Museum Worlds

This special section of Museum Worlds explores the entire process of repatriation as a set of rituals enacted by claimants and museum staff: a set of highlighted performances enacting multiple sets of cosmological beliefs, symbolic systems, and political structures. Some of the rituals of repatriation occur within the space of Indigenous ceremonies; others happen within the museum spaces of collections storage and the boardroom; others, such as handover ceremonies, are coproduced and culturally hybrid. From the often obsessive bureaucracy associated with repatriation claims to the affective moment of handover, repatriation articulates a moral landscape where memory, responsibility, guilt, identity, sanctity, place, and ownership are given a ritual form. Theory about ritual is used here to situate the articles in this section, which together form a cross-cultural examination of ritual meaning and form across repatriation processes.

As a curator who has been responsible for the return of Indigenous human remains from a UK museum, I take as a starting point for this article the dossier of paperwork and the administrative acts required to negotiate the decision about a claim and de-accession; to meet requirements for export, customs, and airline transport; and effect the return of human remains. The administrative actions involved in repatriation are forms of ritual, performances of corporate identity, and relations of power. Although museum staff and claimant groups have different agendas in this process, and the nature of their rituals is quite different, administrative and claimant rituals are interdependent across the repatriation process. These intersecting, powerful actions have the same overarching functions for each group: to articulate identities, core values, and structures of power; to open the possibility of new aspects of identity; and to articulate ongoing tensions between majority society and minority claimant groups.

The backdrop for the events discussed in this article is the Kautokeino rebellion in 1852, a violent uprising wherein a group of indigenous Sámi attacked and killed representatives of the local Norwegian authorities. This led to death sentences for two Sámi men who participated in the uprising. While their bodies were buried outside the local church, their decapitated heads were sent away, became objects of research, and ended up in scientific collections. Tracing the intricate movements of these skulls, as well as subsequent indigenous struggles for their repatriation and reburial, the focus here is on the ceremonies arranged in the course of these actions. The ceremonies depart from different narratives and myths connected to these historical events. Contextualization is important to understand how a multitude of different interests and strategies are invested, resulting in different understandings and interpretations in these contemporary ceremonies of repatriation and reburial.

Working largely from archival documents, this article examines the material traces of the confiscated and repatriated Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw potlatch collection that remains in the museum register. I unpack the museum register to demonstrate that, in lieu of a predetermined repatriation process, museum staff relied instead on existing administrative processes to navigate this largely uncharted territory of repatriation in the 1960s. These highly formalized processes or rituals served to reaffirm institutional identity in the face of an uncontrollable element—repatriation. Using the museum register, this article provides a historical lens through which to view the personal and institutional shifts that were necessary for this early repatriation to occur. The contemporary repatriation ceremonies performed by Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw peoples and the contemporary significance of the repatriated regalia in Alert Bay and Cape Mudge point to the ways repatriation processes and relationships have changed over time.

Tlingit repatriation activities at museums become ceremonies involving both Tlingit and museum staff. These groups connect to one another in a temporary alliance that erases their differences, and for a time celebrates an incorporation of colonizer and colonized. The principle challenge to a successful repatriation is the US legal notion of “right of possession.” Even if items are not returned, some museums have made efforts to allow clans to use them in ceremonies. These complex ceremonial interactions between staff and Tlingit within the museum setting can represent yet another form of these empowering expressions of cultural self-determination, a process we might call repatriation sovereignty.

Religious practice, in all its forms, is intrinsic to the Hopi way of being. The Hopi people have performed rituals of balance and renewal continuously for thousands of years, but the collection and removal of ceremonial items have created a spiritual void. Repatriation legislation has given hope that items can come home, go back to ritual use, and, simply, by the act of their return, nurture the Hopi spirit. Paradoxically, legal and bureaucratic requirements in federal legislation such as the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) both constrain and subvert Hopi authority over their own repatriation efforts and the items returned. To engage in repatriation, the Hopi must participate in what have become highly ritualized processes outlined in law, as well as submit to a museum’s procedural requirements, also legitimated in law. In this way, the repatriation process ultimately reproduces and reinforces the existing power of the nation-state.

Having a dual perspective as researcher of expressive culture and museum curator, I engage in the ceremonial aspects of repatriation through a practice-based “museology from within.” Focusing on a handover of human remains by the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm to indigenous claimants from Australia (2004), I combine material from my own participant observation with sources such as interviews and written and photographic documentation. The aim is to bring an autoethnographic perspective to a discussion on the ritual dynamics of repatriation. The transfer of custody and right of interpretation was accomplished with a ceremonial process, cocreated by museum staff and indigenous claimants. Drawing on differing cultural scripts as well as on improvised interplay, participants engaged in turn taking and intercultural translation of symbolic communication. Certain themes were ritualized redundantly, such as mutual exchange and reconciliation, but there also existed the more paradoxical copresence of seclusion and openness, closure and continuation.

What do those who participate in repatriation—on behalf of the museums and the communities to whom there is return—most want people to know about it? Nine prominent scholars provide short commentaries in response to this special section on the ritual processes of repatriation. The discussants are museum professionals, Indigenous community members, repatriation claimants, and repatriation officers; these are not mutually exclusive categories. They discuss the transformative power of repatriation on museums, communities, and our individual selves, and provide models for appropriate cultural practice and how to demonstrate respect. Their contributions call us to ceremony, to restorative justice, to engage in repatriation, and to witness how it has changed them.

How to deal with the legacies of colonial and other problematic pasts is a challenge shared by most museums of ethnography and ethnology. In this introduction to the following special section on the same topic, the section editors provide an overview and analysis of the burdens and potentials of the past in such museums. They set out different strategies that have been devised by ethnographic museums, identifying and assessing the most promising approaches. In doing so, they are especially concerned to consider the cosmopolitan potential of ethnographic museums and how this might be best realized. This entails explaining how the articles that they have brought together can collectively go beyond state-of-the-art approaches to provide new insight not only into the difficulties but also into the possibilities for redeploying ethnographic collections and formats toward more convivial and cosmo-optimistic futures.

Franz Boas’s 1897 monograph The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to ethnography, the use of multiple media, and the collaborative role of Boas’s Indigenous partner, George Hunt. Not only did the volume draw on existing museum collections from around the world, but the two men also left behind a vast and now widely distributed archive of unpublished materials relevant to the creation and afterlife of this seminal text. This article discusses an international and intercultural project to create a new, annotated critical edition of the book that reassembles the dispersed materials and reembeds them within Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw ontologies of both persons and things. The project mobilizes digital media to link together disparate collections, scholars, and Indigenous communities in order to recuperate long-dormant ethnographic records for use in current and future cultural revitalization.

This article starts from the question of whether the concepts “cosmopolitan memory” and “shared heritage,” with their inherent universalism, are helpful when dealing with ethnographic collections from the Amazon. After presenting some historical context information on the collections in focus, I contrast different notions of “cosmopolitanism” and “cosmopolitics,” drawing on Latin American perspectives. The latter claim to represent an epistemological alternative to a Europe-centered cosmopolitan project. They propose a focus on difference, which in relation to the museum and its working processes means looking at the collections through the others’ lenses. This approach is applied to a collaborative research project between the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and an indigenous university in the Amazon, in order to document and reflect on the outcomes and dilemmas that have emerged thus far.

How can the online distribution of heritage facilitate successful forms of collective online memory production? Two online archives from India are taken as case studies to analyze practices that make online archives effective as devices for recalling and constructing the Indian past. It is not only contextual conditions of the Internet age, but also particular applied practices of presenting, communicating, and using social media that enable it. Yet, the analysis of the two recently created online archives, which are partially driven by the idea of widening access, show that they do not so much set up counterpositions to established conceptions of archives as regulating entities, but rather aim at becoming acknowledged heritage agents.

A collection of photographs by colonial officer and amateur anthropologist James Henry Green now in the collections of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery has been extensively reappropriated and reused by members of the Kachin community from northern Burma who originally formed their subject. This article considers one specific use, in a music track and video produced as part of a collaboration between a Burma-based Kachin rap artist and a Kachin singer and media producer currently living in China. Released at a critical moment for the Kachin community, following the recent breakdown of a long-standing cease-fire agreement between the Kachin Independence Organization and the Burmese government, the track and video reveal some of the tensions at play between the outward-looking, transnational, and cosmopolitan tendencies of the growing overseas Kachin community and the nostalgic, territorially based ethnonationalism that has been at the heart of Kachin demands for greater political autonomy since the 1960s.

The opening of the World Cultures galleries in Edinburgh in 2011 marked the renewal of the well-loved, much visited, and rebranded National Museum of Scotland, a museum that has long envisaged its role in national and international terms. Tracing an episodic trajectory over 150 years, the article highlights key moments (in the 1850s upon founding, the 1940s after World War II, and the late 2000s during the renovation) when culture and citizenship were subjects of debate. This museum historiography forms the explanatory framework for the principles underlying the development of new World Cultures galleries and the collecting of indigenous North American art and material culture. Two galleries—Artistic Legacies and Living Lands—are used to explore the theoretical underpinning and representational practices deployed, and how voices, objects, images, and partnerships were used not only to respond to critiques of ethnographic museum display but also to engender more open and optimistic connectivities.

This article outlines some recent museological initiatives aimed at responding to the important issues raised by the famous protest against the exhibition Into the Heart of Africa, organized by the Royal Ontario Museum in 1989. Despite the significant temporal hiatus from the historical protest, many of the questions raised in that context continue to be relevant in thinking of ways to engage and present African collections in a mainstream encyclopedic institution. Rather than rethinking a new, more culturally sensitive narrative, I suggest that the introduction of multiple voices and perspectives may be the only way to disrupt the linear authoritative narratives and promote a more significant and affectively relevant engagement with historical collections.

In Germany, the new cultural center Humboldt Forum (to open in 2019) has become a major site of debate. It will include the contested collections of both the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, which contributed to the negotiation of the role of colonial legacies and their reverberances on contemporary Germany. We took those contestations as a point of departure for the exhibition Object Biographies (2015), part of the program Humboldt Lab Dahlem designed to experiment with innovative displays for the Humboldt Forum. Here we reexamine our research collaboration with the Beninese art historian Romuald Tchibozo that was part of the exhibition. His call for the “decolonization of research” was the central guideline in our museum practice aiming for cosmo-optimistic futures. We argue that focusing on processes and questions engaged by the exhibition project can transform contested museum spaces to enable negotiations on ownership, representation, and memory politics.