Short Abstract

Museum collaborations bring multiple, divergent worlds into negotiation over colonial collections and their restitution. This workshop explores how cosmopolitics and affect intersect in these encounters, move participating actors, and produce affective dissonances.

Long Abstract

Ethnographic museums across Europe increasingly collaborate with communities of origin to address collections acquired in colonial contexts. These collaborations reconstruct provenance, revise colonial or incomplete catalogue descriptions, identify cultural meanings and sensitivities, and facilitate encounters through which people reconnect with their belongings. They also confront questions of ownership, restitution, and reparation.

Such encounters reveal not merely different interpretations of the same collection pieces, but divergent understandings of what—or who—these entities are. While museums have historically classified them as ethnographic “objects,” collection items, or heritage, people from communities of origin may understand them as ancestors, subjects, sensitive beings, or belongings endowed with agency and inseparably connected to persons and communities. Colonial collecting did not simply displace these entities geographically; it transformed their status, relations, and capacities through violence.

We approach museum collaborations and restitution processes as sites of cosmopolitics: negotiations among multiple, divergent worlds and ontologies. Yet these negotiations are also affective. Participants affect and are affected by the presence, absence, handling, display, and possible return of collection pieces. Encounters may generate grief, anger, fear, care, hope, solidarity, or refusal. They may also produce affective dissonances when different orders, procedures, and categories collide.

This workshop invites ethnographic and conceptual contributions that examine how cosmopolitics and affect intersect in museum collaborations and restitution processes. How do affective dynamics generated in these encounters enable, complicate, or unsettle negotiations? How are the resulting affective dissonances articulated, managed, or left unresolved? How might attending to these dynamics transform collaborative practices, restitution processes, and anthropological theory?