Bénedicte Savoy and Yann Potin (Archives nationales, Université Paris Nord) are organizing a one-day workshop comprising four round-table discussions, as part of their Chair in the Cultural History of Artistic Heritage in Europe, 18th-20th centuries.
Ethnology, like art anthropology, has long approached the transmission of objects from the angle of their "social life" (Arjun Appadurai, Daniel Fabre, Thierry Bonnot, etc.). This personalization of the object borders on anthropomorphism, with the symmetrical model of the "relic" as a distant matrix, i.e. the body as object: a well-known rhetorical figure since Antiquity, the ventriloquist object, endowed with a name and sensitive, emotional properties (complaints and cries, if not will and desires). Like the furta sacra studied by Patrick Geary, the personalization of objects presupposes - or pretends to make believe - that they are endowed with intentionality. This supposed personality aims to express the modalities of objects' super-life, without rarely raising the question of the possible legal implications of an imaginary assimilation whose effects are real and whose stakes are often political. At a time when the natural world is inviting itself onto the stage of the theater of law, can we envisage "a right of objects to dispose of themselves"? The contemporary evolution of practices and emotions linked to displaced heritage, on an international scale, offers a pretext for reflection for a series of round tables. The aim is to compare the points of view of those involved, curators and heritage experts. How can we describe the phenomenon over the long term? How can museums, libraries and archives grasp this symbolic and legal fiction?