Paper short abstract:

Many anthropology museums have been founded more than once. Their creation involved three or more stages from royal cabinets to ethnographic museums or museums of ethnology. Others are connected to a university. What was ethnographic about them and why were some of them reinvented as world museums?

Paper long abstract:

Comparative research on the history of anthropology, ethnography and ethnology, summarized in Before Boas, indicates that many anthropology museums have more than one date of origin. The Ethnographic Museum of St. Petersburg became independent in 1836, the first with such a name worldwide, but remained within the Imperial Kunstkamera, founded in 1714, in which it had been developed during the eighteenth century. The ethnological museum of Berlin was founded in 1873, opened its doors in 1886, but its collections go back to the sixteenth-century Royal Prussian Kunstkammer. Likewise, the museums of Munich and Vienna treasure Renaissance collections but were opened as Ethnographic Collections in 1868 and 1876. In Paris, Jomard developed plans for an ethnographic museum in 1839, realized as the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1878. What does this say about ethnography as a field originating in the eighteenth century and becoming institutionalized during the nineteenth century? Other collections are connected to a university: in Germany in Göttingen (1773/1928), Freiburg (1860-65) and Marburg (1925); in Oslo (1850-57); in Oxford (1883); in the USA in Cambridge (1866), Philadelphia (1889) and Berkeley (1901). How were such ethnographic collections defined and what criteria were used to distinguish them from other collections, including archaeological, natural history, anthropological, folklore or art objects? If ethnography's scope remained comprehensive during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when and how did ethnographic museums become reoriented towards only holding extra-European objects? And what led directors and policy makers to rename them world museums in the early 2000s?

Paper short abstract:

1878, 1938, 1996-2000: like the Mayan calendar, the process of destruction/creation of an anthropological museum in France follows a sexagesimal cycle. This bumpy history is marked by successes that inevitably turn into failures due to the swift obsolescence of this kind of institution.

Paper long abstract:

Like the Mayan calendar, the process of destruction/creation of an anthropological museum in France follows a sexagesimal cycle. 1878, 1938, 1996-2000: every sixty years, a new project emerges from the ground - Musée d'ethnographie du Trocadéro, Musée de l'Homme, Musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac have thus succeeded one another, capitalizing on the same public collections, each time augmented by restructuring and acquisitions of objects with a changing identity (archaeological, ethnographic, fine arts even contemporary art). This bumpy history, which sometimes stutters, is marked by successes that inevitably turn into failures, the successes of one moment regularly leading to a dead end, a scientific and ideological bankruptcy, two generations later, due to the very rapid obsolescence of this type of institution. In my paper, I shall return to the (scientific, imperial, national, cultural, geopolitical) issues that governed the existence of museums in France. Only 25 years after its conception, the Quai Branly Museum already seems threatened in its very foundations, old-fashioned. Will the 60-year cycle experience its first exception, with the acceleration of time and the challenges posed by the debate around the restitution issue initiated by President Macron?

Paper short abstract:

While claims for « restitution » appear as an appropriate means to redress colonial wrongs, alternative conceptions allow for imagining novel forms of plural reclaiming and sharing. The paper explores various contemporary cases of processes of « reclaiming » cultural artefacts .

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographic museums in post-colonial times face formidable challenges. Various of them have tried to escape critiques regarding their colonial origins by refashioning themselves, sometimes changing their name; in recent years, they are also feeling threatened by the rising calls for « restituting » artefacts in their collections to their 'legitimate owners'. While claims for « restitution » appear to many as an appropriate means to redress colonial wrongs, the discussion of the issues at stakes should not be limited to this. The principle of restituting objects supposed to belong to its "national heritage" to another state is grounded in Roman law notions of property and sovereignty. In such a framework, property is marked by exclusivity. If it's mine, it can't be yours. However, alternative conceptions, grounded for instance in Mauss' reading of « hau », allow for imagining novel forms of plural reclaiming. The national level is not the only scale involved, as representatives of some indigenous groups, sometimes in conflict with their own national state, ask to be included in new museum narratives, more respectful of their culture. The paper intends to explore various contemporary cases of processes of « reclaiming » or sharing cultural artefacts and some of the various ways museums can deal with it.

Paper short abstract:

The colonial appropriation of Naga artefacts in northeast India enhanced anthropology in Europe and informs recent interest in Naga collections amongst European academics and museums. The paper examines the contrasting historical trajectories, positions and modern consequences.

Paper long abstract:

Restitution claims for artefacts from museums in formerly imperial Britain, France, Germany and Portugal are prompted by a history of theft and plunder of subject peoples located at great distances from metropolitan powers. For the USA/Canada/Australia/New Zealand the plunder was internally of indigenous peoples now recognised, technically, as equal citizens and denoted as, for instance, "First nations". Broadly there are two partially overlapping flows of artefacts. The earlier imperial one was from colonial possessions to museums in Europe, and the later one from Europe to 'New World' countries (North America, Australia/New Zealand) as increasing commercial value was placed on them. Through claims by indigenous peoples for restitution, the imperial flow of artefacts confronts early imperial extortion and exploitation. The modern flow indexes monetary value more than heritage. For example, Naga objects taken from northeastern India became museum collections in the European metropolitan countries (notably UK, Germany and Austria), fuelling the development of anthropology and museology (Hutton, Haimendorf, Mills, Kaufmann). In due course the artefacts travelled to museums in, principally, the United States and other New World countries. The colonial history of Naga collections is now confronted by the regeneration of interest in them both among European/New World academics and ethnographic museums in the late 1980s, mid-2000s and currently in Humboldt Lab (2015) and Forum (2021) and by Naga communities themselves. The paper examines how the contrasting historical trajectories, positions and modern consequences play out.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper I will present my research on the 'restitution' campaign that the Portuguese diamond company Diamang began in the 1950s and show how it was a propagandistic response to the British raze of Benin (1897). This will allow me to provide an interesting theoretical angle on current debates.

Paper long abstract:

Pitt-Rivers' Antique Works of Art from Benin (1900) had a profound impact on Portuguese society. Detailing several bronze sculptures seized by the British during the raze of Benin (1897), this catalogue makes the Portuguese influence on some of their patterns and themes clear. While this 'revelation' was not enough to raise public sympathy for the plight of the Edo people, when Leo Frobenius proposed that Ife and Benin Art had an 'Atlantean' origin, Pitt-River's book allowed the Portuguese to counterargue that these masterworks were influenced by them instead. Throughout the 1930s and 40s, they were framed as part of the national heritage and became central to the imperial rewriting of Portuguese national mythology that was sponsored by the dictatorial New State. In the 1950s, Diamang, a diamond mining company operating in Angola, began financing the 'restitution' of hundreds of African objects back to the Continent, beginning with a 'Benin head'. Regardless of their cultures of origin, these objects were symbolically 'returned' to the Dundo Museum, a private institution located at the far North-eastern limits of Angola. Diamang's propagandistic efforts were framed as the creation of a 'Museum of African Art' in Africa, where racialized populations could be taught about their 'past' and admire 'masterpieces' taken to Europe by competing colonial powers. In this paper I will present my research findings on this historical episode, drawing conclusions that give us perspective on the terms of the current debate about 'restitution' and the creation of new ethnographic and Art museums in Africa.

Paper short abstract:

The Humboldt Forum in Berlin, once called Germany's most important cultural project of the early 21st century, is going through a severe crisis. Its intention to show Germany's new cosmopolitanism has been undermined by demands to return "stolen" items from its collections to their original owners.

Paper long abstract:

In 2002 the German Bundestag decided to rebuild the Palace of the former Prussian kings in Berlin, which the communist German Democratic Republic had demolished and replaced by a "Palace of the Republic" in which its People's Chamber held its meetings. To avoid the impression of a restorative political action, and prove the country's cosmopolitan spirit, the German parliament also decided to move the collections of the Berlin Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art to the new building that should carry the name of the two famous German scholars. After many delays, construction works were launched in 2013. While the responsible curators were still working on a convincing concept, political activists demanded to stop the whole project with the argument that the museums' cultural treasures were "looted" in the former European colonies and should be returned as "stolen art" to their rightful owners. After several scholars had adopted this position, and the atrocities of German colonialism had become a popular topic in the media, German cultural politicians gave in to the pressure and expressed their willingness to respond positively to any officially submitted and substantiated demand. But actually, such demands are few. Some African intellectuals criticized restitution as neo-colonial symbolic politics, while states such as Tanzania declared to waive any title claim on restitution. In this way, the ambitious project of the Humboldt Forum triggered a debate that not only concerns all European anthropological collections but also reveals the patronizing "speaking for" attitude of its postcolonial critics.

Paper short abstract:

In a cartography of the affective and emotional dynamics and genealogy of the Humboldt Forum debate in Germany, this paper unravels some of the strings in a complex web that connects people, objects, atmospheres and sentiments around the Humboldt Forum.

Paper long abstract:

Alexithymia refers to the inability to make sense of one's own emotions and the emotions of others. In reference to Ann Stoler's notion of "colonial aphasia" by which she refers to the inability to speak about colonialism in France, we mobilize colonial alexithymia to investigate the workings of the German debate on the Humboldt Forum, the prestigious cultural center focusing mainly on non-European arts and cultures which is about to be completed in central Berlin. Constructed at the place of the dismantled Palace of the Republic, a central symbolic building for the former German Democratic Republic, the Humboldt Forum's outside will resemble the Prussian royal palace that had been destroyed in the Second World War - a symbolism that was criticized by many as revisionist history, denying the heritage of Nazi rule and its aftermath. In the resulting debate, cosmopolitan and more nativist nationalisms compete with each other over the "right" kind of German national identity. All the while (activits) actors in Germany and the former colonies, mainly in Africa, contest the use of "their" objects (obtained under the conditions of colonialism, some as war booty in colonial military interventions) as tools for German identity politics. Strong affective dissonances between national and (anti-)colonial sentiments emerge as different emotional repertoires about colonialism clash. In a cartography of the affective and emotional dynamics and genealogy of the Humboldt Forum debate, this paper unravels some of the strings in a complex web that connects people, objects, atmospheres and sentiments around the Humboldt Forum.

Paper short abstract:

This paper matches the debates on provenance and restitution in Germany with the collaborative provenance research into collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin. It argues that the latter affords subjectivity formations beyond dichotomous notions of perpetrators and victims.

Paper long abstract:

This paper takes Mikhail Bakthin's notion of 'chronotope', understood as the ways in which writers narrate time and space and thus create worlds which enable particular subjectivities to emerge, to analyse the discussions about the practices and future(s) of anthropology museums in Germany. How do political and cultural stakeholders relate to colonial pasts by mobilising museum collections? How do they use them to envision (decolonial) futures? And what kind of subjectivities do their respective ways of relating to pasts, presents and futures afford? In particular, I take the collaborative provenance research into historical collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin as starting point to match the public debates of provenance and restitution with the needs and interests of the stakeholders involved. While the museum practitioners in Berlin urged to understand the entanglements of the collection with German colonisation and, especially, the war against the Ovaherero and Nama which escalated into a genocide from 1904 to 1908, the Namibian historians, artists and curators sought to take the collection to envision decolonial, creative futures. At first, these movements in time - looking back and looking forward - seemed to contravene each other. A constant process of translation between different epistemic regimes and ways of relating to pasts, presents and futures was needed to bring them into dialogue. This translational approach moved 'towards a new relational ethics" (Sarr, Savoy 2018) which afforded the formation of subjectivities beyond dichotomous notions of perpetrators and victims, commonly perpetrated in the public.

Paper short abstract:

The case of K. Th. Preuss Náayeri ethnographic collection (West Mexico, 1906) shows that any decision of a repatriation process should contemplate not just the history of the collection, but also the cultural study of these objects through time and that of their permanence in the Occidental world.

Paper long abstract:

The actual focus of discussion around contemporary anthropology museums resides in the tension between two possible futures for ethnographic collections: restituting or keeping. This debate is based on the question "to whom should the objects be physically consigned?".

Generally, to answer this question, we look into the history of ethnographic collections. In this paper, I want to propose that what we consider "the history of ethnographic collections" should not limit itself to the process though which a particular object came to be part of an institution's collection. It should include also an ethnologic study about two other levels: first, the sense given through time to that particular object in its cultural context, from its conception to its destruction or preservation; and second, the contemporary history of that object throughout its permanence in the Occidental world.

I will analyze here a concrete ethnographic collection: the one obtained by Konrad Theodor Preuss among the náayeri of Western Mexico in 1906. This collection was immediately sent to Germany and preserved at the Ethnologisches Museum of Berlin. History of this collection points to repatriation as a suitable and legally strong case, whereas its ethnological study -in two directions, as we suggest- shows that its actual "status" -culturally and conservationally speaking- may not be appropriate for such process, because it would imply a lack of politeness and even danger for the Amerindian population from which the collection was originally removed from.

Paper short abstract:

Vague terminology and false assertions dominated the German restitution debate from 2017 to 2019. Specialists weren't sufficiently involved and there is still a need for research on the historical objects.

Paper long abstract:

The analysis of the few restitutions (or restitution requests) reveals the shortcomings of the public debate in Germany. The media are dominated by the opinions of politicians, journalists, art historians and artists, whereas the voices of ethnologists, restorers and historians who actually publish works on the specific objects, or their collecting history, are barely audible. Since statistical evaluations (meta-studies) of the object acquisitions are missing, asserting that the objects were unlawfully acquired ("stolen art") turns out to be an ideological interpretation and also shows the need for ethnological research.

Many hardly documented objects reached museums in the past. Studying them was left for future generations to do. Up to the present day, only a few objects have been described exhaustively: data is missing on materials and techniques, on their use, meaning, collection history and the modifications they underwent after purchase. The rare museum curators were and still are often in charge of entire continents, and academic interest started to dwindle in the 1930s which in turn had dire consequences on the education of curators. Systematic disinterest in object-centred research can easily be illustrated by the fact that all museums lack independent budgets for the work of external specialists.

The renovation of ethnological museums is limited to replacing names and logos. The museum directors haven't had the collective guts to contradict politicians' and journalists' one-sided or wrong assertions in the public debate and most academic representatives of Social and Cultural Anthropology don't have sufficient knowledge. Simultaneously, one must note that the debate is not based on a multitude of restitution demands.