

ONLINE CONVERSATION | THINKING WITH | 25 OCTOBER 2022 | 15.00 - 17.00 CET
As part of our on-going Thinking With series, we will organize a conversation with Alana Osbourne, Deborah A. Thomas, and Nicholas Thomas, moderated by Carine Zaayman. This discussion takes place on the occasion of Nicholas Thomas’s re-edition and update of his book Possessions: Indigenous Art/ Colonial Culture/Decolonization (1999, 2022). His work in the book and notably his writing in the new introduction inform the inquiries of the TAKING CARE project, which “involves a set of speculative inquiries into the ways in which ethnographic and world cultures museums, their histories and their collections, can be refashioned to address the growing precarity of our planet and the plurality of our human and non-human world.”
The conversation has as its aspiration to think through the stakes of what it means to engage the concept of “possess/ing” in the context of what we collectively refer to as ethnographic and/or world museums. We enter into this conversation with four explicit—and seemingly, at best remotely related—intertexts:
This conversation then asks, the following questions:
Alana Osbourne is an FNRS fellow at the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie des Mondes Contemporains (LAMC) at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Focusing on the sensory, memoried, and non-conscious effects of the politics of race and inequality, she is concerned with the material and atmospheric manifestations of empire and colonialism – and with everyday processes of unlearning and undoing colonial legacies carried out by urbanites. She currently examines the ongoing ‘Parliamentary Commission on Belgium’s Colonial Past’ where she observes how official parliamentary spaces and grassroots urban tourism initiatives work issues of race and memory into - and through - the city. Her past research at the University of Amsterdam investigated how violence and poverty are transformed into tourism experiences that can be purchased and consumed, and to the inequalities that permeate such encounters in Kingston, Jamaica.
Deborah A. Thomas is the R. Jean Brownlee Professor of Anthropology, and the Director of the Center for Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also a Research Associate with the Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre at the University of Johannesburg. She is the author of Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation, Exceptional Violence, and Modern Blackness. Thomas co-directed the documentary films Bad Friday and Four Days in May, and she is the co-curator of a multi-media installation titled Bearing Witness: Four Days in West Kingston. Prior to her life in the academy, she was a professional dancer with the New York-based Urban Bush Women.
Nicholas Thomas first visited the Pacific in 1984 to research his doctoral thesis on culture and change in the Marquesas Islands, which led to work ranging over Indigenous histories, cross-cultural encounters, colonialism and contemporary art. Foundation Director of the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research at the Australian National University (1996-99) and Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths College, London (1999-2006), since 2006 he has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He is author or editor of nearly fifty books, including Entangled Objects (1991), Discoveries: The Voyages of Captain Cook (2003), and Islanders: The Pacific in the Age of Empire (2012). He co-curated Oceania for the Royal Academy in London and Musée du quai Branly in Paris, which attracted over 250,000 visitors. His current work, building on The Return of Curiosity: What Museums are Good for in the Twenty-first Century (2016), focusses on museum histories and futures.