Religious Heritage Network Symposium 2025
University of Groningen

Organizers: Andrew J.M. Irving (Centre for Religion and Heritage, RUG); Todd H. Weir
(Centre for Religion and Heritage, RUG); Birgit Meyer (UU)
Date: 3-4 December 2025
Locations: House of Connections and University of Groningen Museum (Day 1), University
of Groningen Museum, Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society, RUG, Groningen (Day 2)
Sponsors: Rijksdienst voor Cultureel Erfgoed (through the Religious Heritage Network);
Centre for Religion and Heritage; NOSTER; University Museum Groningen, Utrecht
University

To participate or for any questions, please contact: Austin Brewin (student assistant, CRH)
A.D.W.Brewin@student.rug.nl

Aim
Over the past years, both in scholarship and public debate, much attention has been paid to
the problematic provenance of collections of artifacts from areas colonized by European
powers. Across Europe, the publication of the Sarr-Savoy Report “The Restitution of African
Cultural Heritage. Towards a New Relational Ethics” (2018) had a strong impact on debates
about the past and future of colonial collections in the European museum-scape, triggering a
number of spectacular restitutions of artefacts, such as the Benin bronzes looted by British
military from the Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria, treasures looted from the court of the
Asantehene in Kumasi, Ghana, and the return of royal statues stolen by the French from the
Kingdom of Dahomey (masterfully documented by Mati Diop in the film Dahomey).

In the Netherlands, in 2020 the advisory report Colonial Collection: A Recognition of
Injustice was submitted to the government, and its recommendations were adopted in the
2021 policy document Beleidsvisie collecties uit een koloniale context, further supported in
2022 by a kamerbrief informing the Parliament on implementation of the policy. In research,
the NWA-project “Pressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage
in Museums” (2020-2025) embarked on a detailed investigation of the provenance of specific
colonial collections in the National Museum of World Cultures and university museums in
Amsterdam (Vrolik), Utrecht, and Groningen (including the Theo van Baaren Collection).

Against this backdrop, as scholars working on religion and heritage, we call special attention
to musealised religious artifacts. As (former) vessels of spiritual forces, representations of
deities, ancestors, animated materials or powerful devices, they have a special status that
raises pressing questions about the gap between the ways in which they were valued and used
in the communities of origin, on the one hand, and their storage and display in modern,
secular museums, on the other. Through which trajectories did they become part of museum
collections? Which role did Christian missions play in their collection, and their devaluation
as “idols” or “fetishes”? How did museum regimes of categorizing, storage and display affect
these artifacts? What impact did the collection have on the receiving institutions? To what
extent has there been an acknowledgement of their status as spiritual and potentially
animated? How could museums host such artifacts in a respectful manner? Is this impossible,
given the secular orientation of the Western museum?

Debates about provenance and the possibility of restitution have also raised questions about
the value and meaning of religious artifacts for the descendents of their makers and first
users. Often, the artifacts have been re-categorized in the “secular” museum by invoking
dismissive concepts drawn from the colonial and missionary lexicon. Old charges of
“idolatry” and “fetishism” may be powerfully resilient for today’s Christian beholders from
communities of origin. This shows the resilience and persistence of colonial and missionary
ascriptions.

In this workshop, we will explore how spiritual artifacts are viewed and dealt with as they
transition into and out of museum collections, both in Europe and in museums in the societies
from which the collections were taken. Which ideas and feelings do such artifacts evoke for
multiple beholders? How are they seen by Christian believers and theologians, especially in
the countries from where the artifacts hail? Are they still – or again- regarded as animated?
What happens if they are re-appreciated as “cultural assets” or “religious heritage”? How are
they treated in the museum context? In short: How do secular museum contexts – in Europe
and in the Global South – affect the meaning, value and ontological status of spiritual
artefacts and what remains of the powers imbued in them?

Format
We envision this workshop as a space for constructive, case-based discussions for scholars
and students. Accordingly, the two-day workshop is organised around five panels (each of
three 20-minute papers) and a student poster session. Each panel is thematically oriented in
order to bring into conversation five interested parties:
● The Collectors
● The Curators
● The Spiritual Artifacts
● The Theologians
● The Communities

Day One focuses on the creation of collections and the fate of artifacts in them: Panel 1
“Collectors; Panel 2 “Curators”; Panel 3 “Spiritual artifacts”. We ask how the artifacts arrived
in the collection, how was this documented, and perceived at the time of collection and
display? What were the motivations and interests of the collectors? How have curators
engaged with this legacy in their curatorial practice? What is the voice of the artefacts
themselves on these journeys, and how can they be made to speak? To what extent have these
collections intersected with reflection or spur new developments in religious studies and
anthropology? What about (new) animism as a conceptual framework?

Day Two focuses on the prospect of restitution and return of such spiritual artifacts from
Western collections to the states to which their former makers and users belong. How does
conversion to Christianity mediate current views towards such spiritual artifacts? How do
Christian theologians understand them? Is there a possibility to move beyond a resilient
Christian frame of “idolatry” towards “cultural heritage”? How do current – Christian and
non-Christian – members of source communities view and value such artifacts? In short, how
are differences between religious pasts and presents, differences which are often
characterized by conversions to new religious practices and faiths, mediated vis-a-vis such
collections?

The workshop also provides an opportunity for ReMA/MA/PhD student poster presentations,
to showcase student research projects on the topic, and provide an opportunity for
questioning, exchange, and networking.

Programme (provisional)

DAY ONE
House of Connections, Grote Markt 21, Groningen
10.00-10.30 Walk in
10.30-10.45 Welcome
10.45-12.15 Panel 1: Seekers and Collectors
Facilitator: Peter Pels, Universiteit Leiden, Birgit Meyer, Universiteit Utrecht
This panel is particularly interested in the motivations and the practices of collectors of
spiritual artifacts from cultures not their own. Two prominent collectors of ethnographic
objects who were also scholars of religion are central: Rudolf Otto and Theo van Baaren.

Rudolf Otto and the Founding of the Religionskundliche Sammlung in Marburg:
Concept, Acquisition, Musealization
Susanne Rodemeier, Philipps-Universität Marburg

Rudolf Otto (1869–1937), known for his groundbreaking work The Idea of the Holy (1917),
also initiated a lesser-known but equally significant project in studies of religion: the
Religionskundliche Sammlung, which was founded in 1927 on the 400th anniversary of the
University of Marburg. Unlike ethnographic or art historical collections, Otto’s vision
centered on comparative forms of religious expression. His aim was to create tangible and
emotional access to different forms of religious practice for academic teaching and research.

This talk explores Otto’s motivations and the scientific and institutional context in which the
collection was created. It sheds light on the process of acquiring objects, exhibiting
principles, and strategies used to visualize the diversity of religions. Beyond documenting
these aspects, the talk raises a further question: what significance does the collection have for
the research on materiality of religion? By focusing on the origins and conceptual
foundations of the Religionskundliche Sammlung, the talk aims to shed light on a topic that is
currently receiving renewed attention: the debate connected with religious artefacts
originating from missionary and colonial contexts, namely the question of object sensitivity.

Beyond Categories: An exploration of the Van Baaren collection at the Groningen
University Museum
Rosalie Hans, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
This paper will present some of the outcomes of the provenance research carried out in 2024
and 2025 on the Van Baaren collection in the Groningen University Museum (GUM).
Analysis of the Van Baaren collection made clear that the categories of ‘university
collection’, ‘missionary objects’, ‘art’ and ‘ethnography’ do not accurately describe the
variety of objects (or artefacts) brought together by Van Baaren nor his motivations and
collecting practice. Looking beyond these often used categories will allow for a better
understanding of the collection as a whole. This will be illustrated by several case studies
from his collection, with an emphasis on objects he acquired from missionary orders. It has
been assumed that Van Baaren’s vocation as a religious studies scholar and surrealist poet and
visual artist informed what he acquired for his collection. However, a more layered image
arises from his archive: that of an opportunistic collector well-connected to the ethnographic
art networks across Europe, who was consulted as an expert and had a keen eye for
commercial value and museum interests. His involvement with brokering acquisitions
between congregations and museums are of particular interest. The paper will consider what
this could mean for how Van Baaren viewed religious artefacts and what has happened to the
interpretation of the collection since it became part of the GUM in 2003.

12.15-13.15: Lunch

13.15-14.30 Panel 2: Curators and Conservators Part A
Facilitator: Dr. Sabina Rosenbergova, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
This panel explores the new challenges as the collected objects enter museum collections.
How has the museum acknowledged, (dis)respected, disregarded, or obscured the persistent
spiritual nature of the artefacts? What are the implications for display, access, preservation
and communication?

Curating Living Asmat Artefacts
Andreas Wahyu, Asmat Archive

This paper reflects on the curatorial challenges and ethical issues involved in exhibiting
Asmat artefacts at the Asmat Museum of Culture and Progress in Agats, Papua. The Asmat
people do not simply understand their carved objects as material creations, but also as
embodiments of ancestral presence and communal memory. However, when these artefacts
are transferred to museum collections, both local and international, their spiritual vitality is
often reframed through aesthetic or ethnographic categories that diminish their ritual
significance.
Based on my experience of curating the permanent exhibition at the Asmat Museum of
Culture and Progress, as well as my visit to the World Museum in the Netherlands, this paper
explores how different museological contexts engage with, or fail to engage with, the
persistent spiritual dimensions of Asmat cultural objects. I discuss how Catholic inculturation
in the Asmat region has produced a unique cultural synthesis where ritual woodcarving,
Christian symbolism and collective memory coexist and shape new understandings of the
sacred.
Through this reflection, the paper considers how curatorial practices can acknowledge the
continuing life of artefacts — beyond preservation and exhibition — and create a dialogical
space that honours indigenous cosmologies while addressing asymmetries of power and
museum representation.

Interests, relationships, pathways and missteps: Handling spiritual items of the Ewe
people from the collection of missionary Carl Spiess at the Übersee-Museum in Bremen
Silke Seybold, Übersee-Museum Bremen

In 1893, the young Heinrich Schurtz began working as an ‘ethnographic assistant’ at the
Museum für Natur-, Völker- und Handelskunde in Bremen. In the same year, he published an
article on ‘Amulets and Magic Devices’. [Heinrich Schurtz: Amulette und Zaubermittel, In: Archiv für Anthropologie, Völkerforschung und kolonialen Kulturwandel, 1893, S. 57-64.] And when he met missionary Carl Spiess in 1896, who was obviously fond of collecting, a close relationship developed between the missionary and the museum. Schurtz expressed the wish that Spiess should pay particular attention to amulets and magic devices. And Spiess fulfilled this wish. Over the next 20 years, he
collected many items for the museum in the mission area of the Norddeustche Missions-Gesellschaft in West Africa (today’s Togo and Ghana): natural history specimens, written information, but above all more than 500 objects, many of which have a spiritual connection.
In my contribution, I would like to trace how this collection has been and continues to
be preserved, researched, presented and communicated in the museum, which is now called
the Übersee-Museum Bremen. What continuities or breaks have there been over the years?
What interpretations and misinterpretations? What interests did and do those involved have,
and what relationships influenced and continue to influence the work? How is the historical
context reflected? Special attention will also be paid to the Legba-Dzoka project, in which
scholars and practitioners from Togo, Ghana, Germany, and the Netherlands are working
together on the provenance of the Spiess collection and its significance for people in West
Africa today. One focus is on spiritual objects. What influence does this cooperation have on
everyday museum life and how the collection is handled today?

14.30-14.45 Break

14.45-16.00 Panel 2: Curators and Conservators Part B
Facilitator: Sabina Rosenbergova, Rijskuniversiteit Groningen

The possibility of a future: the Marind collections at the Wereldmuseum
Fanny Wonu Veys, Universiteit Leiden

Collected by missionaries and anthropologists, the collections from the Marind in southern
New Guinea held by the Wereldmuseum relate to the performance of dema-stories. These
large-scale rituals staged primordial beings, dema, in order to establish a connection with the
ancestral beings of the forest. Via regular visits to the sago gardens and the forest connections
with ancestral family members present in plants, animals and stones are nurtured. However,
because of the rapid spread of oil palm plantations since 2010, and now also the advance of
rice fields, the relationship with ancestors is difficult and sometimes impossible. This paper
explores how these collections represent Marind life worlds through the intervention of
anthropologists and missionaries but also the role museums can play in discussing
multinational capitalist economies and current Marind views on these objects. Is there a
possibility of creating a future if the connection with your ancestors has been impeded?

Rethinking Ancestors beyond “Religion” and Toward “Heritage”

Peter Pels, Universiteit Leiden
Africanist anthropologist Igor Kopytoff took a decisive step beyond the North Atlantic
concept of “religion” in his famous “Ancestors as Elders” (1971). The article suggested that
the North Atlantic tendency to treat deceased ancestors as either “supernatural” imagination
or dead matter, thus reducing their effects on the living, produced a stark boundary that
Kopytoff’s interlocutors’ among Suku did not articulate. Revered elders passed into
ancestrality, but not just by the sudden rupture of death – they lost their personhood as elders
after death and burial, gradually becoming less of a person and more of an abstract presence
as they receded from memory. Kopytoff thus questioned whether certain core assumptions of
the modern concept of “religion” applied to African forms of revering ancestors.
In this essay, I want to apply this “Africanist” analytic – without presuming it covers the
whole of “Africa” (whatever that may be) – to North Atlantic genealogies of heritage. This
should test the hypothesis that ancestrality is equally common in North Atlantic cultural
circuits as in “African” ones, but that its connection to “religion” is obscured by the tendency
to hide that monuments have similar afterlives, both in positive and negative ways. I employ
several examples from the history of the French Revolution, where some of the most central
assumptions about modern heritage – assumptions that determine UNESCO heritage
conventions to this day – emerged. The essay concludes by considering the thesis whether the
nineteenth-century monument can be interpreted as a typically modern form of ancestrality.

16.00-16.45 Walk to Faculty Library and then University Museum (Oude
Boteringestraat 38 and Oude Kijk in het Jatstraat 7a)

16.45-17.45 Panel 3: In the Presence of the Artifacts
Facilitator: Birgit Meyer, Universiteit Utrecht
This experimental panel attempts to attend to ongoing agency of the spiritual artifacts. With
permission of the University Museum, Groningen, it will take place in the museum, and in
the presence of objects from the Theo van Baaren collection. It explores how we can allow
room for the artifacts itself to communicate and thereby shape curatorial, scholarly, and
community practice inside and outside the museum walls, for instance through performance.

What if these are beings?
Nii Ocquaye Hammond and Marleen de Witte, Universiteit Utrecht

Moving from reflecting on a museum collection to consulting the spiritual entities whose
images are held therein, this performative intervention unfolds among artifacts from the Theo
van Baaren Collection. Through symbolic gesture, sound, invocation, and collective
presence, the performance invites ancestral entities to awaken as living participants rather
than mute objects. By ritually opening the space to their agency, it provokes reflection on
their stature, their journeys of violation and displacement, and their promise of reconnection
and nourishment. What happens when spiritual artifacts are no longer treated as objects of
study but as beings in conversation? The performance creates a space of encounter where
museum, scholarship, and ancestral presence intermingle, calling participants to listen –
intellectually, sensorially, spiritually – to the voices that remain.

17.45-18.45 Student Poster Presentations and Borrel
MA, ReMA, and PhD students present their research on topics related to the symposium’s
theme.

Reception
19.30 Conference Dinner for presenters

DAY TWO
Location: University Museum
9.30-10.45 Panel 4: Re-collecting what was lost Part A
Facilitator: Lieke Wijnia, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
How do local communities of origin perceive and engage with the return of spiritual objects?
What remains of the former musealisation and categorization? What new challenges arise
from de-museualisation or re-musealisation in new contexts?

An Uncomfortable Possession. Modelled Skulls in a Mission Museum and their Spirits
Paul Voogt, curator Missiemuseum Steyl

The Missiemuseum Steyl exhibits five modeled skulls from the Sepik-area in Papua New
Guina, from the collection of the missionary society of the Divine Word (SVD). They are an
uncomfortable possession for the congregations in Steyl. The Missiemuseum decided to
investigate whether the skulls could be returned to Papua New Guinea. But the residents of
the communities of origin do not want them back.
According to the people in the source communities, the objects have lost their spirit when
they left their community. But the spirits might return when they return to their place of
origin and the people do not know how to handle them safely anymore.
The Missiemuseum currently investigates different options to deal with this heritage, as part
of the temporary exhibition The Collection Resists. One of the options is presented by Dicky
Takndare and Albertho Wanma, contemporary artists from West-Papua.
The dilemmas surrounding this uncomfortable possession will be highlighted in this
presentation.

Rebuilding the Cosmic Centre: The Asmat Longhouse as Ritual and Resistance
Dr. Jaap Timmer, Macquarie University – Sydney

The jee, or longhouse, is the cornerstone of Asmat culture. Serving multiple ritual functions,
it symbolises the cosmic centre, linking the earthly realm to the upperworld where ancestors
dwell. The cyclical rebuilding of the longhouse every five years is the most significant ritual
act in Asmat society, an ethical obligation that maintains cosmic and social order. Since the
1950s, this tradition was violently disrupted by Catholic missionisation, Dutch colonial
governance, and Indonesian assimilationist policies. Longhouses were burned, rituals
suppressed, and sacred knowledge fragmented. Yet over the past two decades, renewed
interest in the longhouse has emerged. Supported in part by the Catholic Church and driven
by local aspirations for cultural autonomy, many communities have begun rebuilding
longhouses. This reactivation, however, is shaped by generational ruptures, forgotten songs
and techniques, and the broader afterlives of colonial and missionary regimes. In this paper, I
explore the longhouse as a spiritual artefact that remains embedded in Asmat cosmology but
now circulates through altered ontological conditions. What does it mean to ‘recollect’ a
sacred form not from a museum but from disrupted memory? And what remains when a
spiritual object is rebuilt not with intact tradition, but in the shadow of colonial fracture?

10.45-11.15 Break
11.15-12.30 Panel 4: Re-collecting what was lost Part B
Facilitator: Lieke Wijnia, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Re-collecting dzoka
Birgit Meyer, Universiteit Utrecht

At the center of this presentation is the research of the Legba-Dzoka project, an
interdisciplinary and international group of scholars and two vodu-priests, who focus on a
collection of spiritual artifacts kept in the Übersee-Museum Bremen. They were taken there
by Protestant missionary Carl Spiess who preached the Gospel and collected artifacts from
the Ewe-speaking area around 1900. Recently, our team presented the outcomes of our
provenance research to a broader public in Ghana and Togo, from where the collection
initially hails. In this presentation, I will discuss multiple positions formulated vis-a-vis the
possibility and desirability of a return of the items in the collection to Ghana and/or Togo,
ranging from downright rejection in the name of “idolatry”, to recognition as valuable
cultural assets and forms of heritage, to an their embracement as spiritual forces. Arguing that
these positions evolve around the secular-religious boundary, I will pay special attention to
the notion of heritage, which is situated at the core of that boundary.

Art, Heritage, or Religion? The Restitution of Vigango Memorial Posts of the Mijikenda
to the Religiously Diverse Context of Coastal Kenya
Erik Meinema, Universiteit Utrecht

Vigango (plural, singular is kigango) are wooden posts that Giriama and other Mijikenda
people use to represent deceased male ancestors who were members of the Gohu fraternity.
While a few vigango where collected during colonial times as ethnographic
objects, vigango gained recognition as East African art during the 1970s and 1980s. In
relation to this newly acquired status, many vigango were stolen and/or sold to art traders and
collectors, and subsequently ended up in museum collections across the globe. In recent
decades, Mijikenda activists, scholars, and Kenyan government institutions have been
involved in attempts to return vigango to Kenya. In this presentation, I explore how different
parties involved in these restitution efforts use the globally circulating frames of ‘art’
(usanii), ‘heritage’ and culture (utamaduni), and ‘religion’ (dini), and how these frames relate
to different (ownership) claims that are made about vigango. In addition, I explore if and how
these frames leave open the possibility of recognizing vigango as vessels of the spirits of
deceased ancestors.

12.30-13.30 lunch at RCS (Oude Boteringestraat 38)

13.00-15.30: Panel 5: Past Religions and Decolonization: Religious Heritage and
Contemporary Theology in the Global South
Facilitator: Professor Todd Weir, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
This panel explores developments in theological discourse (systematic, missiological,
pastoral, liturgical) concerning sacred images and practices belonging to non/pre-Christian
religious traditions. In particular it asks: What is the response of pious Christian or Muslim
members of communities of origin to the return of their “lost” spiritual heritage? How does
“heritage” figure in efforts of theologians from the global south to establish new relationships
to the “indigenous” religious heritage of their ancestors?

Return of Lost Spiritual Heritage: A Response of Pious Akan Pentecostals
Bismark Agyapong, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Akan religious beliefs and practices intertwines with its culture. Although Akan Pentecostals
generally practice their newfound beliefs in opposition to their indigenous religion, remnants
of their cultural identity are always kept. It is then the very interest of this paper to ask the
question what is the response of a pious Akan Pentecostal to the return of their lost spiritual
heritage? A vast majority of Akan Pentecostals incline to a theological viewpoint that is
incompatible to their indigenous religion. These Pentecostals, for example, perceive their
salvation as a radical break from their “past,” i.e., vestiges of indigenous religious beliefs and
practices. Despite this positionality of the vast majority of Akan Pentecostals, there is also a
growing number of Akan Pentecostals who have renewed appreciations for their “past.” As a
methodology, I focus on existing literary scholarships particularly on Birgit Meyer’s work
“Make a Complete Break with the Past: Memory and Post-Colonial Modernity in Ghanaian
Pentecostalist Discourse” and oral narratives collected through recent conversations with
some devout Akan Pentecostals in Kumasi, Ghana. These sources are thematically analyzed
in view of interpreting theologically the return of lost Akan spiritual heritage. This paper
analyses how some Akan Pentecostals engage with spiritual vestiges of the past, not as
sacrilege but as insights into Akan spirituality for theological re-evaluation. This paper argues
for a contextual Pentecostal theology that perceives the “past” as a resource for constructing
an authentically Akan expression of Pentecostal Christian faith. As an Akan Pentecostal
theologian, I propose that the return of lost spiritual heritage is not a threat, but as reflective
inroads for the contemporary Akan Pentecostals in understanding the historical body of
beliefs conceived among the Akan people of old. This paper contributes to a deeper discourse
on faith and culture, decolonial theology, and African Christian identity in current religious
contexts.

Three Perspectives on Sacred Traditions of Indigenous Kachin People
Zung Bawm, Protestant Theological University
This paper, a work-in-progress chapter of my PhD research, outlines three main perspectives
on the sacred traditions/practices of indigenous Kachin people of Myanmar: (1) discontinuity
or demonization, which rejects all indigenous traditions out of fear of syncretism and a
theology rooted in human exceptionalism; (2) divergence, which advocates for a total return
to lost indigenous religious traditions by romanticizing pre-Christian Kachin beliefs as an
antidote to Westernized Christianity, coupled with an ecological critique of the Bible and
Judeo-Christianity; and (3) appreciative discovery, which fosters a constructive and creative
dialogue between Christian theology and life-affirming indigenous traditions, allowing these
to be interpreted through reformulated Christian theological lenses to enhance the relevance
of the Christian gospel message.
Aligning with the third perspective of appreciative recovery, I briefly engage three
ecologically relevant concepts from my green exegesis of the three parables in Mark
4—where Jesus presents the earth/γῆ as a key character to articulate the ecologically resonant
message of the kindom of God—in dialogue with analogous pre-Christian Kachin traditions:
human kinship with the earth, the earth as a living, nurturing entity, and the earth with
prophetic agency. This intercultural exchange seeks to cultivate a culturally sensitive,
earth-oriented biblical interpretation that enriches ecological theology and offers fresh
insights for restoring humanity’s relationship with the earth and caring for God’s good
creation amid the pressing global and local ecological challenges of the Anthropocene era.

Shrunken heads and Evangelical radios, or the complications of heritage on
Shuar territory, Ecuador
Victor Cova, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen

Shuar people and neighbouring members of the Chicham linguistic group used to
ceremonially reduce the heads of their enemies captured in war, producing artefacts that
became very popular among European and North American primitivist collectors. In recent
decades, these artefacts have become problematic in European and North American museums
both because they are human remains and because of their religious nature, and efforts have
been made to repatriate them. Yet Shuar institutions that receive those artifacts often do not
know what to do with them, in parts because most Shuar people consider themselves
Christian, even if not always practicing ones. In this paper I will discuss the contemporary
ambivalence of Shuar people towards shrunken heads, and compare it with the equally
difficult memorialization of Christian missions on Shuar territory, and with some
anthropological perspectives that see memorialization itself as contrary to Shuar culture.

15.30-16.00 Break

16.00-16.45 Closing Discussion
Chair Todd Weir, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Mirjam Shatanawi, KITLV and Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the
Arts)
Birgit Meyer, Universiteit Utrecht