Where Memory Meets Matter: Indigenous Conservation Knowledge, Practices, and the Ensemble of Spiritual Cultural Belonging, North East, Namibia

This paper examines the interwoven spiritual, material, and ethical aspects of Indigenous conservation knowledge in Namibia, through the study of two sacred cultural belongings among the 23 repatriated/ returned from the Berlin Ethnologisches Museum to the National Museum of Namibia in 2022. The two objects originate from and are utilised by some communities in the Kavango East, Kavango West, and Zambezi regions of Namibia, and form part of an ensemble of healing and protective ritual instruments. Despite their long separation, communities identified them as spiritually connected through remembrance and living memory, affirming Indigenous systems of knowledge transmission and the endurance of cultural continuity. Drawing upon field interviews, oral histories, and participatory provenance research undertaken under the Artistic Research and Communal Knowledge (ARCK) project, the paper highlights how spiritual cultural belongings are remembered, maintained, and conserved within their cultural contexts. It will further contribute to the Indigenous epistemologies of care based on relationality, ritual, and memory, and offer essential insights into the ethics of preserving spiritually active heritage. By foregrounding community voices, the paper demonstrates that conservation is in this circumstance not a purely technical practice but an ensemble of relationships between people, matter, and spirit. The paper contributes to decolonial heritage discourse by showing that the most enduring forms of preservation are embedded in the living practices of those who remember, renew, and revere their cultural belongings.