Decolonization in European Museums as Academic Debate and not Practiced Reality.
Updated: 3 days ago
Introduction
The Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence is currently owned by the
University of Florence. It was the first anthropological institution established in Europe in
1869. The history of its establishment and following years of expanding its collections
remains controversial and linked to the increase of colonizing strategies by Italy in the late
1800s. The first chair and founder of this museum, Paolo Mantegazza was an Italian
politician, physiologist, anthropologist and novelist, who thought of anthropology as “the
natural history of man”. Mantegazza travelled extensively in the South Americas from 1854
to 1858 to carry out medical and ethnographical studies where he "acquired" much of his
collection of human skeletal remains, a collection of plaster casts; busts and masks taken
primarily from living individuals of various tribal groups, cultural objects that were part of
funeral rituals and many other items of importance to the respective culture they were coming from. The anthropology collection at the museum began with two skulls from Mantegazza’s personal collection.
I would like to clarify the quotation of the word acquired in my previous sentence. During the
time Mantegazza was acquiring these objects, it was not considered unethical practice to
“collect” human remains in the Western scientific community. However, the scientific
community still remains Eurocentric in its perspective and language and prefers terms such as “acquiring” when the reality of the process was closer to grave robbing. There is a disturbing account of one such expedition by Mantegazza mentioned in an article by Paul Micheal Taylor in his article for Museum of Anthropology Italy. It describes how Mantegazza on his return trip to Europe from Argentina in 1858, stopped at Tenerife, where he viewed local mummies and “managed to procure” four crania of the Guanches people, aborigines of the Canary Islands who had nearly been exterminated by the Spanish colonisation. The article makes a desperate attempt to protect Mantegazza’s image as a visionary of science while hiding in brackets that the procurement of these crania was him “digging them out, during a moonless and tempestuous night, in a burial cave of Santa Cruz.” An article written by a Western anthropologist rewording grave robbing without the consent of the tribal people as acquisition. And as a result, changing the language and dominant narrative to undermine the brutality of colonial collecting. That is a common issue that remains at the root of debate regarding decolonisation and restitution in European institutions.
Mantegazza was from the Darwin school of thought and he believed that physical traits may
reveal a person's moral and intellectual nature. Mantegazza founded his study of man on
measuring bodies, hence the fascination with collecting skulls which make up a large part of
the museum’s collection. Mantegazza was one of the principal theorists of craniometry in Italy. However, in 1870, he declared that "woe betide us if anthropology is reduced to
craniometry;" he eventually disassociated himself from this approach. Partly owing to his
famous 1876 failed experiment which exposed the unscientific nature of craniometry in
anthropology. No attempt was made to return the skeletal remains of tribes around
the world, which were stolen under the pretense of a science which had eventually proved to
be incorrect and owing to European ideas of racial superiority. In fact in 1874, The Journal
Archivio per l'Antropologia e l'Etnologia, in response to this lack of artifacts, called on
"diplomats, consuls, directors of great trading houses, doctors, and all Italians living in
European colonies, to remember this national museum and send it photographs, skulls,
skeletons, clothing, weapons to build its collection. To summarise, everything they deem
relevant for characterizing a population as per the European perspective.
Due to these donations, and anthropological missions, the museum's collection expanded
quickly throughout the first thirty years.
Parallelly looking at anthropology as a science, it gained popularity during the rise of Nazism
and Fascism in Europe and was widely used to give a sense of scientific credibility to the idea of a “superior race”. 19th-century social Darwinism, which popularized ideas of fitness,
competition, and biological explanations for inequality, served as the foundation for eugenics. Theorists began incorporating Darwinian parallels of "survival of the fittest" into socialarguments at that time. 5 Mantegazza’s use of craniometry to determine intellectual qualities and fascination with plaster casts documenting facial features of indigenous people reinforces the European fetishisation of non-Western physical attributes, often depicting them as less evolved or primitive. The cultural objects looted during colonisation are alienated from their community and context; and used to create an ethnocentric, stereotypical and reductive perspective of the population. As Anna Bottesi writes in her paper, Objects of Stereotype: “The appropriation and reinterpretation of indigenous artifacts through these categories led to a deep transformation both of their functions and their meanings; as soon as indigenous objects entered the Wunderkammern collections, they were turned into devices for the production of a generic non-European otherness in the global imaginary. 6
Having explored the historical context of the museum, its founder and the collection, I would
like to give a personal account of my visit to the museum in December 2025. A group of
students, including a professor and myself were guided around the museum by its curator
Monica Zavattaro. Given the museum’s colonial history, I was expecting many changes in
curation, writing and storytelling to be more sensitized and approachable to contemporary
global debates regarding decolonisation and with respect to the international crowd that visits the museum. However, I was deeply disturbed at the display, state of the institution and their backward narrative which evades acknowledgment to the fact these artefacts were
collected through unethical methods and without the consent of cultures they were
“studying”.
Personal account
After walking up the stairs, the very first room one enters at the Museum of Anthropology &
Ethnography, you see the decomposed skeleton of a Peruvian tribal person bound in textile
sitting in a lower cabinet (Figure 1.) by the door with no disclaimer sign. The display reflects
what Michel Foucault identifies as the transformation of human life into objects of scientific
knowledge 7, and what Achille Mbembe would describe as a necropolitical extension of
colonial power, where authority persists over the dead through classification, preservation,
and exhibition. 8
.
The museum’s implicit justification rests on the language of “research,” yet it remains unclear
what meaningful knowledge this skeleton continues to produce beyond reiterating outdated
anthropometric or typological paradigms rooted in racial science. If its scientific value is
historical rather than contemporary, the ethical question becomes unavoidable: why does it
remain on display, and why has it not been returned or laid to rest in consultation with
descendant communities? In the absence of transparent provenance, repatriation efforts, or
critical contextualisation, the exhibition risks perpetuating the very dehumanisation that
enabled its collection. What is framed as scholarly preservation may instead represent the
ongoing institutional retention of colonial authority over Indigenous bodies.
This room is filled with artefacts from tribal cultures from the South Americas, mainly items
that were part of funeral rituals. In the centre of the room, in a glass display laid out is a 16th
century feathered cape from the Tupinambá tribe in Brazil (Figure 2). Only eleven such
capes have survived and are now in the collections of a few ethnographic institutions in
Europe, including the Ambrosian Library in Milan, the National Museum of Denmark, and
two in the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in Florence. These were passed down to
the museum from the Medici family's Cabinets of Curiosities in the 16th century from trade
across the Atlantic.9 In the 2024 Venice Biennale, the Brazilian pavilion was built around the
restitution of such artefacts in European institutions. The curator of this pavilion, Glicéria
Tupinambá, who is also a member of the Tupinambá tribe explained the urgency of restitution by saying: “For us, these capes are ancestors. However, until recently, none of us had ever seen a mantle in real life, because all eleven remaining ones were kept in European
institutions. We knew of their existence through the chants of our communities, but hadn’t
had any contact with them. It was only in 2000 that one of these capes, which will be donated
to the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro later this year, visited São Paulo for the
Rediscovery Show: Brazil+500 exhibition”.10 The National Museum of Denmark has
returned one such cape to Brazil, the Museum of Anthropology & Ethnography, Florence has
failed to approach similar restitution practices. Although they have published a paper with
Glicéria Tupinambá and Jéssica Tupinambá analysing the feathered cape in 2024.11 This
means access to the knowledge produced through its study remains under the authority of the European institution. In this way, despite gestures toward collaboration, control over both the artefact and its interpretation continues to be exercised within a Western institutional framework, perpetuating asymmetries rooted in colonial power structures.
The Colonial Face casts of Nello Puccioni (Figure 3.) directly supports the argument that
decolonisation in European museums often remains an academic exercise rather than an
institutional reality, particularly in the case of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnology in
Florence. By critically analysing the facial casts produced during Italian colonial expeditions,
the authors expose how the museum’s collections are rooted in Fascist racial science and
imperial power structures.12 While the study reflects a clear scholarly commitment to
confronting this history, the casts themselves remain in the museum’s possession, and
structural questions of ownership, authority, and restitution are not fundamentally altered.As
with the Tupinambá feathered cape, the museum demonstrates engagement through research and critical discourse, yet material control over colonial-era objects remains unchanged. The Puccioni case therefore exemplifies the gap between decolonisation as an academic framework and its implementation as transformative institutional practice.
As one progresses through the museum’s galleries, the visitor encounters numerous ancient
artefacts originally created as offerings to the dead; objects imbued with ritual and communal significance as well as taxidermy animals. Now positioned within glass cupboards, thousands of miles from their places of origin, these items are materially and symbolically severed from their ancestral landscapes and from the descendant communities for whom they once held ongoing meaning. Their relocation transforms them from active participants in funerary and religious practices into aestheticised specimens within a European museological framework.Although the museum’s official materials identify it as a “colonial museum,” this acknowledgment remains largely declarative rather than analytical. The term is invoked without substantial institutional self-examination or critical commentary on the historical conditions that shaped the collection. There is little discussion of the coercive networks of extraction, asymmetrical trade relations, missionary activity, or scientific racism that underpinned the acquisition of many of these objects. By stopping short of explicitly addressing the dispossession and displacement embedded in its holdings, the institution risks presenting colonial accumulation as an inevitable or value-neutral historical phenomenon, rather than as a process structured by violence, exploitation, and control.
Consequently, the museum’s display strategies do not simply reflect a colonial past, they
perpetuate its underlying logic in the present. Indigenous cultures are framed as subjects of
anthropological observation, while interpretive authority remains firmly located within the
Western institution. The absence of descendant community voices in the interpretive
framework, combined with limited transparency regarding provenance and acquisition
histories, reinforces longstanding hierarchies of knowledge production and white
imperialism. In this way, the museum functions not only as a repository of displaced material
culture, but also as a site where colonial power relations continue to be reproduced through
curatorial practice and narrative control.
Conclusion
Relating my firsthand observations at the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in
Florence with my initial statement that decolonization in European museums is an academic
debate and not practiced reality, I would like to highlight specific dimensions of this fallacy
of inclusion. Within the broader debate on decolonisation, the museum’s practices reveal how academic discourse can function less as a vehicle for restitution than as a mechanism of containment. Scholarship on contested artefacts is frequently produced in specialised journals, conference circuits, and institutional reports that remain largely inaccessible to descendant communities. In this sense, academia becomes an insulated arena in which colonial collections are critically analysed yet materially retained. The discussion of restitution is thus relocated into a professionalised vocabulary that privileges curatorial authority and scholarly expertise over Indigenous sovereignty.
A related strategy lies in the recalibration of language. Terms such as “shared stewardship,”
“long-term loan,” “circulation,” or “collaborative research” often replace the more politically
charged vocabulary of “restitution” or “repatriation.” While such shifts appear progressive,
they can subtly preserve Western ownership by reframing demands for return as opportunities for partnership under institutional control. The transformation of colonial expropriation into narratives of “care,” “preservation,” or “global heritage” exemplifies how language operates as a tool of epistemic power. The rhetoric of research and restoration further reinforces this dynamic. Conservation science and technical analysis are presented as neutral, benevolent interventions, implying that European institutions are uniquely equipped to safeguard fragile objects. Yet this framing obscures the historical fact that many artefacts required “restoration” precisely because they were displaced, mishandled, or recontextualised through colonial extraction. The claim to scientific expertise can thus function as a moral alibi for continued possession.
Finally, the politics of visibility and profit cannot be ignored. High-profile exhibitions,
biennales, and publications that foreground contested objects often generate institutional
prestige, funding opportunities, and cultural capital. Even when framed as critical or
self-reflexive, the display of such artefacts sustains visitor economies and reinforces the
museum’s global relevance. In this configuration, decolonisation risks becoming an aesthetic
and discursive performance; visible, marketable, and academically productive, while the
underlying structures of ownership and authority remain fundamentally unchanged.
Bibliography
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