A Tale of Two Museums: Restitution and the Genealogy of the False Dichotomy between Natural History Museums and Cultural Museums

Stewens, Paul P. ‘A Tale of Two Museums: Restitution and the Genealogy of the False Dichotomy between Natural History Museums and Cultural Museums’. International Journal of Cultural Policy, ahead of print, 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2026.2653066.

Museums housing cultural artifacts have long faced restitution claims while these are only beginning to affect natural history museums. Conversely, the law on cultural property restitution does not reflect a such distinction. This article examines the puzzling disconnect between cultural museums and natural history museums regarding restitution, and the comprehensive legal framework that governs it. By developing a genealogy of today’s museum landscape that builds on Foucault’s The Order of Things and Discipline and Punish, the article understands museums as institutions that constitute and enforce a given structure of knowledge and permit exercising control over the material world. Either function is contingent on a historical period’s epistemic configuration, and changes therein are key to understanding why eclectic Renaissance collections disintegrated into disciplinary museums. Understanding the genealogy of museum diversification is essential for critically approaching the false dichotomy between natural history and cultural museums regarding restitution.

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