I just came home from an excellent workshop at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History called “After the Return: Digital Repatriation and the Circulation of Indigenous Knowledge“. In our seminar this week I will be talking about some of the themes and debates that emerged as we explored a spectrum of digital projects that have, at their core, a deep social and technological interest in using digital media to “return” heritage to originating communities. Some of these include:
- the status and significance of the “digital” heritage object: replicas, reproductions, copies, and control
- ownership of cultural heritage in the digital age, and Indigenous claims for intellectual property and copyright
- the role of intangible cultural heritage in the museum and its representation with digital technologies in real and virtual/cyber museum environments
- cultural protocols and Indigenous ontologies, and their translations into digital databases
- opportunities for re-mediation of cultural heritage facilitated by digitization
- participatory research methodologies and research ethics
- the shifting role of the museum as a public institution
I will talk about some of the projects that were presented in the course of the workshop; in advance of the class you may want to look at a few of them–all listed on the Digital Return Website. I will talk in particular about the Reciprocal Research Network, and you will be reading Rowley et. al’s 2010 paper about the RRN (I encourage you to sign up for an account at http://www.rrnpilot.org). Our discussions will be undercut with our attempt to understand Anderson’s notion of the “imagined community” and the role of museum (along with the census, and the map) as an instrument through which “the colonial state imagined its dominion––the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry” (Anderson 1991:243). Building on last week’s discussion of shifting curatorial authority in the museum and public expectations of access to cultural knowledge, I’ll suggest that projects like those featured in the Digital Return workshop provide us with insight into cultural, political, and institutional contexts where national ideologies (including First Nations, Aboriginal and Tribal nationalisms) and relations of power are being contested and reinscribed.