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    The Benin tusk and Zulu beadwork: Practicing decolonial work at Manchester Museum through shared authority


    Chipangura, Njabulo (2023) The Benin tusk and Zulu beadwork: Practicing decolonial work at Manchester Museum through shared authority. Museum Anthropology, 46 (2). pp. 106-116. ISSN 0892-8339

    Abstract

    The museum world is currently grappling with questions of how to decolonize anthropological collections and many of these debates are epistemologically oriented. In pursuit of colonial ordering, material culture was extracted from colonized societies, deprived of its contextual meaning, and scrutinized through the lens of colonial knowledge. This article considers how an empirical decolonial practice can be applied drawing on from the current work at the Manchester Museum (MM). Dialogue, open engagements, multivocal conversations, collaborations, and shared authority in knowledge production are some of the decolonial strategies that I share. To illustrate this praxis turn in museum decolonial work, I first look at how we have addressed cultural objects looted from Benin in 1897 that we hold and “contain” at MM in our living cultures collection, underscoring a commitment by MM to transparency and a provision of access to the living collection by different groups of people. The second example is drawn from a collaborative provenance research that I undertook with Nongoma community members in South Africa in rewriting biographies of Zulu beadwork that we house at MM. Overall, I argue that decolonization should embrace a relational practice of caring for objects through active relations of reciprocity and dialogue with communities. The downside of decolonial practices and how are they are inherently shaped by power imbalances and tensions between curators and communities is also critically discussed.
    Item Type: Article
    Keywords: collaborations; colonial violence; decolonization; dialogue; living cultures; tensions;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Social Sciences > Anthropology
    Item ID: 21512
    Identification Number: 10.1111/muan.12279
    Depositing User: Njabulo Chipangura
    Date Deposited: 07 May 2026 14:43
    Journal or Publication Title: Museum Anthropology
    Publisher: Wiley
    Refereed: Yes
    Related URLs:
    Use Licence: This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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