Paper short abstract

This paper explores colonial violence in ethnographic collections through an Indigenous, affective lens, presenting traces as active substances that shape coeval, relational worlds and open pathways for decolonial engagements beyond polarization.

Paper long abstract

Drawing on collaborative research with Maasai communities in northern Tanzania and on collections held at the Berlin Ethnological Museum, this paper examines traces of colonial violence in ethnographic collections from an Indigenous, affect-centered perspective. Rather than treating traces as static or inert, we denaturalize the concept by foregrounding Maasai epistemologies and ontologies, in which traces are understood as active presences reverberating across time, space, and relational worlds.

When confronted with colonially appropriated belongings, Maasai interlocutors experienced embodied discomfort, fear, and grief. These belongings were framed as ing’weni—dangerous entities infused with iloikop, understood as both the trace and the substance of violence left behind by murdered ancestors. At the same time, violations of moral and relational norms provoke eng’oki: the lingering effects of ethical transgressions in interactions with people, other living beings, and situations in the world. Eng’oki “hangs in the air,” manifesting as misfortune, illness, or ecological disruption.

Within this framework, traces act as substances through which colonialism persists, shaping everyday life, social and natural environments, and cosmopolitical encounters between formerly colonized communities and former colonizers. They render colonial violence coeval, destabilizing linear temporalities and complicating contemporary debates on restitution, decolonial collaboration, and reconciliation. At the same time, Maasai world-ordering practices articulate relational pathways toward restoring balance and togetherness across human and more-than-human domains.

Positioning colonial objects as experimental devices for pluriversal anthropological inquiry, this paper treats traces as a means to open new relational and imaginative possibilities for engaging with colonial violence in the present and beyond polarized futures.