Paper short abstract:

This paper argues that it is not possible to ‘decolonize’ heritage regimes without questioning the hegemony of capitalist property law, and that any attempt to restitute 'objects' must take stock of the epistemic violence that an imposition of capitalist property conceptions present.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic museums throughout Europe are engulfed in controversies over the coloniality of their collections. The frame of contestation is most often capitalist property law: Who should ‘own’ the ethnographic objects – the colonizers or the colonized? However, if one takes a normative pluralism perspective, it becomes visible that the pieces of ethnographic collections in European museums originate in Indigenous cultural systems whose normative orders are based on sometimes radically different conceptions of what persons are, what things are, and how they interrelate. Imposing the frame of capitalist property onto these constellations can amount to a form of epistemic violence. Drawing from legal ethnography in a Maasai community in northern Tanzania, this paper shows how capitalist property conceptions are challenged when what counts as objects in capitalist property regimes are seen as persons and body parts in a Maasai legal framework. It is argued that it is not possible to ‘decolonize’ heritage regimes without questioning the hegemony of capitalist property law, and that any attempt to restitute 'objects' must take stock of the epistemic violence that an imposition of capitalist property conceptions present.