Skeletons in the closet - A post-colonial perspective on museums of world culture and foreign cultural heritage

Abstract: This study stems from an opinion that the current approaches to the repatriation of articles of cultural heritage to their places of origin are inadequate. Attempting to find alternative ways to discuss the matter, I am using idea analysis to investigate if the museums of world culture can be problematised and criticized from a post-colonial perspective – if they can be found to be maintaining a heritage of the colonial era. Finding that this is indeed possible, I use normative given that-analysis to discuss if these museums can still defend their existence and their keeping of the foreign cultural heritage they have got in their collections. Using three different normative logics to study this question; deontology, consequentialism and the logic of appropriateness, I find that different answers can be reached – that museums should send back everything they have got in their collection, that they should not send back anything, or that each repatriation request needs to be looked at individually.