Sensitive Material: A Preliminary Reconnaissance of the Spiritual, Sensorial and Legal Personality of Indigenous Artefacts is concerned with tracing recent developments in the evolution of the notion of the person within the western tradition, with a particular focus on the ‘further elaboration’ (Mauss) of this category in response to challenges stemming from without that tradition. This project focusses on a special class of objects  – or rather, beings – namely, Indigenous artefacts. Our objectives (or ‘research axes’) are:

•   Axis 1)  To examine a range of cases involving the production, animation and care of artefacts in their communities of origin and follow the transactions they enter into en route to their incorporation into ‘the art/culture system’ of their ‘destination culture’ – the Euroamerican museum world or private collection;

•   Axis 2)  To construct a Catalogue of uncommon curatorial practices and artistic interventions keyed to the sensing of Indigenous artefacts as other-than-human persons with their own agency; and,

•   Axis 3)  To assemble a Catalogue of uncommon legal precedents that have heralded, however hesitantly, the formulation of the new (and also very ancient and widespread) sensitive conception of thinghood.

We define sensitive material as follows: Indigenous artefacts can be considered ‘sensitive material’ because: 1) they are ‘sensible objects’ (Edwards, Gosden and Phillips, Sensible Objects,  2006), bundles of sensory properties, not just visual forms (Classen and Howes, “The Museum as Sensescape,” 2006), and have sensory appetites, such as the desire to be bathed and oiled, receive offerings of incense and flowers, be smudged and fed corn meal, be kissed or never touched at all (as the case may be), and sung; 2) they are sensitive because, in their communities of origin, they are regarded as sentient beings (due to the ‘distribution of sentience’ being more extensive and nuanced than in settler society), and treated as relatives (due to the more capacious understanding of personhood and kinship than in western tradition); and, 3) they are sensitive material due to the cultural politics of their disposal in museums and elsewhere. 

This project is aligned with the response of the Canadian Museum Association (CMA) to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) Call to Action #67. In Moved to Action (2022), the CMA urged museums to facilitate Indigenous-led partnerships using UNDRIP to dismantle museum practices that perpetuate colonial harm. It is also aligned with the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s (SSHRC) position that ‘Indigenous research’ – into material culture, in the instant case – signifies a method rather than an area of study, and is otherwise grounded in recent advances in anthropological theory and practice – most notably, the anthropology of things/material culture, sensory museology, and cross-cultural jurisprudence.

This project is primarily focussed on the Canadian scene. The work of David Garneau, Maureen Matthews, and Peter Morn, as well as David Howes, will explore historical and contemporary topics in First Nation and Métis art, craft, culture and society,

The Sensitive Material project is also comparative in scope through its links to two other projects. The first such project – directed by Mark Watson, orchestrated by Kanako Uzawa – is entitled ‘Reclaiming an Ainu voice in the Upoapkas [‘Our Exchange’] partnership: realizing an Indigenous Ainu response to the commitment of five North American museums to decolonize their Ainu collections’. The ‘Our Exchange’ project seeks to unite and give voice to a selection of diasporic Ainu artefacts, who currently make their home in diverse North American museums, in a single exhibitionat the University of Michigan Museum of Art (UMMA) and rekindle their relationship with contemporary Ainu Makers and curators. The second project, or pair of projects actually, consists of Sowparnika Balaswaminathan’s ongoing archival research into the ‘cultural biography of things’ in the Asian collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, with a particular emphasis on their affective traces; and, her ethnographic research on the production, animation and uptake in complex (not always licit) circuits of exchange of South Indian bronzes cast by the Vishwakarma community. Our endeavour, employing the methodology of ‘performative action research’ and ‘inter-cultural legal analysis’ will contribute substantially to decolonizing artefacts and the peoples who create them, in addition to advancing the ‘new sensitive museology’.