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The Maasai Living Cultures Project is a collaborative project between representatives of the Kenyan and Tanzanian Maasai community and the Pitt Rivers Museum. It aims to build trust and address concerns about the portrayal of Maasai culture in museums. It aims to foster knowledge exchange and collaboration between the Maasai community and UK museums and to build relationships based on respect, trust, and deeper understanding.
The process was started in partnership with InsightShare, a community development organization working with Indigenous people worldwide to address key issues through Participatory Video. The project has also led to the establishment the Pan-African Living Cultures Alliance (PALCA), a regional network enabling more communities to document their knowledge systems, cultural practices, crafts, languages, and traditional technologies. Other UK museums have joined the project since 2020, including the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology (MAA) at Cambridge, the Horniman Museum in London and since 2023 and the Museum of English Rural Life at Reading University.
I recently attended a seminar representing the National Museums of Kenya at the Pitt Rivers Museum (PRM) as part of the culmination of the Maasai Living Cultures Program, an engagement between PRM and Maasai community representatives. This program reflects PRM’s commitment to critically re-evaluating its collection practices and strengthening relationships with communities whose cultural artefacts are housed in their collection. This report provides a summary of the program’s background, the seminar events from September 23–30, 2024, and recommendations for NMK’s next steps in pursuing artefact restitution and cultural preservation efforts.
National Museums of Kenya (NMK) is a state corporation established by an Act of Parliament, the Museums and Heritage Act 2006. NMK is a multi-disciplinary institution whose role is to collect, preserve, study, document and present Kenya’s past and present cultural and natural heritage. This is for the purposes of enhancing knowledge, appreciation, respect and sustainable utilization of these resources for the benefit of Kenya and the world, for now and posterity. https://museums.or.ke
Image by: Ian Wallman
