Colonialism, Spiritual Dismemberment, & The Theft of Worlds
Can returning physical objects ever fully address the spiritual and cultural harm caused by their theft?
Colonialism did not only seize land, and bodies; it stole the tools of transcendence. Sacred objects were uprooted from their worlds and placed behind glass, stripped of their breath and spirit.
In their original worlds, these objects were never “art” in the modern Western sense. They were portals—technologies of relation between the living and the dead, the human and the more-than-human, the visible and the invisible. Their displacement constitutes not just theft, but a rupture in the pathways by which a people could move between worlds.
Drums that once carried the heartbeat of the cosmos now sit voiceless in sterile halls. Masks that once mediated the face of ancestors stare blankly behind glass. This is not theft alone, but spiritual dismemberment.
Colonial domination is not just about resource extraction—it is about *world extraction*. What was taken were not only materials but also the very mechanisms through which communities imagined, visited, and inhabited other possible worlds. Empire seized the portals of cosmological travel.
Image: James Alcock © Australian Museum
Dahomey Mati Diop / Senegal, Benin, France
The colonial project not only imprisoned bodies physically but also spiritually, by breaking the circuits of ritual practice that allowed people to inhabit more-than-colonial realities.
The modern museum emerges as a cathedral of imperial memory, where the spoils of conquest are reframed as the heritage of all humanity—while their original guardians are excluded from accessing them in living practice. The glass case does not merely protect; it seals away a history of violence.
Photo by Ricardo Stuckert, courtesy Presidency of Brazil