Paper short abstract:

I draw upon fieldwork conducted as part of the Decolonising the Museum project (University of Edinburgh and Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford) to argue that the work of digital return of cultural artefacts entails a critique of the category of “public” as such.

Paper long abstract:

I draw upon fieldwork conducted in the north-eastern Indian states of Assam, Nagaland and Manipur as part of the project, “Decolonising the Museum: Digital Repatriation of the Gaidinliu Collection from the UK to India” to argue that digital repatriation is not just an act of “returning” digital artefacts to communities. Rather, it entails a critique of the category of “public” as such.

The Gaidinliu Collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford refers to a set of objects associated with Gaidinliu, a sixteen-year-old Zeliangrong Naga prophetess arrested by the British authorities in 1932 for organising an armed rebellion in north-eastern India. Beyond digitising the collection through digital photography, video, and 3-D photogrammetry, the project has undertaken a series of community engagements over the last year, including a travelling pop-up exhibition, group discussion-based workshops and personal interviews.

In this paper, I will discuss people’s responses to a set of twelve notebooks in the collection. Said to be written in her own hand, the inscriptions are considered untranslatable. Drawing on interviews and discussions during community workshops, I will show how the notions of “public” and “community” become problematised as the museum object is activated in the process of digital return, and traverses the contentious terrain of contemporary articulations of Zeliangrong Naga identity. I conclude by suggesting that the use of ethnographic methods can make the work of digital return a collaborative endeavour that engages with the different representational, affective, semantic, and performative regimes that constitute the “publics” within which museum artefacts become meaningful.