Plunder and Return: Colonial-era Artifacts as Contested Cultural Heritage and Their Ethical Predicament

The return of colonial-era artifacts has greatly exaggerated the ethical predicament of decolonization and post-colonial conditions. The restitution of African cultural heritage is expected to establish a new relational ethic (of the colonizer and the colonized). Yet the idea behind the restitution is grounded in the rights to private ownership in close relation to capitalism, and thus has political-economic and theoretical implications we seek to explore in this article. Though there has been much debate over the restitution of cultural objects, objects or things are still understood in light of something possessable or alienable without socio-cultural and sacred values. However, instead of instituting a new ethical relation, this idea of objecthood faces the difficulty that the original materiality of colonial-era artifacts hardly restores when returning their home countries. In this article, we suggest that the debate over the restitution of cultural objects should be engaged in the material turn in anthropology or what is called “new materialism”,which is helpful for us to reflect on the materiality of cultural objects.