The term archive, by its etymology, is closely related to governance and power, but more to the idea of centrality, governance and centralized power (Stoler 2009). Archives always have a history, a genealogy, and a context. So does the museums and collections. The post-colonial efforts to return and repatriate colonial archives and artefacts have put bureaucratic and ethnographic archives into the limelight of historical, social and political examinations. These debates are important for post-colonial countries and for East European ones alike, especially in terms of their usage and instrumentalization by both sides—from the colonizer’s perspective, the imperial history, and from the perspective of the colonized, the national, local and/or ethnic identity. What happens when we talk about an internalized model of national representation related to a greater/ general occidental model?
In my presentation I draws on the very fact that the idea and the practice of exhibitions and building museums is occidental. National museums are built on the idea of self-representation however using the same model. How can we thus understand decolonization of museums and ethnographic collections as they are rooted in a western way of representing, imagining and building up specific idea[l]s?
