Amulet Atlas

organizationsMusée du quai Branly — Jacques ChiracMusée du quai Branly — Jacques Chirac

also: Quai Branly · MQB

organizationWestern EuropeWest AfricaCentral AfricaThe PacificIsland Southeast AsiaFranceneeds checking

Paris museum of the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia, Oceania and the Americas, opened to the public on 23 June 2006 in a Jean Nouvel building beside the Seine. It holds more than a million objects and shows about 3,500 at a time. It is also where the French argument about returning colonial-era collections is loudest, because 70,000 of France's 90,000 sub-Saharan objects are here.

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When

inaugurated 20 June 2006, opened to the public 23 June 2006 still carried cited

Period2006 to now
How the date is knowntextual — a dated text describes it

Years are stored astronomically — 1 CE is 1, 1 BCE is 0, 500 BCE is −499 — and printed the way a reader says them. How these dates are made.

The story

The museum was assembled out of two older ones with incompatible purposes: the 25,000 objects of the Musée national des Arts d'Afrique et d'Océanie, created for the Colonial Exposition of 1931, and the 250,000-object ethnology collection of the Musée de l'Homme, created for the Paris Exposition of 1937. One was run by art historians, the other by anthropologists. The new museum was put under two ministries to match, and ten thousand further objects were bought.

Critics went at it from both directions on opening. Michael Kimmelman in the New York Times, 2 July 2006, called it "a missed opportunity and an inexplicable exercise" and asked whether religious, ceremonial and practical objects, never intended as art in the modern Western sense, would be showcased "like baubles, with no context". James Clifford wrote that in this museum "'illusion' and the 'work of art' coexist uneasily with the realism of ethnography and history". Others praised the same building: the Financial Times called the layered galleries an "animated, occasionally jarring dreamscape", the Washington Post called it visually stunning.

The returns argument has a paper trail. In 2016 the French government refused objects requested by the president of Benin on the ground that the national collections are inalienable. In 2018 the report Emmanuel Macron commissioned from Bénédicte Savoy and Felwine Sarr argued that artefacts taken unlawfully in the colonial period should go back when asked for. Macron then promised Benin 26 pieces taken by force from Dahomey; no French law then existed to permit it. By late 2021 the objects were ready and the museum staged a final exhibition around them. Separately, after a change in French law in 2010, the museum returned mokomokai — Māori tattooed heads — to New Zealand on 23 January 2012.

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Now

In December 2025, 77 works from the museum's Louvre selection were installed in the Louvre's new Gallery of the Five Continents, shown alongside Western art. This project has not read the museum's own image-rights statement and makes no claim about whether its collection photographs are openly licensed; the safe assumption for this atlas's picture pipeline is that they are not.

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What is on record about it

What this is near

carriesNkisithe Central African class of charged object held here in quantity, and named in restitution claimscontrastAkodessawa fetish marketthe West African market where objects of the classes shown here as art are still traded and still madecarriesAkua'bathe Akan figure held in its West African collectionstraditionBakongo nkisi craftthe tradition much of its Central African holding comes fromcontrastMuseum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewathe museum that asked it for Māori remains and received them in January 2012parallelThe British Museumthe other institution where the inalienability argument is made, under a different statutestoryWho owns a charmthe long read on ownership; the Sarr–Savoy report of 2018 is its clearest recent document

What names this one

Each in its own words, from its own page.

orgNkisithe Paris museum at the centre of the French restitution debate, holding 70,000 of France's 90,000 sub-Saharan objectsorgBakongo nkisi craftthe Paris holder at the centre of the French restitution debate after the Sarr and Savoy reportcontrastMana Whenua, Te Papathe Paris museum this one asked for Māori remains and got them back from in January 2012contrastMuseum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewathe Paris museum it asked for Māori remains, and got them back from in January 2012orgWho owns a charmthe French collection at the centre of the restitution argument Sarr and Savoy opened in 2018

Where this came from

Elsewhere

Record updated 2026-09-16. This record as JSON. Every field carries its own provenance; the tier chips above say which.

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