Complicity or Decolonization? Restitution of Heritage from ‘Global’ Ethnographic Museums

Bibliographic Data

ID12915262
AuthorsPádraig McAuliffe (0000-0002-7712-5472, University of Liverpool, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume15
Issue3
Pages678-689
Publication date2021-08-17
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueInternational Journal of Transitional Justice (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1752-7716 • E-ISSN: 1752-7724
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/ijtj/ijab028
OpenAlexW4243990174
LanguageEN
Citations received7

The present moment sees a wide-ranging and unprecedented reckoning in European societies with their colonial pasts and with the related question of how the racist legacies of imperialism resound today. Intense conversations about identity, race and cultural appropriation are spurred by phenomena like Black Lives Matter, ‘fallism’ (e.g., the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement) and the contested politics of representation in the media, the arts and public institutions. Societies are redefining their relationships with old and new immigrant communities produced by colonial and postcolonial interventions in the global periphery. Continuities are identified between structural racism in the present and past colonialism, while old ethnic hierarchies and forms of marginalization remain intact. One such continuity is the way in which campaigns connect questions of decolonization with the presence of the global South’s cultural heritage in European ethnographic, ‘encyclopaedic,’ ‘world culture’ or ‘universal’ museums like the British Museum, the Louvre, the Musée du Quai Branly, the Vatican museums and the Humboldt Forum. These museums gather tangible cultural heritage like Easter Island moai, the Naram-Sin and Hammurabi stelae (both excavated in what is today Iran) and the ancient Egyptian bust of Nefertiti on the basis that they are cosmopolitan institutions inculcating a shared global sense of humanity and community. One obvious consequence is that the most prestigious tangible heritage of societies in the global South from prehistory onwards is visible only in museums of the global North. By one estimate, as much as 90 to 95 percent of African cultural heritage might be located in European and North American institutions.1

Appropriation · Archaeology · Colonialism · Complicity · Decolonization · Ethnology · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Anthropology · Archaeological Research and Protection · Cultural Heritage Management and Preservation · Museums and Cultural Heritage · History · Law

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