Njabulo Chipangura (Maynooth University and former curator at Manchester Museum) gave a lecture on museums, colonial legacies, and the ethics of care for the Natureculture Lab Reading Group.
A central theme of the presentation was the inseparability of colonial collections from the histories of violence, dispossession, and unequal power relations that produced them. Chipangura emphasised that many museum collections emerged through processes of conquest, coercion, and colonial extraction.
One of his most compelling aspects was the challenge to the category of the “object” itself. Many materials held in ethnographic museums are not inert things but participants in living cultural worlds. They may hold spiritual significance, ancestral relationships, social agency, or ritual meanings that cannot be separated from the communities and practices that sustain them.
A drum, for example, is not simply a material artifact valued for its physical characteristics; it produces meaning, participates in social and ritual worlds, and sustains relationships within communities. Similarly, at Manchester Museum, human remains are approached not as anthropological specimens but as ancestors. This distinction shifts the focus away from ownership and preservation alone and toward questions of respect, responsibility, and care.
Chipangura also revisited the legacy of salvage anthropology — the belief that Indigenous cultures were disappearing and that their material heritage needed to be collected and preserved by Western institutions. From this perspective, collecting was often framed as a form of care. Yet Chipangura invited us to question whether removing objects from communities, separating them from their contexts, and placing them within museum collections can genuinely be understood as care.
At the heart of Chipangura’s presentation was the concept of relational curatorship. Rather than positioning curators as experts who speak on behalf of communities, relational curatorship understands communities as partners and co-producers of knowledge. It is based on dialogue, reciprocity, and shared authority. This approach connects with the African philosophical concept of Ubuntu.
An example came from Chipangura’s work with diaspora communities from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Tanzania, and South Africa. Community members were invited into museum collections to engage with objects through memories, stories, sensory experiences, and shared interpretations. These encounters transformed the museum from a repository of objects into what anthropologist James Clifford described as a contact zone.
