England Is Hiring a Researcher to Write a Report on How Museums Should Return Colonial-Era Artifacts

England is looking for someone
to write the book about how to return artifacts that were looted
during the colonial era. 

Arts Council England, the UK’s
state-funded organization dedicated to promoting the arts, is
offering a contract for
someone to develop “guidance on restitution and repatriation for
UK museums.” The move
follows similar efforts by other European countries, including
France, which commissioned an
ambitious report on the
permanent repatriation of African heritage in
2018, and Germany,
which passed a
“joint declaration on
the handling of colonial collections” last March.

“Restitution and repatriation of
objects in museum collections is an area of increasing focus and
debate across the UK and international museum sector,” the posting
for the contract reads, noting that there’s been “increasing calls
for action” across the country to “address this
agenda.” 

“This is particularly, although
not exclusively, focused on objects in Western museums acquired by
European nations from former colonies, and links to wider agendas
around decolonizing museums. There is significant government,
public, and press interest and increasing calls for action by UK
museums and sector bodies to address this agenda,” it says, adding
that the last guide on this issue in the UK, published in 2000 by
the Museums and Galleries Commission, is now both out of print and
virtually inapplicable in the current sociopolitical
landscape.

Applications for the job, which
pays £42,000 ($55,000) are open now through January 31, with a
start date of February 24. The chosen contractor will be tasked
with analyzing previous research on the matter and consulting with
museum leaders and cultural experts across the UK.

Though similar in intention,
there is still a question over whether England’s effort to address
ongoing calls for the repatriation of stolen artifacts will meet
the bar set by France and Germany, each of which devoted
significant government resources and even more time to developing
their own guidelines. Yet in those cases, too, it remains to be
seen how much action really
results from such reports.

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How Museums Should Return Colonial-Era Artifacts appeared first
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