First appearing in the late sixteenth century in the Ambras Castle at Innsbruck (which belonged to the author’s ancestors, as she discloses in the introduction), the Penacho was later incorporated into Vienna’s Museum für Völkerkunde, which eventually became the Weltmuseum Wien. The case study selected, the feathered headdress known as the Penacho de Moctezuma, is especially ripe for this investigation. In 2022, in an unprecedented act of recognition and restitution within a contemporary Latin American nation, the Chilean National Museum of Natural History returned a Moai, one of Rapa Nui´s iconic stone monuments, to the island.Īgainst this backdrop, The Contested Crown by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll is a welcome attempt to analyze how debates and claims sparked by repatriations worldwide–from the Benin Bronzes to Maori Tonga, to Nazi looted art-could lead European institutions to take action toward the restitution of their holdings from the Americas. In even fewer cases, artifacts and human remains have been returned not to national governments but to the communities from which they were removed.
The very few instances of repatriation in the region have been negotiated between specific museums and private collectors, who have returned objects to countries of origin, rather than through centralized state-led policies. Latin America, specifically, has been relatively absent from these debates because of the enduring legacies of Indigenism as a key politics of nation making, justifying the appropriation of Indigenous cultural production in favor of the nation.
Much of the literature engaging the repatriation of museum collections has focused on claims made by postcolonial nation-states, or by Indigenous communities in settler-colonial contexts such as the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Performance Art/Performance Studies/Public Practice.Museum Practice/Museum Studies/Curatorial Studies/Arts Administration.Drawings/Prints/Work on Paper/Artistc Practice.Digital Media/New Media/Web-Based Media.Architectural History/Urbanism/Historic Preservation.Subject, Genre, Media, Artistic Practice.
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