In 2020, curators at Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum removed its popular display ‘The Treatment of Dead Enemies’. Management explained that the exhibit of scalps from North America, war trophies from Nagaland, skulls from New Guinea and shrunken heads from the Amazonian Jivaro people ‘led people to think in stereotypical and racist ways about Shuar culture’. Audiences, they lamented, stood in front of them and described the people who had made them as ‘primitive’.

Are we witnessing the end of what the distinguished anthropologist Adam Kuper calls the ‘Museum of Other People’? Quite possibly. Kuper’s deeply researched account of the rise and fall of museums that display the artefacts of peoples from long ago or far away reveals that they are in a crisis, one that, he warns, could be ‘terminal’.

Museums of other people first came into existence in Leiden, Copenhagen and Dresden in the 1830s and 1840s. Soon after, it was decided that Paris – the ‘capital of civilisation’, in the words of the engineer Edme-François Jomard, who had travelled to Egypt with Napoleon’s army – should have