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Contribution short abstract:

This paper argues that processes of restitution profoundly reshape museums as epistemic sites and proposes the renewed attention to listening as key method to work towards epistemic justice.

Contribution long abstract:

Historically, museums have profoundly contributed to epistemic injustice, severing material culture from its lived environments and epistemic ecologies, putting them into depots or behind glass only to re-signify them according to Eurocentric notions of culture and often racist world views (Tsosie 2017, Vawda 2019). A wealth of knowledge connected and enacted with these ‘cultural belongings’ (Buckridge and Gwasira 2021) was thus marginalised or even destroyed. Recent calls for the restitution of cultural belongings to their places of creation and use underpin their claims not only with the colonial contexts from which they were translocated but by the knowledge which can be reactivated by their return and resocialisation. My contribution to the roundtable discussion will take the collaborative research, exhibition and restitution project “Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures” on the collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin as a starting point to self-critically reflect on the ways in which museums could work (and be reworked) towards epistemic justice. Two of anthropology’s oldest techniques – listening and translating – were key in shifting and reassembling the sovereignty of interpretation, necessitating retuning methods and rethinking the site of the museum itself. Could an ‘epistemology of listening’ contribute to adequately acknowledge and accommodate forms of knowledge beyond Western academia and Eurocentric regimes of care? What happens with the museum as epistemic site when the reactivation of knowledge with returned cultural belongings no longer happens in the physical space of a museum but, for example, under a Baobab tree in rural Namibia?