Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the
restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger set of
processes of return that affect museums and collections, as well as
notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of case studies
and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize and bring depth
to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material
culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing
museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology
provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of
collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.