MIL-PAT

In the field of cultural heritage, MIL-PAT seeks to reveal the political, legal, and ethical stakes, behaviors, and decisions involved in actions as material and technical as the digitization, indexing, editorialization, and virtual circulation of objects from ethnographic collections. Drawing on the knowledge acquired on the direct (geo)political and ethical aspects of these issues, MIL-PAT proposes to examine, using the case of the Natural History Museum of Toulouse as a starting point, and according to a principle of co-construction of knowledge, the technical and material roots of these problems upstream of restitution procedures, which reveal only one aspect of them. The phenomena of restitution cover more general questions of accessibility, sharing, legibility, and maintenance. It is these issues that the project intends to address. It will be based on the treatment of three ethnographic collections of the Natural History Museum of Toulouse - Madagascar, New Caledonia, Brazil - to reconstruct their ecosystem by gathering archives and documents, but also by investigating with collectives of rightful owners in the field. Fundamental research based on a strong hypothesis (the ethical-political also interferes at the technical-material level, not as a guide but as a cog), MIL-PAT also aims to act by helping cultural reappropriation through the fairest accessibility. The approach is designed to be exportable and reproducible, to build better and more effective bridges between the societies of origin and today's conservation establishments, for the benefit of all audiences. To achieve this, the project brings together researchers in anthropology, information science, history, and law, as well as professionals in the conservation of sensitive heritage, in charge of ethnographic collections and databases.