Reshaping Interpretation in the Ethnographic Museum

The collection of the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford (PRM), includes a single breast prosthesis, or implant (fig.1).1 Drawn to its gooey insides and plastic aesthetics, and intrigued by its presence within an ethnographic museum, I selected the implant as a case study for an earlier iteration of this research – a provenance report I compiled as a student in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography (SAME) at the University of Oxford in 2025. The times I interacted with the implant, held it, the implant seemed to hold me back, gravity pulling its gel over my fingers as it moulded to my hand. I squeezed it, tempted to squeeze it harder until it burst, until its insides oozed over my hands and dripped onto the museum floor. My neon green gloves glowed through its translucent body, and at these points the implant seemed more like a ghost of an object than an object itself. The museum’s current label for the implant reads:

This article seeks to unsettle the declarative certainty of the label’s voice, its shift from the breast implant to a universal history of bodily intervention and its closing assertion of total technical possibility. How might provenance research, traditionally confined to the tracing of ownership, transform the task of interpretation? Particularly for an object so ordinary and mass-produced?

By reframing provenance as relational and speculative, I argue that provenance research can serve as an interpretative tool. In tracing the wide range of agencies that have come into play at various stages of the implant’s history, this article aims to disrupt the assumption of the museum as static. Such discussions, emerging in anthropology, and experiments in ethnographic museums, can offer an alternative lens on art museum interpretation more broadly. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s metaphor of the cyborg – a hybrid of machine and organism – I engage in speculative provenance research to challenge the epistemic binaries that define our technological, bodily and social realities.2

Following an outline of my interpretative framework, I trace the social life of the breast implant. Investigating its limited archival record, I construct speculative histories, drawing a brief comparison with another item in the PRM’s collection to illustrate an alternative interpretative mode. I interrogate the implant’s display in the museum and review the museum’s inherited interpretative conventions. By expanding the provenance of the implant, I present an alternative methodology for making and organising knowledge in the museum.

Narrative provenance as a tool for museum interpretation

Museums tend to relate to objects through ownership and classification, their interpretation often favouring declarative statements that flatten the complex histories these objects carry. As the art historian Anne Higonnet has pointed out, provenance research – tracing lineages of legal ownership – has traditionally reinforced this tendency.3 The limits of this practice have been most visibly exposed by movements advocating for the restitution of ancient or looted art, which have placed provenance at the centre of debates about decoloniality, particularly within the ethnographic museum. A report by Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy published in 2018, which examined African material culture held in French collections, included provenance research as part of its recommendations for collections considering restitution.4 It is out of this renewed and contested attention that provenance has begun to be rethought as something more expansive.

Within the ethnographic museum, much of the theoretical foundation for this rethinking lies in what has been termed the ‘material turn’ in anthropology.5 This reorientation dismantles the rigid division between subject and object, between humans and things, insisting that objects are not simply passive symbols of meaning but active agents that produce it. The anthropologist Alfred Gell viewed art as a system of social relations, in which objects act upon and through their relationships with people, exercising a form of distributed agency.6 Gell’s theory opened the way for a broader rethinking of how museums might engage with their collections.

The turn to materiality is indebted to the countless Indigenous ways of knowing that refuse epistemic dualisms, as well as to feminist theorists working across disciplines, such as Donna Haraway. Her 1985 essay ‘The Cyborg Manifesto’ sought to distort and dissolve gender alongside other boundaries that ‘structure the Western self’ and in doing so embrace plural, distorted and blurred identities.7 This sense of distortion and blur is central to my understanding of the materiality of the implant, sitting under the skin, simultaneously visible and invisible.

Taking a relational, materialist perspective, and embracing virtual possibility reinforces all objects as potential social agents, with the power to reshape social relations. The anthropologist Joshua Bell reflects how within anthropology, these complex, intertwined relations between humans, objects and environments have been variously described as ‘assemblages’, ‘networks’ or ‘meshworks’.8 Bell’s concept of objects as bundles of relations extends the understanding of material culture as constituted by the accumulation of relationships across time. Conventional museum documentation, through its fixed categories and emphasis on singular, documented provenance, tends to sever rather than preserve these connections.

The concept of ‘narrative provenance’, first introduced by the museologists Samuel Bachmann and Marina Berazategui, translates this materialist understanding into a practical interpretative method.9 Narrative provenance pushes beyond the question of who owned an object to recover its layered histories while remaining attentive to the agency of everything and everyone implicated in its story.10 In doing so, provenance research becomes about the social life of an object rather than the history of its transfer.11

By expanding the narrative potential of provenance, Bachmann and Berazategui create presence from absence, transforming dead ends in the archive to clues about the power relations that shaped what was and was not recorded.12 Ethnographic museums such as the PRM have been forced to contend with their practices more urgently than other institutions. Organising objects by function and an implied hierarchy of civilisational development, such institutions have inherited colonial knowledge systems that have faced decades of critique, activism and legal pressure.13

The organising principles of art museums – authorship, medium, period and wider influence – are arguably less directly implicated in colonial violence than those of ethnographic museums. However, no framework is neutral, highlighting the importance of sustained reflexive critique across cultural institutions. Additionally, as the anthropologist Sharon Macdonald explains, contemporary ethnography is increasingly central to contemporary art, a practice that she argues is ‘capable of sensitising and estranging, of creatively critiquing’ the conditions in which we live.14 The case study that follows presents a speculative interpretation of the breast implant in the PRM collection. I explore what such an approach might offer to museum interpretation more broadly.

Endings as beginnings in the archival record

The breast implant embodies layers of gathering, of materials, processes and relations. The museum’s accessions book reads:

This tells us that the implant was accessioned in September 2001 from a nearby hospital, and names ‘Vanda Longshaw’ as a key player. Other archival records reveal it was bought specifically for inclusion in a display case exploring body modification practices (fig.2). Titled ‘Reshaping’, the case was part of a permanent redisplay of the Body Arts section at the PRM between 2000–2.15 Curated by Jenny Peck and Jeremy Coote, this redisplay was conceived as an opportunity to rethink practices involving the alteration or decoration of the body through global comparison. The ‘Reshaping’ display is made up of three table height tilt displays and three mounted displays. Alongside the implant, the central mounted display includes a nineteenth-century corset, an orthodontic brace, tooth alteration tools traditionally used by Indigenous Australians, and padaung, neck coils traditionally worn by Kayan people in Myanmar. The display originally also included human teeth, which were recently removed.

The accession of the implant was made possible through a donation from the Acland Hospital, also located in North Oxford. The archive registers Vanda Longshaw as the specific donor from the hospital. I was able to contact her grandson online, who confirmed that Longshaw had worked as an administrator at the hospital, but that she recalled nothing about the donation of the implant.

The implant is clearly documented as a donation, however there is no record of how Longshaw or the hospital initially obtained the implant. This absence aligns with Bachmann and Berazategui’s observation that ethnographic museums tend to record their own acts of acquisition meticulously, while the earlier movements of objects often remain elusive.16

This could mark the end of a short and unspectacular provenance trail. However, with a reading guided by a narrative, materialist approach to provenance, these limits become an opening for an interpretative practice that embraces the plural and unknown. For example, classifying the implant as ‘British’ in the label might appear to settle the question of where the object comes from. Within a narrative provenance framework, however, geographical data of this kind is rendered meaningless if not integrated with ‘specific biographical and other contextual information’.17

An alternative interpretation could be to conceive the implant as ‘inbetween’, a generative condition coined by the anthropologist and curator Paul Basu at the PRM that recognises material culture as ‘constituted by movement and mediation’.18 This approach acknowledges that breast augmentation is part of a global web of commodity chains, practices and ideals. Therefore, the implant, rather than a regional artefact, is better understood as a node in transnational networks of aspiration, medicine and self-modification. By pushing – or squeezing – a little harder, the story of the implant expands beyond a record of transfer, with the absences in its biography inviting a productive uncertainty, speculation and multiplicity.

Scars, scandal and speculative questioning

The breast implant offers a kind of evidence that narrative provenance, with its attention to materiality and agency, is particularly well placed to engage with. Turning from archival to material analysis, a close visual inspection of the implant reveals the number 150 embossed onto its back (fig.3). Although the number is recorded in the object catalogue, what the number refers to is not: 150 is the size of the implant measured in cubic centimetres (cc). 150 is one of the smallest sizes commercially available, approximating to an increase of around one bra cup size (fig.4).19

This number can be understood only in relation to the intended use of the implant as an aesthetic item to be surgically inserted under the skin to augment the appearance of the breast. This opens a chain of material and social histories that the catalogue does not record: the story of the implant’s possible life inside a body, and a story of the industrial and regulatory conditions of its manufacture. Together, these speculations demonstrate how narrative provenance can move beyond the archive’s limits to surface the interpretative questions that conventional museum documentation forecloses.

Typically, implants inhabit a sterile medical context – from creation to insertion, they avoid contamination. Once it is implanted under the skin, however, the micro-textured surface of the implant is designed to bind itself to the body through the build-up of scar tissue.20 In this sense the implant represents what Haraway refers to as a ‘potent fusion’ that reflects ‘leaky distinctions’ between body and technology, unsettling assumptions of ‘who makes and who is made between human and machine’.21 It is likely that the PRM implant was purchased by the Acland Hospital for use in breast augmentation surgeries but never implanted. However, it is worth pausing to dwell on its potential life inside a human body, attached, then severed, cleaned of bodily fluids and handed over to the museum. This speculation raises a set of interpretative questions: if the implant had once belonged to a human body, would this change how it is treated? Would its museological category shift? Would it be considered human remains, thereby invoking protocols of care and repatriation?

Worth considering alongside these questions is the Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) scandal, in which implants using cheaper, unapproved industrial-grade silicone were inserted into over 400,000 people. Knowing with certainty when the PRM implant was manufactured is impossible, but if it was made around 2001, as the object catalogue states, it is possible the object is haunted by a potential future it once held as an implant at high risk of rupture. This scandal exposed the failures of regulation and the market logic underpinning cosmetic surgery, whereby the body, particularly the feminine, becomes a site of capitalist investment.

However, the complex relationship between bodily standards, bodily autonomy and uses of cosmetic surgery are not, as Basu reminds us, a ‘singular, universal “reality” subject to a plurality of cultural explanations, but a multiplicity of realities’.22 How can the interpretation of such a meshwork address the entanglements between aesthetics, gender and capital without collapsing into voyeurism or moralism? And how might a museum rooted in a particular institutional and geographical context acknowledge that the bodily ideals materialised in this implant are not local but global – shaped by intertwining forces of capitalism, colonialism and medicalisation that no single label, however carefully written, can fully hold?

Such speculative questions expose the boundaries of knowledge that museums continually negotiate. For example, the label of the implant is used to tell a wider story of corporeal interventions, claiming that ‘in the twenty-first century it is possible to replace or reshape every exterior part of the body’. However, notions of where the body ends are also products of culture. In this context, the label invokes Western notions of the body as bounded, assuming that to replace or reshape the body must be a change to flesh.23

It is important to note the practical constraints of label writing, such as the roles clarity, brevity and accessibility play in reaching a wide range of visitors. The museum consultant Beverly Serrell’s foundational guidance on interpretative labels argues against the continued reflex of museums to fill exhibitions with overtly academic text.24 Further practical frameworks developed by such institutions as the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A), argue for communicative equity, particularly with the useful advice to ‘admit uncertainty’.25 Such a claim reflects that although conventions are not made in bad faith and offer helpful suggestions, there is a continued preference for efficiency and compression of uncertainty into didactic or objective statement. Such correspondence risks foreclosing the relational, speculative engagement I advocate, limiting the agency of the display to be what Bell considers ‘generative grounds for negotiations’.26 For example, Serrell critiques a handwritten label text in one exhibition, claiming that ‘some visitors misinterpreted the intent and thought the label looked unfinished’.27 This is fair, but what would it mean to write a label that is intentionally unfinished? That acknowledges its own partiality, rather than asserting authority over reality?

In the case of the breast implant, what would happen to the meaning of ‘reshaping’ if the display included objects not associated with bodily modification – if the category was deliberately destabilised? Or, inspired by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s Unconformities, Trilogies 2018–21 – a mixed media installation based on soil samples taken from Beirut and Athens that explores alternative historical narratives – what if the words ‘possible narrative’ were added at the beginning of each label?28 Perhaps modifications such as this would, in Basu’s sense, create space for the object’s own ‘affordances’?29

The interpretative questions the implant raises come into sharper focus when speculatively combined with another object held by the PRM – a makeshift water pipe, used for smoking cannabis (fig.5). Like the implant, its manufacturing origins – who made it, under what conditions, and where – are absent from the catalogue. Its acquisition by the PRM was for an exhibit initiated in 2000 titled Transformations – The Art of Recycling, where it was used to tell a story of human agency in repurposing materials to create new functions.30

Here, a playful interpretative practice used the agency of museum objects to open conceptions of the body. In their object biography for the PRM website, a group of researchers present an ‘alternative theoretical argument’ of the pipe. Proposing that we consider the pipe as an ‘external lung’, they reveal a complex set of relationships – from the physical connections with the pipe’s user, to associations with NHS programmes and national identity.31 If the pipe were placed within the ‘Reshaping’ case, might this enhance the implant’s work to change preconceived notions of where the body ends?

Emerging out of a speculative and relational reading of provenance, ambiguities in interpretation are not a negation of the museum’s responsibility to accuracy, but a recognition that the archive is never a single authoritative voice.

A breast implant as institutional self-reckoning

Expanding the narrative provenance of the implant includes a critical evaluation of its life within the PRM – asking why it was accessioned, how it has been displayed and what those decisions reveal about the practices of the institution. This unlocks a critical discussion of the conditions that have shaped the implant’s museological narratives. What the anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler refers to as ‘reading along the archival grain’ allows us to attend to curatorial decisions, display choices and interpretative texts as symptoms in diagnosing what stories the museum has inherited and continues, however ambivalently, to reproduce.32

Since the implant was accessioned as part of the redisplay of the Body Arts section, it has been displayed in a plastic Ziploc bag, pinned at the centre of the ‘Reshaping’ case (fig.6). Although the PRM – with its maze-like galleries and quasi-Wunderkammer cases – might give the impression it has been unchanged since its founding, the museum is in a constant state of modification, with the current collection at least fifteen times the size of what it was in 1885.33

Within this context, the implant becomes what Stoler refers to as a ‘watermark’ within the collection – a visible impression revealing an anxiety about what should be counted as ethnographic, and whose stories and materials belong within the museum’s interpretative frame.34 Ethnographic display has been associated with the study of the so-called ‘exotic Other’, a tendency that has long shaped the PRM’s classificatory logic. The Body Arts redisplay marked an attempt to reorient this tradition, exhibiting ‘Western’ practices such as cosmetic surgery and orthodontics alongside ‘non-Western’ practices that the museum had historically framed as distant or transgressive, for example the wearing of neck coils by Kayan people in Myanmar. The museum’s 2001–2 Annual Report and the ‘What’s Upstairs?’ audio guide highlight this curatorial intention.35 The audio guide described the aim of the redisplay as to offer a ‘full and comprehensive’ comparison of the permanent and temporary ways in which people alter their appearance, a language of inclusivity that signals a desire to counter the museum’s tendency to ‘emphasise the exotic’ in its typological displays.36

The guide further describes the breast implant and the corset in the ‘Reshaping’ case as British objects illustrating ‘parallels between practices carried out in this country and those carried out in other parts of the world, which might initially seem shocking’. The reference to shock in relation to ‘non-Western’ practices is telling. It implies long histories of mixed pleasure and terror in the colonial imagination of the Othered body, particularly in relation to the museum. Ethnographic museums have direct heritage in the so-called ‘freak shows’ and ‘world fairs’ of the nineteenth century, in which Indigenous people from colonised territories were exhibited in a racialised and dehumanising spectacle.37 As the scholar and curator Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett examines, when staged performances became disagreeable with conservative protestants in England, ‘museums became surrogate theaters’.38

In a display that intentionally draws parallels between Western and non-Western body modification practices, the inclusion of the implant functions as an interpretative intervention. For the viewer it might produce a momentary disruption to the preconceived certainty of what a case at an ethnographic museum would contain. In doing so, the implant reflects anthropology’s reorientation towards the ethnographic as a method of first-hand engagement rather than a particular focus on specific social groups.39 This reorientation foregrounds the relational and existential dimensions of cultural practices over inherited notions of origin or hierarchy. Here, the museum reminds us that received categories are never static, and interpretation offers a chance to continually ask items in the collection questions and listen to their answers.

The redisplay was not a wholesale transformation. As the audio guide states, it maintained the style of the PRM, using traditional wooden cabinets and keeping the cross-cultural approach, in which items are arranged mainly by function rather than cultural group, with many objects in each display (fig.7).40 This tension is itself significant. Rather than waiting for the institution to overhaul its agenda entirely, or rendering the ethnographic museum completely defunct, the curators enacted what the writer Natasha Ginwala has described as a ‘dissonant agency and productive refusal’ – a refusal to conform entirely to inherited museological categories while continuing to work in them. The breast implant makes the museum’s inherited frameworks less easy to pass without friction and question, without dismantling those frameworks entirely.41 This is the condition of much institutional self-reckoning: partial, provisional and ongoing.

In an article that discusses a series of artistic interventions staged by young people, researchers and curators, David Rousell and his co-authors draw on the psychoanalysis of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to argue that subjectivity is produced through unconscious, affective processes rather than conscious deliberation.42 Museums, as institutions that shape collective imaginaries, can intervene in these processes. The display case becomes what the authors call a ‘micropolitical battleground’: not a neutral presentation of objects but an active site where colonial-capitalist norms are reproduced or unsettled.43

Nowhere is this more visible than in the handling of human remains at the PRM. Until 2020 the ‘Reshaping’ case included shaped teeth from Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania, and skulls from Peru and Arawe, which were displayed alongside the breast implant.44 Their removal, while significant, is acknowledged only by a relatively generic information board downstairs in the Museum Court. This board replaces the ‘Treatment of Dead Enemies’ case, in which a collection of tsantsas (shrunken heads) were displayed until 2020.45 It attempts to explain the history of human remains at the PRM and the Museum’s revised ethical code, including a case study of the return of (some) of the human remains from Australia held by the museum.

Although the inclusion of the quote from Neil McKenzie communicates the painful and partial nature of such returns and the museum’s reflexivity regarding this, the PRM continues to use offensive and outdated terms – in a label on tooth alteration, for example, the museum uses a colonial term to refer to Indigenous Australians. Like the information on human remains, the museum’s acknowledgment of the racist language used throughout the display is limited to a small informational text in the Museum Court entitled ‘Hierarchy’, which collapses specific histories of violent dispossession into an abstracted acknowledgement of colonial wrongdoing.

A vinyl covering the glass of the ‘Welcome to the Pitt Rivers Museum’ case added in 2020, which also acknowledged this use of language has since been removed. A booklet available to visitors, titled The Pitt Rivers Museum…, included the subheading ‘… uses labels that oppress’. This booklet is now also unavailable. This quiet withdrawal reflects what Stoler observes as the construction of a ‘generic “colonial” as something external to be addressed’ by museums, rather than an ongoing, internal condition.46 The displacement of colonial histories, treating them as ‘some other place, some other time’, is itself a colonial gesture – one that allows the institution to perform accountability without disturbing its inherited structures of display.47 The gap left by the teeth in the ‘Reshaping’ case leaves these questions open.

Concluding reflections

The story of the breast implant reveals an institution caught in the ongoing work of reckoning with what it has inherited. Each act of redisplay, each interpretative label, is an opportunity to stage new relations between curator, object and audience. The provenance of the breast implant, framed as relational and speculative, invites us to reconsider interpretation as relational experimentation: an unresolved, imperfect negotiation between different ways of knowing, audiences and affective registers.

A narrative provenance approach does not resolve the histories of the breast implant but holds them open, insisting on the museum’s responsibility to consider what or whom its practices have excluded. This reckoning brings into focus how developments in anthropology and experiments in ethnographic museums, shaped by decades of critique and political pressure, offer alternative approaches for art museum interpretation.