The (NMVW) () is an overarching museum organisation for the management of several ethnographic museums in the Netherlands, founded in 2014. It consists of the Tropenmuseum () in Amsterdam, the

Afrika Museum The Africa Museum ( nl, Afrika Museum) is a museum in Berg en Dal (village), Berg en Dal in the Netherlands. The museum on the outskirts of the city of Nijmegen is a complex with indoor as well as open-air display areas, covering art, culture, m ...

in Berg en Dal, and the Museum Volkenkunde () in Leiden. The National Museum of World Cultures works in close cooperation with the Wereldmuseum () in Rotterdam. It is also part of nation-wide Dutch organisations for research into provenance studies and projects of restitution of cultural heritage to countries of origin, like the former Dutch colony in today's Indonesia.

Structure and collections

The Dutch National Museum of World Cultures (NMVW) was founded in 2014 by a merger of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Museum Volkenkunde in Leiden and the

in Berg en Dal. It also oversees the Wereldmuseum in Rotterdam, whose collection belongs to that city. According to the museum's webpage, these collections contain "nearly 450,000 objects and 260,000 photographic images that are part of the state or municipality collections, and another 350.000 images of documentary value." The NMVW was created in the context of public discussions in the Netherlands, as well as in other European countries, about the colonial history of ethnographic collections and calls for the restitution of African cultural heritage to different countries of origin. About forty per cent of the collection in the museum is estimated to have been acquired in colonial contexts. As Stijn Schoonderwoerd, then director of the NMVW, said about this discussion: “It led us to question our colonial history and we saw that we had the potential to ask a lot of questions about identity, control, power, inequality and decolonization.” According to an article about the NMVW, published in the UNESCO Courier of October/December 2020, the museum began work on its guidance for repatriation in 2017. Already before this, repatriations are said to have "occurred over the decades, but claims had previously been handled on an ad hoc basis." In March 2019, a document called ''Return of Cultural Objects: Principles and Process'' was published, to express “the overall mission of the museum to address the long, complex and entangled histories that have resulted in the collections the museum holds.” It includes a “commitment to transparently address and evaluate claims for the return of cultural objects according to standards of respect, cooperation and timeliness.” In a collaboration with the

Rijksmuseum The Rijksmuseum () is the national museum of the Netherlands dedicated to Dutch arts and history and is located in Amsterdam. The museum is located at the Museum Square in the borough of Amsterdam South, close to the Van Gogh Museum, the St ...

in Amsterdam and the ''Expertise Centre for the Restitution of Cultural Goods and the Second World War'' at the National Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD), the NMVW is focused on Indonesia – with projects to consolidate research into colonial-era military expeditions and trading-house networks.

Repatriation of cultural heritage

In March 2020, the Dutch culture minister returned a gold-inlaid

kris The kris, or ''keris'' in the Indonesian language, is an asymmetrical dagger with distinctive blade-patterning achieved through alternating laminations of iron and nickelous iron (''pamor''). Of Javanese origin, the kris is famous for its disti ...

– a large dagger – to the Indonesian ambassador in The Hague, on the basis of

provenance Provenance (from the French ''provenir'', 'to come from/forth') is the chronology of the ownership, custody or location of a historical object. The term was originally mostly used in relation to works of art but is now used in similar senses i ...

research conducted by the museum. It belonged to Prince Diponegoro, a Javanese rebel leader and Indonesian hero who waged a five-year war against Dutch colonial rule from 1825 to 1830. Some of his belongings, including a saddle and a spear, were repatriated to Indonesia in the 1970s. In January 2021, the Dutch government approved a central mechanism for the repatriation of colonial heritage. Upon the recommendations of an advisory commission, it announced to return any objects in the national collections found to have been illegally taken from former Dutch colonies. To this end, a research group of nine museums and Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit are said to launch a €4.5m project in June 2021 in order to develop practical guidance for Dutch museums on colonial collections.

Sources

References

External links

Webpage
of the National Museum of World Cultures in the Netherlands (in English) *W
page
of the ''Museumovermensen.nl'' (). *W
page
of the ''AfrikaMuseum.nl'' {{DEFAULTSORT:Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen Ethnographic museums in the Netherlands Museums established in 2014 National museums of the Netherlands African art museums

Structure and collections

Repatriation of cultural heritage

See also

Sources

References

Further reading

External links