ABSTRACT
The chapter introduces the book’s central problem of analysis: the colonial wound, understood herein as our shared colonial heritage, which includes museums in their imperial form and “universal” pretence. The chapter begins with a reflection on the notion of the “universal museum” coined in Europe, referring to the universal importance of major museums and galleries and their collections, aiming to present a critical approach to the processes of restitution and repatriation centred on material culture and mediated by nation states. Approaching universalism as a hegemonic philosophical notion, it explores the example of a Tubinambá feather cloak, an Indigenous production acquired during the colonisation of what is today Brazil, discussing its presence as a rare “treasure” in the collections of the Nationalmuseet in Copenhagen, Denmark. Turning our attention to ethnographic collections and the practice of “salvage anthropology,” the analysis considers the claims of Indigenous groups in contemporary Brazil to expose processes of land expropriation, cultural violence and dehumanisation encrusted in our colonial heritage.
