Foreword Henrietta Lidchi
Provenance research, of late, has widened its grip on the museological and political imagination. Formerly the methodology of art history, provenance has now become one of the means by which we reckon more systematically with contested histories, and recognise that objects are witnesses to processes that they can help us investigate, and more properly understand. Provenance in the art historical sense is the attempt to track and trace the history of ownership of an item. In that context it is always allied with authenticity or proof: a point of creation, or ownership, or transfer of title. The question of provenance with collections formerly deemed ethnographic is different. In part because they were often acquired as assemblages with individual items rarely recorded or distinguished. Because objects were given in relation to place and culture, they were assumed to stand for something, not be allied to someone. The picture is correspondingly more complex and entangled, with questions regarding agency and consent intermixed with understanding of historical transactions and provable destinations. 5
