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- Convenors:
-
Luisa Marie Marten
(LMU Munich)
Magnus Treiber (LMU Munich)
Philipp Schorch (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich)
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- Format:
- Workshop
- Transfers:
- Closed for transfers
Short Abstract:
(Post)colonial demands have put pressure on collecting institutions to make holdings accessible. This workshop assesses the multiple and differing ways and forms in which collections could and should be commoned or not, inviting contributions to reflect upon potentials, frictions and limitations.
Long Abstract:
The history of anthropology and anthropological collecting has been marked by a paradox of un/commoning. In the name of academic freedom, unrestricted access to knowledge has been feverishly sought and vigorously defended. The outcomes of such frantic exercises, often inscribed in collections (archival, material, visual), have paradoxically been largely uncommoned, hidden away in tightly controlled depots where they hibernate inaccessibly to wider publics to this day. (Post)colonial demands have put pressure on archives, galleries, libraries, museums and universities to make holdings accessible and democratize collecting institutions. Digitization is often seen as a promising means to that end. However, what happens to sacred and secret knowledges, memories and identities that are enshrined in collections and should never have been collected? What happens when formerly collected individuals and societies experience yet another intrusion as the urge of (digital) commoning puts them on public display? This workshop argues that much more nuanced, case-based and anthropological analysis is needed to assess the multiple and differing ways and forms in which collections could and should be commoned or not. We invite contributions from anthropology and beyond to reflect upon the potentials, frictions and limitations. The latter, while seemingly having negative connotations, might instead be a productive finding or situation, moving from extractivist knowledge exploitation towards collaborative approaches underpinned by guiding principles, such as relational ethics and mutual care, across publics and their multiple and differing ways and forms of defining what un/commoning entails.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1Contribution short abstract:
This contribution is based on a workshop with scholars & indigenous representatives in Namibia. Going beyond restitution we dealt with collections of items with overlapping senses of belonging, issues of access and with digital divides that are better dealt with in terms of sharing than commoning.
Contribution long abstract:
This contribution is based in large parts on a workshop held at the Helvi Mpingana Kondombolo Cultural Village in Namibia, in 2024. Participants were a dozen scholars from a range of German and Namibian universities and museums while the other half of the gathering were members from communities in Namibia, mostly indigenous San, with an interest in material culture and ethnographic collections. The theme of the meeting ("How things connect people") was expressly going beyond the celebrated cases of stolen heritage which are at the centre of restitution efforts. Instead, we were turning towards collections of everyday items, often held outside museums and often by fieldworkers as a "byproduct" of their research. What would the future uses and purposes of such items be?
The results underline that there can hardly be "common property" if commons presuppose the existence of "a community". When we deal with a variety of transfers through which items were incorporated into such collections, then we have to do justice to a multitude of agents connected through things in a host of ways that are not appropriately covered by "common property". Rather, there are overlapping senses of belonging, issues of access and questions of digital and generational divides that are better dealt with in terms of an anthropology of sharing than through a concept of commoning. The contribution reports on the results from the specific case but also seeks to draw more general conclusions for best practice models.
Contribution short abstract:
Exploring museum objects made by Indigenous people, given their complex pathways from community to museum and the varying temporal contexts transitions occur in. This intersectional research team visits Îethka (Stoney Nakoda) belongings in museums to build relationships.
Contribution long abstract:
Over the last five years a group of Îethka (Stoney Nakoda) artists and storytellers, working with a museum professional and student researcher, have been responding to requests from their community to forge connections with living objects and knowledge stored in museums. Their work involves a process of visiting, with museums and their workers, with community members and Elders, with archival sources, with language, and with the belongings and living objects themselves. Through this process they have identified hundreds of “artifacts” in museums around the western world which originated in their communities of Mînîthnî, Gahna, and Kiska Waptan, in the baha (foothills) of what is today known as southern Alberta, Canada.
Museums typically exist for the good of the commons, but our challenges to find belongings in collections, in essence, to do research with them, shows some flaws in the idea of museums as ready sources of object-based knowledge. Many belongings we found have never been on exhibit, have limited provenance data, and are still in many ways, inaccessible to our research. This project explores some ways museums can improve relationships with Indigenous people for the benefit of all.
Contribution short abstract:
In order to reflect on the opportunities and challenges of recommoning collections the paper explores what the reconnection of a personal ethnographic archive can mean along a German-Congolese exchange process.
Contribution long abstract:
Anthropological museums, archives and departments store diverse remnants of their past research and collecting activities from various parts of the world. These holdings refer simultaneously to often controversial encounters as well as the originator societies, individuals and ancestors indexed in these assemblages. This entanglement of the cultural heritage of specific lifeworlds with the epistemic legacy of an academic discipline raises the question for whom these institutions actually preserve such dislocated fragments of tangible and intangible knowledge. Based on the notion that these epistemic infrastructures do not merely govern materialities and discourses but also a “bundle of relations” (Bell 2017), I would like to argue for reactivating the inscribed connections in order to dialogically reflect on the potentials, pitfalls and limitations of recommoning collections: Who should be involved in a reconnection, how should the reengagement be conducted, and who makes these decisions? Whose objectives are considered and what responsibilities are induced? What expectations on the exchange and flow as well as accessibility and inaccessibility exist before and develop through this process of reentanglement? Which stakeholders articulate which protocol of sharing, circulating, and caring for cultural belongings kept in a diaspora? In order to reflect on these questions, I draw on preliminary insights from the ongoing process of reconnecting a “personal ethnographic archive” (Marcus 1998) preserved at the University of Mainz with possible “communities of implication” (Lehrer 2020) in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Contribution short abstract:
In this paper, we explore a collaborative research process that aimed to deconstruct the racist-colonial legacy of images by foregrounding postcolonial perspectives through local histories and joint cross-cultural investigations of those problematic contexts.
Contribution long abstract:
In the 1960s and 70s, German photographer Leni Riefenstahl produced highly exoticized images of the Nuba communities in Sudan. Before she had also contributed to the media propaganda of the Nazi regime. As the Nuba images, charged with colonial-racists aesthetics, were published worldwide they produced controversial discussions. Almost 60 years later, in an effort to decolonise the museum, the National Museums in Berlin aim to bring digitized images back to the Nuba communities in Sudan. A multi-perspective research process with Nuba communities, researchers and artists focused on contextualizing Riefenstahl’s works historically, and enabled the re-appropriation of the images by the communities. During the process of the collectively viewing the images and through group discussions with Nuba representatives, different and unexpected perceptions and insights emerged. Against the backdrop of violent experiences, racism and oppression in the context of the Sudanese history, Nuba representatives discuss the images as documents of suppressed cultural heritage. In the context of marginalisation by the dominant Arab-Muslim culture, the images are perceived as a means of making Nuba cultural identity. The images take on significance in the (re-)construction and discussion of identities, particularly in the context of the current political situation in Sudan. In this paper, we reflect on how to navigate these multiple perspectives with regard to the recommoning of shared heritage. We highlight points of friction arising from contradictory postcolonial positions that tend to deny the ability and knowledge to interpret the images.