Working Through Colonial Collections: An Ethnography of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin

This book explores the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It highlights the Museum's embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in its everyday activity, addressing the diverse areas of expertise in the Museum and drawing on archival research and oral history interviews.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 08 November 2022
Publisher: Leuven University Press

Reckoning with colonial legacies in Western museum collections What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin's Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum's various work practices, this book highlights the Museum's embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum's everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum - the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections - and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum's present - processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn. Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Open Research Library

Weight: 695g
Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9789462703100