Contesting the Box: Museums and Repatriation (Book chapter)

‘Boxes: a field guide’ (edited book) Eds: Martina Schlünder, Susanne Bauer, and Maria Rentetzi

A book full of boxes. A box in itself. An unboxing. This book explores boxes in their broadest sense and size. It invites us to step into the field, unravel how and why things are contained and how it might be otherwise. By turning the focus of Science and Technology Studies (STS) to boxing practices, this collation of essays examines boxes as world-making devices.

Gathered in the format of a field guide, it offers an introduction to ways of ordering the world, unpacking their boxed-up, largely invisible politics and epistemics. Performatively, pushing against conventional uses of academic books, this volume is about rethinking taken-for-granted formats and infrastructures of scholarly ordering – thinking, writing, reading. It diverges from encyclopedic logics and representative overviews of boxing practices and the architectural organization of monographs and edited volumes through a single, overarching argument.

This book asks its users to leave well-trodden paths of linear and comprehensive reading and invites them to read sideways, creating their own orders through associations and relating. Thus, this book is best understood as an intervention, a beginning, an open box, a slim volume that needs expansion and further experiments with ordering by its users.

Contesting the Box: Museums and Repatriation

The modern public museum is known for its collecting, sorting, conserving, and exhibiting work; in this article, through framing the museum as a particular kind of box, I tell the story of how this box gradually relinquished these functions and came to be “unboxed” in many ways. 

I discuss the crisis of the museum box: the ways in which the modern public museum shifted from a showcase and justification of Empire to one that could no longer translate nor encase its objects. A museum serves not only to contain and enclose particular objects but also to frame and tell stories or narratives with objects (see Appadurai 1988). This suggests that boxes are not simply given but rather emerge and are made by multiple practices, forces and actors including political forces of colonialism and Imperialism and social forces of education and control. These forces are dynamic, not static; they are in a constant state of flux. Consequently, these same forces can also unmake a box or object.

I tell the story of the museum box through the frame of the repatriation of a sacred headdress back to its originating community and the exhibition that it gave rise to. Along the way, I discuss how the museum box came to be opened and debated, how it relinquished its authority to define its objects, and in some cases relinquished the objects themselves. In the course of doing so, a different kind of box altogether was created, one based on newly developing notions of mutual respect, understanding, and increasing collaboration. The museum box then is no mere mute receptacle to the objects contained within but rather emerges in conjunction with its object, each giving form to the other through their varied lines, traces, and trails (Ingold 2007).