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Contribution short abstract:

The contribution reflects on collaborative provenance research projects on ethnographic collections from Tanzania in German museums and universities. It traces how cultural belongings are remobilized through the negotiation of value attributions, ownership issues and knowledge exchange modalities.

Contribution long abstract:

For a couple of years, fahari yetu Tanzania serves as a Tanzanian partner in different collaborative provenance research projects on ethnographic collections of colonial origin in German museums and universities such as the Museum Witzenhausen, the Lower Saxony State Museum Hannover, and the Universities of Göttingen and Marburg. As the NGO’s managing director I am personally engaged in collection and archive research in the German depots as well as in ethnographic field research in possible Tanzanian communities of origin. In the field research we show community members pictures of the belongings to learn about their meanings, uses, and memories of historical events associated with them, and compare them to similar objects that are still available and in use. Most of our work resonates around the three cornerstones: Attributions and accumulation of value between origin and diaspora contexts; issues of common ownership and individual claims between local communities, government authorities and the institutions holding the collections; and modalities of collaboration between institutional and individual stakeholders in provenance research and the possible return to the communities of origin. My contribution investigates our work between these cornerstones as a process of shared knowledge production and transfer, a process of remobilizing ethnographic objects for the purpose of developing sustainable and mutually beneficial collection economies.