Foreword Henrietta Lidchi

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.

Provenance, as noted above, often supposes a single origin – an origin point or beginning. However, in English ‘origin’ can also mean ‘the intersection of coordinate axes’. That definition feels more suited to the questions that are posed in this publication. The intersection of histories, objects, personalities and events, the probable linkages between them, and the meanings that arise from these conjunctions.

As will be shown here, what provenance research signifies in the context of world cultures collections is not finding an answer, but clarifying the questions. Provenance research, it might be argued, is a practice of healthy scepticism as regards your institutional ancestors, by re-assessing their documentation, their criteria of value and their purposes. It provides a critical engagement with traditional museological projects of identification, representation and collecting. It aims to give names and dates to people and processes formerly undistinguished in the archive. Provenance is allied with an optimistic sense of what research and critical museology can give to the interpretation of things, recognising their role as witnesses within complex and entangled histories.

Even if world cultures collections are constituted of assemblages, here individual objects are the focus of the essays. This edition is part of the commitment of the National Museum of World Cultures to think through its collections, using the tools available to us, be this documentation, material research, the objects themselves, social media, communities and artist(s). It aims to make this thinking accessible as ‘work in progress’, and in this way to render our research accountable. Provenance is not only a means to understand past practices and historic collections, but a way of thinking through the legacies we create for the future.