Lewis McNaught writes: Britain’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) will review the exclusion it imposed on national collections that prevents them from returning cultural objects on moral grounds. The review provides an opportunity to reverse an unwelcome inconsistency in the UK Charities Act 2022.
Yesterday, RM* published an item about the repatriation by museums in Great Britain of shrunken heads to Ecuador. Lewis McNaught explains that this is easier said than done. Given the particular cultural contexts of tsantsas (both making and taking), the need for further research and analysis have been agreed. According to him, no repatriation requests have been made to date and given the number of different groups involved, any future process is likely to be extremely complicated.
With the deaccession policies of Britain’s national museums so diametrically different from Britain’s larger number of regional and university collections, learning how museums unencumbered by national legislation are dealing successfully with the same legacies of inequality and trauma is revealing.
The National Museum of Scotland nearly had to call off the high-profile repatriation of a totem pole to the Nisga’a in Canada after the Scottish Government reneged on a promise to cover costs.
During Mongolia’s Minister of Culture, Nomin Chinbat’s visit to Britain, not only the 2027 exhibition Arts of the Mongol World was discussed but also provenance research and restitution. Mongolia’s treasures ‘provide a window on the country’s history and demonstrate the vibrancy and captivating nature of our nomadic culture’.
