The museum display of ancestral remains and its historicities

Objects in museum collections have always evoked differing ideas of how museums should label, conserve, display and return objects, especially when human remains are at play. Discussions around these types of material culture are now heightened and often contentious as public opinion and museum staff are becoming increasingly aware of the afterlives of colonial practices in today’s world. This paper focuses on a set of ten wooden figures from the Raja Ampat Islands (Southwest Papua, Indonesia), collected in the 1920s, of which one sculpture’s head is a human skull. Named ‘the Raja Ampat Altar’ since their collecting, the figures have been on display in West Papua, the Netherlands, the UK and France and have seen the involvement of the Raja Ampat village communities, but also that of Dutch colonial administrators, missionaries, museum staff, museum visitors, Raja Ampat and Papuan communities in the diaspora, Polynesian museum advisors and artists. By tracing a century of narratives – from the 1920s to the 2020s – around the display and the naming of ancestral remains in so-called ‘World Museums’ that, from the nineteenth century onwards attempted to present culture in an organized way, the paper discusses the different historicities at play for the people implicated in viewing, naming, displaying or removing these Raja Ampat objects from display. This leads to the question: what is at stake in terms of people’s constructions of time and identity in relation to the ‘altar’?