Working Through Colonial Collections

Front matter

Working Through Colonial Collections An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

Margareta von Oswald

CHAPTER SEVEN Probing materiality: Collections as amalgams of their histories

CHAPTER EIGHT Repairing representations: Curatorial cultures and change in the Ethnological Museum

Timeline References cited

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as part of the research award for Sharon Macdonald’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship, and was carried out at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Department for European Ethnology, Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin. I also received financial support from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the International Scholarship Program Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in the form of an ‘Aires culturelles’ scholarship, all of which I acknowledge gratefully.

Without the support of those who let me participate in their museum life this work would not exist. I thank all of those at the Ethnological Museum Berlin who shared their everyday jokes, thoughts, and reflections with me, and in particular Paola Ivanov, without whom none of what follows would have been possible. My gratitude for being made welcome at the Museum extends to the Museum’s and the Humboldt Lab Dahlem’s entire staff, but in particular to Jonathan Fine, Ulrike Folie, Silvia Gaetti, Boris Gliesmann, Peter Junge, Viola König, Ute Marxreiter, Caroline Nüser, Hendryk Ortlieb, Romuald Tchibizo, Hans-Joachim Radosuboff, Eva Ritz, Verena Rodatus, Andrea Scholz, Andrea Schubert, Angelika Tunis, Agnes Wegner, Anja Zenner. Mathias Alubafi and Romuald Tchibozo were also working in the Museum at the time, and I want to thank them for their research and generous contribution to Object Biographies. Concerning my work at the Royal Museum for Central Africa, I would like to thank in particular Christine Bluard, Hein Vanhee, Bart Deputter, and Brigitte Cornet for letting me participate in the crafting of the museum’s permanent exhibition. I thank those who agreed to do interviews with me for sharing their experience and thoughts with me. Many of their reflections have become crucial points of departure for my analysis, as well as personal learning. I want to thank in particular Clémentine Deliss, Billy Kalonji, Wayne Modest, and Nanette Jacomijn Snoep for the ongoing conversation.

I am grateful to my PhD supervisors Sharon Macdonald and Béatrice Fraenkel for their continuous, encouraging, and critical engagement with this research, and their support - on all levels - for getting my research done.

Your committed reading, editing, and discussion of my research have enriched and guided this work substantially. Béatrice, you accompanied me through the ups and downs of this research, always with encouragement, great advice, and care. Sharon, I don’t know how to put my gratitude into words. Sometimes it feels like you read my work more than I did. You taught me how to write. Thank you.

The academic support of Sophie Houdart and Ann Laura Stoler as members of my comite de these, as well as of Charlotte Klonk during a time of institutional floating also remain unforgotten. I want to thank Emmanuel Grimaud and Kerstin Pinther, James Clifford and an anonymous reviewer for their valuable reflections on this research. For their editorial work on my text, I want to thank Danielle Carter, Theresa Clasen, Deborah Cohen, Christopher Feeney, and Frank Lange.

I don’t think I would have survived the period of writing without my dear colleagues at CARMAH. I would especially like to thank Larissa Forster, Christine Gerbich, and Jonas Tinius for their ongoing interest in this research

- the most original thoughts in this book certainly stem from them. I also thank my other most wonderful peers-turned-friends with whom I shared the pleasure of reading and writing: Aida Baghernejad, Ulrike Gerhardt, Friederike Landau, Yann LeGall, Antonia Wagner, and Patrick Wielowiesjki. Iam grateful to Stefanie Weifgsmann for her continuous and laborious efforts to establish the Co-tutelle contract. I want to thank Ama Walton for legal advice and mentoring.

The research seminar ‘Réécrire le passé colonial: enjeux contemporains des collections de musée’, as well as the related doctoral atelier at the EHESS Paris, accompanied my research for several years and the exchange with its many guests and my co-organisers Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Otoiu, Anna Seiderer, Benoit de L’Estoile, Dominique Poulot, and Laurella Rincon contributed significantly to my research and reflections.

Other than this wonderful professional context which appears in its outlines through the names I have listed, I thank my family, my love, and my friends. To make it short: I am surrounded by love, warmth and strength which I cannot account for, and the simple thought of what you have given me makes me shed tears of joy.

Foreword

Sharon Macdonald

This book goes behind the scenes of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin at an extraordinary moment, namely, during the 2010s, when questions of colonialism and the decolonisation of institutions came onto the public agenda in many European countries, and beyond, to a remarkable new extent, resulting in considerable and often vehement debate. Those museums that are variously called ethnological or ethnographic became key locations in which some of the most awkward and symbolically significant aspects of continuing colonial relations - cultural property, restitution, and who has the right to represent whom - were played out. In the process, the very legitimacy of these museums was questioned and they struggled to make the case for their continued existence, at the same time as looking for new modes of operating and positioning themselves.

Nowhere was the debate more intense than in Berlin, where it was planned that the public displays of the Ethnological Museum - one of Germany’s national museums and one of the largest ethnological or ethnographic museums in the world - would in future be shown in the Humboldt Forum. Opening in stages since late 2020 until 2022, this exhibition and cultural complex has been mired in controversy over its architecture and historical resonances. Locating the Ethnological Museum within it only inflated the disputes further.

Margareta von Oswald carried out what she calls ‘observant participant’ fieldwork in the Ethnological Museum during some of these fraught years. In addition, her documentary and oral history research take her further back into the past, and her coverage of continuing developments brings it closer to the present, showing both stasis and change underway. While this careful context-setting is valuable in itself, the significance of this book lies especially in its attention to, and original analysis of, the work being done within the Ethnological Museum in relation to its colonial collections. Her focus is not so much the high-profile cases of objects subject to restitution claims or the creation of the main exhibitions for the Humboldt Forum. Instead, she takes us into a variety of less prominent locations and more everyday practices within the Ethnological Museum, where we meet not only curators but also other staff whose work - usually invisible to the outside world - also shapes what is done and what it is possible to do. Striking here is just how deeply and widely what she calls ‘colonial legacies’ may pervade the workings of the

Museum, creating problems, for example, of the names and categories in the

object database, of the sheer number of objects to deal with, and of remaining toxic substances that were used for conservation. Each of these - like the

other challenges for ‘working through’ that she identifies - exerts its own

force, posing awkward and even intractable problems for museum staff in

their attempts to do things differently. An important message of this book, then, is that any attempt at change within ethnological museums -including

attempts to decolonise the institution itself- needs to grapple with such usually overlooked routine museum work and ways of doing things.

That many staff in the Ethnological Museum are aware of the problems of their discipline and institution - and that in some cases they have long been trying to address these - is another insight of Margareta von Oswald’s work behind the scenes. By introducing us to particular individuals who variously try to get things done - sometimes in creative and even surprisingly improvised ways - she not only introduces readers to museum workers who never or rarely take public stage but also shows how they are often actively grappling with the situation at hand. Here she is able to draw on her own first-hand experience of curating an exhibition in the Museum - an experimental exhibition that might have ended up in the Humboldt Forum but did not - to reflect still further on the challenges of working differently with colonial legacies.

Since Margareta von Oswald completed her fieldwork, the situation has changed further. In particular, the wider public and media attention to colonial legacies and decolonisation have continued to grow, and governmental positions have become more supportive of provenance research and restitution. At the moment at which I write, that looks set to escalate further, though readers of this book will be better able to judge whether or not the momentum continues or not. Whatever is the case, however, a thorough working through of colonial legacies depends not only on change in this and other museums’ public-facing activities but also on the more mundane - but so crucial - matters identified in this important book.

Introduction

My fieldwork on ethnological museums started with a major conference in the summer of 2013. ‘The Future of the Ethnographic Museum’, hosted by the University of Oxford and its Pitt Rivers Museum, was the culmination of a major five-year-research project funded by the European Commission. Representatives of its eleven partaking ethnological museums, as well as pioneers in the field of museum scholarship and practice were present. The conference’s organisers Clare Harris and Michael O’Hanlon, both curators and anthropologists, stated in an accompanying article that ‘the ethnographic museum is dead’. Reflecting voices from the field, they wrote that ‘(The ethnographic museum] has outlived its usefulness and has nothing more to offer in pursuance of its historic mandate as a location for the representation of “other” cultures’ (O'Hanlon & Harris, 2013, p. 8). The provocative statement reflects what characterised the field at that particular moment: ethnological museums were facing what was described as an “identity crisis’ (O'Hanlon & Harris, 2013, p. 9). The demands that people - not only in academia, activism, and the field of art and cultural production but also in politics - addressed to the museum were manifold. Linked to the ethnological museums’ constitutive relation with the European colonial project, the moment was shaped by enquiries into their mission, authority over representation, and ultimately, the collection as rightful property of European museums.

These demands were far from new. In 1998, the French anthropologist Jean Jamin polemically asked whether ethnological museums should be burnt. Within the discipline, anthropologists had debated on the authority over cultural representation in both writing and exhibiting practices, ownership, and repatriation since at least the 1980s. Restitution had been put and erased from the political agenda (von Paczensky & Ganslmayer 1984; Savoy 2021). What marked this particular moment in 2013, however, were processes of fundamental transformation in ethnological museums across Europe, which requested museums take stance with regard to these queries.

Most major museums holding ethnological collections in European capitals had gone through or were preparing name modifications, changes in leadership, the radical restructuring of permanent exhibitions, and the construction of new buildings for their collections.” In the context of these museums’ transformations, their renaming reflected their search for a place within Europe’s museumscape. Former denominations established links to the different traditions of social and cultural anthropology in Europe, being named ‘anthropological’, ‘ethnographic’, ‘ethnological’, or ‘Völkerkunde’ museum. However, the large-scale museum projects of the last two decades throughout Europe typically chose names that erase this relation. Some museums introduced categories such as ‘world’, ‘cultures’, or a combination of the two in their titles. Others chose to name themselves after a particular place* or to keep denominations linked to a particular person, usually a European collector or researcher.® Such names made the museum’s position within the museumscape less legible. They also marked the profound unease governing museums holding ethnological collections, then and now: if the museums are no longer ‘ethnological’ or ‘anthropological’, which role do they choose to adopt?

With this question in mind, I planned my research with fieldwork in several European museums undergoing transformation. My research started in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (henceforth, Ethnological Museum or Museum with a capital M) and would ultimately lead to this book. In Berlin, the debates were particularly sensitive. The Humboldt Forum, anew cultural centre, would host the Ethnological Museum’s future exhibitions on Berlin’s Museum Island. The project put the questions of which ruins to keep, which monuments to (re) build in Germany’s capital, and therefore, which histories to honour or neglect on the political and public agenda: approved by the German parliament in 2002, the Humboldt Forum is now situated in the partly reconstructed Berlin Palace (Stadtschloss), selectively emulating the historical baroque architecture. The Stadtschloss was substantially affected by bombing in the Second World War, then demolished by the government of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and replaced with the Palace of the Republic, to be finally rebuilt on the ruins of this demolished ‘House of the People’ (Haus des Volkes), as it was often referred to. Characterised by the coming together and confrontation of the nation’s different histories, or in Jonathan Bach’s words, the ‘incarnations of Germany’s twentieth century’ - imperial (until 1918), Weimar (1919-1933), National Socialist (1933-1945), a divided Germany (1945-1990), and a reunited Germany (since 1990) - the Humboldt Forum turned into a ‘conflict zone’ in which the question of how to deal with its diverse histories has taken centre stage (Bach, 20172, p. 91). Players in the Humboldt Forum were to

be the collections of the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, Berlin’s Central

Library, and the so-called non-European collections, represented by the

Ethnological Museum and the Asian Art Museum. Most of Berlin’s museum

collections, including those two, are part of the Prussian Cultural Heritage

Foundation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz; henceforth, SPK). The

SPK consists of a large conglomerate of cultural organisations, including, among others, the State Museums of Berlin (SMB), the Berlin State Library, the Prussian Secret State Archives, as well as several research organisations. Employing more than two thousand people, it is Europe’s largest cultural organisation (Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, 2018). The Humboldt Forum, often referred to as Germany’s ‘most important cultural project of the 21st

century’ (Parzinger, 2011), reflected this grandeur: The costs for the building alone rose from an original estimate of 480 million euros to 680 million

euros in 2021 (Bundesregierung, 2019a, p. 2; Schonball, 2019; APA, 2021).

I wanted to understand how the Ethnological Museum was to position itself within a broader museum landscape, what its mission could be, and who it was to serve. The issues raised about the Humboldt Forum, and in particular, its relation to the Ethnological Museum, pointed from the beginning to larger questions of collective memory, and thus, to politics and the negotiation of German national identity. Observing how people negotiated the give-and-take of exhibition making and related tasks on a day-to-day basis, I imagined, would provide insights into how these larger questions resonated. Which echoes would they find in the process of producing the exhibition’s move from Berlin’s outskirts, where the Ethnological Museum was located, to Berlin’s centre on Museum Island? I imagined that breaking open the process of production would allow me to enter, at their core, the debates on ethnological museums and their historical mission to represent culture. I didn’t imagine, however, that it would be precisely via the debate on national museums collections that the negotiation of Germany’s colonial past would take political centre stage in the period of 2013 - 2021, the period this research is concerned with.

I started my research with a body of literature on ethnological museums and material culture at hand that conceptualised objects and museums with metaphors related to change, hybridity, and transformation. The literature applied theories from actor-network theory to conceptualise how we work with and understand museums and their collections (Gosden, Larson, & Petch, 2007). These understandings focused on the dynamic and transformative potential of museums, describing them as ‘enmeshed’, or as ‘assemblage’ (Harrison, Byrne, & Clarke, 2013). The idea that the museum is constituted by its objects was the point of departure for my investigation, but I regarded the museum not only as a construct consisting of material assemblages but also as a set of social collections (Byrne et al., 2011, p. 4). I adopted the analytical and methodological tool of the object biography to trace and problematise the negotiation between the different layers of significations that the objects had accumulated over time and their affective and political weights that were being negotiated (Harrison, Byrne, & Clarke, 2013, p. 5)°. I distanced myself from approaches that frame the museum as a static entity, going beyond the immediate physical and temporal confines of the museum, and involving a variety of events, negotiations, and technologies. In defining the museum as a ‘repository of social histories in material form’ (Gosden, Larson, & Petch, 2007, p. 2), I considered the museum as a dynamic and relational entity, made up of a variety of associations between people and things in a constant state of transition.

Working in the Museum made me see these approaches in a different light. The Museum didn’t feel ‘dynamic’ to me. I experienced the everyday in the Ethnological Museum as shaped by frustration, anxieties, complaints, slowness, and hurdles. Despite the ongoing and passionate work of museum staff, some things just didn’t seem to change. The museum staff related this atmosphere to what they framed as the larger organisational ‘structures’ affecting museum work. The public debate and activist opposition to the Humboldt Forum - which had just started to be built - influenced this atmosphere of stagnation, or even regression, as some critics situated the Humboldt Forum. These activist positions and the curatorial work within the Museum focused the attention on the complicity between ethnological museums and colonial rule, in particular German colonial rule. Taking these changes into consideration, my questions and analytical lenses shifted.

This book takes the current transformation processes of ethnological museums in Europe as its point of departure to analyse how colonial legacies are worked with and through in the present. Defined here as colonial legacies in themselves, ethnological museums have long been criticised for their attempt to both own and represent the world. This book focuses on how these points of critique are addressed in one museum -the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, and in particular, its Africa department. How do museum staff work with collections that were collected in colonial contexts? How do the museum’s colonial legacies materialise in the museum’s everyday? How do museum staff relate to and engage with both the material and immaterial colonial legacies, as they become increasingly contested?

This book focuses on how and why the stubborn facts remain. Working in the Museum and researching the biography of particular objects made me realise not only how strongly colonialism had shaped the Museum’s coming into being but also how powerfully colonial logics influenced the Museum’s present. I relate the resistance to change in the Museum to how colonial logics persist within it. In this research, I don’t argue against change in ethnological museums - indeed, so much has changed in the decade during which I have followed this debate and which this book also traces. Rather, the book shows how deeply colonial ways of conceiving and doing the world are ingrained in the organisations we work with, how they linger and are carried along, and how they continue to act powerfully in our everyday.

The Ethnological Museum as colonial legacy

My analysis departs from the observation that the Ethnological Museum is a colonial legacy in itself. I unravel the different dimensions of the collection’s relationships to colonial rule in the following. I then show how in this book, I approach the Museum via an ethnography, which unfolds in the systematic working through of colonial collections.

Ethnological museums offer themselves as potential subjects for an ethnography of colonial legacies. Both in their material and immaterial dimensions, ethnological museums are a blatant example of colonial violence, as they played a crucial role in the colonial system of appropriation and alienation. They materialise contemporary anthropological ways of thinking that were informed or even structured by the racialisation that characterised the colonial endeavour. Today, the organisational character of the collections per se perpetuates the colonial construction of the ‘unmodern other’ through anthropological knowledge orders that themselves conceal the colonial encounter.

I work with the notion of ‘colonial collections’ in this book, but this doesn’t mean that these collections are in themselves colonial. Many of the objects labelled as such and the related systems of governance and belief predate colonial times. The collections carry meaning and significance beyond the colonial encounter. However, these collections have been considered under and somehow limited to this attribution, due to their mode or the period of acquisition, production, and appropriation in ‘colonial contexts’, both in the colony and the metropole (German Museums Association, 2019, pp. 20-33). The collections stand in for the colonial and imperial histories that underlie their presence in the museum.

‘Colonialism was profoundly material’, argue Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Philipps (Edwards, Gosden, & Phillips, 2006, p. 3). The materiality of colonialism didn’t only concern the extraction of ‘resources’ (gold, rubber, human resources, etc.). The often violent acquisition of material culture in the colonies was equally a constitutive part of the colonial enterprise and governance. Colonial collecting allowed the coloniser

to research, control, and disempower societies by means of seizing their

material culture, both in the colonies and in imperial centres (Abonnenc, Arndt, & Lozano, 2016; Bennett et al., 2017). This included not only a mere

material seizure but also a spiritual disempowerment, such as in the context

of war: some objects were deliberately taken because they were of spiritual

importance to those resisting colonial conquest (see, for example, Ivanov &

Weber-Sinn, 2018). Colonial collecting usually went hand in hand with the

establishment of colonial archives or, put differently, the collecting of material culture was part of constituting the metropoles’ archives of colonial rule. These archives supported the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of knowledge from and about the colonies (Basu & de Jong, 2016). How museum

staff used both these archives and collections - in exhibitions and research - often encouraged the justification of the colonial mission and supported the

contemporary conviction and narratives of European and White superiority

in imperial centres. Objects became principal players in the construction of narratives about the colony and confirmed the role of collecting as central, not marginal, to the colonial project.”

Anthropology was equally profoundly material, in particular in its constitutive phase, which coincided with the heyday of European colonial rule (1884-1914). As in other European anthropology departments, the progressive institutionalisation of anthropology in Berlin was closely linked to Berlin’s Ethnological Museum, then Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde, and its collecting policies. From the museum’s foundation in 1873 onwards, its co-founder and director Adolf Bastian aimed to establish anthropology on the basis of the natural sciences. In that context, the collection would serve as the point of departure for research. Bastian was convinced that ‘the monstrous mass [was] necessary to sufficiently represent in a systematic, methodological order the ethnological provinces of the earth in their full extent’ (quoted in Zimmerman, 2001, p. 186). For Bastian, in contrast to the natural sciences, categories in anthropology had not yet been established, but would result from and be developed out of the totalising gaze on the collections. Bastian attempted to create a ‘universal archive of mankind [...] to provide a real basis for the study of ethnology’ (Bastian, 1872, p. iii). Defining anthropology as a ‘comparative’ and therefore ‘statistical’ discipline, ‘completeness [...] is the first and most important desideratum’. In the tradition of a salvage anthropology, Bastian described this desideratum of completeness as ‘eternal’ (‘fiir immer’), as in ‘impossible’, because he started from the postulate that ‘many tribes [Volksstämme] are irretrievably and forever lost’ (Bastian, 1872, pp. iv-v).®

The publication of the Anleitung für ethnographische Beobachtungen und Sammlungen (‘Instructions for Ethnographic Observation and Collecting’) in several editions reflected the Museum founder’s mission and alludes to the kind of collecting the Ethnological Museum pursued.? The instructions put forward the aim to collect ‘systematically’, ‘to give a preferably exhaustive image of the respective tribe’s culture’ and ‘to raise an inventory, as it were, of the complete cultural heritage’ (Ankermann & von Luschan, 1914, p. 9).1° At the same time, the fact that there was a need for the instructions pointed to the lack of documentation of the collections. This means

ANLEITUNG ZUM ETHNOLOGISCHEN BEOBACHTEN UND

SAMMELN

-e

| BERLIN IS om ee

Figure 0.1. Cover of ‘Instructions for Ethnographic Observation and Collecting’, Bernhard Ankermann and Felix von Luschan, 1914 that, unlike other museums, which would send scientific expeditions to the colonies,1! the collections were mainly provided by colonial staff situated in the colonies who served as suppliers of material culture for the Museum. It is subsequently both the collections as well as the lack of information and documentation about them that constitute the Museum’s legacy.

Concerning the Africa collections, objects arrived in disproportional numbers from the German colonies, namely what were then Togo, Cameroon, German East Africa, and German South West Africa (Ivanov, 2005, p. 42). Between 1884 and 1914, the African collections grew from 7,388 objects to 55,079 objects (Krieger & Koch, 1973, p. 106). The Berlin Museum’s position as the ‘Central Museum’ encouraged the steady growth of collections, as the Berlin Museum claimed the right of ownership to all collections arriving from the German colonies.!? About 64 per cent of today’s Africa collections, consisting of approximately 75,000 objects, stem from what have been defined as ‘colonial contexts’, be they governed by German or other European colonial powers (German Museums Association, 2018, pp. 16-23).13 Ethnological museums played a crucial role in the colonial system in which ‘comprehensive collecting [manifests] as a form of domination’, as Mieke Bal pointed out (Bal, 1992, p. 560).

At the same time, the colonial project was backed up with ideologies, imaginations, knowledge systems, and knowledge production - in short, a mindset. This mindset justified the colonisers’ mission by virtue of their alleged superiority, beyond actual colonisation - meaning the occupation of a territory and a society. As literary research has shown, ‘colonial fantasies’ and ‘imperialist imaginations’ were as much part of German colonialism as the exercise of rule. These imaginations and mentalities preceded, accompanied, and lingered long after actual German colonisation (Zantop, 1997; Friedrichsmeyer, Lennox, & Zantop, 2001; Ames & Gilman, 2005). As Sharon Macdonald, Henrietta Lidchi, and I summarised it,

[e]thnographic museums, then, carry a colonial legacy not only in terms of objects acquired during specifically colonial periods and not only, indeed, in terms of the objects themselves. Questions of potentially wrongful acquisition of objects, as well as the issues of ownership

to which they lead, are undoubtedly important, but they are only one

aspect of the complexity of this legacy [...] Important too in considering

the extended legacy of colonial relations are questions about particular knowledge formations and modes of knowledge making, the nature

of the ethnographic museum and to whom it orients itself, and access

to the collections and involvement in shaping their futures, in both the

past and the present. (Macdonald, Lidchi, & von Oswald, 2017, p. 97)

1880 3 361 Katalognummern 1884 7388 Katalognummern 1887 11 058 Katalognummern 1890 12 723 Katalognummern 1893 14 246 Katalognummern 1896 17 107 Katalognummern 1899 25 105 Katalognummern

1905 36 onl Katalognummern Figure 0.2 Documentation of the 1910 48 845 Katalognummern Africa collection’s growth between 1914 55 079 Katalognummern 1880 and 1945, in catalogue numbers 1925 60 182 Katalognummern (Katalognummern) (Krieger & Koch, 1945 66 953 Katalognummern 1973, p.106)

Figure 0.3, designed by the department’s curator, Bernhard Ankermann, in 1911, also figures on the cover of this book. This image epitomises the constitutive relationship between colonialism and the Ethnological Museum in both its material and immaterial dimensions. The map reflects contemporary ideas of the Museum’s collections, in which ‘a culture’, ‘a tribe’, or a particular ‘region’ could be represented through ‘its’ material production. Conceptions of ‘tribes’ and indigeneity were defined by drawing on collections, which were constructed as the materialisation of otherness, and in particular of ‘savageness’ and ‘primitiveness’. In exhibition, the objects were used as representative of particular kinds of otherness, as fragments of cultures. These exhibition and display modes as well as the objects themselves would have implications for the ways in which notions of ‘culture’ were normatively employed and how they were used in social management regimes in the metropole and colonies (see, for example, Dirks, 1992; Bennett et al., 2017). At the same time, the map reveals the strong impact that colonisation would have on the acquisition policy of the Ethnological Museum: all the areas marked in dark grey - indicating ‘complete or almost complete collections’ - are almost identical with the German colonies (see figure 0.4). The collections are proofs of colonialism’s materiality; they constitute one of colonialism’s tangible manifestations. How collections were used, then - in exhibitions and research - reveals how contemporary colonial ontologies were substantiated with the help of anthropology, and in particular, its museums.

At the same time, the relations between colonialism, anthropology, and museums have been shaped by ambivalence. As Benoit de L’Estoile highlights, colonial relations are characterised by ‘a multifarious process of appropriation rather than by the sheer negation of the colonised’ (de L’Estoile, 2008, p. 268). These processes of appropriation, roughly situated between

SS ‘complete or almost complete collections’

= ‘rather good collections’

‘no or almost no collections”

‘bad, very fragmented collections’

Figure 0.3 ‘Map with Indications on the Collections of the Africa department in the year of 1911’ (authored by Bernhard Ankermann, Krieger, & Koch, 1973, p. 112)

EB Maplisting German “protectorates” in Africa 1884/1885-1919

5 Contemporary national borders in Africa

Figure 0.4 Map of contemporary national borders and German ‘protectorates’, designed and used for Object Biographies exhibition the fifteenth and the twentieth centuries, have historically adopted different forms and modalities, but they have often been predominantly shaped by violence, domination, and conquest. For de L’Estoile, ‘[a]lthough generally asymmetrical, this process of appropriation entailed, to some extent, a mutual aspect’ (de L’Estoile, 2008, p. 268). This concerns the discipline of anthropology in particular. If one scrutinises the politics of anthropological research at the time - both conducted in armchairs in German anthropological institutes, and in colonies abroad - it is clearly complicit with colonial regimes of domination, appropriation, and racist misrepresentation. It also crucially reveals an interest in and defence of cultural difference, exchange, hybridity, and cosmopolitanism.+ Seeing these processes of appropriation as a legacy, then, centres on the enquiry of a common history of mutual, often violent, and conflicting relationships.