Through this project I propose to analyze the recent metamorphoses of museum policies concerning physical anthropology collections. I examine the case of the collections of the Musée de l’Homme in Paris, more specifically the specimens collected in Romania (late 19th – early 20th century). The research will aim to apprehend the forms of contemporary rewriting of these collections. I am interested in the place occupied by the diaspora and the “communities of origin” in the debates surrounding the physical anthropology collections. The diaspora is not only a central actor in processes of institutional reconfiguration, but also a label (“objects in diaspora”) that pro-restitution activists put on collections built up during the colonial period. Now, if this question becomes central to the relationship between the former metropolis and the former colony, what about the European collections, which constitute the majority of the specimens in the Musée de l’Homme?