Religion, Rhetoric, Kinship: Repatriation as a Critique of Violence

Indigenous calls to repatriate human remains rehumanize objects in museum contexts: skulls, skeletons, hair, once called specimens, become relatives (again). This profound moral shift from ‘objects’ to ‘subjects’ recognizes violence in a field that was once progressively named "science." This paper considers a critique of violence in the rehumanization process in one repatriation, in this example, through the return of 14 Yawuru and Karajarri ancestors to Broome, Australia, from an Ethnographic Museum in Leipzig, Germany. It draws on ethnographic and historical research alongside Walter Benjamin's essay Toward a Critique of Violence to consider how naming kin allows speakers to understand something anew as violence without issuing guilt, catalyzing a sense of obligation and not punishment. Drawing from her experience as a repatriation coordinator and museum conservator as well as historical research on Yawuru kinship systems, Hamburger will discuss repatriation and religion in terms of the rhetoric of kinship that might describe an Aboriginal critique of violence that asks Western institutions to consider relations to Indigenous people.