Indigenous minority from Sri Lanka receives cultural assets back from Basel
Published: Monday, May 6th 2024, 10:51
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The Museum der Kulturen and the Natural History Museum, both in Basel, are returning around 90 cultural assets to the indigenous Veddah minority in Sri Lanka. The two cantonal museums are thus confronting the colonial past of their collections.
The Museum of Cultures is returning 47 objects. These include weapons such as bows and arrows, as well as everyday objects such as bags, plates and pots. One important object is a so-called ceremonial arrow, a status symbol that characterizes the head of the group.
The Natural History Museum wants to return 42 human remains: skeletons and skulls of ancestors of the Veddah are to be transferred back to their homeland. This was announced by the Basel-Stadt cantonal government on Monday.
The two museums received official restitution requests from Sri Lanka in November 2022. The managers of the two museums supported the request on the basis of the Ethical Guidelines of the International Council of Museums (ICOM).
Unethical from today's perspective
The goods arrived in Basel at the end of the 19th century. The two naturalists Fritz and Paul Sarasin devoted several years to zoological and anthropological field research in what was then Ceylon. From today's perspective, the acquisition of the objects was unethical, according to the Basel government council. Records show that the Veddah were put under pressure. The ceremonial arrow in particular "was certainly not intended for exchange or sale", according to the press release.
For decades, Fritz (1859-1942) and Paul (1856-1929) Sarasin shaped what was then the Basel Museum of Ethnology, now known as the Museum of Cultures. In the late 1890s, they ran the Natural History Museum.
The planned return is linked to the fact that the Museum der Kulturen is currently gaining an overview of the so-called provenance of its collection. The holdings are being examined for problematic acquisitions with a colonial background. In January, for example, the museum returned a carved tree trunk to Australia. A similar project is also running at the Natural History Museum until 2026. Here, the focus is on the history of the origin of 1600 human remains in the collection.
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