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.