His Dark Materials Among the Displays, the Pitt Rivers Museum, December 12, 2022 to December 31, 2023

Abstract

In the fourth chapter of fantasy author Pullman's (1997) The Subtle Knife, Lyra, his young protagonist, stumbles upon the Pitt Rivers Museum while wandering in a parallel world. While this alternate Oxford proves strange to Lyra—full of people whose souls do not reside outside their bodies as talking animal companions—the Pitt Rivers, an institution that does not exist in her version of the city, feels familiar.

A recent exhibition of props and costumes from the BBC/HBO television adaptation of Pullman's His Dark Materials series sees objects displayed across three Oxford museums in 2023—The History of Science Museum, the Story Museum, and the Pitt Rivers. Of these, the Pitt Rivers is the only one to appear in the novels and television program. The museum's inclusion in a fantasy series suggests that there exists a permeable boundary between the fantastical and the ethnographic. However, unlike the academic literature that critiques these ties, Pullman's works of fiction embrace an exotic take on the material culture of non-European and non-Euro-American peoples. While not a full exhibition, the display of objects from a fantasy series alongside ethnographic collections presents an opportunity to revisit critiques of the ethnographic museum form and to reconsider how such museums' many, varied publics approach ethnographic collections.

Through a door at the back of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers appears to the casual museum goer to be an extension of the prior, as Lyra assumed. However, the transition from the Natural History Museum into the Pitt Rivers is a stark one. The main hall of the former is grand and full of natural light, the towering articulated dinosaur skeletons given ample space for visitors to admire them. By comparison, the Pitt Rivers appears to be a shadowed, crowded cavern of curiosities. Finding the cases that contain the props involves navigating a riot of glass boxes, packed with objects grouped, in keeping with the museum's mandate, by type.

The Pitt Rivers website includes a map that shows the locations of the props, as well as other objects and exhibits linked to the Arctic. Set out in numbered order, the list leads guests on a set course through the museum, providing a brief description of each listed object along with simple questions for young visitors to answer. With eight stops total, the “His Dark Materials Self-guided Museum Trail” includes,

Much of the first novel in Pullman's series, Northern Lights—and the first season of the television program—takes place in a fantastical version of the Nordic Arctic. As someone whose research concerns perceptions of the Arctic, the inclusion of Arctic material culture in the museum's self-produced educational materials piqued my curiosity and served as the focus of my visit.

Lyra's Northern clothing is the presumed highlight of the His Dark Materials display as the only set of objects associated with the series' main character. They are also the most compellingly displayed of the props. A mannequin wearing the coat stands in a case at a back corner of the ground floor, alongside gut parkas collected from Inuit and Unangax̂ communities. Several fur parkas fill an adjacent case. The tan prop coat with its long-haired lining does not immediately stand out from its surroundings. Even the red of the hat and gloves, positioned above the headless torso and attached to the sleeve ends, are complemented by a nearby photo of Greenlandic Inuit, the women in similarly bright red anoraks. The only indication that the mannequin in prop clothing is different from its companions is a blue text panel at its foot, describing the clothing and its role in the series.

The next stop on the trail is a gut parka and cape, on display in the same case as the prop clothing. Despite there being no signage related to the His Dark Materials display accompanying the gut attire, these objects attracted more attention and interest from the dozen or so passers-by I observed on the day of my visit in the spring of 2023. Lack of familiarity with gut as a clothing material seemed to compel visitors to stop and examine.

This pattern held for the other props. Few visitors appeared to take note of the out-of-place objects as they passed through the maze of display cases, leaving the added props to blend into the visual noise. Why, then, bother to exhibit them? The simple, pragmatic response is audience engagement—a desire to appeal to the young audience of the books and show.

In addition to the map, the museum website provides additional information on the props, with a page dedicated to each. Some of these pages contain information on related permanent collection objects. The page on Lyra's coat notes the “indigenous [sic] ingenuity” of communities who use intestine for waterproof clothing. On other pages, information is limited to the use of the objects in the series. All pages include reflections from students who participated in museum education sessions centered on the props. The description of these sessions, meant to encourage students to “reflect on the literary themes and characters in Philip Pullman's novels,” suggest the exhibit's intended audience.

Ethnographic museums and their collections exist in a continuous state of uncertainty. Museum professionals and museum audiences have proposed a variety of approaches to revitalizing, reforming, and reimagining such institutions (Janes & Sandell, 2019; Lilje & Clark, 2019; Macdonald, 2020, 2022). However, attracting audiences by including objects born of fantasy risks intensifying the sense of the exotic that ethnographic museums have tried to escape.

Centering the fictional story of a White British girl raised in the upper class surrounds of a magical, alternate-reality Oxford reinforces the sense that the Pitt Rivers collections are themselves mystical artifacts of the strange and unknown. Even as the permanent signage in the parka display invokes the “ingenious ways of surviving” devised by Arctic peoples, it places those peoples and their ways of life at a distance. This distance comes into sharper focus when Lyra's coat and its owner are considered. Alongside the television costume, the beautiful hide and gut parkas reveal something of the colonial relations that assembled the ethnographic museum. Here, material culture continues to serve as a prop of the 19th century British colonial imagination, even as that imagination has come under increased scrutiny.

That museums trade in fictions is not a new insight (MacDonald & Silverstone, 1990). Oxford too, is a purveyor of fantasy. Pullman's writing illustrates this well. His home for decades, Pullman's magic-laden Oxford is the product of fond familiarity. Both city and university play a primary role in his series. The complex matrix of power and wealth that undergird the city-university blur into the magic of Pullman's world, where they remain uncritiqued. For its part, the Pitt Rivers of His Dark Materials conveys a treasure-trove-like wonder, the product of the author's consumption and reproduction of the museum's fictions.

Those who study the North have commented on the fictions tied to the region, noting its mythologization as a realm of adventure and magic (Bravo, 2019; Davidson, 2005; Powell, 2007). In the popular narratives of the professional explorers of the 19th and 20th centuries, Inuit and other Northern peoples appear as friendly assistants, or else as extensions of the natural environment (Peary, 1910; Stefánsson, 1913). While the television show largely skirts the inclusion of Northern peoples, the magical North of the His Dark Materials novels does not avoid them entirely.

While unnamed on screen, self-identified “Samoyeds” kidnap Lyra and bring her to the research facilities of the villainous Magisterium in Northern Lights (Pullman, 1995: 236). Additionally, despite its real-world distance from communities that make such garments, Lyra acquires a gut parka in the Nordic Arctic of her world (Pullman, 1995: 177). One such parka is worn, without comment, by one of her on-screen captors.

Other Northern peoples also appear. The men who patrol the research base at fictional Bolvangar are described as “Tartars” in the books, presumably based on real-world Tatar peoples. The fictional Tartars, although largely antagonistic, are not always so. One ally, a British man thought lost on an Arctic expedition, is made a shaman by Tartars in Lyra's Siberia, giving him supernatural powers (Pullman, 1997). That the technologies of Northern peoples are freely available to Lyra and her friends—in one case through the medium of a White male “expert” in traditional spirituality—is in keeping with Arctic exploration narratives of the past. In His Dark Materials, these tropes are taken further, as the relevant tools are accessible to the protagonists without the bother of interpersonal relations with Northern communities of origin.

The series' depiction of the Arctic as a realm of exploration and heroic endeavor is perhaps a better fit at both the History of Science Museum and the Story Museum, where relations to the real peoples of the region are more easily overlooked. The former has a separate exhibition space for what it calls Lyra's Worlds. There, a prop alethiometer—the tool Lyra uses to communicate with Dust, the novels' sentient dark matter—shares a case with real-world scientific tools. Sixteenth and 17th century handheld astronomical instruments are shown to be quite like the imaginary device. Together, the objects tell a simple story of the power of scientific inquiry, in both our world and Lyra's. The Story Museum has an even clearer path forward, having added the Subtle Knife—a blade used to cut between parallel worlds—and other television props to a case dedicated to Philip Pullman. These fit well among the other interactive exhibits dedicated to children's fantasy tales and their authors.

The Pitt Rivers Museum is an institution that has grappled creatively and purposefully with its origins. No longer the personal collection of a colonial officer, over several decades it has worked with communities of origin, local stakeholders, and artists from around the world on many projects. Recent efforts, as I encountered them, work to mixed effect. A television showing Serbian performance artist Marina Abramović caressing, recoiling from, and gesturing at a variety of objects from the collections elicited chuckles from teenagers on a school trip. The spectacle of Abramović—a White woman—encountering objects predominantly from non-European cultures makes an uncomfortable addition to the museum's ground floor. However, in a side gallery, the special exhibition Unmasked: Spirit in the City uses an art installation to explore a popular form of African masquerade with exceptional creativity and care. Taken together, the two demonstrate both the pitfalls and the strengths of engaging creatively with ethnographic materials.

The Wandering in Other Worlds exhibit, listed as the fifth stop on the His Dark Materials trail, occupies a single case. Like Unmasked, Other Worlds was co-created with members of the community it describes, the Evenki of Siberia. The resulting display takes seriously the task of explaining Evenki cosmology to a presumed non-Evenki audience. Having taken in that exhibit, I left the Pitt Rivers hopeful. At their best, ethnographic museums can provide platforms for sharing complex stories, told from myriad perspectives and drawn from our own multifarious world(s).

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (Grant Agreement number: 724317—ARCTIC CULT—ERC-2016-COG).