Click the star to add/remove an item to/from your individual schedule.
You need to be logged in to avail of this functionality,
and to see the links to virtual rooms.
Log in
Accepted Paper:
Collaborative projects with museum indigenous artefacts? Reconsidering the object repatriation movement
Nadezhda Mamontova
(University of Birmingham)
This presentation discusses the problem of adopting a multimodal perspective in the movement for repatriating museum objects of Indigenous people. It proposes to investigate this problem through the notion of equivocation.
Paper long abstract:
Over the past decade, there has been much discussion on collaborative projects in the light of the repatriation of Indigenous artefacts from metropolitan museums back to their communities. Indigenous activists, scholars, and museum curators agree that many objects found their way into museums through unjust actions and as a result of colonial encounters. Returning these artefacts is regarded as an important step in restoring justice to Indigenous communities. Simultaneously, there is limited contextual knowledge about the circumstances under which these objects were obtained due to a scarcity of archival material. This presentation proposes to reflect upon the repatriation movement through a possibility of incorporating ‘voices’ of the objects themselves. Specifically, it discusses the practices of object donation among Indigenous people in Siberia and explores the current approaches to communicating with objects stored in museums among community members. Collected archival material and ethnographic field data reveal that Indigenous people carefully discuss with the objects the possibility of sending them to the museum. Their decisions regarding donation are often based on the objects’ will. This challenges the repatriation of these objects and further poses an interesting methodological question to be explored: how anthropologists and museum curators can incorporate this multimodal perspective into collaborative projects. This presentation proposes to investigate this question through the notion of equivocation (Viveiros de Castro 2004) as a mode of communication about, with and through the objects.