Paper short abstract:

Despite decades of promoting "inclusive" methodologies in cross-cultural heritage management, complaints about their lack of social diversity continue to be voiced. This presentation reflects on some recent efforts in the Netherlands to uncover some of this situation's epistemic conditions.

Paper long abstract:

This presentation reflects on two recently started projects in the Netherlands on colonial collections and the democratization of heritage. They tend to show that discussions on collaborative methodologies used by museums to engage with so-called source communities, but also with diaspora publics, often tend to meet with a range of epistemic conditions that seems difficult to work through even in the current "Age of Restitution": (1) a kind of research fatigue on the part of extra-museal communities, complaining about the continuing emphasis on "taking" rather than giving or actual collaboration; (2) a kind of exhaustion or reluctance to speak out on the part of museum curators who feel that they are not able to escape being on the receiving end of critique; and (3) a form of being locked in the "home and away" ideology that is common to modern nation-states, yet ignores that such dichotomies of being 'native' and being other are impossible to uphold in societies where both museum collections and the people who engage with them are inevitably "diasporicized". I discuss a number of experiences in the Pressing Matter and At Home Otherwise research projects to support that latter conclusion.