boasblog papers. Thinking About the Archive & Provenance Research

In the debate about the colonial past of ethnographic museums in Western Europe, provenance research has emerged as a central method for researching colonial legacies and addressing museums’ need for decolonisation. Researchers have started to investigate colonial era collections systematically to create a sound basis for dealing with these collections in the future. As a consequence, they are increasingly seen as archives in themselves. What has been lacking, however, is a debate about the theoretical implications of this approach – what are the implications of such an archival perspective and what kinds of knowledge can provenance research create? To find answers to this question, the authors of this volume engage with a range of materials – from the famous Benin Royal Collections to a seemingly insignificant Egyptian doll. They approach these materials sometimes on a theoretical, sometimes on a very practical level to offer their different visions of what a theoretically grounded provenance research may look like

A Note on The Swiss Benin Initiative. Identifying Looted Artefacts and Addressing Their Return

The Swiss Benin Initiative is a joint endeavor that brings together eight public museums in Switzerland with holdings from Benin City in Nigeria. This research note presents the findings from the project’s first stage (2021-2022), which sought to identify the provenance of the collections and which objects were likely to have been looted in 1897. It presents a multi-sited methodology for undertaking provenance research in both museum collections and source communities and illustrates how Swiss museums are currently dealing with contested collections.L’Initiative Bénin Suisse est une démarche commune qui réunit huit musées publics suisses possédant des fonds provenant de Benin City au Nigéria. Cette note de recherche présente les résultats de la première étape du projet (2021-2022) qui visait à identifier la provenance des collections et à déterminer quels objets étaient susceptibles d’avoir été pillés en 1897. Elle présente une méthodologie multisituée pour entreprendre des recherches de provenance, à la fois dans les collections des musées et dans les communautés sources, et illustre la manière dont les musées suisses abordent actuellement les collections contestées