Abstract
Provenance research on European museum collections of colonial origin is a process of knowledge production from the reconstruction of collection items’ trajectories and the memories and meanings attached to them, often envisioning an eventual restitution to their supposed communities of origin. This paper examines how this process of examining and possibly returning physical relics of colonial extraction risks reproducing colonial knowledge and its accessibility. In order to counter this risk, it proposes a conceptual shift towards participatory approaches of engaging the scholarly as well as local communities on both sides in sharing and developing knowledge about and from the collections and creating equitable mutual access to the different layers of the produced knowledge. The thoughts presented here are supported with examples and experiences from collaborative field research on selected object collections from German museums in possible communities of origin in Tanzania.
Published Version
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