ABSTRACT
The question of what value ethnographic museum collections might hold for originating communities is particularly relevant in the current era, when so many collections now sit on the edge of living memory. This chapter focuses on the digital return of cultural material as a means of connecting originating communities with their distributed collections and the contemporary value communities ascribe to those collections. In this case, the originating community comprises the Makasae and Naueti descendants of the original makers, owners and users of a collection acquired by the geographer and ethnographer Dr Alfred Bühler in Baguia, Portuguese Timor (now Baguia Sub-district, Timor-Leste) as part of the Timor Rote Flores Expedition, 1935. The expedition, instigated by the Commission of the Museum der Kulturen Basel (MKB), aimed to document migration and racial boundaries between Papuan and Austronesian cultures as well as to develop the MKB’s permanent collections.
