(Repatriat)Able Bones

Tales of Ambiguity in the Repatriation Nexus

Abstract

European museums (of ethnography) and the material culture under their custody — a large portion of which was collected by the soldiers, explorers, and professional looters of the colonial era — are increasingly confronted by formerly colonized countries and Indigenous communities demanding the repatriation of their cultural patrimony. In this context, more and more ancestral human remains become the protagonists of their descendants’ concerted efforts to bring them back home and offer them a reburial. Recognized as having been brought to Europe and its museums primarily as specimens for the racial theories that scientifically abetted the colonial agendas of power and control, these bones now find themselves at the center of the contemporary scenario of Europe’s — delayed — reckoning with its colonial past. From an anthropological point of view, the current potential for repatriation to their native lands (and their capacity to acquire a ‘repatriatable’ status) should not be pinned down to singular meanings. Indeed, from their long museum sojourns and their unfolding repatriation adventures to their troubling stories of colonial acquisition, the reclaimed remains seem to condense diverse temporalities. Analytically speaking, this paper suggests that the bones’ ‘repatriatable status’ does not entail their entrapment within a discursive system of binary oppositions, but their emergence as social persons that could be paralleled to other classical person-like ‘things’ in anthropology: the art objects of Alfred Gell, or the Maussian gift. Through such a theorization, the repatriatable remains are empowered to teach us that the social dramas around their potential return are not necessarily about the infliction of closure, but the activation of incessant cycles of reciprocity. Repatriation then, can be narrated otherwise: not as a story of resolution, but as one of irreducible ambiguity.