Real-Time Repatriation: Data Governance for Social Anthropology in the Twenty-First Century

The rapid growth of the international data economy has forced the field of Australian social anthropology to clarify its attitude to data governance in general, and the attendant broader scientific objective of open data in particular. Concomitantly, Indigenous communities in settler-colonial jurisdictions around the world have mounted increasingly effective legal challenges to the removal of their cultural property by researchers, including social anthropological research data. This article presents an overview of these convergent developments, summarizes the underlying regulatory context, including relevant international conventions, guidelines and principles, and then synthesizes a generalized data governance protocol by which social anthropology may adapt its practices in a manner consilient with contemporary expectations. “Real-Time Repatriation” describes a prospective data governance protocol, demonstrated here using an Australian case study, which is designed to provide formal, transparent and ethical terms and definitions for social anthropology’s articulation with the data economy and best-practice open data science.