(Please find recording at the end of the post)
We are grateful for Dr Yugo Tomonaga who offered the special guest lecture titled 'Repatriations of Ancestral Remains of Indigenous Peoples: Through a Comparison with the Case of Australia and Japan'. The event was co-hosted with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (AMES) and the Heritage and Colonialism Discussion Group (HCDG) who we are also grateful for.
The event took place in SG2, Alison Richard building and on Zoom on the 24th of February, 2023.
Dr Yugo Tomonaga received his Ph.D. from the Department of Area Studies, The Graduate University for Advanced Studies. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of International Studies, Ryukoku University, Japan, having worked as a Visiting Fellow at the National Museum of Ethnology and a Research Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He has been a Visiting Researcher at the Center for Ainu and Indigenous Studies, Hokkaido University since 2020 and at the Faculty of East Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Cambridge from September 2022 to March 2023. His areas of specialization are social and cultural anthropology, mainly Indigenous Australian Studies and Minoirity Studies in Australia and Japan.
Lecture Synopsis: The current repatriation movements to return indigenous peoples’ remains around the world are inseparably linked to the worldwide decolonization effort. After briefly introducing my projects, my talk is to focus on the indigenous repatriation movements in Australia and Japan and clarifies how the human remains were collected by European or Japanese researchers through a comparative study of the cases in Australia and Japan. It will become clear that the recent movements to repatriate the remains of indigenous peoples are not a national event but a global action. It will also be shown that the repatriation movement in Japan is far behind the global trend.
The event was chaird by Dr Brigitte Steiger (AMES, University of Cambridge) and moderated by Ana Lucia Pelaez Echeverria(University of Cambridge)
Our group is grateful for the support of the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) and the Cambridge Heritage Research Centre (CHRC).