Benin bronzes at the top of the main staircase at the front entrance to the British Museum, London

~Clearly, it would be overdetermined to presume a tidy continuum between ideologies marking the formation of anthropology as a discipline in the early twentieth century, and the present ‘post-colonial’ context. I want to suggest, however, that some vestiges of these earlier preoccupations remain at the root of contemporary debates on the value of...