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Accepted Paper:
Unsettling Encounters: Affective Dynamics in Collaborative Research on Ethnographic and Photographic Collections
Maren Wirth
(Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology FU Berlin)
Paper Short Abstract:
The paper elaborates on Maasai community members' affective responses to historical photographs and ethnographic "objects" with colonial histories in the context of collaborative research. It aims to highlight the complexities of research on museum collections.
Paper Abstract:
Collaborative approaches have become a highly relevant mode of research on museum collections from colonial contexts over the past 20 years. Scholars and institutions alike have emphasized the ethical and practical benefits of collaborative research. However, the process of researching colonial collections with so-called "communities of origin" is often far from smooth and easy. Colonial collections are highly charged affective arrangements. They carry a multitude of sometimes conflicting meanings and histories.
Collaborative efforts on collections are permeated by the historically shaped relationships not only between researchers and communities, but also between scientific institutions like the Ethnological Museum and their so-called collections, as well as broader global and economic inequalities. Encounters between researchers, collections, and members of so-called communities of origin are therefore charged with affective predispositions and preconditions on various scales, which can surface in the affective arrangement of an interview. Rather than fostering a clean and ethical research environment, collaborative encounters are highly sensitive, personal, and conflicted sites of contestation. Drawing on research with Maasai objects and photographs in Tanzania, the paper explores some of the affective dissonances and irritations that can arise in these contexts and highlights lessons learned from them. Rather than glossing over these frictions, I argue that it is precisely the moments of irritation and dissonance, and their affective and emotional underpinnings for scholars and their research partners, that allow for a deeper understanding of the complex ongoing relations and dynamics interwoven with colonial collections.