"Once Ours: The Making and Unmaking of Claims to Cultural Property" by Martin Skrydstrup

Martin Skrydstrup

Deposited 2010

Abstract
This dissertation is a juxtaposition of two cultural property regimes; The first being NAGPRA (Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act) and the second being UTIMUT (the designation of the world's numerically largest repatriation of 35,000 objects from Denmark to Greenland). The key thesis is that colonial experiences are indexed in contemporary cultural property regimes. Ultimately, I argue that we need to shift from the tired tropes of 'culture', 'capital' and 'colonialism' to 'continuities', 'convergences' and 'connections' to reach a comprehensive understanding of cultural property. The argument is divided into three analytical moves: theorems, topographies and topologies. The first (Theorems) raises the problem of how 'property' has been understood in the history of anthropological thought caught betwixt and between dichotomies such as gifts versus commodites, debts versus rights, recognition versus redistribution, and political economy versus moral economy; The second (Topographies) concerns the question of what an ethnography on cultural properties might look like. Here I draw methodologically on George Marcus' notion of 'complicity' and 'para-sites' in exposing and elucidating two particular case studies set within each property regime. The first concerns a dispute over a ki'i aumakua (God's Image) from Hawai'i; the second deals with a fontomfrom (Royal Talking Drum) from Ghana. In the third part (Topologies), I ague that if we are to account for the current location of these two objects we need a topology of continuities, convergences and connections to reach a new anthropological understanding of cultural property.