Archive

WORKING GROUP MEETING #2 (October 25)

What’s our role? Situating scholars of Plunder

As we begin our exploration of “loot”, we must address the significance and implications of this project. Researchers studying material culture, cultural history, and cultural organizations are deeply enmeshed in a network of illicit markets, colonial and postcolonial institutions, and a range of shady characters and corporations.

In this context, what does it mean for scholars to study colonial loot or illicitly acquired items? Does our involvement perpetuate unequal ownership, access, and control of loot? How can we adapt our theoretical and methodological approaches to level these inequalities, rather than deepen them?

Readings

The readings for this month focus on scholarly engagement with looted manuscript material, an object category where links between academia and plunder are especially salient. The sources also provide a good overview of how the illicit trade works.

WORKING GROUP MEETING #3

🗓️ Friday, November 8 \ ⏰ 2-4PM \ 🌐 Virtual

Documenting Dispossession: new approaches to provenance

Provenance is a concept that comes up over and over again when studying loot. At times, provenance is a measure of legality, and in other contexts, it is used to verify authenticity. In some situations, provenance is applied to prove an item is not looted, while in others it seems to show the opposite. As the critical study of heritage gains ground, provenance becomes increasingly important, and yet there seems to be little consensus on what it is, how it is applied, and why it matters.

So, what is provenance, really? How does it inform critical approaches to the study of history, heritage, and looting? How is it used, or misused? And what role does provenance play in the acquisition, circulation, and restitution of looted heritage? In this meeting, we will both complicate and expand concepts of provenance to develop a more comprehensive, critical understanding of loot and its origins.

Readings

The readings for this month present three varying perspectives on provenance, all of which complicate traditional understandings. The sources provide a good overview of what provenance is, and demonstrate provenance-in-action in different contexts.

WORKING GROUP MEETING #5

🗓️ Friday, January 31 \ ⏰ 2-4PM \ 🌐 Virtual

The Politics of Plunder: occupation, control, and state-building*

We know that colonial-imperial regimes, as well as fascist and authoritarian states, engage in the systematic looting (and destruction) of cultural heritage. But why? What makes cultural heritage a first-class war aim for these governments? Why is access, ownership, and control of Others’ heritage such a big part of military and political strategies?

In this meeting, we will attempt to answer these questions by investigating the entanglements between looted heritage, the military, and the state. By contextualizing looting in broader political projects, we will work towards inscribing intentionality to plunder, thus developing a better understanding of the role of looted heritage in political control, expansion, and occupation.

*The topic for this meeting has changed slightly, to accommodate the topics that were supposed to be covered in our (cancelled) Fall event

Readings

The readings for this month explore heritage-military-state entanglements through the lens of three different contexts of colonial looting. Please read 2 of the below texts, based on what sparks your interest.

TALK & WORKSHOP - CONTESTED COLLECTIONS SERIES

This event has been rescheduled. A replacement event will be held at the same date and time!

Due to some unforeseen institutional issues, we have had to reschedule this event for later in the Spring (date TBC). Instead, we will be joined by criminologist and illicit antiquities expert Simon Mackenzie for a talk on trafficked Cambodian artifacts — see more details on the new event page.

Reverse looting, or liberating archival records of colonization? The United Fruit Company fonds at University of Toronto Mississauga Library

Join UTM Library archivist Christopher (Cal) Long for a hands-on exploration of a unique archival collection held by UTM Library.

In the early 1980s, anthropologist Phillipe Bourgois stumbled upon a cache of documents in an aging warehouse attic near the border of Costa Rica and Panama. Nearly two thousand pages which filled “four to five dozen unnumbered, mildewed, and rodent-eaten cardboard boxes”, documented almost a century of the United Fruit Company Ltd.’s management of its Latin American plantations. The papers document in vivid detail nearly a century of one of modern global capitalism’s most notorious multi-national corporations whose corruption, exploitation, and meddling in Latin American politics in collaboration with the U.S. government is well-known. Bourgois’s acquisition of these papers and their archiving helps reveal the history of UFC’s plunder of Latin America. In this event, we will consider the implications of this unique archival story and discuss what it tells us about the role archives can play in liberatory movements and counter-histories.

TALK & WORKSHOP - CONTESTED COLLECTIONS SERIES

Temple Looting in Cambodia: Anatomy of a Statue Trafficking Network

Simon Mackenzie, criminologist and renowned expert on the illicit antiquities trade, will be joining us over Zoom for a virtual lecture, followed by a roundtable discussion led by Isra Saymour, director of the Looting Lab. This event will be fully hybrid. Coffee/tea, snacks, and dessert will be served for in-person attendees.

Event description:

What happens to a Cambodian statue once it’s looted from an ancient temple? To answer this question, Simon Mackenzie’s work maps the villages, forests, chokepoints, and borderlands that constitute statue trafficking networks. Drawing on firsthand accounts from fieldwork in Cambodia and Thailand, he unravels the surprisingly short journey these artifacts take from temple ruins to prestigious international markets. Along the way, he uncovers the involvement of organized crime, the role of forgeries, and the shadowy networks that sustain this illicit trade.

Register now at uoft.me/temple

See full event details →

WORKING GROUP MEETING #6 (March 28)

Reparations, Restitution, and Return

Repatriation is often reduced to the simple return of objects—but what does it truly mean? How does it fit within larger struggles for restitution and justice? This session explores the shifting meanings of return: Is it always reparative? What happens when legal repatriation fails to address deeper harm? We also examine alternative approaches to restitution and reparations in the context of cultural heritage that go beyond physical return, such as rematriation. In this meeting, we seek to complicate taken-for-granted concepts of ownership and return, and develop new understandings of heritage that might lend themselves to more holistic, restorative, and decolonial solutions.

Readings

The readings for this month focus on decolonial, indigenous, and restitution-based approaches to heritage, archives, collecting, and repatriation. Please select at least two of the following texts to read.

Matthes, Erich Hatala. 2017. “Repatriation and the radical redistribution of art.” Ergo 4(32): 931–953.

Odumosu, Temi. “The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons.” Current Anthropology 61, no. S22 (2020): S289–302. 

Gray, Robin RR. 2022. "Rematriation: Ts' msyen law, rights of relationality, and protocols of return." Native American and Indigenous Studies 9(1):1-27.

And for those in the museum sector, I enjoy this short reading as a way to rethink objects in the context of institutional issues, changes, and challenges:

Bowell, Kate. 2017. “Object Reincarnation: Imagining a Future Outside the Permanent Collection.” Pp. 153-161 in Active Collections

Discussion Questions

This month, we’re trying a new discussion model! I’m sharing discussion questions before our meeting to help orient reading and thinking, with the hope that this sparks richer, more collaborative dialogue.

• How does thinking about return as a form of redistribution reconfigure existing understandings of cultural property and repatriation?
• What obstacles or opportunities does digitization pose for heritage restitution?
• In our current legal and political system, do you think can cultural heritage ever be fully restored to source communities in accordance with indigenous laws and protocols?

WORKING GROUP MEETING #7 (May 30)

The Praxis of Plunder: Collection, Curation, and Display

This month, we will examine the politics and practices behind the collection, curation, and display of looted objects. How does the “gaze” produced by museums, archives, galleries, auction houses, and libraries shape how we view, understand, and engage with loot? What types of discourses are produced by these curatorial techniques, and to what end? We will also explore alternative methods of curation and display, considering if there is a “better” way to collect, curate, and display with loot — and if so, what is it? The goal of this meeting is to deconstruct taken-for-granted practices, interrogate the objectives of loot-collecting institutions, and, hopefully, begin to develop a new “toolbox” of curatorial techniques.

Readings

This month’s readings focus on dynamics of display, and the contested nature of both. There are a few options — please pick at least one historical reading and one contemporary reading.

Contemporary Contestations (pick one or more of the following)

• Anderson, Stephanie B. 2019. “Museums, Decolonization and Indigenous Artists as First Cultural Responders at the New Canadian Museum for Human Rights.” Museum and Society 2: 173–92.
Anderson 2019.pdf2954.0KB
• Wastiau, Boris and Arnaud Lsmond-Mertes. 2025. “‘Tervuren Remains a Place of False Memories’: On the Impossibility of an Epistemological Rupture at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium): An Interview with Boris Wastiau.” In Reframing the Ethnographic Museum. UCL Press.
Wastiau and Lismond-Mertes 2025.pdf247.6KB

Historical Legacies (pick one or more of the following)

• Riggs, Christina. 2013. “Colonial Visions: Egyptian Antiquities and Contested Histories in the Cairo Museum.” Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1: 65-84.
Riggs 2013 - Colonial Visions.pdf1035.4KB
• Pham, Vincent. 2025. "Turning the Crank: The Performance of Empire through Tipu's Tiger." Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 54(1): 225-237.
Pham 2025.pdf64708.9KB
• Hartwell, Nicole M. 2021. “Framing colonial war loot: The ‘captured’ spolia opima of Kunwar Singh.” Journal of the History of Collections. pp. 1-15.
Hartwell 2021 - Kunwar Singh.pdf419.9KB
• Hevia, James L. 1994. “Loot's fate: The economy of plunder and the moral life of objects from the summer palace of the emperor of China.” History and Anthropology 6(4):319-345.
Hevia 1994 - Loot’s fate.pdf2167.3KB