The starting point, as written down by editors Gabriele Alex, Alexis von Poser, Anna Schäfers and Anna Szöke, is:
Ethnographic and non-European art collections currently form a field that is particularly prominent in the public eye, since the methods of curating, exhibiting and work-ing with cultural belongings have undergone significant changes over the past twenty years.
These changes are rooted in postcolonial and decolonial approaches, especially since the institutions housing these collections are confronted with ongoing debates about their entanglement with histories of colonialism and unequal power relations.
Consequently, new approaches were and still are needed to establish and sustain fair relationships between museums and the communities of the collections’ places of origin.
The current practice of cooperation and collaboration in ethnographic and anthropological museums shapes and is shaped by the debate surrounding social and cultural anthropology as a whole. Since the early beginnings of the discipline, anthropologists have practised and theorised collaborative curating and collaborative and participatory research, both in and outside museums.
The articles in this special issue show that collaborative museum practice is neither merely a technical process nor a set of strict ideals. Instead, it is an ongoing negotiation involving infrastructures, epistemologies and historical responsibilities.
The institutional contributions demonstrate how collaboration depends on reorganising the fundamental conditions under which museums operate. Meanwhile, the collections-focused articles reveal how these structural changes are tested, reinterpreted and sometimes undone through direct encounters with communities, objects and lived histories.
