List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations

Introduction
Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu, and Eva-Maria Troelenberg

Part I: From Objects Back to People: Ways of Life and Loss

Chapter 1. The Value of Art – a Human Life? Works of Art in the Crosshairs of the Persecution of Jews under National Socialism
Ulrike Saß

Chapter 2. Return as Reconstruction: The Gwoździec Synagogue Replica in the Museum of Polish Jews
Ewa Manikowska

Chapter 3. The Other Nefertiti: Symbolic Restitutions
Ruth E. Iskin

Part II: The Subject of Return: Between Artefacts and Bodies

Chapter 4. Blurring Objects: Life-Casts, Human Remains and Art History
Noémie Etienne

Chapter 5. Of Phrenology, Reconciliation and Veneration: Exhibiting the Repatriated Life Cast of Māori Chief Takatahara at the Akaroa Museum
Christopher Sommer

Chapter 6. Ancestors or Artefacts: Contention in the Definition, Retention and Retun of Ngarrinderji Old People
Cressida Fforde, Major Sumner, Loretta Sumner, Tristram Besterman and Steve Hemming

Part III: ‘The Making of Law’: Politics and Museum Ethics

Chapter 7. A Long Term Perspective on the Issue of the Return of Congolese Cultural Objects : Entangled Relations between Kinshasa and Tervuren (1930–1980)
Placide Mumbembele Sanger

Chapter 8. ‘How Would You Like to See Your Great-Grandfather in a Museum?’: The Issue of ‘Human Dignity’ in Repatriation Processes (Cases Involving French Museums)
Cristina Golomoz

Chapter 9. (De)Museifying Racial Taxonomies: The Display and/ or the Restitution of Human Remains of Indigenous Peoples from Southern Africa
Damiana Oţoiu

Part IV: Partial and Paused Returns

Chapter 10. Baroque Returns: The Donations and Reuses of Francesco Gualdi
Fabrizio Federici

Chapter 11. Getting the Benin Bronzes back to Nigeria: The Art Market and the Formation of National Collections and Concepts of Heritage in Benin City and Lagos
Felicity Bodenstein

Chapter 12. What Future for Looted Syrian Antiquities?: The Clash Between the Law and Practice for the Repatriation of Cultural Property to Countries in Crisis
Erin Thompson

Conclusion: Unfinished Projects of 'Decentering' Western Museum Practices
Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu and Eva-Maria Troelenberg

Index

Contested Holdings

Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return

Edited by Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu, and Eva-Maria Troelenberg

306 pages, 16 illus., bibliog., index

ISBN 978-1-80073-423-4 Hb Published (February 2022)

eISBN 978-1-80073-424-1 eBook

Details

“Contested Holdings makes a refreshing and invaluable contribution to the rolling discussions surrounding restitution and reparations. The editors have successively produced a comprehensive and invaluable resource – a volume anchored to the sturdy groundwork of the contributors’ meticulous and exhaustive research.” • The International Handbooks of Museum Studies

“This is a timely book that tackles controversial, pressing issues from a range of angles in an innovatove way. The editors and authors indeed manage to reach beyond the currently predominant focus on provenance research, restitution and repatriation by foregrounding actors and challenges as well as political and epistemic aspects of appropriation and return.” • Annette Loeseke, Bard College, Berlin

Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger set of processes of return that affect museums and collections, as well as notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.

Felicity Bodenstein is a lecturer in the history of museums and heritage studies at Sorbonne University, Paris. She is also a principal investigator of the digital humanities project, financed by the Ernest von Siemens foundation, “Digital Benin” (https://digital-benin.org/) that will bring together data from close to 200 museums holding pieces from the 1897 British colonial expedition to Benin in their collections.

Damiana Otoiu is an assistant professor of political anthropology at the University of Bucharest. She coordinated several research projects, including Museums and Controversial Collections: Politics and Policies of Heritage-Making in Post-colonial and Post-socialist Contexts (2015-2017) and Decolonial Practices in Museum Collections (Europe and sub-Saharan Africa): Local Histories and Global Circulations (2021-2022).

Eva-Maria Troelenberg is professor for modern and contemporary art history at Utrecht University. Her main fields of interest include transcultural art and museum history, arts and visual cultures of the modern Mediterranean, Islamic art history and Orientalism.

Series: Volume 14, Museums and Collections

Subject: Museum Studies Archaeology Cultural Studies (General)

Area:

LC: CC135 .C6295 2022

BISAC: ART059000 ART/Museum Studies; SOC003000 SOCIAL SCIENCE/Archaeology; ART006000 ART/Collections, Catalogs, Exhibitions/General

berghahn New York · Oxford

Contents

Contested Holdings

Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return

Edited by Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu, and Eva-Maria Troelenberg

Series: Volume 14, Museums and Collections

Subject: Museum Studies Archaeology Cultural Studies (General)

Area:

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Contents

Contested Holdings

Museum Collections in Political, Epistemic and Artistic Processes of Return

Edited by Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu, and Eva-Maria Troelenberg

Series: Volume 14, Museums and Collections

Subject: Museum Studies Archaeology Cultural Studies (General)

Area: