By stirring provenance research away from the idea of involuntary loss of possession, it becomes a discipline concerned with building durable, equitable relationships with stakeholders from the global south.
In this way, provenance research serves not only as a method of historical inquiry, but also as a means of opening up the collection and creating opportunities for renewed contact with the individuals, communities, and institutions connected to its contents.
Archival research needs to be put in dialogue with other ways of knowing and telling history, because only then can it function as a pathway towards reparative justice, shared authority, and the co-creation of more inclusive narratives about cultural heritage and the colonial past.
The questions the authors pose in their research can be summed up as follows:
Where is an object from (both culturally and geographically speaking)?
- How, by whom, and from whom was that object collected, and what did its trajectory into the collection look like?
- What was the function and meaning of objects prior to them being collected?
- How has an object subsequently been used and interpreted by the museum?
- And what role has the museum played in international networks of collecting cultural heritage during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?
These questions reflect the institutional responsibility of the museum, which has a duty to provide ground knowledge on the constitution of the collection it cares for.
On 23 January 2026, the Netherlands Association for Anthropology (NEvA) and Etnofoor organises a webinar about this and other articles from 14:00 – 16:00 CET: Etnofoor-NEVA(ABv) Webinar | (Un)making the Archive: Presents, Pasts & Futures
The webinar invites participants to think with archives rather than simply about them. It asks how scholars, artists, activists, and community members work with silence, absence, and excess. It foregrounds methods that attend to what has been erased from the archival record and that treat archival engagement as an ethical and political practice in the present.
