ABSTRACT
Ideas, materials and practices of ‘heritage’ as contained in museum objects move and change despite the human desire for imperishability. This chapter examines the metamorphosis of some colonial museum leftovers in the French context: buildings, artefacts and human remains. Paying attention to the changes implied in terms of cultural and political subjectivities, it explores how actions on things transform material culture, and who contributes to the process and under which conditions. The chapter aims to bring to the field of French museums in (post)colonial contexts the methodological and theoretical reflections developed in the informal group ‘Matiere a Penser’ at the turn of the millennium. In the heritage field, the biographical approaches distance themselves from any attempt to naturalise the artistic, historical or ethnographic value of past remains, by showing how socially constructed and culturally dependant are their uses and meanings.
