{"title":"Reaching for Ancestral Heritage: Sakha Collections in the Museums of the World","authors":"Tatiana Argounova-Low","doi":"10.1111/muan.70029","DOIUrl":"10.1111/muan.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper is devoted to the collections of old Sakha objects produced by Indigenous craftsmen in the north of the Russian Empire and now located in many museums around the world. For several centuries, objects representing Sakha material culture were taken away from their place of origin by explorers, scholars, collectors, and missionaries under the paradigms of “salvage ethnography,” evidence of exotic travels, specimens, and mementos. These objects ended up in museums' collections in Europe and America. This paper follows the steps of contemporary art historians, ethnographers, and museum practitioners in their efforts to access these collections. The main outcome of their sustained work that started in the early 1990s is a printed publication of a catalog featuring many of these items. The paper explores whether this output could be considered as a way to claim ownership of the objects, as well as a form of repatriation of ancestral objects. The paper contributes to the debates about access to ancestral heritage, processes of decolonization, and repatriation of Indigenous objects.</p>","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/muan.70029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145891106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Museum AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-12-02Epub Date: 2025-11-06DOI: 10.1111/muan.70026
Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia
{"title":"Doing Shaku for Kanchendzonga at the British Museum: Ritual Care and Relationship Repair for Deities and Kin From the Sikkim Himalayas in the Center of Empire","authors":"Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia","doi":"10.1111/muan.70026","DOIUrl":"10.1111/muan.70026","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>I didn't expect to meet Kanchendzonga in a plastic storage container in a British Museum study room. This is the chief mountain deity for my community in the Sikkim Himalayas; we live in his shadow in the valleys of Sikkim, and interact with him through daily rituals. My first response was to engage in a ritual apology that he had been left for so long. My next was to consider how this ritual apology may be extended into an act of ritual care that traces the provenance of this mask as a way to renew relationships between Kanchendzonga and the people of Sikkim, far from the British Museum, as an alternative to the extractive environmental practices underway in the Himalayas. This article contributes to discussions about Indigenous engagement and provenance histories in museum collections, and affirms the importance of ritual care as a form of rematriation.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145695159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Museum AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-12-02Epub Date: 2025-09-19DOI: 10.1111/muan.70022
Gudrun Bucher
{"title":"Historical “Koryak-Collection” in the Reiss-Engelhorn Museums in Mannheim, Germany","authors":"Gudrun Bucher","doi":"10.1111/muan.70022","DOIUrl":"10.1111/muan.70022","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>This article summarizes provenance research regarding a small collection from the Bering Sea region. The items were part of a bigger collection brought together by the painter Gabriel von Max. The city of Mannheim (Germany) purchased it from his heirs in 1917 as the founding collection of a planned museum (today's Reiss-Engelhorn Museums).</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145686430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Museum AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-12-02Epub Date: 2025-09-17DOI: 10.1111/muan.70020
Anya Gleizer, Jaanika Vider, Pablo Fernández Velasco
{"title":"“Seen Again”: Ethnography, Immersive Technologies, and Temporality in the Siberian Collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum","authors":"Anya Gleizer, Jaanika Vider, Pablo Fernández Velasco","doi":"10.1111/muan.70020","DOIUrl":"10.1111/muan.70020","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper proposes Virtual Reality (VR) and 360 film as promising fieldwork tools for addressing problematic temporalities in ethnographic museums and for collaborating with communities of origin. Focusing on the Maria Czaplicka Siberian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, we examine how previous methods of display marginalized the Evenki by denying their coevalness. Drawing on research in Evenkia in 2019 (part of the project Wandering in Other Worlds, Talking with the Spirits), we then analyze the potential of immersive technologies as fieldwork tools. While cautioning against the dangers of blindly trusting the promises of “empathy-production” and “immersion,” we emphasize ways in which immersive technologies can facilitate the decentering of “western” observational focus. We discuss how carrying the museum into the field via VR helped to challenge the observer-observed relationship prevalent in the museum. Studying how community members chose to share, create, and “re-see” their own footage, we further argue that the cocreation of VR/360 film with communities from Baǐkit, Surinda, Chirinda, Tura, and Sulomay destabilized temporalities prevalent in the Pitt Rivers Museum, facilitating a shift toward an Evenki, helical timeline.</p>","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/muan.70020","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145695553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sacred but Undocumented: Meeting the Challenges of Repatriating Poorly Documented Objects","authors":"Jason M. Gibson, Michael Cawthorn, Iain Johnston","doi":"10.1111/muan.70028","DOIUrl":"10.1111/muan.70028","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>What happens when sacred Indigenous objects held in international museums have no clear path home? This paper explores the challenges of repatriating poorly documented Aboriginal secret-sacred objects—known as <i>tywerrenge</i>—to central Australia. Despite limited provenance, these objects remain spiritually potent to Aboriginal custodians. Drawing on a multi-year, Indigenous-led project by AIATSIS, Deakin University, and senior central Australian men, the study consulted over 110 ceremonial leaders across nine language groups. All supported the return of <i>tywerrenge</i>, emphasizing spiritual connection over Western legal frameworks of ownership. Leaders called for repatriation to restore ancestral presence to land and community, not just to return physical items. The project culminated in a regional gathering where leaders advocated for a dedicated museum facility in central Australia, governed through adapted ceremonial protocols. The study demonstrates how Indigenous-led models can reshape global museum practice and promote culturally informed systems of care for sacred objects.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145686157","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Museum AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-12-02Epub Date: 2025-09-14DOI: 10.1111/muan.70019
Sandipan Mitra
{"title":"“Room of the Nudes”: Indian Museum and the Practice of Anthropology in India","authors":"Sandipan Mitra","doi":"10.1111/muan.70019","DOIUrl":"10.1111/muan.70019","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>Scholars of the history of anthropology in Western countries have called the museum “the institutional homeland” of the discipline. They have analyzed the prominent role played by museum collections in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century. Art historians and historians of empire have extensively explored the Victorian preoccupation with collection, classification, conservation, and display in the context of India. But scholars of the history of anthropology have ignored the constitutive role of museum collections in the making of anthropology in India. This article fills that lacuna by scrutinizing the evolving relationship between the anthropological collection of the oldest and largest multidisciplinary encyclopedic museum of India and the science of humankind. It examines how the anthropological collection of the Indian Museum, amassed by colonial administrators over the nineteenth century, came to act as the exhibitionary incarnation of the theory of racial classification of the people of India, and it then unravels how the university-based Indian anthropologists engaged with the same collection in the mid-twentieth century. In so doing, it foregrounds how the relationship between the museum and the discipline was intertwined with the ideologies of colonialism and nationalism.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145695462","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Museum AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-12-02Epub Date: 2025-09-12DOI: 10.1111/muan.70018
Eka Yusup, Reddy Anggara, Lukmanul Hakim
{"title":"Between Shadows and Silence: Reassessing the Role of the Wayang Museum in Jakarta’s Urban Cultural Landscape","authors":"Eka Yusup, Reddy Anggara, Lukmanul Hakim","doi":"10.1111/muan.70018","DOIUrl":"10.1111/muan.70018","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145695214","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Museum AnthropologyPub Date : 2025-12-02Epub Date: 2025-09-22DOI: 10.1111/muan.70021
Victoria Soyan Peemot
{"title":"Objects as Knowledgeable Elders: Lessons From the Reindeer Calf Halter Mȯnggu̇i","authors":"Victoria Soyan Peemot","doi":"10.1111/muan.70021","DOIUrl":"10.1111/muan.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article presents ongoing research that reconnects a historical ethnographic collection housed in a European museum with the descendants of its source communities in the transnational Inner Asian region, specifically among the Tozhu and Tukha reindeer herders of the Tyva Republic and Mongolia. Framed through Indigenous research methodologies and grounded in the author's personal linguistic and cultural ties, the study explores how museum objects—once detached from their living context—are being reactivated as sources of memory, identity, and intergenerational knowledge. Focusing on the reindeer calf halter <i>mȯnggu̇i</i> (also written in ethnographic sources as <i>munguĭ, monguĭ</i>), the article illustrates how material culture functions not only as ethnographic evidence but also as a relational conduit that fosters language revitalization, ecological knowledge transmission, and cultural continuity across borders. By attending to the entanglements between language, landscape, and material practices, this research argues for the transformative potential of collaborative museum work in supporting Indigenous futures.</p>","PeriodicalId":43404,"journal":{"name":"Museum Anthropology","volume":"49 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.8,"publicationDate":"2025-12-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/muan.70021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145695373","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}