Paper short abstract:

The appeal of stereotypical authenticity claims ought to be balanced by cautious practice but museums are vulnerable to cultural property rights claims which employ authenticity arguments framed in terms of “traditional” practice. This paper looks for a theoretically informed understanding of repatriation in this contested cultural context.

Paper long abstract:

While there are many sound and practical ways for museums to establish the provenance and connections between persons and artefacts for the purpose of judging repatriation claims, this paper looks at an instance where claims of cultural authenticity, bolstered by assertions of "traditional" practice, completely overwhelmed excellent provenance. In most museums, the power of stereotypical authenticity claims will be balanced by cautious practice but museums are as much a part of contemporary political sphere as they are the academic anthropological world. As this case shows, all museums may be vulnerable to spurious authenticity claims; they are a party to the creation of those ideas in the first place. This paper suggests that anthropology itself is at the root of one of the biggest problems, the idea that culture inheres in objects and that people can retrieve their culture, having lost it through negative experience, by reconnecting with objects that provide links to the past. Following Strathern, who argues that persons do not exist prior to their culture, and cannot lose it by any means, this paper looks a theoretical approach to repatriation claims which acknowledges the distributed personhood and cultural context of our artefactual relations at the museum.