By Imlisanen Jamir
There is a quiet, almost genteel violence in watching a cultural object become “home décor.” It is the kind of violence that does not break bones or burn houses but rearranges meaning. A 125-year-old Naga bed, carved from a single tree trunk, now sits in a Chicago gallery as a decorative curiosity. Earlier this year, a “horned Naga human skull” appeared in a British auction house, polished and photographed like an exotic accessory for someone’s mantelpiece. Between the two lies a shared fate: objects once embedded in the deep architecture of a community’s life re-emerge abroad as ornaments.
This conversion is not accidental. It is the natural end of a long cultural alchemy in which memory is transformed into merchandise. A bed that once held the weight of generations now holds the weight of a price tag. A skull that once belonged to an ancestor becomes a “conversation piece.” The world is full of such transformations, but they feel particularly sharp when the objects in question belong to communities whose stories were rarely written and whose artefacts are often the last surviving text.
Civilisations have an uncanny talent for trivialising what they cannot understand. What begins as ritual becomes novelty; what was once sacred becomes collectible. In this worldview, a human skull and a hardwood bed share the same destiny: both are stripped of context, scrubbed of story, and fitted neatly into a catalogue for interior design enthusiasts.
There is an unsettling logic to it. If an object is removed from its society long enough, eventually someone will decide it no longer belongs to that society at all. The gallery label becomes more authoritative than the village memory. The auctioneer’s description becomes more permanent than the oral histories that shaped the object. Culture, once uprooted, is easily redecorated.
But these transformations say as much about us as they do about the objects. They reveal a world that prefers artefacts to people, symbols to histories, aesthetics to ethics. The Chicago bed is admired for its “primitive elegance”; the British skull was described for its “tribal embellishment.” The language sanitises the discomfort. It creates a polite distance between the buyer and the life that once animated these objects. It allows one to purchase a piece of someone’s past without acknowledging the people still living their present.
This is the danger of turning culture into décor: the living world becomes invisible. A bed becomes merely beautiful, not meaningful. A skull becomes interesting, not human. And once meaning evaporates, the ethical questions follow it out the door.
Yet these transformations only occur because the objects were allowed to drift. Somewhere between colonial extraction, missionary collections, private hoarding, estate sales, and our own national neglect, the objects slipped into a river whose current ends in auction houses and luxury galleries. They arrive there not because someone stole culture last week, but because no one protected it decades ago.
The greater tragedy is not that these artefacts are abroad; it is that we encountered them only when someone put a price on them.
To resist this transformation—from heritage to décor—we must first recognise it. We must rebuild the chain of meaning that anchors an object to its people: inventories, community museums, oral histories, repatriation mechanisms, proper legislation, and a living culture of care. Not as nostalgia, but as necessity. Because if we do not claim these objects while they are still objects, the world will continue to claim them as decorations.
And then, years later, we will find what remains of our memory hanging politely on someone else’s wall.
Comments can be sent to imlisanenjamir@gmail.com
