ABSTRACT

Implied in the rhetoric of cultural repatriation is the notion that objects will return to their proper or rightful place. This is usually explained as sending objects home or, in the parlance of Aboriginal Australia, seeing that they are back ‘on Country.’ This relationship between place and object is a critical one to the process of cultural heritage repatriation. When museum and archival objects are removed from storeroom shelving, cabinets and exhibition display cases and re-engaged with by source communities, they are almost always made anew through processes of transfer and relocation. What is often left under-theorised however is the changing nature of home and the different colonial inheritances that alter both the people and places that objects were originally collected from. Vignettes from different communities and localities are used in this talk to explore underlying notions of return, reintegration, and transformation as well as the different experiences of ‘putting things back in their place’ in fluctuating colonial space-time zones.

SPEAKER DETAILS

Dr Jason Gibson

Jason has worked extensively with Aboriginal custodians throughout Australia on history, museum, and heritage related projects for close to two decades. His first book Ceremony Men: Making Ethnography and the Return of the Strehlow Collection (SUNY Press, 2020) was awarded the Council for Museum Anthropology Book Prize 2021 and the Australian Historical Association W.K. Hancock Prize 2022. He is Lead Chief Investigator on the Collecting at the Crossroads: Anthropology, Art, and Cultural Change (1939-1985) Linkage Project and co-leads the Anmatyerr Shields, Songs and Ceremonies project with members of the Laramba community (N.T.).

ADDITIONAL DETAILS

Our speaker will be presenting in person at Deakin Waterfront: ad1.122 in the Sally Walker building (click here for the map).

Otherwise if you can’t make it, feel free to join us on Zoom.