Fieldwork, Publicly-Engaged Scholarship, and Trafficked Indonesian Mortuary Materials

What is it about?

This chapter spotlights the case of trafficked Toraja effigies of the dead (tau-tau) which, since the late 1970s, have moved into private collections and museums within and beyond Indonesia. This case is used to examine the practices of museum-oriented anthropologists doing long-term field research in locales where unrest, social inequality, poverty, international networks of antiquity thieves, or other factors have conspired to disenfranchise source communities from their spiritually sacred material cultural heritage. What does it mean to be engaged in such scenarios? What are the methodological, cultural, and ethical challenges embedded in the pursuit of engagement? Data derive from discussions with museum curators, collectors, and dealers, as well as recent fieldwork interviews with a cross-section of Torajas surrounding images of tau-taus in collections and their varied desires for these sacred effigies. Ultimately, this chapter addresses the complexities, challenges, and potential rewards entailed in the process of engaging multiple local and international communities in order to find satisfying ethical responses to a history of disenfranchisement from sacred material objects.

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Photo by Nicole on Unsplash

Photo by Nicole on Unsplash