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The article discusses collectibles acquired by Swedish missionaries and military officers active within the ill-reputed Congo Free State (1885-1908). Objects are approached here not primarily as tokens of Congolese material culture but as traces of a transnational cultural history and as points of entry to a cricial museology. drawing on case studies of collections I discuss the ways in which artifacts have been selected, joined and charged with new functions and meaning on their voyage between hands narratives and genres. In focus are five examples of objects that, analytically, have worked as what Roland Barthes (1980) calls punctum: the detail that distrubs and fascinates by force of seeming ungrammatical in relation to the larger context of which it forms part. By adding material to the Barthian concept I want to stress that such analytical imuplses may be evoked by all senses. During an inventory of Swedish Congolese collections, when the historical state of stored museum items as untouchables could temporarily bwe broken, their multisensory material presences proved able to challenge textual discourses, serve as alternative witnesses and demonstrate hidden significances of ethnographical museums and collections.

Résumé Le Musée ethnographique de Stockholm et le Musée des cultures du monde de Göteborg possèdent près de 18 000 objets « exotiques ». La plupart de ces objets ont été acquis par les missionnaires et les officiers suédois qui travaillaient dans l'État indépendant du Congo (1885-1908), la colonie belge à la réputation sulfureuse du roi Léopold II (1885-1909). L'auteur n'envisage pas ces collections comme autant de témoignages de la culture matérielle congolaise, mais comme autant de traces d'une histoire culturelle suédoise restée trop longtemps inconnue, et qui s'exprime en fait dans ces objets. L'auteur analyse en effet en ethnologue la façon dont ces objets ont été choisis, réunis, chargés de fonctions et surtout de significations nouvelles.

This special section of Museum Worlds explores the entire process of repatriation as a set of rituals enacted by claimants and museum staff: a set of highlighted performances enacting multiple sets of cosmological beliefs, symbolic systems, and political structures. Some of the rituals of repatriation occur within the space of Indigenous ceremonies; others happen within the museum spaces of collections storage and the boardroom; others, such as handover ceremonies, are coproduced and culturally hybrid. From the often obsessive bureaucracy associated with repatriation claims to the affective moment of handover, repatriation articulates a moral landscape where memory, responsibility, guilt, identity, sanctity, place, and ownership are given a ritual form. Theory about ritual is used here to situate the articles in this section, which together form a cross-cultural examination of ritual meaning and form across repatriation processes.