Jason M. Gibson – författare

Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage examines how returned materials - objects, photographs, audio and manuscripts - are being received and reintegrated into the ongoing social and cultural lives of Aboriginal Australians. Combining a critical examination of the making of these collections with an assessment of their contemporary significance, the book exposes the opportunities and challenges involved in returning cultural heritage for the purposes of maintaining, preserving or reviving cultural practice. Drawing on ethnographic work undertaken with Aboriginal communities and the institutions that hold significant collections, the author reveals important new insights about the impact of return on communities. Technological advances, combined with the push towards decolonising methodologies in Indigenous research, have resulted in considerable interest in ensuring that collections of cultural value are returned to Indigenous communities. Gibson challenges the rhetoric of museum repatriation, arguing that, while it has been tremendously important to advancing Indigenous interest, it is too often over-simplified. Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage offers a timely, critical perspective on current museum practice and its place within processes of cultural production and transmission. The book is sure to resonate in other international contexts where questions about Indigenous re-engagement and decolonisation strategies are being debated and will be of interest to students and scholars of Museum Studies, Indigenous Studies and Anthropology.

Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage examines how returned materials - objects, photographs, audio and manuscripts - are being received and reintegrated into the ongoing social and cultural lives of Aboriginal Australians. Combining a critical examination of the making of these collections with an assessment of their contemporary significance, the book exposes the opportunities and challenges involved in returning cultural heritage for the purposes of maintaining, preserving or reviving cultural practice. Drawing on ethnographic work undertaken with Aboriginal communities and the institutions that hold significant collections, the author reveals important new insights about the impact of return on communities. Technological advances, combined with the push towards decolonising methodologies in Indigenous research, have resulted in considerable interest in ensuring that collections of cultural value are returned to Indigenous communities. Gibson challenges the rhetoric of museum repatriation, arguing that, while it has been tremendously important to advancing Indigenous interest, it is too often over-simplified. Repatriation of Indigenous Cultural Heritage offers a timely, critical perspective on current museum practice and its place within processes of cultural production and transmission. The book is sure to resonate in other international contexts where questions about Indigenous re-engagement and decolonisation strategies are being debated and will be of interest to students and scholars of Museum Studies, Indigenous Studies and Anthropology.

Rethinks the role of Indigenous and non-Indigenous interactions in the production of ethnographic museum collections.Winner of the 2022 W.K. Hancock Prize presented by the Australian Historical Association Shortlisted for the 2021 Prime Minister's Literary Awards in the Australian History Category presented by the Australian Prime Minister and Minister for the Arts Winner of the 2021 Council for Museum Anthropology Book Award presented by the Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA), a section of the American Anthropological Association By analyzing one of the world's greatest collections of Indigenous song, myth, and ceremony-the collections of linguist/anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow-Ceremony Men demonstrates how inextricably intertwined ethnographic collections can become in complex historical and social relations. In revealing his process to return an anthropological collection to Aboriginal communities in remote central Australia, Jason M. Gibson highlights the importance of personal rapport and collaborations in ethnographic exchange, both past and present, and demonstrates the ongoing importance of sociality, relationship, and orality when Indigenous peoples encounter museum collections today. Combining forensic historical analysis with contemporary ethnographic research, this book challenges the notion that anthropological archives will necessarily become authoritative or dominant statements on a people's cultural identity. Instead, Indigenous peoples will often interrogate and recontextualize this material with great dexterity as they work to reintegrate the documented into their present-day social lives.By theorizing the nature of the documenter-documented relationships this book makes an important contribution to the simplistic postcolonial generalizations that dominate analyses of colonial interaction. A story of local agency is uncovered that enriches our understanding of the human engagements that took, and continue to take, place within varying colonial relations of Australia.