Contested Holdings

Contested Holdings

The value of art - a human life? : works of art in the crosshairs of the persecution of Jews under national socialism / Ulrike Sass -- Return as reconstruction : the Gwoździec Synagogue replica in the Museum of the History of Polish Jews / Ewa Manikowska -- The other Nefertiti : symbolic restitutions / Ruth E. Iskin -- Blurring objects : life-casts, human remains and art history / Noémie Etienne -- Of phrenology, reconciliation and veneration : exhibiting the repatriated life cast of Māori Chief Takatahara at the Akaroa Museum / Christopher Sommer -- Ancestors or artefacts : contention in the definition, retention and return of Ngarrindjeri old people / Cressida Fforde, Major Sumner, Loretta Sumner, Tristram Besterman and Steve Hemming -- A long term perspective on the issue of the return of Congolese cultural objects : entangled relations between Kinshasa and Tervuren (1930-1980) / Placide Mumbembele Sanger -- 'How would you like to see your great-grandfather in a museum?' : the issue of 'human dignity' in repatriation processes (cases involving French museums) / Cristina Golomoz -- (De)museifying racial taxonomies : the display and/or the restitution of human remains of indigenous peoples from Southern Africa / Damiana Oţoiu -- Baroque returns : the donations and reuses of Francesco Gualdi / Fabrizio Federici -- Getting the Benin bronzes back to Nigeria : the art market and the formation of national collections and concepts of heritage in Benin City and Lagos / Felicity Bodenstein -- What future for looted Syrian antiquities? : The clash between the law and practice for the repatriation of cultural property to countries in crisis / Erin Thompson -- Conclusion. Unfinished projects of 'decentering' Western museum practices / Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu and Eva-Maria Troelenberg.

Contested Holdings

Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger set of processes of return that affect museums and collections, as well as notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.

Constitutional Rights of the Mentally Ill