach, is the responsibility of the curator in charge of that exhibition; it is those people who are the experts in that field and they have the responsibility for the form of the exhibition.

We have one particular difficulty there: many visitors have little background knowledge of the subjects of our exhibitions, they start out `cold', as it were. People visiting the Tate, or the Battle of Britain Museum, or the Egyptian displays at the B.M., often have a good idea about what they will see. If we do an exhibition on the Yemen, or Madagascar, some visitors may not even know where the places are. We therefore have become known as much for the type of displays we mount as for the material itself. Over the years I am sure our life-like reconstructions have set the pattern for other museums in this field, but we still have much to do.

The Paolozzi exhibition was innovative in display, while fulfilling an old British Museum function. It has always been a vast resource for artists right from the moment the place opened; later, for example, the Elgin Marbles and the Assyrian and Pacific Art has had a considerable influence on painters and sculptors, including Derain, Epstein, and Henry Moore. The Paolozzi exhibition represents a new way of dealing with this relationship of the art world to the Museum. There have been many retrospective studies in our field of what Picasso collected, what Henry Moore liked, and how it affected their work, and it was time a modern artist was asked `well what does it mean to you now?'. This is what the Paolozzi exhibition showed. I think many people have treated it much too seriously. It is meant to be a pleasure and an amusement as well as a stimulation. You see children laughing and people grinning and that's good. They are both aroused and shocked at having to focus on the material in new ways, see it in new conjunctions. Ten years ago it would certainly not have been possible to mount it, I suppose, but it was worthwhile.

The central market (suq) from the old city of San'a', Yemen, recreated in the technically influential exhibition 'Nomad and City' which was organized by Shelagh Weir at the Museum of Mankind, as part of the World of Islam festival in 1976.

How responsive is the Museum of Mankind to change? While anthropology is increasingly `coming home', researching in our own societies, and on issues of importance to it, the Museum has hitherto specialized in `tribal' culture and American archaeology. Could you point to responses in Museum policy to this trend?

Museums are often machines for denying time, in that they try to combat all change and decay in the universe by freezing little moments in time. As in restaurants and churches, there are no clocks in most museums, and you enter into a special static time zone. This emphasis on the static is enshrined in their thinking in all sorts of ways. Their architecture tends to be classical, overpowering, imposing, and also silencing. But I do not think we are like that, though there is of course always an element of this attitude in every museum.

We are changing as society changes. Certainly the sort of exhibition we do now and their themes are quite different from what they were ten years ago. But we are not collecting or researching in our own society because this is not within the brief of the Ethnography Department as part of the British Museum. But one day I can see the B.M. setting up a modern department which would be involved in just such studies and where we could play a part.

We are also particularly responsive to changes going on abroad. For a period many anthropological museums tried to get artefacts which they thought represented the pristine `authentic' culture of the people concerned, before contact took place and `degeneration' had set in. But this ignored the changes that are occurring all over the world all the time, and our present-day collecting policy increasingly includes what we might call contemporary archaeology, where we collect modern, post-contact or culture-change material. This helps us to add to the collections we already have in a way which is complementary. This is now important support from the Trustees for this type of collecting and our Museum is one of the few places in the world collecting such ephemeral and commonplace materials. We have items in our collection that show how, for example, in Africa today people use bags made from old rubber inner tubes to bring up water from wells, or other adaptations of Western-made items.

The exhibitions themselves also increasingly address change. No longer are we merely trying to produce a picture of how the Bushmen or the Asante were a hundred years ago, but we try to show how they evolved to their present position. We shall be doing an exhibitions on the Canadian Arctic which will be very much concerned with both the past and the exact present, the past into the present. We are doing an exhibition next year on Palestinian costumes which documents the changes over the last 100 years and the social and economic reasons for them. In future we will undoubtedly develop new display techniques. It would be extremely beneficial, I think, not only to show artefacts, but to try to communicate much more about basic concepts in different societies - of kin relations, ideas of the person and the body, of space and time. That presents a real challenge in exhibition creation and design.

But it is not easy to convince that collecting the commonplace is useful. We get criticized by dealers who want to sell us great pieces of sculpture or masks. We get criticized by the less perceptive collectors of African or Pacific art. who think we should be concentrating entirely on sculpture. More important, most of the public prefers to know about the Maasai as noble warriors, the way they are often depicted, and do not want to know about the changes they face in Africa. It is important that we try to show both areas and explain how each evolved.

Should the Museum of Mankind actively seek to take into account changing conditions and modern socio-political consciousness among indigenous peoples, and enter into dialogue with them over its activities? What requests do you receive from peoples indigenous to the societies exhibited in the Museum with reference to: access to the Museum's resources, modification of displays, inter-museum loans, and restitution of specimens in the Museum collections?

Of course we are conscious of and sensitive to requests from indigenous peoples, and we probably know as much about those as many of the people who pose as experts in these fields. What people often forget, or ignore, is that virtually all our recent collections, and the majority of our earlier ones, could not have been achieved without close contact with the indigenous groups concerned. Today we work in close cooperation with them and with local government, museum or antiquities services. As far as my present staff are concerned, we have all lived as guests in other cultures while doing field research, all been cared for by those people. How on earth could we not be conscious of their wishes?

Indigenous peoples have also participated directly in many of our exhibitions. For example, the Asante and the Madagascar exhibitions were done with the participation of people from those societies. The Madagascar exhibition was done with the full cooperation with Madagascan colleagues and authorities, who helped with the research, the collecting, the catalogue and the displays.

Indeed we do, from time to time, get requests from indigenous groups for various forms of cooperation and we give those gladly as far as we are able. Sometimes we get requests for the return of objects. Restitution is a complex and difficult question and we fully understand its importance. However it would be illegal for the British Museum to alienate items permanently from the collections, so we cannot break the law. On the wider situation I would emphasize how closely we work with museums in the developing countries and how we have, over the years, helped train many of their staff. I have recently returned from West Africa where I was seeing what aid might be allocated to museums; as a museum, we assist such museums in many ways.

The protests against our Amazon exhibition break down into two types. Some said they thought the overall effect of the exhibition was bad because it gave the impression that the Amazon Indians were prosperous, rich and living untouched in their forests. I don't think that was the case; showing the civilization of the Indians at its peak made the horrors they were subject to even more graphic. It showed what was being lost by the Indian's destruction.

It is also very obviously our brief to exhibit the material in the national collections. By doing that I believe, among other things, we made a most powerful statement about the importance of Amazonian culture which, unless one is utterly prejudiced, most surely reinforce other types of defence of that culture.
A second objectification about the Amazon exhibition was that we should have said more about the destruction of the forest and its peoples and that, particularly by showing an Indian on a motorbike, we are giving people the impression that he owned the motorbike and therefore that he could afford to go on wearing loin cloths, live in the old way, and also had the time to run around on a motorbike. That was a deliberately perverse reading of that particular picture, which was chosen because it posedand summarized all sorts of questions about the relationship of the traditional to the modern, and, of course, it was shown next to the photos of huts made of scrap metal sheets and a devastated landscape.

We did feel that we were being exploited for a campaign which, if it hadn't concentrated on that, would have found some other reason for agitation. Of course it is always difficult to get the balance right but, in the end, however much we may consult, and listen, or come under pressure from any group, we have to make the final decisions, we have the final editorial control, we cannot and will not become a shop window for any pressure group whatever its origin and aims.

It is a delicate problem of which we are conscious all the time. It will always be with us because we are dealing with cultures which are under attack, under stress, under change, and there are always going to be deep emotions and political problems. As museum enter more and more into the national consciousness then they are increasingly entering these controversial areas.

Given a free hand, what would you see as the most worthwhile projects you would like to undertake in the Museum?

Given unlimited resources, there are three broad areas where I would like to see improvements.
The British Museum houses the national collections. Every year we loan specimens, even whole exhibitions, to museums and galleries all over this country, we help local research and excavation and provide information for people all over the country. Yet people still have it stuck in their minds that we only cater for visitors to the West End - that infuriates me. However if we did have unlimited funds I would like to see us doing even more throughout the country, perhaps with branches spread throughout the UK. I would also like to set up a system of sharing exhibitions; it is wasteful to spend large sums building an exhibition here and then tearing it down after a year or two.

Also, I would like far greater resources so that staff could publish and do more research as well as keeping up with their many other duties.

Finally, I would like to have funds to bring archaeologists and anthropologists here for fixed periods - perhaps up to five years - so they could work with us and contribute their ideas. Similarly it would be excellent if our people could spend time in universities or other museums around the world. And, of course, we always like to bring indigenous people to work with us.

Museum work - because it is about disseminating complex ideas to a general public - requires communication skills. Do you find training in academic anthropology prepares for work in a museum?

Anthropology teaches people to be open minded and sensitive. But it does not give them the basic training on what to look for in objects and to be visually sensitive; also, it often does not teach them to write clearly and simply without using jargon. Archaeologists are generally much more sensitive to material culture, they have a much better grasp of theories relating to things, but they are not so good at theories relating things to societies. Of course, the distinction between archaeology and anthropology is becoming pretty nebulous, at the edges of the subjects anyway. But I think the real difference between anthropology and archaeology is that: if you are an anthropologist you talk to the people and they answer you back and correct you, so that there is feedback all the time, but the dead can never correct the archaeologist. That is a basic element throughout human society: there are people who are on an interchange and there are people on a one-way system, and the only hope for the human race is the first. Certainly the sort of anthropologists increasingly available have as good a training as any for museums.

How do you consider anthropology can best serve the museum world?

The answer if not the obvious one of enhancing anthropologists' visual aptitudes and understanding of material culture; some anthropologists will never go far in that direction. What I always look for in anthropologists are new questions - as far as I am concerned that is the basic justification for anthropology - posing new questions about human life. In the end anthropology is not about finishing dissertations in a certain number of years or doing something of immediate use to a particular organization or government; those must always be derivative or subsidiary functions. Asking original questions is the heart. And museums, as much as any other bodies need those questions, need to ask them of the material they have. And even the old problems, the old questions, can be seen afresh. Take Johnny Parry's superb Malinowski Lecture (Man, September 1986) on the Gift - taking a question that was central in anthropology for seventy years, turning is over and showing there is still a vast amount in it - wonderful. And I always get great pleasure reading people like Gilbert Lewis and Alfred Gell, get ideas from them - and others - which can raise all manner of questions in totally different fields.

A popular religious image of Saint James, the patron folk of healers, from 'Bolivian Worlds', a current Museum of Mankind exhibition soon to be reviewed in A.T. by Tristan Platt.

What major issues and trends do you see in the museum world in approach to exhibitions, recruitment of staff and orientation to the public?

It is very difficult to generalize. The situation in North America is different from in Europe and Great Britain, and the developments in Africa, India or Japan are different again. One obvious development is the huge and hugely expensive special touring exhibition which, I suppose, dates back to Tutankhamun about 15 years ago. These cost millions of dollars to mount; no single museum can afford them, and so they tour from city to city. In the States they are highly successful; sometimes so many go you can hardly see the objects for the people.

I think the other big trend is that in more and more museums the public participate: they see things being done, they see specimens - trains, cars, farm machinery etc. in action, and they can use them, ride in them and so on. Also, as in Osaka where I was recently, the visitor can order up data or films from the computer banks, compare different languages of music and so forth.

Now I believe that these developments could be dangerous. A museum should always be a place where the visitor's imagination is stimulated, where he or she is made to see things in a new light, where some sort of stretching or change - conscious or unconscious - occurs in the way they see the world. I am worried that - if we are not careful and do not keep working to understand things in new ways - museums could become little more than enjoyable entertainment - soothing but never stimulating. The original educational role of museums cold easily be lost unless we are constantly aware of the dangers of the glossy package with no real content.

I am not saying anthropologists are essential for museums - only that we recruit people with particularly enquiring and original attitudes to the world about them. If I were setting up a new museum I might just as well look for a good art critic, archaeologist or historian as for an anthropologist - plus a designer and a good handyman of course. But it would be the combination of knowledge and ideas, and the ability to apply their training to particular fields which would be important. It is the ideas which are going to be crucial. Too many museums are now tending to rely on the degenerate version of the social scientist - the marketing man, the cheap plastic copy of the original thinker.

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