University of Oxford

Current DPhil Student

Christofilli Kefalas
Maori Ways of Knowing: The politics of knowledge surrounding Taonga and the Charles Smith collection

Selected Past DPhil Students

Maureen Matthews (2010)
Repatriating Agency: Animacy, Personhood and Agency in the Repatriation of Ojibwe Artefacts

This thesis addresses the question of whether recent anthropological work incorporating objects in social analysis and treating them as if they have a degree of personhood and social agency, contributes to a theoretically informed analysis of the repatriation of Native American artefacts.  Based on a detailed analysis of a mistaken repatriation of Ojibwe ceremonial materials, this thesis interrogates a repatriation event in which, in spite of excellent provenance and considerable source community involvement, artefacts from a small Canadian museum collection were secretly given to an entirely unrelated Ojibwe cultural revitalization group.  The unconventional trajectory of this repatriation event reveals the weaknesses of existing anthropological literature on repatriation but also provides detailed evidence for a nuanced ethnographic analysis which acknowledges and explains harshly conflicting perspectives.  Chapters alternate between those which are narrative in intent and simply tell the story of the repatriation from four different points of view and theoretical chapters in which the events of the narrative are reconsidered theoretically.  Throughout this thesis, a dual Ojibwe and anthropological perspective is developed, interrogating and comparing Ojibwe and anthropological conceptions of animacy (the attribution of life), personhood (the attribution of social relationships), and agency (the claim that objects may make things happen), as they relate to this repatriation case study.   I adapt Alfred Gell’s theory of Art and Agency, treating agency as an emergent and provisional explanation of social events and conclude that the social agency of museum artefacts is unstable and varies with perceived personhood and the strength of social relationships; the more immediate and complex the social relationships, the more agency is evident and the more isolated and relationally diminished, the less agency is perceived or claimed by persons on behalf of objects. I suggest that in politically charged repatriation claims, a focus on agency and personhood helps to anthropologize and depoliticise analysis and enables researchers in these charged situations to keep key multiple and conflicting social relationships in analytic view. 

Cara Krmpotich (2008)
Repatriation and the Production of Kinship and Memory: Anthropological perspectives on the repatriation of Haida ancestral remains

An ethnography of Haida repatriation efforts, the thesis also builds a theoretical framework to understand the intersection of kinship, memory and materiality as expressed during the process of repatriation, and in Haida society more broadly.

Cara is now Assistant Professor in the Museum Studies programme at the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto. Her research interests include ethnographic understandings of repatriation, memory and material culture, museum and source community relations, and new modes for understanding 'post-colonialism' in the museum context. She continues to partner with the Haida Repatriation Committee and as a post-doctoral researcher, she continued to work with Dr Peers to facilitate a hands-on research visit for 20 Haida delegates who visited the Pitt Rivers Museum and British Museum. She has published articles in the Journal of Material Culture, the journal Mortality, and is currently working on two books. She has a forth-coming article, co-authored with Dr Peers, in the journal Museum Management and Curatorship.

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