Throughout the years of my undergraduate degree in Social Anthropology, I have always been aware of a stark divide that has influenced our scholarly curriculum; that between the symbolic and the physical worlds. In my academic journey over the years, it has always felt as though our educational institutions remain tethered to pedagogical frameworks that privilege sight over touch, epitomised by the cautionary refrain: ‘You can look, but you can’t touch.‘ And this becomes applicable to my young childhood experiences visiting museums and exhibitions across Scotland, where I was perpetually positioned as a distant observer, separated from historical artefacts by impenetrable barriers and clinical glass enclosures.
And of course, there are obvious rationales that could indicate why young children should not run their hands down the skeleton of a Diplodocus which is millions of years old at the Kelvin Grove Art Gallery. However, in relation to slightly less radical circumstances, I have always wondered what is left unseen in this systematic physical distancing between human subjects and material objects. What essential dimensions of understanding become obscured, suppressed, or entirely lost? How do these institutionalised boundaries of engagement fundamentally alter our epistemological relationship with material culture?
Having had the privilege to engage with the Anthropology Teaching Collection over the course of this project, I can conclude that none of the above questions can satisfyingly be answered. The artefacts that we held in the palms of our hands mirror a legacy of dispossession and imperial negligence at this institution of further education and with that emerges a series of forgotten stories and contested pasts that may not ever be recovered. Our experience of object-based learning thus becomes intricately entangled in a complex web of decolonial scholarship, revealing the power dynamics and hierarchies of touch that undergird elite educational institutions. These objects are not neutral; they are charged with unspoken narratives of extraction, appropriation, and systemic erasure -speaking volumes about the violent histories of knowledge production and the continued mechanisms of cultural loss that the University of Edinburgh is accountable for.
It can then only be assumed that overwhelming emotions of guilt and disturbance have filtered my learning experience in this way and handling these valuable artefacts has never felt comfortable, has never felt okay. However, in my (still) limited knowledge about the artefacts, touching them has catalysed a connectedness that I have rarely felt over the trajectory of my academic career. And this has been the most poignant learning experince I have witness across this course. I feel as though I have been granted the opportunity to be held responsible for something that falls outside of the jurisdiction of a gradebook; to care.
With this I realise that in our current educational landscape, caring has become a radical act. We’re trained to consume information, to memorise, to perform – but rarely to feel, to connect, to understand deeply. By systematically removing tactile, emotional engagement from our curricula, we’re producing a generation of learners disconnected from the very histories and material worlds that shape our present. Academic engagement across the humanities has become confined to theoretical and scholarly understanding and removed from our human experiences. And this becomes particularly prevalent in relation to the precarious political climate that threatens the world currently. We’re teaching students to observe, but not to feel. To analyse, but not to empathise. To engage but not to act.
