The collection of essays critically addresses the multivalent ways in which mobility reshapes the characteristics of artefacts, specifically under prevailing issues of representation and colonial liabilities.
The volume attests to material culture as central to understanding the repercussions of problematic histories and proposes novel ways to address them.
It offers valuable reading for scholars of anthropology, museum studies, history and others with an interest in material culture.
George Paul Meiu, University of Basel, about this book:
The book offers a provocative reflection on the relationship between mobility and materiality, things and their social and historical trajectories. Starting with recent controversial public debates on museum inventories—salient questions on provenance and restitution—the book challenges the relative insularity of some of these debates.
A key contribution of this essay collection, as I see it, is that it situates the circulation of museum objects—now at the center of so-called “provenance research”—within broader forms of material culture circulation. It explores what emerges along the paths of circulating things.”
