 based. It can be good morning, good afternoon, or good evening. I am very pleased to chair this panel today. This is the first of two panels on the topic of heritage and repatriation. This is part of the SOAS Festival of Ideas, as you know. The Festival of Ideas is a week-long series of virtual events with a broad team of decolonizing knowledge. From this team we have devised many different events and therefore the panel today on heritage and repatriation will reflect on this big team of decolonizing knowledge. The issue of repatriation and restitution is a very important topic in terms of, as I said, in terms of decolonizing knowledge. In recent years it has become more and more prominent, especially with regards to the call to repatriate artifacts acquired in the colonial era to the places of origins. As you might have heard of different cases that have also been attention to the media. For instance, some of the artifacts from the British museums or some of the artifacts in Africa, specifically the Benin artifacts and so on. Our panel today is a panel of experts that specialize in this area of heritage and repatriation from anthropologists, art historians and perspectives. The expert will explore some of these heated debates and then with, obviously, specific reference to their own research, as I said, in art, archaeology, anthropology, and try to understand from specific contexts how this issue is dealt with and what are the constraints and the hurdles to discuss this big idea of returning objects to where they were taken from during the colonial time. As I said, this is the first panel of two, so please do tune in again on Friday, the 23rd at same time, 11am. Our technical team will put in the chat information about the next panel on this topic. Just briefly, I just wanted to say a big thank you to the organizers of the festival, in particularly the creative director, Dr. Amina Yakin, and the festival coordinator, Stefanie Girand, as well as for me, Oluytangi, that have been providing us with the virtual events. I'm not going to take too much time now. I would like, basically, the format will be, I will introduce one speaker at a time. Some of the speakers are still in the process of joining us. Therefore, I will now start to introduce the first speaker, Dr. Maria Costoglu. Sorry if I'm pronouncing some names. Sometimes, as you know, please apologies about that and do correct me. Our first speaker on this panel is Dr. Maria Costoglu, as I said, who is a lecturer at SOAS, University of London in the Department of Art and Archaeology. Maria has received a PhD in Archaeology from the University of Glasgow, and she's an expert in ancient metalwork. Before coming to SOAS about two years ago, before then, she was a lecturer curator at the University of Manchester and the Manchester Museum, where she taught and researched material culture and museum studies, and also served in various committees related to acquisition of artefacts. Therefore, it will be very interesting to hear from Maria, because on top of having academic knowledge, she also has a practitioner's knowledge of really understanding what are the issues in museums who are at the forefront of this idea of heritage and repatriations, because they are the custodians of most of the artefacts. So, it will be very interesting to hear from Maria and from her experience at the Museum in Manchester. Also, Maria, just to say she's currently a lecturer in Curatorial Museology at SOAS, and at SOAS as well, we have a very interesting MA programme in museums, heritage and material culture studies. Therefore, she will draw also on that teaching, and also she has kindly asked her students to join this panel and to take this panel as part of the learning experience as they are taking their courses at SOAS. Therefore, welcome all the students and again remind you that this is the first of two panels. So, please do follow us again in the second part. To conclude, Maria, just to say that she's a very passionate advocate of research-led collection-based learning, the bridge to divide between academia and the public in order to promote social justice. So again, I think that's really interesting how academia is important in terms of understanding the deep complex issues, but then he has to be put into practice. Therefore, the collaborations between academic and practitioner is extremely important. In one of the recent projects in London, she designed and led a master's student project with the National Maritime Museum, introducing decolonial narratives to the interpretation and archiving of the collections. I leave it like this and I now pass on to Maria. Just one more housekeeping point. Please do put your questions in the Q&A section of the Zoom at the bottom of the screen. Do feel free to put in your question at any time and then I will pick them up at the end when we reconvene with all the panelists for the discussion. So, please do put in your question as we go in along. Okay, I will now leave it to Maria to give us a presentation. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Angelica, and thank you for having me on this panel. Good morning, everybody. I'm very thrilled and I'm looking forward to the discussions today. As Angelica said, I'm sure this will feature in many of the presentations from colleagues today. Museum collections have been in the West especially, have been entangled with colonial histories, and it would be true to say that this is probably the case for museums around the world. Calls for repatriation of objects, of artifacts, are not new in the sector. They date back to the late 70s, early 80s, and they happened within the context of postcolonial debates, institutional critique by academics and artists who have questioned and problematized the authority of museums to hold and interpret objects that belong to cultures of other people, and also they were a result, if you like, of more involvement of visitors with connections, more diverse groups of visitors entering the museums in the West, especially in the 80s, later in the 90s, and a strong development of diaspora communities within the museum sector. So, as I said, we shouldn't be dealing with repatriation, the institution of cultural property as a new phenomenon. However, these voices have been really multiplied and became louder over the past years in the context of decolonization and social justice debates, and as it happens with the development of museums, since they are part and so much entangled in the socio-economics and cultural changes in society, museums kind of try to respond to these new demands, and I think to experience, and a lot of curators and other museum studies experts would agree, museums are not always very fast or very effective in their response to changes in society. So, what we currently see is that the sector is split and there is a great tension, so much so that the members of the International Committee of Museums, the so-called ICOM, cannot decide on the new definition of the museum. What is a museum? What is the role of museum in society in the 21st century? Every few decades ICOM suggests a new definition that really tries to clarify and advocate the role of museums in society, and they have been debating these new definitions for almost a year now, and the sector is really split into two with one hand members who believe that it is about time to advocate the role of museums in promoting justice, in diminishing inequalities, in being inclusive and so on and so forth, and the more conservative part of the sector who pushes by members, pushing back and believing that museums are here only to look after objects, to kind of simplify a very long and very heated debate. So, one thing is certain, however, that visitors, very much in the UK, where these visitor responses and feedback are monitored very, very closely, and now we have very good record of what the visitors actually think and expect and how they engage with our objects. Visitors are very clear in their feedback and they see museums that keep contested antiquities or contested objects as agents justifying the inequalities and the wrongdoings of the past. So, they are very vocal and very negative and very critical about this issue. And museums, as I said, had to respond to visitor feedback, had to respond to critiques and there are a few museums that have been more successful than others in repatriating some objects at the Manchester Museum. We had a few, some of the very early repatriation cases back in 2005 and so on. However, you don't hear about this as often in the news. I will come to the point towards the end of my brief introduction, which really aims to highlight some of the main issues the sector is dealing with. So, we now have a set of museological, if you like, tools and practices and good practice methods to address some of these issues and do our job as curators in a more transparent and inclusive way. And museums have tried these practices for a number of years and these practices range from inviting members of communities, source communities, as we call them, or members of the diaspora to co-curate or co-interpret collections and objects that originate from these same communities. We do see increasingly appointments of curators and other staff members in museums from these same communities to break out, to increase the diversity in the workforce of the museum in July. We also see efforts to revisit the archives and decolonize the language used in the archives, which is full of colonial biases. And of course, we see museums inviting more research into their objects and collections and be willing to open up these collections to the public and to students, to anyone who would be interested in engaging with these collections. And a lot of investment actually is going through the development of open storage or rooms and facilities that are appropriate for both the preservation and the care of objects, but also for inviting and welcoming people working with these objects and collections. So there is a very big range of engagement in the effort to decolonize or be more inclusive, if you like, with the way they use these objects. And bear in mind that not all objects in collections are contested, although these are the ones we are talking about today. And in many cases, these are not single small portable objects. They are full facades and freezes from ancient monuments. So defining the meaning of objects also is part of this broader discussion. In an effort to participate in these ongoing debates, I have initiated and run the past two years a very interesting project, rather multiple small-scale projects with the curators of the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich and London. I had previous experience from other collections in the Northwest, in museums in Manchester, Liverpool and Scotland, Glasgow, etc. However, coming to London and thinking about working with a museum that was built to glorify the British Empire, like the National Maritime Museum, is quite another challenge. And we were very, very fortunate to have very open-minded and very interesting curators who really don't have a lot of resources, but they have plenty of good ideas in how to do things differently within the contemporary context and trying to bring these ideas into their collections. So we built up some projects for our source master students and the students could contact original research. They were given access to everything the museum had about these objects and they tried to find, to fill the gaps in the history of these objects, to research their provenance and also come up with new narratives, post-colonial narratives, decolonial narratives and bring some of these very interesting ideas and debates the students are exposed within their modules and seminars at source and see how they can research and bring this more into the interpretation of these quite problematic collections. And then the museum actually gave us the platform to present the results of these projects and we had a series of different outlets to do so. Some of our students were given access to community learning programs so they could work with people from the communities or visitors of the museum. In other cases the reports brought up interesting information that changed the dating of some Chinese maps because of course we had Chinese students who could translate more accurately and they could also research Chinese archives and bring this information into the archive. We had a narrative developed by a student which is now, this narrative is now used in the guided tours of the Atlantic gallery and so on so forth. So the students really brought brilliant research skills into the project and the museum appreciated this and put this new information in good use if you like. However, one area where our students constantly hit the wall and they couldn't really find what we were expecting or what we needed for the objects, for the history of these objects, was the provenance of the objects. And it is the case in many museums archives that you might have a very sketchy line about the donation of this object back in 1825 and you might have the name of the person which could be spelled in every entry differently so you need to be very creative and do some genealogical research in order to find if all these different spellings actually represent the same donor and so on so forth. So there are some very big real issues in the way these objects were collected, in the way these objects were archived and they were accepted because 200 years ago museums did not really have very proper rigorous acquisition panels or even the policies to apply so there are a lot of problems in provenancing objects. Nevertheless, this is not the case with some of the very iconic repatriation cases we will see today and in the following presentations you will have more details on these ones and of course being Greek I couldn't avoid mentioning the Parthenon marbles and which actually I think Romina might correct me but I think it's one of the oldest repatriation claims still ongoing for something like 40 years now and there is no clear progress on this. We have the Rosetta Stone, Egypt has asked to repatriate the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, the Benin bronzes which is a huge group of objects with a very clear history related to the looting of these objects and of course we have Benin bronzes in France and Germany and other countries and so the iconic repatriation cases present us with very clear ethical and legal complexities and as I hope we will discover today there is no it's not an easy thing to have a blanket policy to deal with all the cases together we have we have conventions and we have guidelines etc however one of the reasons that we don't see these repatriation cases moving forward is that every museum operates under a different set of policies and statues and the official guidance by UNESCO or other bodies is only it only presents a set of recommendations it does not have any legal enforcement power to push institutions to do this or that or that and before I conclude I would like also to mention that when we are discussing repatriation we shouldn't be excluding all the objects that are currently in circulation from conflict zones think about Iraq, Syria, Yemen and and of course these objects have to be protected and when found have to be returned to the to to these countries there is the cultural property although it was not called such back in 49 it is protected by the fourth Geneva convention so immediately after the end of the world war two everybody realized the need to protect heritage and this is explicitly stated in the Geneva convention in 1949 and this convention prohibits military forces to to damage to damage enemy property actually when it comes to cultural property it obliges them to protect it of course we had these cases of army the army involved in the looting of Iraq antiquities etc and the media are full of such stories the details of what is protected under cultural property law can be found in the 1970 UNESCO convention and and I think the legalities are very complex and that's why countries prefer to discuss these claims in bilateral or international committees instead of involving lawyers etc because the issues are mainly ethical and moral and and there is still a question about the degree of legalizing this debate but this is beyond my expertise I think I don't know if we have someone with a legal expertise in the panel and a last point I would like to bring to the attention of the panel is the fact that we do tend to focus in repatriation claims with the western world of course because we have all these massive museums in west in north europe the states canada scandinavian countries etc however I think it is an issue that has to be addressed with the context of museums abroad the past few years we see the growth of museum industry china has built I don't know thousands of museums in the past 10 years india and south korea vouched last year to build 140 museums each or something like that we see saudi arabian building museums and so on so forth so there is a question about practice here about her inclusivity and representation when it comes to this to this to this issue and we will have to wait and see if these museums will have to face the repatriation claims or other claims in the near future thank you thank you very much Maria for a very interesting presentation and a very good way to start off our panel discussion and I'm sure some of the topics you you raise we can bring them back in the in the discussion afterwards I will now pass on to our second speaker Dr Romina Estrati also from soas Romina is a research associate to the department of development studies and the center of world christianity at soas she previously served as a senior teaching fellow to the school of history religions and philosophy teaching specifically on sub-saharan africa in fact her expertise is on ethiopia a research lies at the intersection of gender religious and development and applies a decolonial perspective to gender and development practice informed by a decade experience in community-based research in sub-saharan africa she has written on the ethics of international development western gender metaphysics and religious knowledge systems and the discourse of fundamentalism in gender studies the most recent research project was a decolonial ethnography study of conjugal abuse in the Ethiopian orthodox Tawahado community of Aksum which has evolved into an ongoing funded project called religion conscience and abusive behavior understanding the role of faith and spirituality in the deterrence of intimate part of violence in rural Ethiopia. Romina is also the co-founder of the open access publishing platform The Colonial Subversions which I really encourage you to check out because it's very very interesting. I will now let Romina give a presentation and then as I said we can go back to discuss later but please keep putting your question in the Q&A don't forget that thank you and the floor is for you Romina. Thank you Angelica thank you for the generous introduction well I have some slides so I'm going to put the slides up and just let me know if they're they're visible to all I think having some slides will make it a bit easier to follow is this okay okay I see no one complaining so thank you so much for having me as Angelica sort of introduction of myself suggests I'm not grounded in archaeology or you know heritage studies per se I come from an anthropological subethnographic point of view and so I thought I thought it was appropriate to title the presentation today The Colonizing Heritage Ethnographic Insights so it's really um it's a it's a topic that I'm really interested in on heritage and repatriation one because I was raised in Greece so the partner marbles were a case study that I was I grew up writing about in my you know essays in school um but also because I'm based in Ethiopia in Aksum and Aksum is you know is the center is the historical center of the Aksumite Kingdom which flourished in the fourth century and and you know it's an archaeological site so all these issues are very pertinent to my research and this is just a picture of a photo from my work in Aksum working primarily with clergy in the field and so because my emphasis has been very much on decolonizing theory and practice and development um I'm I'm I'm hoping to take an epistemological approach today so it's really about um questioning perhaps or problematizing what it means to decolonize heritage uh from that point of view from the conceptual point of view and then the implications for practice and museums uh sort of linking back to Maria's presentation and the question she raised um and I will I will draw because again I'm I'm an ethnographer I'd like to draw from the the research I have done and what that research suggests uh based on the discourses of the communities that I know and engage with and again as I said the aim is to inform these debates uh in an ethnographically grounded way you know if we if we can engage them uh directly in this debate then at least we can cite their discourses and realities and and in this way decolonize the the the discussion itself and ourselves and so in looking about definitions uh you know around to see how people conceptualize decolonizing heritage because again this is a there's multiple multiple ways of approaching this and one definition I found which is very interesting to me by the International Center for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property says and I'll read out loud because I think it's important uh decolonizing is about difficult conversations and reflections on the meaning of cultural institutions and who these institutions are intended to serve it is about open and true dialogue with all members of communities and society it is about sharing power and authority decolonizing is about cultural institutions becoming learning communities about the necessity to create room for multiple perspectives showing the different contexts that determine how we look at objects or themes now it this definition spoke to me because I I still recollect when I was writing my essays in in high school on why the partner marvels should be repatriated I was making the case that these monuments need to be appraised within their fullness and it's important for the viewer to view them from the outside as opposed to them being in a room in a closed room and being object objectified by the viewer so actually a perception of the object and the relationship to the object are very much spoke to me in person um but I thought I thought this definition uh kind of sets the ground for what I want to argue for it it's important to really look at cultural institutions becoming learning communities now the interesting thing is that for many uh for many people culture is a living organism and and I I think the way we understand cultural museums might understand cultures in the western context differ from the way communities understand culture and live it and experience it so what I would like to argue is in uh to promoting this idea of decolonizing heritage and and thinking of practical approaches to um question the fundamental metaphysical assumptions so the fundamental beliefs or philosophies that underpin this idea of heritage and what is culture and to sort of start doing that praxisically uh because decolonize decolonization is about uh praxis I kind of wanted to look at that at a case study um and this is again builds on on my on my uh sort of specialization and in 2019 the Atlantic published an article that was exploring in fact these very issues why the British are unwilling to return national treasures you know to previously colonized or occupied uh you know countries or nations uh mentioning you know the Parthenon marbles in Greece which were taken during um under the Ottoman occupation uh and also the um the holy treasures that were seized uh from Ethiopia by the British army after the battle of Magdala in April um 1868 um so in in the article there is an Ethiopian American novelist Miasa Mengisti who actually asks a bit lamentably uh why doesn't Britain recognize that these items are important to Ethiopia and they truly matter as much as the most holy and historical items in Britain now as a religious scholar as someone who has really deconstructed the concept of the holy and the sacred and religion uh this sentence to me and didn't really sound exactly right because the idea of the holy does not invoke the same feeling or sacred you know sacred or invaluable heritage that it does necessarily uh in the Ethiopian orthodox to Ahead of Context uh with which these items are linked uh because the holy was the idea of the holy and the sacred was fundamentally altered you know by Western European enlightenment and secularization processes begetting collective memories and understandings of British heritage which used to be a Western Christian Roman Catholic very different than the ones one finds in Ethiopia today and I'll take you through to understand precisely what I mean uh just before I move on this is a crown probably made in Gondar Ethiopia um in in the 1818 century it's held at Victoria and Albrecht Museum in London and I took the picture from their blog I hope this is fine but but these are the items are of invaluable uh in incalculable value so it you know they're very very valuable items that are held in churches and in um and you know uh holy places in Ethiopia so I thought I give a bit of a genealogy in in terms of thinking around culture in the Western context because it will set the stage so Western Europe experienced multiple stages of historical progression right and these included you know the widely condemned abuse of uh theological authority this used to be a Roman Catholic society the majority of Western societies then by formation struggles happened uh in order to liberate theology from political appropriation and then post-reformation enlightenment multiple alignments in multiple um uh Western societies to take religion out of the public sphere uh precisely because what as Talala said the Saudi Arabian anthropologist was pointed out uh because the religious was perceived as uh risking co-option by power and therefore as being dangerous to the public sphere so religious had to become a private thing an issue of the private sphere and now initially understandings of human understanding and human civilization and culture and advancement you know what human advancement means intertwine with this theological worldview that was widespread in these societies Western Christian values were oftentimes juxtaposed to local indigenous usually pagan societies and you know this fostered in combination with many other items and things and sort of uh you know the rise of nationalist identity in these societies foster essentialist representations of cultures and peoples and as religion started to be separated from the public life because of this pushback that I discussed the hiatus grew between culture and religion and the culture became more secularized and and with this human humanistic understandings of culture more dichotomies were increasingly introduced so culture versus nature mind versus body gender basis sex and so forth and I'm especially interested in in the study of culture specifically so this is this is how world systems and public life and sort of shifted in these societies but it's also interesting to look at the concept of culture and how culture was approached in science so with the rise of science in 18th century you know in scientism you know the the sort of secularization of knowledge production and philosophy we have multiple shifts in how culture is approached apologies that's someone on my on my door but I won't answer that so in the 15 and 16th centuries you know very roughly this is a very rough genealogy early theories around the development of civilizations tend to be evolutionary and so speaking about the advanced west versus primitive peoples 16 17th centuries as I said we have a rise of nationalist and empiricist philosophies and approaches taking a more context specific approach and then 18 19th century we actually have the study of culture by anthropologists being institutionalized as a discipline and at the same time around the same time we have you know ethnographic museums being established in London Paris Vienna Washington Munich Berlin although the Danish had established one as 1650 so up to the 20th century the study of culture focused primarily on questions of origin and evolution and then more hermeneutical paradigms were introduced precisely because there was more interaction with diversity of cultures and peoples you know anthropologists started taking more ethnographic approaches more grounded approaches and so forth now why is this important why is this genealogy important and why should we keep this in mind because I think it's important to recognize that culture within the western context was what I discern as a gradual objectification it was something that was to be observed studied scrutinized and this is also pertinent to the idea of religion which is a construct a 19th century construct that became again the objective study and as an outcome of secularization and the relegation of religious beliefs to you know from the public sphere to the private sphere now this objectification of cultural religion and the demarcation actually between cultural religion is very specific to these societies and the historical events and the sort of philosophical and the evolution of philosophical thinking in these contexts but it doesn't necessarily it didn't necessarily happen in other societies right because each society has a very different historical developments and I think it's also important to link this objectification of the concept of culture and the discipline of cultural you know the studying culture essentially anthropology with the with why you know with with why I guess there is a difference museum culture in the world so I've noticed you know when I'm based in various African countries that people are not as much interested in in going to a museum to see you know to to appraise a cultural item necessarily it doesn't have the same appeal the same relevance you know it's not it's not valued in the same ways so I think it really is important for us to maybe consider a bit more carefully how does the culture of museums that we have in western societies which is now as Maria suggested is spreading to other societies as I hear and is in how is that informed by the historical approach to culture and how culture was understood in these societies and then maybe in order to change that we need to really deconstruct or subvert these notions of culture and heritage that are implicit and now one of these as an anthropologist and others who work you know with various communities in the world we know that for many communities world views or cultures or whatever term you use are lived and embodied heritage and and they're oftentimes embedded in religious traditions that distinction is not made necessarily and that tradition continues in folklore practices so so culture is not something that is old you know it's not about necessarily about the past but it's something that continues within a once embodied practice every day in the vernacular reality so heritage is not something that is dead or of the past but it's lived and experienced and has relevance today to those communities um so you know to go back to this idea of the holy and the sacred it's really important to remember that the way the holy or the sacred is understanding for the Ethiopians those items were holy because they have a different meaning today um precisely because the holy was understood you know did not necessarily undergo these secularization processes and the banishment from the public life and so I'll make that clear I'll come back to that in a minute and so so if we were to look at the Ethiopian Orthodox Diohead community in which hand based in Aksumi northern Ethiopia I was fortunate to conduct this research I was about six months in the countryside where I lived with you know with the community and and we spoke a lot about the religious tradition in the life of the people of course I was looking at conjugal abuse but you know obviously this was ethnographic comprehensive research and when people spoke about heritage uh or when they spoke about the Ethiopian Orthodox tradition which was part of the wider vernacular life the cultural life the societal reality they spoke of it as heritage and they saw this as indivisible or sometimes as one of the same one and the same with the religious tradition which traces back to the fourth century in the kingdom of Aksumi when it was formally introduced so it has a very long history and it's considered the people's indigenous tradition that defines their identity and you know belonging um so you know religious idiom uh continues in everyday life in the vernacular practices of the people in sociocultural norms and in behavioral norms and in people's attitudes and it's really something that as I said gives people a sense of identity um and and you know roots um it gives them roots to something that they value and that helps them to you know give them a sense of identity this is the church of uh Mary of Zion Mariamtion in Aksum during holy week people will come for the whole week uh pray and fast and these are the obelisks in Aksum uh the one that is standing uh these were established again in the around the fourth century by in Parazana uh who was the one who formally introduced uh Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity in the country uh the the longest obelisk the tallest obelisk is I believe 24 meters uh the one that you see uh down um uh I think that was the the longest one 33 meters um so obviously these obelisks are again very much valued and um connected to the people's heritage and history a religious history now we thought this in mind we can then go back and revisit the British looting at Magdala that Meaza was lamentably asking about you know why don't the British understand what these items mean to the people to return them well they don't understand it because they don't have the same sense of holiness that the people in Ethiopia might have that that's my argument so just to say a little bit about the looting uh this occurred after the Ethiopian soldiers led by the monarch of the country children lost in battle and then children committed suicide and subsequently the British soldiers pillaged you know the citadel of the the disease monarchist treasury nearby church um which held valuable items uh and the boot included innumerable items uh of again uh you know invaluable um uh measure you know religious manuscripts sacred ecclesiastical items the tablets these are the plates that define the church so we felt the tablet a church is not a church really um icons and very other you know silver and gold uh items and and they have historical so this this these this event I guess is very important to people because Teodoros's defiance you know his decision to commit sacrifice as opposed to uh surrender is considered you know a moment of historical pride as something that um serves as a reminder of an instance of defiance especially in an era when colonialism was rising you know the scramble of Africa would happen in 1884 very soon so you can imagine what memories this event triggers to the people um and it also invokes again the indigenous heritage a religious heritage of the country right it's these are religious items that have a holy holy meaning uh and you know people might not necessarily know the theological interpretation of what exactly they they mean but but they hold them very dear because it's their sacred tradition so I would say on the basis of this case it's really important to try not to take a historiographical ethnographic approach when we try to understand what culture means to people what heritage means to people different communities and and learn from that and see how we can perhaps sort of adopt our ways whether it is practitioners researchers or museums in order to you know better better um respond to these notions of culture and heritage so already as Maria sort of pointed out decolonial and critical thinkers archaeologists practitioners activists of all sorts have made efforts to engage more substantively with communities whether it is in excavation and preservation of activities or in the production of historical narratives about artifacts or monuments and what these mean to them but I would argue that in parallel we need a radical reconsideration of fundamental concepts especially culture and to question to what degree the concept of culture as upheld were assumed by British museums by western telelocutors of all sorts reflects how the non-western communities or the communities in question they may be western as well of a different sort of belief system or you know different historical developments how they understand and live it so when British museums attune their understandings to the understandings of communities there might be possibilities for something better for change and it's important to predicate those conceptualizations of heritage to the embodied historical memories of communities and this obviously requires engaging with communities and their deeper belief and knowledge systems not superficially but actually trying to understand their own lived realities and memories of their own lived realities through their own discourses and that means speaking the local languages documenting oral histories reading local texts and manuscripts and spending time with people to understand what in the same spaces with the same artifacts monuments or you know items that are important to them so I think as scholars speaking to our panelists and being at us we have a responsibility to use our epistemic power with the flexibility of the sort of west-centric theories that we oftentimes still use maybe unintentionally and then facilitate this community-based historiography and storytelling and you know analysis or you know engagement with culture or cultural analysis I guess through the eyes and through the words of local communities and I'll stop here thank you so much I hope I didn't go too much of our time Angelica thank you Romina thank you very much for this very very interesting presentation and so rich and in that and you went a little bit over time that's okay because it was so interesting anyway so that's fine and now I will quickly pass on to our next speaker because as I said we still have two speakers to hear from and then we still want to have a little bit more time for Q&A and our next speaker is Christian Luz Sarnit sorry if I mispronounced your surname is Christian is a lecturer at SOAS and in the department in the School of Art and he studied his specialization is Tibetan and Buddhist studies that's where he gained his PhD at the University of Vienna at the Institute of Tibetan and Buddhist studies there after completing his PhD under the supervision of the late Maurizio Taddei that I'm very pleased to read this because I met Maurizio Taddei I also studied at Instituto Universale Orientale in Napoli and so I know the standing of Taddei and Christian you know it's great to hear that you you work under the late professor following his PhD he held research position at the University of Vienna the Austrian Academy of Science as well as the Lumbini International Research Institute he held visiting the professorship in the US at Berkeley also at the Free University in Berlin and Stanford University and as well while teaching in Berlin Christian also curated the exhibition Gandhara the Buddhist heritage of Pakistan legend monasteries and paradise and at the sorry I can't really pronounce this very long German word is the cruise and Ostolager something in Bonteraps Christian you might pronounce it for me when you start your presentation he worked together with Michael Jansen and was responsible for its catalog before joining SOAS he was senior curator at the Ruby Museum of Art in New York so again we had an academic who was also a practitioner so again we're very interested to hear the intersection I am not going to read the entire abstract that Christian gave me I will leave it to him to embed it in his presentation because I don't want to take more time so I'll now give the floor to Christian to talk about the Tibetan Buddhist monastery collections today thank you Christian thanks a lot I should have given a kind of introduction to my name to cross out the first C then it's Lieutenitz which is relatively easy to pronounce then and the other terminology that you asked was the Kunst und Ausstellungshalle of Germany in in Bonn that's where the exhibition was I'm going to share my screen as well with a short presentation so I hope that's visible now and talk about I will talk about my research project that is currently running I introduced that and then kind of put up some questions that are more broadly addressing this particular panel so I have a research project that is called Tibetan Buddhist monastery collections today and more recently was AHRC funded it works in two areas of the Himalayas and rather remote areas in that sense namely Lomantang which is about the center of the map and Ladakh in the upper left corner of the map here both rather remote and rural areas in the Himalayas with monasteries scattered throughout the region and what I'm essentially doing is I'm going to monasteries and document the collections that they have and I'll do that since 2012 with the first explorations that were still done when I was curated the Ruin Museum of Art and I continued that project when I came to so as in 2014 2016 to this year the project was AHRC funded and essentially I'll go every year to both regions Ladakh in India as well as Mustang in present day Nepal and engage the monasteries in questions of management preservation and display and on the picture you see essentially a traditional display as we found it in 2012 in Namgil monastery one of the most important works that we do is documentation so we'll simply document all the portable artworks including books and consequently or subsequently give inventories to the monastery not all of these inventories are done database in this particular database it really depends and in most cases we can only give a print out to the monastery simply because they are not they don't have the object management system with this work there was kind of an interesting change observed from in terms of the display of the objects because traditionally Tibetan Buddhist monasteries have quite literally been stuffed with objects that were accessible to the general public and on the left side we have a picture taken in 1981 at Hamas monastery in Ladakh where we see the entire space kind of filled with different types of sculptures and two of these sculptures which are in the foreground today in the monastery museum the Hamas monastery museum which opened in 2007 and it just gives a good relationship about of the difference between these these spaces but also that the modern display essentially copies western museum display with traditional furniture and equally if the monasteries needed will also help them in creating such spaces and we did that in particular for one monastery that is close to him is in Ladakh it's called Gemre and these were the plans and the case plans that we made for the new display and this actually shows the transformation of a space that clearly was not created as a museum space but they wanted to use as a museum space the plan for the display the making of the cases which were made locally and then after the installation of the objects in 2019 so you see the pictures here from 2016 to 2019 and of course now I can kind of look back at eight years of experience in this work and I think there are a few interesting observations that I can make in these regions are remote mustang hasn't had a road access until maybe three years ago permanent road access and even then in summer it's usually down but nevertheless the recent decades have seen a lot of modernization and that modest modernization affects the heritage of these places very severely and I think it's in part driven by outside funding as well as the leading monks being actually very well traveled and seeing modern institutions elsewhere and there is something and I'll just put that out there what I would kind of what one could call a kind of self-colonialization process going on in the sense that the monastery is essentially attempt to copy western museums and want to build museums within their structures in Ladakh that's more advanced than we have seen the examples already in mustang the idea is circulating and plans in this regard as well and it's interesting to note that most of this happens through the possibilities that outside funding offers usually of course very well meant outside funding but that also resides in distraction of heritage a good example here is the restoration of the monastery in Lomantang taking in 2015 where they essentially broke through the the 15th century wall to create the new entrance and enable the construction of a concrete building inside the monastery which of course is hardly usable in winter at an altitude of 3800 meters and with very low night time temperatures the other observations I wanted to make those about potential of repatriation that or thoughts about repatriation that come out of the project and in principle in some collections I could say yes I know that from from this particular monastery there is a set of objects of which let's say five sculptures are missing and if any of these five sculptures would be found it would make perfect sense to actually repatriate to the monastery itself and essentially reunite the set of sculptures it was originally made for but it's I also had may have made the observation that objects are also spread within the region itself so for example I have documented a whole set of books at one monastery but one particular set of book covers in another monastery does that need to be repatriated then in this case and and the the another example is actually that one particular sculpture set seems to spread to be spread across many monasteries I have now I think it was probably once 20 to 24 objects and it's spread across I've identified seven objects across three different monasteries so obviously this particular set has been spread within the region and what would be what would one do in these cases and so I think what this example is kind of supposed to demonstrate is the problems that you may actually encounter when you go there and with our ideas of of a museum world and and repatriation but what actually kind of happens or what you may find out may actually be quite different and in a way it's still a very strong western influence and it's rather me who tries for example not to build a museum but to to to argue for a traditional display but with kind of certain security features attached to it these precious objects so they always afraid of them to be stolen and for that reason the Hamas objects weren't accessible between the early 80s and 2007 the opening of the museum itself and they weren't accessible even for the local worshipers of the monastery and so in in a way the museum opened the possibility to show these objects again but all the attempts I made over the last eight years in essentially furthering traditional display were kind of in vain because what they want is to show that they are modern institutions and that they can have a museum just like we have in the west thank you thank you very much christians excellent presentation a lot of yes things to think about especially in terms of yeah how do we do repatriation is easily said than done but we have we can discuss this more in in a little bit and again mindful of time I don't want to take too much of my of time and I am now going to introduce our last speaker and then after the last presentation I will call back the panelist Berry Maria because I believe that Maria she had to leave at 12 o'clock so unfortunately we won't have her in the conversation but if there are specific questions for her we can then pass them on I am very pleased to welcome here Dawa Lokitang good morning I will say because she's based in the US therefore she just woken up so welcome Dawa to our panel today a brief introduction Dawa is a PhD candidate in the field of culture anthropology at the University of Colorado in the USA her dissertation research is on the establishment of sovereignty in exile by Tibetan refugees through the development of their own educational institutions and the larger diaspora community of Tibetans in India in addition to a research focus she's also interested in and is written about ways of belonging that are racialized and gendered within the Tibetan diaspora community Dawa is also concerned with the questions of Chinese settler colonialism and its impact on Tibetan subjectivities in colonized Tibet so in a sense Chinese imperialism more broadly and the need for decolonization as a necessary practice still in fun and fashion for counteracting such ongoing mechanics of racialized modern colonialism and imperialism. The scholarly writing has been featured in lexical books with forthcoming work with Duke University Press and also University Press occasionally she writes for Laka Diaries a well-liked blog run by N40 Tibetans or which is a co-founder Laka Diaries is also where you will find most of her writing so please do check the the blog out as well and I will now pass on to Dawa, sorry I'm mixing your name, to give her a presentation and then we can reconvene for the Q&A. There you go Dawa, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you for that introduction and thank you for the panelists for today's talk. I'm going to go straight to my powerpoint presentation and I'm going to read my presentation doing this right now so I just once again having technical issues. I just do share a button and I'm getting share screen. I'm getting many different options just dashboard whiteboard. Do I just click anything? Yes, you have a different option and you click on the one of the powerpoint. Okay, Microsoft Power. It's asking me for all kinds. You have to open the powerpoint first. It's open. Okay. I'm just not sure how to share it. At the bottom do you see share screen? Yes, I'm just getting a lot of different options just desktop one iPad. Okay, so perhaps if you can email it to Stephanie. Okay, I'll do it right now. Yes, SG96 at Sawal.ac.uk and then she will be able to share it for you. That's fine. Okay. No problem. Sorry about that. We all very new with this technology. So that's okay. Just send it to Stephanie and then she will just be able to share it for us. Okay, so I just. That's okay. Just emailed it. Yes, thank you. And I'll just motion every time I need to change the slide. Yes, you can say next. Okay. So just a few minutes to upload it. There it is, audience. And yeah, so Dawa will speak for about 10, 15 minutes. And that will leave us about 20 minutes for Q&A. I can see there's quite a few very interesting questions. I'll hope to get through, you know, as many as I can, but given the time constraint, I might not be able to answer them all. And if not, please, you can still say that. Oh, there we go. Okay. There we go. This is the presentation. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Stephanie. I'm just, I'm going to go ahead and read it without the camera. Yeah, so next. What does it mean to be a responsible scholar attuned to decolonization as a method responsible as a method responsible to whom when and why I'm struck by how simple yet complex this question is for me to answer easy because I'm a native scholar doing work with my own community. I know to whom I am responsible and my community's path towards self-determination is closely tied to my own liberation. That's the kind of work I produce impact my community and myself directly. So question of who I am responsible to is not a hard one for me to answer. However, working with the community with whom I am from does not guarantee I will not produce work that the Nepali scholar Bista describes as an insecure and thoughtless mimicry of the West. In fact, in demystifying some ethnographic texts on the Himalayas, Podar and Suba make clear that native scholars are not free from producing orientalist discourses. However, scholars who work with communities that they are from, I argue, are more mindful of this critique for they have familial and communal ties that can easily be threatened due to works that may be perceived as harmful to the collective. This also brings up the question of positionality for native scholars. Native scholars are tied to their community and so are susceptible to such works of harm, which I argue forced them to be less blind to perspectives of privilege. Thus, I do not see myself as having a choice over having responsibility, rather familial and communal bonds demand that I serve my obligation as a member of this community to produce work that is healing. In this response, I seek to de-center the framing logics of anthropological ethics by asking what happens when the question of responsibility becomes one of obligation, choice becomes necessity, and crisis exists as an everyday reality. As Mohawk anthropologist Audra Simpson argues, it is important not to fall into the delegitimizing trap of justifying native scholarship on the basis of identity politics and justice alone. Next. This matters, but a deeper reason relates to the ways in which Simpson engaged the distinction between resistance and refusal with event and structure. This cuts to the heart of the question. Ethical anthropologists are encouraged to do the right thing through the logic of ethics for the very reason they don't have to. However, like refusal, obligation, necessity, and everyday realities are the non episodic qualities that structure the daily lives of indigenous peoples, researchers, or otherwise. By naming refusal, Simpson has not presented a new fashionable anthropological turn. While her conceptualization is novel and valuable, the reality of refusal according to Simpson is something that indigenous people have experienced throughout the history of colonization. If colonization was an event, then resistance would be enough. It's not. Next slide. As Patrick Wolfe notes, colonization was and remains structural. Therefore, modes of decolonization must, too, be structural. If we truly want to decolonize, we must reimagine legacies of episodic conceptualization as structural, and move away from resisting colonial encounters by ethical outsiders. Towards the refusal of colonial structures by obligated stakeholders, for whom non obligatory ethics loses all meaning. Next slide. For guidance, I turn to decolonization methodologies by Maori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith, another native scholar during work with her own community and a leading theorist on decolonizing methods. Smith problematizes Euro-Western approaches to research that she argues has historically served to essentialize communities and assist those in power in their project to further colonization, a system she terms colonizing knowledges. In order to avoid this, she proposes research that is decolonial in method. For research to be truly decolonial, it must argue Smith, prioritize indigenous voices, histories, epistemologies, and their struggle against settler colonialism. In other words, research that orients itself around indigenous people and their thought and struggles first and foremost. Such an approach that Smith stresses must be collaborative and can lead to healing of the research and a wider scope of representation for the voices of the dispossessed, disenfranchised, colonized other in the research process. The goal, she writes, is to make them visible and integrate them in the academic discourse and the global knowledge economy. Thus, for me to produce responsible scholarship on the community from whom I'm from, my obligation requires me to produce decolonized work that centers them and their struggles and concerns. It requires indigenous scholars such as myself, argue Smith, to be ethical, critical, respectful, reflexive, and most of all, humble, so that native scholars may hear members of their community when they are speaking. Next. In 2012, the number of Tibetans who chose to self-emolate in Tibet began to increase at an alarming rate. Although the first Tibetan to set himself afire to protest in Tibet took place in 2009, following the 2008 uprising, which was the largest recorded protest in Tibetan history across the three provinces of Tibet, the number of Tibetan self-emolating jumped at an increasing rate from one in 2009 to 14 in 2011 to 86 in 2012. There were one or two self-emolations taking place almost every week during the winter of 2012. If one understands the self-emolations as episodic, it takes away its deeper relationship with settler colonialism, which is not episodic. Tibetans across the world reacted emotionally and in unison to this act because this is a physical manifestation of their everyday life and history. Tibetans organized at all levels to amplify the voices of the self- self-emolators so that their protest was seen and heard inside and outside Tibet. During this time, scholars of Tibet and the Himalayas stepped forward to take scholarly responsibility to address the misrepresentation of self-emolations of Tibetans in the media. Next. On April 9, 2012, American anthropologist, McGranahan and Litzinger edited a series of essays on the self-emolation titled Self-Emolation as Protest in Tibet. Months later, French Tibetologists Buffer Trill and Robin edited Tibet is Burning on December 14, 2012. I consider these works to be decolonial because they try to strengthen the voices of the self-emolators by giving their actions, socioeconomic, religious, political, and historical context, trying to, in Smith's words, make them visible and integrate them in the academic discourse and the global knowledge economy. Rather than take an objective stance, scholars came together to use learned knowledge from their subjects to engage larger conversations that contextualized individual self-emolators and their protests as the act took place. This was scholarship that drew on knowledge of indigenous pasts to make sense of their individual presence, especially during moments in which the baseline daily structural violence manifested in ways that were read internationally as episodic human tragedy. But where does my work as a native scholar fit into all of this? Next. In indigenous feminism, Suzak and Hondrap make the argument that for any work to be considered decolonial, such works need to first center settler colonialism. As the number of self-emolations in Tibet began to slowly rise in 2011, I began addressing individual self-emolators by intentionally placing them within the discourse of Chinese settler colonialism on Pakar Diaries, a blog I run with other Tibetans to serve as a platform for Tibetan thought by us for us. However, the alarming rise in numbers in 2012 put me in a constant state of anxiety, especially when I felt so far away from friends and family who were engaged in practices of commemoration and solidarity. I made every effort to bring up self-emolations as they took place in every space I was engaged. Next. On April 11, 2012, I was invited by a friend to give a targeted talk on the self-emolations as these acts were virtually unknown at my university. I felt obligated in the positive generative sense to amplify their calls to action. Following this, I wrote another post on Pakar Diaries giving an outline of my talk for others interested in doing something similar for public awareness. In all these posts and talks, I situated individual self-emolators against the backdrop of Chinese settler colonialism. Next. In Indigenous feminism, the project, held in Italy argued that to decolonize, one needs to reclaim, reread, and rearticulate Indigenous peoples from the past and the present, whose voices are always being misrepresented or erased. Next. I published the essay, Their Burning Bodies Told Histories Never Forgotten, on December 18, 2013. The essay was my attempt to write against colonizing narrative on the self-emolations by the Chinese state, as well as to speak with rather than for its self-emolators. Next. Aside from few scholars, most reports on the self-emolations and scholarship and media until then had mostly focused solely on just the act and very little attention had been paid to whom the self-emolators were speaking and the structures that they were speaking about. The article was my attempt to write about the self-emolators and the audience they were speaking to. It was my attempt to reclaim, rewrite, and rearticulate self-emolators and their multiple audiences. This, according to Hilden and Lee, is how I am able to begin the process of healing of the research myself included. The reason I go through this timeline is to demonstrate how my role as a native scholar requires me to always address present circumstances of the Tibetan community at all times. The position of colonized Tibetan, a refugee exiled Tibetan, suggests a positioning of crisis that isn't episodic, but an everyday structural affair. I consider the historical approach I have adopted over the course of my progression as a scholar to be a method to decolonize next. It is a method that has helped me center the voices and subjectivities of Tibetans in the present using their memories of the past, a method many Indigenous scholars stress. It also allows me to engage Tibetan pasts in order to make sense of Tibetan presence so that we may collectively engage in imagining Tibetan futures. An engagement that Indigenous scholars argue preoccupies itself with the project of healing. For my work to be truly decolonial, it must engage the concerns of my community at all times because it engages the futures of not just myself, but my family and thus my community. Decolonized work suggests pathways towards individual and communal healing. This is how I view my obligation as a native scholar doing work with my own community. As such, I invite researchers to consider a structurally decolonizing praxis. This would not only involve theories and methods generated by community members with whom you work. It would also employ the genealogy of works produced by Indigenous scholars over the last 40 years. The contributions made by such scholars often remain inaccessible in our disciplines, yet they offer ways of approaching questions regarding ethics and responsibility that anthropology and other disciplines often consider important. Next. Having engaged refusal, we might ask a larger disciplinary question beyond the level of the individual. What happens when scholarly ethics becomes disciplinary obligations embedded into the ethnographic process itself to refuse the everyday structures of ever-present colonization? Next. So this is my presentation. Thank you. Thank you very much, Dawah. Thank you for your presentation. Very interesting and very sort of in line also with Christian, so it was good to see representation across from Africa and Asia in this panel. I will now call back the panelists if you can come back to us by unmuting and putting your video on again. I will now read through some of the questions that came into the chat, into the Q&A, and perhaps you can feel free to answer some of these questions as you feel comfortable. Okay, so there is some question about, there is a specific question. Let's ask about the Coenur Diamond. What about the Coenur Diamond and others in the Queen's Crown? In the panel opinion, should they be returned to India? Is anyone willing to ask any question, Christian or Dawah, perhaps? Or Mina, I mean, or anyone? Are you happy to answer this? So shall I take a few more? It's up to you. I don't know. I don't think we should kind of take single objects and decide where they should be. This is a discourse obviously in many ways. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. There was some question about, isn't the practice of self-colonization building on museums in non-Western communities practice as a way to haste the repatriation of the artifacts? This is the question for Christian specifically. Maybe on a state level, yes. I would assume so that, but I think not necessarily at the monastery level. And I forgot to kind of mention that at least in Nepal, it's the case that the ownership of the objects is not entirely clear. So theoretically, the state could always claim the object for anything, it seems. And there's kind of certain insecurity in terms of the laws regarding the objects and what the role the state could play within that. And so it's mostly a cultural basis. And then you have in countries like whatever, both Nepal and India, you have also the tensions between the ruling or the state itself and the minority within it that of course sees the itself quite independent of the state as such. Yeah, that also needs to be considered. We have two questions for Romina. And then I can see Romina also, she wants to comment on this one. But Romina, there are two questions for you. The first is, may I discuss your definition of heritage in Ethiopia? I have a different experience when discussing this in Ethiopia. And the second one for Romina is, how can the involvement of local communities suggested by you in excavation and preservation activities led by critical nonetheless European researchers invert or even really subvert the colonial relationship of the epistemically advantaged Roving Orientalism with the narrative, with the native informant or assistant. So Romina, perhaps you can comment on the previous one and then answer this question. Excellent questions. I think the first one was from Dorothea. I would love to hear what kind of insights Dorothea had from hair interlocutors because it differs. Dorothea, I don't know where you are based. It differs. Ethiopia has multiple ethnic cultural and ethnic groups. And depending on the religious tradition, depending on the culture, people might perceive it differently. Hence, I did emphasize that one has to take a context specific approach. In this research, because the emphasis was on the religious tradition, I think people sort of felt that it would be relevant to invoke the religious tradition first when they thought about heritage. So maybe if we had a different kind of conversation where the topic or the emphasis was not on the religious tradition, maybe they would approach it differently. So obviously discourse matters. And this is the, I think the important element in ethnography that one needs to be aware of how one introduces a topic in what context and understand that the way you ask the question or the way the topic is introduced will influence how people respond. So I think there is a limitation that one needs to be reminded of. So thank you so much. If you want to join and just ask your question, if it's possible, I'd love to hear. And then on the second one, I think it's a brilliant, excellent question. What is our role? I come from Eastern Europe, by the way. We had our own experiences of being colonized and occupied. So I do understand, I'm not necessarily a Western researcher, but I am based in the West. So of course, that the affiliation and the geographical position makes me sort of complicit in the coloniality that continues. So I'm very much aware of it. But I also have my own positionality, which is also from a different region. And those two positionalities inform also my approach. And my approach was really about placing emphasis on the linguistic and conceptual repertoire of the community as much as possible speaking of languages. So I was trained in three of the languages that were relevant, two of which I speak quite fluently, to Greenham-Harrick and the ecclesiastical language, just to be able to access manuscripts and religious texts. And so language was very, very important, because it's the means of communication. And the other important sort of element is the methodologies. As Dawa mentioned, Linda Tihua Smith's work about decolonizing methodologies, being reflexive and using methodologies that allow the community to really voice their own understandings without preconceiving those or giving them the language to do so, a language that is foreign. So for my research, I use very much participatory workshops. So instead of the standardized standard anthropological approach, where you just observe, where you presumably in a distance manner, I was very much involved, very much lived with the communities, spoke the languages to the best of my ability and use participatory methods. So workshops where the community were invited to define their own topics, their own language, and their own ways of analyzing their own experiences. So it was very much exploratory. And I think, again, going back to Dawa's point, humility. I think, look, we can't avoid who we are. We can't skew the power dynamics we are embedded in. But I think if there is humility, and we understand our own biases and challenge those as we go along the way constantly, and we want to listen to what we're being told. And I think there is possibilities to do subvert the system. But of course, we kind of skewed all together. I hope this answers the questions. Thank you very much, Romina. Dawa, please come in to comment. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to say that it's kind of in relation to what both panelists just, who just went. And my emphasis was about positionality and the fact that how we train researchers, you know, meaningful ways of approaching research that's ethical. I'm also questioning whether, you know, these are just episodic kind of, you know, reactions versus how do we make them more structural? How do we do ethical research that isn't just based off of how we, you know, how we'd like to do research rather, how we make these standard practices that are, you know, obligations rather than just choices. But also like I'm, I'm, I'm a little familiar with Nepal and, and Ladakh. And as Dr. Christian just spoke, positionality there is also extremely important to consider in terms of the state versus local community. How much jurisdiction does the state have over ways in which communities want to approach development and museums? But also, you know, like in terms of like autonomy over a decision making process, and even within the community, there's also positionality in terms of hierarchies of who gets to make these decisions. So I also think there needs to be, you know, attention paid to the state versus local, whether they're colonial or not, dynamics and who really gets to make decisions about museums. But I also think there needs to be room for local community to be hybrid. I think there is a tendency to make natives seem as if they're static in time. If they want to museumize, I mean, I will say Tibetan refugees have been very good in the exalt Tibetan community to weaponize museums to tell their own narratives. This can be said for indigenous communities during the same who want to center settler colonialism as an avenue for telling the development of their current situation and communities history. So I think, you know, a larger way of looking at this needs to be closely paid attention to positionality. And the question of ethics, you know, whether it's choice or it should be structural. Angelica, you're muted. Sorry, sorry. And I was just saying, thank you, Dawa. It's very important to emphasize this important this question about ethic and what do we mean by engaging the community because sometimes they can be maybe slogan rather than actual practices. Going on with the questions going back to the bigger topics of repatriation of cultural heritage, we have one question for all panel members. Let's ask how would you approach a discussion with the British Museum about repatriation of cultural heritage material to traditional owners? What would be your main arguments? And I just wanted to add here that it will be interesting for you to come in on Friday as well, because on Friday we specifically talking about the return of the icons. I recommend everybody to read the report, which, you know, is specifically bringing us example and the British Museum is involved in this conversation. So, but again, yeah, it's quite complex and I will let the panelists to come in and initial some light. Yes, Romina, you want to start? I mean, I'm happy to share some thoughts because I've followed these debates. So I was a participant last year at the European Association of Archaeology on the decolonizing panel. So it was the first panel that was ever held on decolonizing archaeology in Europe. And this very much question came up, the same question, what do we do when, you know, perhaps as researchers, as activists, when we communicate with museums to make a convincing argument? And there's multiple sort of responses that museums can give, right? They will say that if we return one item, it will set a precedent and then it will sort of, you know, everyone will, essentially, everyone will ask their items back and then the museums will be emptied. So this is sort of the argument that they often use to discourage that, you know, that thinking in the thinking in that direction of repatriation. But I think the best approach that I have heard in the various debates I heard is that we let communities make their own demands and decide where, you know, if there are debated items or items that have been taken, you know, go back to the communities and discuss dialogically and participatory on what the approach should be and how this, you know, in conversation with the community. So, you know, there might be a community that might say actually it's better to let the item rest in the British Museum because it's safer or, you know, we're fine with an arrangement that, you know, we can learn to each other. So what I think the approach here is not necessarily to say that there is a one-size-fits-all, right, and actually encourage museums to have that conversation with the different communities to not see it monolithically, but actually look at the context in each case and appraise it in conversation. I mean, I think that's a sort of a practical approach, but I'd like to hear the other panelists. I'm really curious. Yeah. Thank you so much. I mean, I just wanted to add that, yes, the conversation with communities, but I will say perhaps the conversation should also be with state museums in the country we're talking about because at the end of the day, I'm not sure communities can actually receive, as well as museums in those countries, for instance, I did some work with the Museum of the Resalam or the Museum in Nairobi. You know, I think the conversation had to be also at that institutional level with the involvement of the Ministry of Education and at that kind of high level because here is the British Museum is this kind of high-level institution and we can expect an equal partnership with communities that don't have that kind of level of power, whereas perhaps museum practitioners and museum directors and Ministry of Education and Cultures in specific countries, I believe that might become more effective, but also there is a lot of issue around the legality and also, as you said, about the way in which preservation can take place. So it's quite complex, different layers of I mean, just as the communities often do have sort of informal institutions that represent them that are not equivalent to the Western institutions, so I think even the concept of institution differs that we need to be aware of. Absolutely. Christian, what do you want to come in on this issue, how you see actual practices of repatriation within your whole research areas? Yeah, no, I think as a background, I think it's important to know in this context that across the Himalayas objects disappeared for decades, but they have no evidence for it. And so it's practically impossible to go back for them to go back and say, you know, this was in the prayer room of this and this house, we want to have it back. And it won't work that way. And this is one of the reasons why I do the documentation at the first place, to ensure that they have evidence for what they own. And evidence of what they own is, of course, the most important element that you can bring in to this discussion to get objects back if they were illicitly sold or something like that. It was stolen. I also wanted to comment on this. So during the military invasion of Tibet, a lot of artifacts were stolen. Actually, artifacts were stolen in 1904 by the British when they invaded Tibet. Then again, 1911, when the Qing invaded. And then again, in 1949 through 59 is when the Communist Republic invaded and colonized Tibet. So over the course of 10 years, there's been a lot of looting. And a lot of these objects have somehow found homes and private ownership collections like the Rubens actually in New York. And again, as Christian commented, it's hard to kind of figure out how to do repatriation with the lack of bureaucratic legal documents. Again, back in those days, legal procedures were not standardized. So now we have a standardized practice. So I also think it complicates how we think about repatriation, especially when we've developed standardized practices in the current moment that we can't go back in time and reproduce. So I think it's interesting in terms of how private collectors themselves want to engage with repatriation as a method for kind of giving back. I also think Rubens' relationship with the Tibetan community is interesting because they've gone from an institution that Tibetan refugee community in New York villainized at first for actually housing a lot of these stolen artifacts during the invasion of Tibet. And then I would say a decade later, now they're actually participating with the Tibetan refugee community in New York to do community kind of outreach and community kind of engagements. How do I feel about this? I think it's a better approach than previously not engaging with the Tibetans in New York, primarily choosing to engage with Tibetans inside Tibet because authenticity was always an issue with anthropologists and museum anthropology. But I think, I do think it's positive steps forward for trying to engage the community. But I do think, again, there's a lot of power politics and positionality that needs to be considered because this is a beneficial relationship for Rubens also. So I do think that we shouldn't just excuse museums as spaces for just producing, ethical ways of approaching new ways of doing engagement. But the fact that these museums need these artifacts to pretty much run its own identity. So I do think that that needs to be considered. Thank you, Dawa. As I got you here, could I also put another comment that is there for you from Renata Peters? She says, thank you, Dawa. I much prefer the concept of weaponizing museum than self colonization. Would you mind commenting on that briefly? And then I was actually put off by the word self colonization. I'm not a museum anthropologist. So I have no idea what this is. So when I heard self colonization, I just had a major reaction like what does that even mean? But I do like the concept of weaponizing museums because I do think at the end of the day, museums produce discourses and narratives. And I think what's really important is what is the museums for and who is the audience? Most of the time, it's not the native communities. It's outsiders. Museum has a long history with colonialism, just like anthropology does. So in terms of trying to change its identity in the current moment, I do applaud the discipline for trying. But I do think a lot of attention needs to be paid to how specifically native communities in North America and Pacific Islands, how they are using museums as a way to tell a story that centers them rather than the settler colonial states. So the development of indigenous sovereignty and nationhood and the history of colonization told through their perspectives. So again, I do think audience matters here. I think for a lot of indigenous communities, museums become a way for teaching their own community about their history, but also teaching outsiders about what happened to them. And the fact that what happened to them is not going to determine what happens to them in the present and in the future. So it is also about telling a story not only about the past, but again, my emphasis has been talking about how does the past influence the present? And how does that shape the way forward for a future? So if we're talking about agentive ways of moving forward, this is something that needs to be considered. So again, I'm not really sure about the word self-colonization, but again, I don't really know the background for this. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dawa. Before we close, I will just give another couple of minutes to Christian to come in and comment for maybe a couple of minutes and Romina a couple of minutes. And then unfortunately, we have to close the session. So Christian, yes? Yeah, besides the weaponizing museum question, Renata also posted an earlier one about to whom or for whom these museums were made. And of course, locally, they are made for in the end, I think, for tourism, but they are also presented as for the local public and making these objects accessible to the local believers again. And so very classic example is him is monastery that says in local language, it's a good and come to the locals. So it's a religious room, so to speak, that has the body support, but sells it as a museum to the Westerners. And so I think it's very clear that they engage two different audiences through the same institution here. And that is built in the concept of self colonization is of course just the kind of way of me to think about it, because I'm a bit puzzled by the whole phenomenon of them wanting to create these institutions that are essentially foreign to them. And in the context where they actually have the institution already to achieve more or less the same thing. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Chris and Romina. Final comment? I think I fully cover, but I mean, I was just to comment on what Christian Dallas said on self colonization. When I heard it, I thought, again, sort of replicating the model of the museum and the culture around the museum in a context that might not had this culture of museums or might not think of culture in the same way. Because again, I think the museum, in the way we've known it so far, there might be other ways, as Dawa says, that we're not exposed to. The culture is sort of at the center of what you perceive. So it's being objectified. There's that relationship in my travels and engagements with communities. For many communities, culture and heritage has lived and it's lively and it's used. It has actually used in the daily life. So for instance, an Ethiopian church or a monastery might be sort of a place to see if you're a tourist, so might have that kind of function as sort of in the lines of the museum, I guess, but it's being used actively in the daily life and it has other meanings as well. So I think learning from the communities themselves, perhaps there is a way of teaching something about us, as in any community, through the monuments or buildings or artifacts or tools that we use every day, through that active use. So it doesn't have to be, I think Dawa used this term made static or made an object in order for it to be appraised as something of cultural value or heritage. So that's what I would say. Learn from the communities. Yes, brilliant. Thank you so much, everyone. Unfortunately, we have to close.