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From the Objects to the Actors of Restitution: Jewish Agency in the Nazi-Era Looted Art and Artefact Restitution Field
Full text linkScholarship on the restitution of art and artefacts looted during the Nazi era has predominantly focused on objects rather than the actors who have shaped this field. This article adopts an actor-oriented approach to examine the agency of Jewish cultural brokers formative to restitution processes since the 1950s. Drawing on interviews conducted with fifteen Jewish cultural brokers from 2022 to 2025 and archival research at the Leo Baeck Institute Archives in New York, it traces how Jewish actors have pioneered and transformed the restitution field. The research reveals two phases of restitution work. In the first phase (1950s–1990s), Jewish lawyers and organisations established legal frameworks for restitution claims. In the second phase (late twentieth century to the present), second- and third-generation Jewish actors shifted the field from national toward moral and global frameworks to emphasise ‘just and fair solutions’. Contemporary Jewish cultural brokers understand their work as both personal heritage practice and moral obligation. They assert agency, seeking not merely the return of objects but the restoration of marginalised stories to history. This actor-centric approach reveals restitution as a processual, relational, and spatial practice of heritage-making that encompasses voice, recognition, and collective memory. By centring Jewish agency, the study demonstrates how marginalised populations can transform institutional fields, offering new perspectives on cultural heritage as an active, lived process rather than a static product of the past
Book Review: Garcia, Angela (2024) The Way That Leads among the Lost. Life, Death, and Hope in Mexico City’s Anexos. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
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Anthropological Gossip: On a Bad Habit in Our Discipline
Full text linkAnthropological gossip, that is, writing mainly for an anthropological audience while criticising other fields, undermines the discipline’s relevance within academia and beyond. To realise the discipline’s critical potential, this piece argues, anthropologists must speak more actively across disciplines
The Archives of Kirsten Pedersen (1932–2017): Inventory and Research Perspectives
Full text linkCatholic nun and historian, Kirsten Pedersen (1932–2017), also known as Kirsten Stoffregen Pedersen and Sister Abraham, is renowned for her scholarly work on the history of Ethiopian Christianity. Located in Jerusalem, her archives (books and documents) were inventoried by the Centre de recherche français à Jérusalem (CRFJ) in 2023 and then donated to the library of the École Biblique et Archéologique (EBAF) in Jerusalem. The aim of this article is firstly to provide an overview of Pedersen’s archives to encourage all researchers to consult them. Providing biographical and bibliographical elements about Pedersen, this paper describes the more interesting books and printed materials owned by her as well as provides a short description of the archival boxes, highlighting the most remarkable documents. Furthermore this paper aims to show the scientific interest of these archives, suggesting some of the research prospects open to researchers thanks to the documents preserved in them
Review of ERIC J. BECK, Justice and Mercy in the Apocalypse of Peter: A New Translation and Analysis of the Purpose of the Text
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Stranded in Dongola: MS Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. et. 44, 71v–76v, a Colophon by Takla ʾAlfā, Reconsidered
Full text linkThe paper offers a re-edition of a valuable first-hand account concerning sixteenth-century Sudan, recorded in Gǝʿǝz by the Ethiopian monk Takla ʾAlfā during his stay at Dongola in 1596. Notably, Takla ʾAlfā was the only known Ethiopian visitor to post-medieval Dongola to leave an account of his visit. The colophon, MS Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. et. 44, 71v–76v, is preceded by hymns composed by the monk and offers insights into the circumstances of their creation. The text, which represents an expanded colophon with autobiographical elements, has received limited scholarly attention, but has a number of remarkable features. It sheds light on some philological practices and indicates a connection between the fast of our Lady Mary of the Mount of Qwǝsqwām and king Śarḍa Dǝngǝl. The newly identified reference to ǧǝlābā merchants in the colophon is the earliest known mention of the term in primary sources concerning Sudan. While the reference to a light in the sky remains vague, it adds to the corpus of Ethiopic narratives featuring celestial apparitions as meaningful quasi-supernatural elements or signs
Seismographic imaging via the ethnogram: The potential of tailored ethnographic techniques in architectural education to capture below-the-surface user experiences.
Full text linkSet in an architectural design educational context, this paper contributes to tackling the current weak spot of grasping and including future users\u27 socio-spatial experiences in the early design stages, by tailoring ethnography to this particular field of architectural design. To capture below-the-surface experiences, we bring together ethnographic research methods and architectural design, steered by the Design-Based Research (DBR) theoretical framework (Euler, 2014), fostering an educational learning aim and providing a handhold for the fuzzy front end of the architectural design process, enabling young designers to collect rich, below-the-surface user data.
We first conducted a literature review in ethnography to explore how current techniques should be tailored to the specifics of the architectural design context. Next, we empirically tested these tailored techniques for three consecutive rounds in the educational design context of a master seminar. The seminar’s participating master students in (interior) architecture developed and executed three ethnographic studies to capture below-the-surface user experiences in three different spatial and social contexts, exploring three different design challenges. These iterations led to (i) the design principle of ‘seismographic imaging’, an approach characterized by applying a well-balanced mix of tailored ethnographic techniques to capture and interpret rich, below-the-surface user experiences. Reflecting on the benefits and challenges thereof resulted in (ii) the development of a design tool, the “ethnogram”, which can be introduced in the architectural design studio, to aid design students in developing a well-balanced mix of tailored ethnographic techniques considering a specific spatial context, target group and design challenge, and necessary to render designerly rich user data.
That way, this paper fulfills an identified need for methodological educational strategies regarding the collection and integration of user experiences in the early design stages of an architectural design process in an educational context and contributes to the theoretical understanding of the possibilities of the DBR model.