Ghosts of Future Nations, or The Uses of the Holocaust Museum Paradigm in India
This chapter discusses two twenty-first-century museum projects in India dedicated to the historical traumas of two different communities. The first of these, the Khalsa Heritage Complex, addresses the Sikh community and is a multimillion-dollar project whose high-tech displays are housed in spectacular “starchitecture.” The other, far more modest, project is sponsored by the Tibetan refugee community in their exile capital at Dharamsala. Though the two museums are vastly different in scale, architecture, and ambition, this chapter shows how both museums were inspired by Jewish Holocaust museums. But forms of Jewish Holocaust memorialization cannot simply be “cut” from one place and “pasted” in another, for local contexts and politics exert their own pushes and pulls on these projects. By comparing the differing fortunes of these two projects, this chapter discusses the circumstances in which a difficult memory becomes possible, or a difficult amnesia becomes a necessity. 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
exile Tibet; 
holocaust museum; 
JuBus ; 
Khalistan; 
Khalsa Heritage Complex; 
Moshe Safdie; 
Anandpur Sahib; 
Sikh martyrdom; 
Tibet Museum; 
Yad Vashem
Repatriation Without Patria
Most claims for the repatriation of artefacts are made by newly sovereign nations, or by communities emerging from a period of domination. They dispute the legal and moral rights of former powers to remove objects from their original home. What meanings can ‘repatriation’ have for Tibet, which exists both as a province of China and as an exile community that has established a ‘virtual’ nation with a government-in-exile? This article studies some Tibetan artefacts that have been in circulation since 1959, to show the ambiguities surrounding ideas of a ‘home’ for such objects; in this context, removing an object from its original location can be an act of theft and of salvage. The author demonstrates how the idea of ‘repatriation’ is often invoked in relation to the current global circulation of Tibetan artefacts in order to make claims about legitimacy and nationhood.
the body in the gift: memory and forgetting in Sabarl mortuary exchange
In casting gift exchange as an inscriptive performance of embodied gender relations, the Sabarl of Papua New Guinea reveal an indigenous valuation of forgetting as a willed transformation of memory and resist the opposition between inscribed and enacted cultural traditions that is so pervasive in the anthropological literature on social memory. Sabarl mortuary exchanges that feature “corpses” of gendered wealth serve here as a case in point. [exchange theory, gender performances, embodiment, memory and forgetting, Melanesia, mortuary rituals]