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Are museums celebrating cultural heritage—or clinging to stolen treasure?
Curators are realizing that returning looted artifacts isn’t closing museums—it’s opening new doors. “The ethnographic museum of the past is making its way to the exit.”
Around 1900, colonial officials and traders—like the Austrian merchant sitting next to Bamum ruler Ibrahim Njoya—scoured the world for art and ceremonial objects to bring back to museums in Europe.
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