Contribution short abstract:

I propose an understanding of ethnographic collecting based on the affects of the collector. By showing the desires that motivated anthropological practice under empire, I aim to deconstruct the very concept of 'ethnographic collecting', and to create new affective strategies for the museum today.

Contribution long abstract:

What were the motivations behind imperial ethnographic collecting? In this paper, I argue that the collector's affects are an important and hitherto overlooked aspect in answering this question. Using a pair of Japanese vaginal balls, or rin-no-tama, from the collection of German anthropologist Wilhelm Joest as a case study, I show how affective constellations of (sexual) desire and White guilt could drive collecting decisions and anthropological research. I use this example to show that such affective impulses are not peripheral explanations - to paraphrase Ann Stoler, they were not the "soft undertissue" of imperial anthropology, "but its marrow". I propose, therefore, to question the explanatory potential of 'ethnographic collecting' by making the concept itself an object of inquiry. In undoing 'ethnographic collecting', I aim to discover what is obscured by its supposed self-evidence - the role of collecting in the affective self-regulation of empire. This affective historical research can, in turn, play an important role in addressing the affective constitution of the ethnographic museum today. Re-introducing the affects of ethnographic collectors can challenge the presumed unaffectedness of White actors, past and present, and enable new generative modes of affective transformation and healing.