![[Talk] The Ancient Town of Si Thep in Thailand: A Crossroads of Indianization](https://www.southeastasianarchaeology.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/the-ancient-town-of-si-thep-in-thailand-a-crossroads-of-indianization-502-120x86.jpg)
Readers in Tempe, Arizona may be interested in this talk about the repatriation and restitution of Southeast Asian antiquities by Prof. Ashley Thompson coming up on November 3.
To what extent does restitution live up to its name? Can an object be returned to its original place? What does such a return (un)do? What’s a place, for that matter, or an object? Is a place the same before and after the destitution/restitution? And what about ownership: could you imagine a form of restitution that wrests an artefact away from a culture or an ideology of ownership? To what extent does restitution participate in or confirm the reduction of a complex cultural form to a tangible, material, objective state, or to a marketized commodity? Where does restitution sit in the uneasy divide between decolonization as a concrete political action and a decoloniality that takes on more abstract, arguably less tangible structures? In any case, these ‘returns’ are anything but simple and seem to function on several different levels, in different, culturally incommensurable frames and even with different apparent temporalities. In this session I hope to sketch some links between three projects I am currently involved in: one on the circulation of Southeast Asian artefacts in the context of ongoing interventions around restitution, one on decoloniality in Southeast Asian art (history) and the third on the new/old cultural or national narratives that returning artefacts (re)tell.
https://asuevents.asu.edu/event/global-asia-lecture-series-restitution-oninto-southeast-asia
