The English translation of this guide offers the basic steps for how to begin, with the main sources and practical tips. The guide was written for Dutch museums and other institutions.
Jongsok Kim wrote this open access book in 2018, but it is still very relevant for our discussion. With legal and historical perspectives. Some case-studies about restitution are noteworthy.
This open access book (only after 10 - 14 days) offers a unique perspective on the return of cultural objects by considering the aftermath of the handover processes.
Vanessa Hava Schulmann (Freie Universität Berlin): The stories I will tell you about happened during my work in a Berlin university collection. I was tasked of meeting the deceased whose bones and tissues were stored in those dusty wooden cupboards and figure out how to handle their presence in a dignified way.
'Mobile Heritage' explores how diverse digital technologies have allowed for new types of mobilities and introduced a novel set of practices, interventions, and politics for heritage collections, archives, exhibitions, entertainment, conservation, management, commerce, education, restitution, activism, and regulation. With a case-study about digitalised ancient manuscripts from Ethiopia in the British Library.
[ in Italian ] From the dawn of Italian exploration in Africa and throughout the colonial period, objects and samples from overseas came to the Peninsula, finding their way into temporary exhibitions and more than one hundred permanent displays, where they were studied, described and presented to the public.
[ in German ] In a new book, German author and former SPD politician Mathias Brodkorb denounces the development of ethnological museums in Europe, especially Leipzig, Hamburg, Berlin and Vienna.
In her book 'Colonial Ambitions and Collecting Anxieties: Aboriginal Objects and Western Australian Frontiers, 1828–1914' Nicola Froggatt assesses how non-Aboriginal collectors understood Aboriginal objects, and what this reveals about colonial relationships, anxieties and ambitions.
This interdisciplinary encyclopedia brings together scholars from different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences to provide the state of the art and most comprehensive overview of theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of cultural heritage and conflict.
In Eternal Sovereigns: Indigenous Artists, Activists, and Travelers Reframing Rome, Gloria Jane Bell considers Indigenous cultural belongings held in Vatican Museums collections. As she turns attention to the stories they tell—and the Vatican’s efforts to silence them—she locates these possessions within a long history of Indigenous travelers with creative ties to Rome.
Dan Hicks' 'Every Monument Will Fall - A Story of Remembering and Forgetting' reappraises how we think about culture, and how to find hope, remembrance and reconciliation in the fragments of an unfinished violent past.
'Deconstructing Dinosaurs - The History of the German Tendaguru Expedition and its finds, 1906-2023' takes a fresh look at the history of the German Tendaguru Expedition (1909–1913), using recently uncovered sources to reveal how Berlin’s Natural History Museum appropriated and extracted 225 tonnes of dinosaur fossils from land belonging to modern-day Tanzania.
This dissertation investigates the histories and itineraries of Abelam collections from the East Sepik Province of Papua New Guinea held in museums in Europe (the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland and the UK), Australia and Papua New Guinea.
Since the later part of the twentieth century, ethnographic museums have come under increasing scrutiny, and many have reflected on and changed their presentation as they questioned collections so often made by colonial officials and explorers.
New World Objects of Knowledge: A Cabinet of Curiosities delves into the hidden histories of forty of the New World’s most iconic artifacts, from the Inca mummy to Darwin’s hummingbirds.
The volume offers new findings on the historical and current significance of artifacts and highlights the current dialogue with partners from Nigeria and the diaspora, reflecting on the methods of cooperative research and the future of the objects currently kept in Swiss collections.
[ open access ] 'Displacing and Displaying the Objects of Others - The Materiality of Identity and Depots of Global History' brings a diverse range of contributions inspired by research from the "Hamburg’s (post-)colonial legacy" research center.
This annotated bibliography presents mostly Indigenous authors and thinkers who have identified this disconnect between Euro-centric and Indigenous ways of seeing and understanding the world for decades, if not centuries.
A foundational handbook for critical heritage research about Africa and its diaspora. Part III African Objects and the Global Museum-Scape is relevant for RM*.
[ in German, English and French ] German museums of world cultures hold 40,000 objects from Cameroon, more than the entire African collection of the British Museum, according to a new study, presented by Bénédicte Savoy (Technische Universität, Berlin) and Albert Gouaffo (University of Dschang).
The Return of Cultural Heritage to Latin America takes a new approach to the question of returns and restitutions. It is the first publication to look at the domestic politics of claiming countries in order to understand who supports the claims and why.
This book examines the ways in which law can be used to structure the return of indigenous sacred cultural heritage to indigenous communities, referred to as repatriation in this volume. In particular, it aims at developing legal structures that align repatriation with contemporary international human rights standards.
Much ink has been spilled on the Parthenon marbles, mostly on the ethical and cultural merits of their repatriation. But what has generally not been considered are the legal merits of their return in light of contemporary international law.
Material Culture in Transit: Theory and Practice constellates curators and scholars actively working with material culture within academic and museal institutions through theory and practice.
[ in French ] French historian Patrick Howlett Martin focuses on colonial spoliations and those committed during conflicts and military interventions with their procession of enslavement, repression and pillage exercised on the peoples and cultures that suffered the rule of the conquering powers.
[ in French ] Marie-Sophie de Clippele’s book maps the numerous recent regulations relating to legal limitations on the marketing of objects and to assess their impact on the art market.
[ in French ] Relations between ethnographic museums and African and Oceanic art markets in France, Switzerland and Belgium : building value(s) and appropriating otherness
Archaeology in its formative years was often less a meticulous science than an exercise in vandalism. A little-known horror unfolded in the Southwestern United States.
In 'The Parthenon Marbles Dispute', Alexander Herman examines the entire contentious history of the Parthenon marbles from their creation up to the famous restitution debate of the present day.
On August 26, 2016, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Cooperation of Benin, in a letter to his French counterpart, made an official request calling for the restitution of cultural goods brought back to mainland France by French colonial troops during the conquest of the kingdom of Danhomè. [ in French ]
Mirjam Shatanawi's 'Legacies of Colonialism in Museum Collections - The (Un)Making of Indonesian Islam in the Netherlands' tells the untold story of Indonesian Islam in museums: Often overshadowed by Hindu-Buddhist art, Indonesian Islamic heritage rarely receives the attention.
Tea sets, paravents, spears and shields – even if today’s heirs were not involved in their acquisition or theft, these artefacts are inextricably linked to German colonial history.
The wars of 1845–72 were described by James Belich as ‘bitter and bloody struggles, as important to New Zealand as were the Civil Wars to England and the United States’. The conflict’s themes of land and sovereignty continue to resonate today.
Although Laura Benton's book is not directly about colonial collections and restitution, RM* wants to mention it. 'They called it peace' is about the ideological-legal justification of colonial violence and plunder.
Cynthia Scott analyzes the history of the negotiations that led to the atypical return of colonial-era cultural property from the Netherlands to Indonesia in the 1970s. By doing so, the book shows that competing visions of post-colonial redress were contested throughout the era of post-World War II decolonization.
Resist, Reclaim, Retrieve - The Long History of the Struggle for the Restitution of Cultural Heritage and Ancestral Remains Taken under Colonial Conditions, brings together authors from countries in the Global South and North. They shed light on the long history of restitution claims from colonised countries, with a focus on the pre-1970 period.
This reader, edited by Sarah Van Beurden, Didier Gondola and Agnès Lacaille, is the first scholarly work has scrutinized the collections of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (Belgium) as a whole.
[ in German ] While the debate on looted art has so far focussed on works of art from African and Asian colonies, Jürgen Gottschlich and Dilek Zaptcioglu-Gottschlich focus on archaeological finds in the former Ottoman Empire in their 2021 book Die Schatzgräber des Kaisers. Deutsche Archäologen auf Beutesuch in Oriënt.
Christa Roodt, specialist in international private law and and provenance and restitution issues at the University of Glasgow, adopts a novel approach to the social question of restitution and repatriation of sacred cultural property and heritage acquired unethically during the colonial era. Her approach premises on better integration of law, ethics, history, anthropology, and provenance research.
Sela K. Adjei and Yann LeGall (eds.): Debates around restitution and decolonising museums continue to rage across the world. Artefacts, effigies and ancestral remains are finally being accurately contextualised and repatriated to their homelands.
Over the centuries, a multitude of items – including a cannon of the King of Kandy, power-objects from DR Congo, Benin bronzes, Javanese temple statues, Maori heads and strategic documents – has ended up in museums and private collections in Belgium and the Netherlands by improper means.
In 'The Empty Showcase Syndrome - Tough Questions about Cultural Heritage from Colonial Regions', author Jos van Beurden explores three questions that slow down the restitution process.
Historian Justin M. Jacobs challenges the widely accepted belief that many of Western museums’ treasures were acquired by imperialist plunder and theft. His account re-examines the allegedly immoral provenance of Western collections, advocating for a nuanced understanding of how artefacts reached Western shores.
In 'The Making of Museums in Nigeria - Kenneth C. Murray and Heritage Preservation in Colonial West Africa' Amanda H. Hellman, director of the Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery, writes: In November 1927, Kenneth Crosthwaite Murray (1902-1972) left for Nigeria to develop the art program in the British colony.
Justin M. Jacobs examined the allegedly immoral provenance of Western museum collections and challenges the widely accepted belief that many of Western museums’ treasures were acquired by imperialist plunder and theft.
In 1925, Pius XI staged the Vatican Missionary Exposition in Rome’s Vatican City. Gloria Bell explores the relationship between Indigenous cultures around the world and the Vatican, which holds thousands of works by Indigenous scholars and refuses to return them.
In A Programme of Absolute Disorder, political scientist Françoise Vergès puts the museum in its place. Exploring the Louvre's history, she uncovers the context in which the universal museum emerged: as a product of colonialism, and of Europe's self-appointed claim to be the guardian of global heritage.
Until the late 1980s Indigenous art was being ripped off left right and centre. It was open slather. First at the cheap end of the market on T-shirts and then on fancy carpets made in Vietnam. The rip-off merchants maintained black artists were just painting old patterns, so their work was for the taking.
(Book in French; review in English) Claire Brizon describes in her 2023 book the military, traders and missionaries who collected in colonial regions; their collection culture and the use and meaning of the collections they had in Europe.
