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Paper short abstract:

This paper explores emotional investments in museum objects and the repatriation discourse by museum audiences, staff and collaboration partners in a decolonizing museum project. Departing from what emotions do, it looks at the strategies developed to manage the pain of the past.

Paper long abstract:

During the last decades, debates around repatriation has spread outside the involved parties of museums and so-called source communities. A perception of ethnographic collections as “loot” has thus gained a strong foothold in public discourse. Rather than dismissing this perception as a misconception, this paper engages with the emotional experiences of encountering objects thought of as wrongfully located at ethnographic museums. The paper builds upon a case study of the project Ongoing Africa at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. This project seeks to make the African collections relevant to more and new visitors and has an ambition of raising new perspectives on the African continent with and by Swedes of African descent. However, the material which this paper builds upon indicate that this is a target group which for various reasons experiences tensions about coming to the museum – the collections is one of them. Drawing on an ethnographic material consisting of observations of public program activities held under the project and 20 interviews with staff members and collaboration partners, the paper examines questions about provenance and ownership. Focusing on emotional investments in understandings of the past, it addresses the experience of pain and the strategies developed by both staff members and collaboration partners to manage the pain of both themselves and others, as well as the visions of the future.