Interpreting Borneo in Britain: interrogating the colonial legacy of the Charles Hose museum collections

UK museums contain a vast repository of Borneo’s cultural heritage, much of which was collected during the colonial period and is largely under-researched and under-utilised today. A significant proportion of these collections were acquired through one man: Charles Hose. An officer for the Brooke government in Sarawak between the 1880s and 1907, Hose contributed more than 2000 ethnographic objects to multiple British museums. In doing so, he positioned himself as the conduit through which knowledge about Borneo flowed to Europe and the US, and as a prominent expert in Borneo cultures after he retired to England. As a result, Hose’s ideas, theories and classificatory systems have had an enormous impact on the interpretation of Borneo and its cultures all over the world. Although much of his anthropological scholarship has since been discredited, Hose’s voice can still be heard loud and clear in wider representations of Borneo’s cultural history. Jennifer Morris became aware of the huge Borneo collections in UK museums while studying the history of the Sarawak Museum in Kuching and the network of collectors that emerged from the Brooke state. In this talk, she will introduce her current project, in which she is compiling data from all the Hose collections in Britain and analysing it together for the first time. She will share how this approach is yielding insights into historical collecting and interpretation practices, and some of the challenges facing contemporary museums in confronting the legacies of these collections formed in colonial contexts.

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Jennifer R. Morris is a historian and museologist from the UK who specialises in the history of museums and collecting in Southeast Asia. She trained at the universities of Cambridge and Leicester, before completing her doctorate in history at NUS. Since then, she has contributed to the development of the Borneo Cultures Museum in Kuching as a Sarawak Museum Fellow, and curated the ‘Plant People: Unearthing Botany in Sarawak’ virtual exhibition for the Beccari Centenary Project in 2021. She is now the Borneo Early Career Research Fellow at the British Museum, working on a two-year project that aims to re-examine the Charles Hose Borneo collections and work collaboratively with stakeholders in Borneo to develop new approaches to their interpretation.