[Note: the articles are open access for ICOM members only]
This is the second issue of Museum International on provenance research. It has a wide variety of contributions. Editors Njabulo Chipangura, Yunci Cai and Sophie Delepierre write:
Some museums with ethnological collections, particularly those in Europe and settler-colonial contexts, must deal with the consequences of European colonial expansion and imperial knowledge-making.
These museums functioned as sites where objects taken from colonised peoples were removed from their lived social, cultural and historical contexts, and reclassified according to Western knowledge frameworks.
Through processes of collecting, cataloguing and display, complex cultural materials including objects and ancestral remains were reframed as specimens, artefacts or art, often detached from the contexts, relationships, practices and meanings that had given them the significance within their source communities.
This translation of objects into museum knowledge systems not only naturalised colonial hierarchies of value and authority, but also reinforced reductive and static representations, shaping how difference was understood, governed and exhibited.
This renewed interest in provenance research can thus also be understood as part of the broader agenda to decolonise these museums.
Over the past decade, calls to address colonial legacies in cultural institutions have gained momentum with social justice movements. The decolonisation agenda has directly informed renewed interest in provenance research, which seeks to recontextualise museum objects that were historically stripped of their social, cultural and historical meanings.
By tracing the conditions under which objects were collected, transferred, and institutionalised in the historical past, provenance research challenges the epistemic frameworks that once rendered such materials anonymous, decontextualised, or universalised.
