Are museums celebrating cultural heritage—or clinging to stolen treasure?

via National Geographic, 23 February 2023: This story doesn’t have a Southeast Asian angle (it focuses mainy on Africa) but the issues are the same. Can there be ‘universal’ museums if museums do not engage the origin communities (and the often-dubious acquisitions) of these collections?

Last year alone, Germany transferred ownership of hundreds of objects to Nigeria’s national museum commission, France handed 26 artifacts back to Benin, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York cut a deal to transfer ownership of dozens of sculptures to Greece.

“Around 1900 you had competition between European nations to have the biggest ethnological collections,” says Bénédicte Savoy, a professor of art history at the Technical University of Berlin. “Now I think we have a competition to be the first to give the things back.”

Many curators hope the shift will be the beginning of a new era of cooperation between museums and the communities and countries their collections originally came from. Critics, meanwhile, worry that the returns may spark a chain reaction that will dismantle “universal” museums whose international collections offer unique insights into how the world is interconnected.

Source: Are museums celebrating cultural heritage—or clinging to stolen treasure?