When physical anthropology “specimens” turn back into ancestors: Ethnographic materials on the Indigenous peoples of Southern Africa in the age of open science

By Damiana Otoiu
English

The collections of ancestral remains of the Indigenous peoples of Southern Africa kept in museums, research institutes, and university labs are arguably a prime example of a “problematic” anthropological collection that, as part of the work of “undoing Empire” (Rassool, 2015b), should be returned to living descendants. Such a restitution signifies more than a “mere” reburial of remains; it also involves initiating a dialogue with the descendants around the status of the raw ethnographic materials created by the anthropologists who studied the Khoe-khoe and San Indigenous peoples: field notebooks, inventories, photographs, plaster casts, sound recordings, as well as around the research being currently carried out (or to come) on these collections. By focusing on a few South African case studies, I show that the consultations surrounding these collections and the knowledge resulting from their analysis bring together multiple actors and logics, at local, national, and transnational levels, which go well beyond the simplistic opposition between “academics” and “descendants.” The different actors and their underlying rationales, while often contradictory, must be taken into account when databases and digital infrastructures are created and shared, in order to challenge (rather than consolidate) the “colonial archive and its modes of evidence” (Lalu, 2009).