Does a decolonial digital access to cultural assets from colonial contexts provide a fundamental emancipation from Western-influenced knowledge and power formations? Or is it all about epistemic justice?
Contribution long abstract
The presence of extensive Mapuche collections in German museums and university collections can only be understood against the background of the late 19th century interplay between the Chilean government and the Propaganda Fide in the Vatican. This led to the foundation of the Bavarian Capuchin Province in the Araucanía and the presence of three different groups of German actors taking on various roles in the internal colonisation of “the Mapuche”: (1) German colonists on expropriated Mapuche territories, (2) Capuchin mission stations spread out between remaining Mapuche territories, and (3) the presence of German scholars at Chilean cultural institutions and museums.
In postcolonial provenance research, the paradigm of decolonising collections refers to contextualisation and indexing methods that incorporate the perspectives of representatives of societies of origin. Does a decolonial digital access to cultural assets from colonial contexts therefore provide a fundamental emancipation from Western-influenced knowledge and power formations? Or is it all about epistemic justice?