Paper short abstract:

This paper moves from the digitalisation of MAET african ethnographic and photographic collections and discusses the history of this heritage. It focuses on the role of “archival silence” in the past Museum's knowledge production based on evolutionist (when not openly racist) scientific paradigms.

Paper long abstract:

This paper aims to contribute to the debate about African cultural heritage preserved in European archives and museum institutions. In particular, it aims to emphasise how lacks rather than presences often characterise the archival data relating to the history of large ethnographic and photographic collections originating from or relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, whether of colonial or more recent production. The critical analysis and the digitalisation of the ethnographic and photographic collections and the historical archives of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography of the University of Turin (MAET) has brought to light a substantial 'archival silence' that says much about how this heritage was understood since the recent past. This contribution intends to focus on the african ethnographic and photographic collections which in the past were used as a corollary and documentation of theses about human evolution. Digitalised and analysed by cultural and museum anthropology with the aim of reconstructing their 'social life', these collections reveal the meanings they carry by raising new questions about the role of the museum in society. This approach to collections reveals the histories and ideas about otherness and the power relations underlying the practices of accumulation and exhibition. Digitalization made possible new research paths that brought to light the need to use more inclusive approaches that open heritage to the subjectivities that can be recognised in it and that have so far not had a voice.