David’s teacher Marshall Sahlins came up with the idea of MetaPersons, collective entities like gods, ancestors, or nations, given agency and meaning in culture. They help people navigate social life by making abstract ideas relatable.
It seems to me that museums are the perfect place for metapersons to inhabit. After all, a museum is where the muses live, inspiring us mortals to heroic deeds and revolutionary discoveries that connect mortals to the profound knowledge and beauty of the world that otherwise only gods are able to grasp.
we are like dwarfs sitting on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more and farther than they, not because of the sharpness of our sight, but because we are raised up and carried aloft by their giant size.
Bernard of Chartres
Our museum will feature a hall inspired by the famous Galerie d’Apollon in the Louvre in Paris. However, instead of kings, French artists, architects, and their treasures, we set our own pantheon of MetaPersons, obviously radically different from the ones that are in the Louvre.
One of the most important places in the Room of Giants will be secured for the native heroes of Saint Vincent: the Garifuna people, who heroically resisted English colonizers. Despite an attempted genocide by colonial powers that nearly led to the extinction of their entire nation, they managed to survive, preserving their language and culture.
David Rolfe Graeber, whose legacy our institute continues, will feel at home in the room of Giants on a Caribbean island, surrounded by the shadows of pirates, freedom fighters, on a derelict ship that was turned into Museum of Care, whose mission, unlike the Louvre, is not to be unique and valuable, but to spread care and freedom to as many people as possible.
The others we have in mind are Aaron Schwartz, Rosa Luxemburg, Patrice Lumumba and… and maybe you have some suggestions.