Contested Holdings

Felicity Bodenstein is a lecturer in the history of museums and heritage studies at Sorbonne University, Paris. She is also a principal investigator of the digital humanities project, financed by the Ernest von Siemens foundation, “Digital Benin” (https://digital-benin.org/) that will bring together data from close to 200 museums holding pieces from the 1897 British colonial expedition to Benin in their collections.

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations



Introduction

Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu, and Eva-Maria Troelenberg



Part I: From Objects Back to People: Ways of Life and Loss



Chapter 1. The Value of Art – a Human Life? Works of Art in the Crosshairs of the Persecution of Jews under National Socialism

Ulrike Saß



Chapter 2. Return as Reconstruction: The Gwoździec Synagogue Replica in the Museum of Polish Jews

Ewa Manikowska



Chapter 3. The Other Nefertiti: Symbolic Restitutions

Ruth E. Iskin



Part II: The Subject of Return: Between Artefacts and Bodies



Chapter 4. Blurring Objects: Life-Casts, Human Remains and Art History

Noémie Etienne



Chapter 5. Of Phrenology, Reconciliation and Veneration: Exhibiting the Repatriated Life Cast of Māori Chief Takatahara at the Akaroa Museum

Christopher Sommer



Chapter 6. Ancestors or Artefacts: Contention in the Definition, Retention and Retun of Ngarrinderji Old People

Cressida Fforde, Major Sumner, Loretta Sumner, Tristram Besterman and Steve Hemming



Part III: ‘The Making of Law’: Politics and Museum Ethics



Chapter 7. 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



Chapter 8. ‘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



Chapter 9. (De)Museifying Racial Taxonomies: The Display and/ or the Restitution of Human Remains of Indigenous Peoples from Southern Africa

Damiana Oţoiu



Part IV: Partial and Paused Returns



Chapter 10. Baroque Returns: The Donations and Reuses of Francesco Gualdi

Fabrizio Federici



Chapter 11. 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



Chapter 12. 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



Index