Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

In this presentation, I propose to think of anthropological museum and academic collections as part and parcel of the production of racialised hierarchies that were crucial to the enforcement of capitalism as a world economy, and thereby also served as a means of production of capital themselves.

Paper long abstract:

Racial capitalism, a concept originally proposed most prominently by Neville Alexander in South Africa and Cedric Robinson in the USA, has recently been reintroduced to the analysis of a variety of subjects, ranging from climate justice (Gonzalez 2021), a re-assessment of reproductive labour and racial capitalism (Bhattacharyya 2018), a re-evaluation of Alexander’s contributions (Vally and Motala, forthcoming), as well as edited volumes on the histories of racial capitalism (Leroy and Jenkins, 2021) and colonial racial capitalism (Koshy et al., 2022), to name but a few. While interpretations of both key terms – racial and capitalism – differ, a unifying claim lies in the assertion that racialised hierarchies of exploitation are central to capitalist production.

In this presentation, I propose to think of the foundation of anthropological museum and academic collections not only as part and parcel of the production of these racialised hierarchies, but also as a means of production of capital themselves. I aim to provide a theoretical framework in which the appropriation of anthropological collections, their decontextualisation and integration into a racialised classificatory order, can be understood as part of wider processes of dispossession of those who were constructed to be at the bottom of the hierarchy, and an accumulation of capital on the side of those who were supposedly superior. Such an understanding allows for an interrogation of current claims for restitution as a possible means of redistribution.