From the Global Renaissance to ‘New Relational Ethics’: Early Modern African Artifacts in European Museums and Matters of Restitution

his article focuses on issues related to restitution, yet not with regard to objects from Africa that arrived during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but with regard to an early modern group of artifacts. Interrogating case studies of ivory carvings from Sierra Leone that have been created in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century and collected in European Kunstkammer collections since then, the article challenges the restitution concept arguing for a need to reconsider also the role of such objects for restitution discourses, both on material and epistemic levels.