Repatriation

Abstract

Repatriation is the return of persons, material heritage, and/or associated knowledge to its place of origins. Within anthropology, this frequently refers to the return of items collected and held within museums or other institutional collections to originating communities. Origins and originating communities are variously identified as nation-states, Indigenous or ethnic groups, kin groups, cities or villages, or sites of removal. It is repatriation from cultural institutions, as opposed to battlefield repatriation or repatriation of displaced persons, that the bibliography focuses on. Anthropology is well into its second generation of focused repatriation scholarship, whereas the material culture and human remains at the heart of repatriation requests have frequently had a much longer place in anthropological research. Many items now returning through repatriation processes were originally collected and made objects of study by anthropologists and archaeologists. During the formation of anthropology and archaeology as disciplines, museums, material culture (see the separate Oxford Bibliographies article Material Culture), and physical anthropology were central. Collecting, documenting, and measuring the physical bodies and material heritage of cultural groups were understood by anthropologists to generate data, while museums were sites where comparative analysis could occur, training of students happened, and emerging theories could be presented to scholars and the public alike. Given this history, it is unsurprising that anthropologists have been actively engaged in scholarly debate about the repatriation of materials (whether ethnographic or otherwise), as well as participants in the development of institutional policies, national legislation, and public understanding. In the contemporary moment, anthropologists frequently find themselves working with Indigenous peoples who are vying to hold colonial and settler nations to account for injustice, and who are asserting the viability and legitimacy of their cultural practices into the future. Repatriating ancestral remains and material heritage is one form of redress and expression of sovereignty for many nations and cultural groups. Thus, repatriation is increasingly understood as an expression of contemporary Indigeneities and nationalisms, pushing anthropologists to ask what roles repatriation—and museums more broadly—play in processes of decolonization, reconciliation, indigenization, and nation-building.