The volume examines this emerging landscape and its unsettling of existing relations between heritage and knowledge, value, identity, power, sense of place, community, nationhood, and ownership – thus outlining a new set of issues, implications, and consequences.
It offers case studies from around the world and each chapter considers mobility matters associated with tangible and intangible cultural heritage (relating to art, film, music, games, manuscripts, traditional knowledge, architecture, cities, and more) and the involvement of a variety of actors in digital heritage practices and interventions (such as artists, activists, communities, museums, non-profit organisations, educational institutions, enterprises, and governmental agencies).
For RM* is relevant the chapter The transfer to Ethiopia of digitised manuscript copies by the British Library by Eyob Derillo and Alexander Herman.
They describe how in 2019, representatives of the British Library handed over a hard drive consisting of over 100 high-resolution images to the Ethiopian Minister of Culture for deposit at the Ethiopian National Library.
These were digital reproductions of manuscript pages that are of great historical and cultural importance to the nation of Ethiopia: the 349 original books had been looted by British troops from Maqdala in 1868 and are now in the British Library’s collection.
The 2019 transfer raises pressing questions about whether such a return is tantamount to a ‘restitution’ of cultural material. If we understand restitution to be a return as a way of doing justice for past wrongs, does a digital transfer suffice?
The Ethiopian case allows us to investigate the role of digitisation within the larger debate around the restitution of contentious collections.
Can a digital transfer unaccompanied by physical artefacts ever be enough? What impact does it have on countries of origin, notably in terms of access provided to the material?
In certain circumstances, transferring contentious heritage material through digitisation can serve some of the aims of restitution, but it will always depend on the specific circumstances of the case.
