A documentary about the great plunder of Nepal
They interview the curator of the Rubin Museum in New York, who abruptly leaves
https://dharma-documentaries.net/nepal-the-great-plunder
I genuinely do not believe one can be involved in the major western museum space without being complicit in colonialist plunder
Your work literally sustains it
Oct 7, 2026, 6:26 AMI mean, there are plenty of regional and local museums, it's not all the big anglophone thievery museums.
@CarstenBoll plenty of non anglophone European museums and countries also stole stuff or were actively involved
Oct 7, 2026, 6:37 AMAbsolutely, but definitely not all of them, far from it. The big national museums, sure, but my local museum Moesgaard - which is big and famous - has no permanent exhibitions for things outside Denmark.
There are Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Viking, and Medieval exhibitions and then visiting exhibitions from around the world on loan from other museums. So you can work in large museums and not be complicit.
That said, I agree that in a lot of places it an exhibition of all the stuff someone stole back in the day, and that it should be given back (or leased, I guess, if you can come to an agreement).
@skinnylatte "a large section of Nepal’s heritage [...] has become the property of wealthy collectors of various kinds overseas."
I object to the wording here. No it has not become their property.
@skinnylatte during a pre-grad school visit,I went to a faculty member’s house for a dinner party. She pulled me aside and wanted to show me something. It turned out that she had a number of Chinese artifacts purchased before China put a ban on exporting these things. Some of them were grave goods. It was just a really surreal experience. I don’t know that these were important things but there is just something uncomfortable about taking a grave good and placing it in your home. Of course, she wanted to show me because I’m Chinese 🤦♀️ and I couldn’t very well say anything because she was quite famous.
@irene @skinnylatte Wow, it's gross that she would single you out to show you this. And this was supposed to make a good impression on you as a prospective student?
@skinnylatte @lindsey I don’t mind saying who it was. It was Lenore Blum at CMU. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenore_Blum
I feel like there’s a certain survivor bias of older women in CS that lends itself to well meaning but problematic women. I’ve encountered ones that told me to “suck it up” essentially to harassment and that I should pretend that it’s my fault when men make mistakes to keep them from getting mad. So I’m kind of not surprised?
@irene @skinnylatte Sigh. Even just "I'll show these objects to a Chinese person and they'll like them because they're Chinese!!" is not cool, but if these were grave goods, then I think that takes it beyond your typical garden-variety cringe behavior
@lindsey @skinnylatte yeah it’s just never ending. I’m possibly unique in academia and tech in that I grew up in some parts of the US that were pretty sexist and racist towards me and it just .. never got better? Like I feel like I kept running to places that people would tell me are safe and then it just wasn’t. I’ve probably survived more cringe behavior than anyone that I interact with on a regular basis and it’s just still a lot all the damn time.
@lindsey @skinnylatte And of course, every time I try to make it better or enforce boundaries .. how dare I??
Not wanting to serve on a PC with people that have bullied me in the past? Offensive!
Not wanting to take a tenure-track job in a state that voted for Trump in 2016? The gall!
Not wanting women to be sexually assaulted at conferences? Too much!
Oct 7, 2026, 12:21 PM@irene @skinnylatte that’s awful and bonkers.
@skinnylatte absolutely agree. The only way I could see it working is if the originals were returned and the "owners" (if that even makes sense) could choose to make a high quality replica that could then be sent out of exhibits.
I'm thinking about the tomb plundering of the Egyptian pyramids for example. If the country decides to monetize their culture, they should be able to. I'd hope they'd put the corpse back though...
Same goes for pieces in private collections if they were stolen.
@skinnylatte I’d say this attitude reaches its high point when you are so afraid of discussion that you change the law to make it illegal to return stolen items.
@skinnylatte Yeaahhh. At this point you kind of have to be actively working on returning anything for which you cannot establish a clear, clean chain of informed, enthusiastic consent.
Oct 7, 2026, 9:35 AM@skinnylatte I don't know. The Hubei Provincial Museum and the Wuhan Museum both are pretty massive and major edifices of artifacts here, but they're not really complicit in colonialism.
Perhaps the difference lies in whether your displays are domestic or foreign?
Oct 7, 2026, 12:28 PM@skinnylatte there are a lot of different kinds of art museums out there, many do not traffic in stolen cultural artifacts.
@skinnylatte I always feel honored when I'm in front of an object important for another culture because it puts me closer to cultures I don't think I'll meet in person during mv lifetime but I believe originals should stay in their communities and museums should make their own replicas, not the other way around.