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Paper short abstract:

Switzerland has had no oil wells or colonies on its own, but many institutions hold archival material giving insights into its entanglements during the emergence of a global petroleumscape (Carola Hein, 2022). What role do these heritage institutions play today?

Paper long abstract:

From 1900 onwards, oil industry was in need of geologically trained staff to explore undergrounds for future oil drilling spaces. Many Swiss geologists were seen to be suitable for this task, having had practical work experience in the Swiss alps. They were sent to promising oil areas all over the world and had to adapt within the colonial and imperial setting of international oil companies. Being in a constant exchange with friends, families and professional colleagues, a flow of ideas, images and (cultural) things emerged between Switzerland and petrostates worldwide. Results were huge ethnographic, geological and photographic collections, which we find today in Swiss heritage institutions like libraries, archives and museums.

Taking the example of the Museum der Kulturen Basel, I will show, how the emergence of the ethnographic collection was linked to job opportunities within the petroleum industry. In current provenance research debates about such collections, questions about the parallelism of resource extraction and collection building in western museums haven’t received consideration so far. Following an actor-based research approach, I will analyze historical material stored at the Museum der Kulturen Basel and outline its merits for both: provenance research and environmental history approaches. I will argue that we must carefully rethink about our holdings in libraries, archives, and museums and that we often face ‹dirty data legacies› (Hannah Turner, 2020), especially in western ethnographic collections.