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.