This study examines the processes through which sacred cultural practices and people were made subjects of ethnological studies. It considers these histories through a renewed examination of the contexts under which the chisungu female initiation ceremony of the Bemba-speaking people of northern Zambia came to be studied, and how the sacred belongings of the ceremony were collected and turned into objects of ethnography in museums. This project is conceived not only as a biographic study of these collections and their histories but is also a study of processes of meaning-making about cultural practices and people in a museum in Zambia, the Moto Moto Museum. Founded by the missionary Jean Jacques Corbeil in the 1950s, this museum had its origins in particular colonial contexts and was formalised as a national museum in the period after colonialism. The project involves a critical examination of the work of the British anthropologist Audrey Isabella Richards (1899-1982), and the missionary ethnographer Jean Jacques Corbeil (1913-1990) who respectively studied and conducted collecting on the ceremony in the 1930s and in the 1950s respectively. Their studies led to the collection of images, texts and objects for museums and institutions in Britain, South Africa, and Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). This transformation of sacred cultural belongings into museum objects, and the mobilities that resulted in their circulation were part of the making of empire. This was done within processes of colonial knowledge construction that were disruptive, extractive, and epistemologically violent. Ethnological studies and resultant ethnographic museums were part of colonial governance and control, within the broader contexts of indirect rule, which operated through the use of local systems to rule over colonised people. The consequences were that practices such as chisungu, and local people were placed into classificatory and racialising knowledge orders through the creation of ethnicity and tradition. In this dissertation, I argue that the study, objectification and museumisation of chisungu had the further effect of desacralising the rituals. The end of colonialism did not bring much change to these epistemological legacies. These problematical histories have led to calls to transform ethnographic museums and to demand that they address colonial legacies of ethnographic collections and knowledge projects. Restitution has been recognised as a powerful process to rethink ethnographic collections. Through an examination of the histories of the chisungu objects and the Moto Moto Museum, this dissertation contributes to these broader debates. It argues that engaging communities and projects of co-authorship as strategies of reimagining ethnographic collections must go beyond merely re-validating these problematic collections. These engagements must undo the epistemological configurations of the ethnographic museum, and colonialism itself. Keywords: museum, photography, colonial ethnography, social anthropology, chisungu female initiation, missionaries, Catholic Church, post-colonial museums, Moto Moto Museum, Jean Jacques Corbeil, Audrey Richards, gender