Museums position themselves as universal repositories of human culture, but they are actually elaborate systems of memory and amnesia, deciding what the world will remember and what it will erase. This episode explores the politics of curation, from the Elgin Marbles to the Benin Bronzes, examining how Western institutions filled their galleries with objects acquired through colonialism and conquest. Jasper Quill investigates repatriation debates, the ethics of display, and how curatorial choices shape collective memory. The museum curator's power is immense and largely invisible—determining which narratives get told, which stories remain silent, whose heritage gets preserved and whose gets displaced. From ethnographic collections that severed sacred objects from their communities to plantation museums that sanitized slavery, the episode reveals how institutions preserve by removing, protect by displacing. What a culture chooses to forget often says more than what it preserves, and the museum's absences speak as loudly as its displays.
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Nov 12 20251 min