Working Through Colonial Collections

An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-94-6270-310-0
Verlag: Leuven University Press

Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 229 mm, Gewicht: 690 g

Reckoning with colonial legacies in Western museum collections

What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin’s Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections.

Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum’s various work practices, this book highlights the Museum’s embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum’s everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum – the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections – and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum’s present – processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn.

With a preface by Sharon Macdonald.

Ebook available in Open Access.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

Autoren/Hrsg.

Oswald, Margareta von

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Museumskunde, Materielle Kultur, Erinnerungskultur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein

Inhaltsverzeichnis

A visual introduction Acknowledgements Foreword

Introduction

Chapter One Learning about German colonialism: On memory, activism, and the Humboldt Forum

Chapter Two Being affected: A methodological approach to working through colonial collections

Chapter Three Expanding collection histories: The museum as peopled organisation

Chapter Four Troubling epistemologies: On the endurance of colonial discrimination

Chapter Five Managing plethora:Caring for colonial collections

Chapter Six Researching provenance: The politics of writing history

Chapter Seven Probing materiality: Collections as amalgams of their histories

Chapter Eight Repairing representations: Curatorial cultures and change in the Ethnological Museum

Conclusion

Timeline References cited

Über Autor(innen)

Oswald, Margareta von
Margareta von Oswald is an anthropologist and curator. She is a research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She co-edited 'Across Anthropology. Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial' (2020, Leuven University Press).