Capitalist property as epistemic violence

Ethnographic museums around the world are embroiled in controversies about how to deal with the coloniality of their collections. The frame of contestation is most often property: Who should "own" ethnographic objects? Should they remain the property of Western museums, or should they (again) become the property of museums in the former colonies? As much as this debate rightly foregrounds the need to address and redress colonial violence, it still has a blind spot: capitalist property itself, one of the most powerful legacies of colonialism, is not questioned. As a result, a central aspect remains under-theorised: the fact that the ethnographic objects originate in indigenous cultural systems whose normative orders are based on sometimes radically different conceptions of what persons are, what things are, and how they relate to each other. This poses a cosmopolitical challenge to ethnographic museums: basic understandings of nature and culture are put up for debate. Any attempt to decolonise European museums must include a critique of the specific notions of ownership that underpin modern statehood.