Over the years, I have researched intercultural education, gender relations, art production, environmental humanities, and museum collections in collaboration with Indigenous peoples and communities. In particular, my research explores the impacts of colonialism on the lives of people, things, and territories from the perspective of Indigenous ontological self-determination. By this, I mean that my work combines collaboration and symmetrical methodologies to address the unfolding of colonialism from the reality criteria that animate Indigenous worlds.

I frame my research agenda as a commitment to decolonization and repatriation, especially querying the intersection between both ideas. Thus, repatriation here informs not only the devolution of looted things from museums but also land restitution and land-based practices revitalization. Having land and self-determination as a horizon, my work aims to engage in practical issues my collaborators value, seeking ways to support their contra-colonial processes. At the same time, I am also interested in exploring methodologically and theoretically what happens to anthropological thought once we transit from the image of the gift – in contrast with the commodity – as a metaphorical base to conceive descriptions.

Repatriation as a research horizon requires rethinking how descriptions of material culture are made, considering their processes of musealization. For instance, what would have happened to Gell’s famous theory of agency if he had inflected his concept by recognizing and digging deeper into the effects of musealization on the objects he worked with? Therefore, I am interested in experimenting with forms of description that, instead of having their base metaphor in the contrast between gift and commodity, want to transform it by centralizing the image of repatriation. This leads us to think, for example, of the global connections that not only things but spirits, people, and territories make, producing transformations due not only to colonial collecting, but to the decolonizing impetus. Therefore, my research has explored, for instance, how shamans and spirits travel themselves to museum collections because of the things taken away and to claim their release and return, acknowledging that legal, museological, and material dimensions of collections ontologize within things.

As a result, my collaborative research requires assuming that I do not know what repatriation might be without exploring its many facets and complexities. This has led me to argue for a case-by-case understanding of what repatriation can be. Repatriation cannot be reduced to an institutional policy and a predetermined package of actions to be taken regardless of dispossessed peoples’ ontological self-determination. This is because the physical return of bodies and objects, if required, needs to be traversed by other ontological criteria to achieve the undoing of some colonial implications that exceed the capacity to recognize the real under which museum institutions run, for example.

I am currently researching decolonization practices in museums. It seeks to understand what different institutions refer to with notions of decolonization. That is, what is behind this term that, despite having become an institutional buzzword, still reveals the need to disrupt settler and colonial relations. At the same time, I am preparing to start research on the process of musealization and collection of Mapuche shamanic drums, now in museums in the Global North. The idea is to think about how the vital energy of these drums, their newen, can be used in territorial reconstitution and repatriation concerned with land-based practices.