CENTRE FOR ANTHROPOLOGICAL RESEARCH ON MUSEUMS AND HERITAGE

CARMAH Paper #1 OTHERWISE Rethinking Museums and Heritage CARMAH aims to deepen understanding of the dynamics and potentials of museums and heritage in the contemporary world. It looks globally to identify and analyze the significant social, cultural and political developments facing museums and heritage today. Its in-depth research tackles how these play out and are reconfigured in specific national and institutional contexts. In this way, CARMAH provides new insights into what is going on now and innovative ideas for good karma in the future. Central themes of CARMAH’s research programme are how the following shape and are shaped through museums and heritage:

> Diversity and difference > Citizenship and knowledge formation > Media and material culture

These raise questions of social recogni- tion, audience, collections, cultural property, power relations, communication and public culture. We use established methods – espe- cially ethnographic – and also develop innovative methodological approaches. Our perspective is anthropological in its insist- ence on addressing specific cases in-depth and attending to practice and process, at the same time as thinking comparatively and reflexively. CARMAH is funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Humboldt-Uni- versität zu Berlin, the Museum of Natural History Berlin and the Prussian Cultural Her- itage Foundation. It is also host to research projects funded by other organisations. www.carmah.berlin Table of Content

INTRODUCTION SHARON MACDONALD

PROVENANCE LARISSA FÖRSTER

TRANSLOCALITY KATARZYNA PUZON

ALTERITY JONAS TINIUS

POST-ETHNOLOGICAL MARGARETA VON OSWALD

ENGAGEMENT CHRISTINE GERBICH 2 INTRODUCTION

by Sharon Macdonald

The essays collected together here each explore a concept that offers the potential to think and do museum and heritage practice otherwise – that is, to think and do museums and heritage differently from the ways in which they have more recently or more usually been done. This ‘otherwising’ is thoroughly anthropological. It draws from a disciplinary approach that seeks to explore diverse ways of doing and thinking – to learn from other ways of being wise – in order to rethink, re-do, and transform, what might otherwise be taken for granted or left unexamined.

We examine, then, concepts that seem to hold transformational promise: prove- nance, translocality, alterity, the post-ethno- logical and engagement. Some are already in widespread and international use, others less so; some are relevant for all or many kinds of museums and heritage and others for more specific problematics. Our aim is to consider the practices and other concepts with which they are, or might be, entangled, and to reflect on how far they might not only enable scholars to think about museums and heritage differently but also provoke changes in future practice.

Introduction 3 The Making Differences project

The essays are written by researchers in does not, however, restrict itself to these the Making Differences project – a multi-re- areas but seeks to investigate them as part searcher ethnographic project that analyses of a broader analysis of the difference- (and ongoing transformations in museums and its necessary correlate, sameness-) making heritage.1 Beginning in 2015, though with activities of contemporary museums and most of the researchers only joining the heritage. As such, it looks across a wide project in 2016 and 2017, this five-year range of sites and endeavours, including project’s full title is Making Differences in established museums of various sorts – Berlin: Transforming Museums and Heritage ethnological, art, city, history and also in the 21st Century. It has Berlin as its key natural history – as well as related cultural empirical focus but is also concerned with institutions and groupings, such as smaller what is going on elsewhere in Germany and galleries or activist groups – that grapple internationally. In this way, our aim is to with similar problematics. understand Berlin in relation to more trans- local developments elsewhere, as well as to The research is divided into four be able to grasp the specificities of partic- inter-related themes, each of which indexes ular national or local conditions. Moreover, areas of considerable push towards trans- our ethnographic approach – which includes formation within museums and heritage in-depth participant observation – allows us institutions, and indeed within society more to access practice and process; that is, to widely. Transforming the Ethnographic takes see what happens in action on the ground as its cue the extensive calls to rethink in even more specific settings, such as ethnographic and ethnological museums, particular museums, heritage and cultural and the disciplines of social and cultural institutions or communities. anthropology and ethnology alongside them. It concerns itself especially with colonial The ‘making differences’ of the title of legacies, not only in terms of the holding of the project recognizes the important and objects that result from colonial encounter constitutive role that museums and heritage but also in terms of wider practices of dif- play in classifying and differentiating knowl- ference-making. Representing Islam begins edge, objects and people – and, in various from the struggle of many museums and ways, in engaging the public in this. Specif- heritage institutions – again, as also in other ically, it signals the project’s core focus on parts of society – to deal with what is often the contemporary challenges for museums popularly characterised as an especially and heritage institutions of (a) revisiting challenging form of cultural difference in and addressing problematic aspects of their contemporary society. Our other two themes earlier differentiating activities, especially partly cross-cut these.Media and Mediation in relation to colonialism; and (b) recogniz- looks at the affordances and transformative ing and finding new ways of dealing with potential of different kinds of media – espe- contemporary diversity and diversification, cially new media – for difference- and heri- including that resulting from migration. It tage-making. Science and Citizenship probes

4 how difference-making intersects with In relation to difference-making, what citizen-making, and the role that science our multi-researcher, multi-sited ethno- plays within this. graphic approach allows for, then, is, first, an examination of what kinds of differenti- In all of the themes, research seeks to ations museums and heritage institutions go beyond a mapping of supposedly known see themselves to be making, and which differences or a filling in of pre-determined forms of social and cultural (and in the case analytical categories, to investigate instead of natural history museums, biological) the discursive and also practical work of diversity they regard as important and, or difference-making. This means adopting problematic, as well as those which they do an ethnographic, hermeneutic openness to not recognize. Second, the ethnographic the field, allowing initial research framings approach enables researchers to see what and suppositions to be open to revision. happens when particular differentiations It requires attentive watching, listening are made – what and who is involved in and feeling in order to grasp what is going these and what is at stake; and what hap- on – the said and the unsaid, as well as pens, especially as attempts are made to what is only said to certain people and at address forms of diversity that have been certain moments and why. It also requires relatively ignored in the past or which are attention to practice – to what people do; being addressed in new ways. In addition, and to process – how things unfurl over ethnography potentially enables a grasping time. By doing this across a range of sites of marginal and emergent ways of forming and cultural formations within Berlin during relations – of difference, identity, partial the time of the making of the Humboldt connection, similarity, overlap and so forth; Forum – around which so much contem- as well as following of the practices through porary debate coalesces – we in effect are which these are performed, instantiated and conducting a multi-researcher ethnography sometimes reconfigured. of museum and heritage-making in the city. This is at once multi-sited, in that we look at a wider range of heterogeneous locales, and common-located, insofar as Berlin is our shared larger focus. Even here, however, our perspective means that we need to avoid taking ‘Berlin’ as a known quantity and instead try to grasp how it is itself made-up in the different sites and practices that we investigate.

Introduction 5 Exploring Otherwise

Exploring concepts and practices that or one that was less so but that seemed seem to hold transformational promise in to have the potential to become so. All of the museum and heritage world is central to the concepts, therefore, had some traction the Making Differences project. Our focus in in the Berlin context, though some were this set of essays – forming the first volume less widespread in their use than others. in our CARMAH Paper series – is especially, As it happened, all also have international though not only, on new and relatively new or currency, evident not least from the fact that repurposed, concepts and practices. That is, they all translate readily into English and we are particularly interested in looking at in at least one case, namely ‘engagement’, the biographies and active lives of concepts work better in English than in German. This and their associated practices (or practices currency itself speaks to the international and their associated concepts) that have entanglements of the museum and heritage begun to circulate and that are charged with world that we are investigating – though some kind of potential to change the scene. it makes it no less pressing to try to In many cases, these charged concepts have analyse the more localised inflections and an international life, circulating globally realisations. but taking on new inflections in particular national, local and organizational contexts. To help in the process of reflecting on They do so as they encounter existing polit- the chosen concepts, we all, as a research ical, legal and institutional structures, and team, discussed them intensively together in relation to particular social, cultural and and also carefully designed a process for linguistic complexes. In addition, their lives – further development. What this entailed and sometimes deaths – are also shaped by was that each researcher invited one or specific actors, such as certain intellectuals, more scholars and thoughtful practitioners, activists or artists who promote or criticise from anywhere in the world, to come into them; or even particular realisations (e.g. discussion with them about the concepts an influential exhibition or controversy) that – and also, possibly, alternatives to those gain fame or notoriety for one reason or concepts. As part of the process, theMaking another. Differences researchers sent their own initial reflections to these non-Berlin-based This Otherwise volume grew directly out interlocutors, together with questions that of this research interest. Our starting point they wished to address. Then, in July 2017, was that each of the researchers employed we came together, with further selected on Making Differences at the time we began participants, from within Berlin as well as planning the idea – namely Summer 2016 from elsewhere in Germany or overseas, in a – was to select a term that they viewed as two-day symposium for in-depth discussion. significant for the settings that they were During this, each researcher presented their researching. This could either be a concept own reflections on the concept, opening up that was already in active use and debate points for dialogue. This was followed by

6 the two interlocutors whose primary focus The essays brought together here, was not Berlin presenting their reflections, then, are the Making Differences research- variously focusing on their experience in ers’ reflections on the concepts that they another part of the world, as well as their originally selected after this conceptual intellectual take on the concept and associ- fieldwork phase. What this has meant in ated debates. This was then usually followed practice is that each researcher has gone by a commentary from a Berlin-based back and revised their essay, still setting out participant, who was usually directly their own original motivations for selecting involved as a practitioner in a particular new the concept and their own perspectives but development in the city, often one that was then extended and developed in light of the part of theMaking Differences researcher’s further interrogation and debate during the own fieldwork. Further discussion open to all symposium. Our hope is that presenting participants followed. them in this way provides the reader with a distilled and focused discussion of each In some ways, the symposium was concept. a kind of fieldwork for our project. Those who took part, even if not from our specific fieldsites in Berlin, were part of the broader The Concepts museum and heritage field that we are investigating. This blurriness is a feature Selecting concepts related to their of working in this context. Fieldwork is not individual subprojects of Making Differ- merely observation, of course, but is an ences, then, allowed researchers to varying iterative and two-way process, in which extents, to examine the existing life and the researcher is engaged in figuring out effects of the concepts in their current field- by participating and communicating. The work. In some cases this meant concepts symposium allowed for a kind of trying-out whose journeys they had been following for interjection – throwing the concepts under many years or that they had encountered the spotlight to see what the result would or worked with in previous projects too; be. In some cases, those brought together in other cases, the concepts were ones included people who actively deployed the that researchers had only more recently terms, or who had even coined them, as subjected to investigation. We purposefully, well as others who were either interested in however, left the remit very open, not seek- using them or were perhaps more skeptical. ing to impose much stricture other than that The interjection also involved us bringing they should be concepts that researchers our own thoughts, sometimes derived from felt deserved more interrogation and reflec- fieldwork experience, into conversation too, tion. What we present here, then, are not the thus allowing variously for confirmation of concepts that we think necessarily hold the our ideas and/or for us to be prompted to most potential for future transformation. think about them otherwise than we had Neither are they the most common or the done initially. most problematic ones. Some of them

Introduction 7 might later turn out to fit into any of these By contrast with provenance, translo- categories. That, however, is not the point. cality as a term has much less discursive Rather, they have been chosen from the presence in the museum and heritage world. individual vantage points of the researchers Nevertheless, there is growing attention to involved as concepts deserving of more something at least approximating it, often attention and analysis. As such, they do not phrased in such terms as ‘post-national’ or seek to collectively map a field but instead to ‘heritage across borders’. Quite whether provide a provocatively heterogeneous set such terms do in fact equate or not is, how- of interventions into a longer conversation ever, a question that needs to be addressed, and analysis. as Katarzyna Puzon, who selected ‘trans- locality’, inspired partly by her previous Some of the concepts that we have research on heritage in Beirut,3 discusses selected, then, are already in widespread below, and developed further through mul- use. Provenance, indeed, seems to be mot ti-sited research on the representation and du jour, especially, though certainly not only, (non-) recognition of Islam in Berlin. As she in Germany. Here, however, it is the subject and her interlocutors during the symposium of numerous newspaper reports, confer- showed, translocality holds much potential ences, political documents and speeches, for breaking out of the place-as-container sometimes being read back into the past thinking that so often characterises heritage (even if it was not then referred to in such and museum framings. It does so by empha- terms), and often heavily freighted with the sizing mobility but without ignoring the hope that giving it more attention might significance of place(s). transform museums and heritage. In quite what directions, however, is less clear and In choosing the term alterity, Jonas Tin- indeed the possible directions sometimes ius was inspired both by philosophical and even seem to be at odds with one another. anthropological theorising and by discussion Likewise, there are discrepancies in quite and deployment of the term in his fieldsites how it is understood. In her essay below, in Berlin. These are independent art galleries Larissa Förster, who has also contributed and exhibition spaces that are engaged in more extensively to the debates elsewhere,2 developing forms of post-colonial critique. In and indeed become a major voice in the the face of dilemmas over whether and how arguments for more provenance research, to recognise difference without engaging highlights the trajectory of the term, espe- in problematic othering, a host of concepts cially within Germany, before considering has been proposed, ‘alterity’ or ‘post-other- – inspired especially by her invited interloc- ness’ among them, as he discusses below. utors – some of the possible variants that As Jonas Tinius argues, less mainstream might be deployed. cultural institutions such as the ones he studies (also in previous fieldwork with theatre companies in the Ruhr region) can potentially be especially generative of new

8 concepts and approaches as they try to find does their modes of relating to their visitors. ways to counter the canon.4 Whether alterity These are issues that Christine Gerbich, might gain more widespread traction as a who chose the term, has been working on term remains to be seen but the reflection in a range of ways over many years and that here certainly provides an insightful, if she is currently exploring in the Museum ambivalent, basis from which to consider its of Islamic Art in Berlin.6 As she discusses impact and alternatives to the concept. here, the term engagement is difficult to translate into German. One reason for the Also addressing the awkward issue of difficulty seems to be that it is descriptive difference is the termpost-ethnological , of a rather indistinct complex of ideas and selected by Margareta von Oswald for its practices that have been developed in the particular relevance to her work on eth- English-speaking museum world, especially nological museums. This research, which in the UK, and that cannot be straightfor- includes work in the Ethnological Museum in wardly mapped on to Germany. At the heart Berlin, has also led her to investigate ques- of the engagement issue, however, are tions of colonial legacies in such museums transformations within museums that seek and to collaborate on new approaches.5 to not only give greater access to visitors In relation to the ‘post-ethnological’, her or communities but to more fundamentally interest is in what such a term might poten- transform relationships such that greater tially mean for such museums – how might it input into museums’ own agendas and prac- transform them or, indeed, potentially even tice comes from those who do not formally dissolve them? Does it have reformative or work in them, and especially from those who possibly even revolutionary potential? In previously saw little to interest them in such effect, what the term and these questions institutions. open up is consideration of the ethnological museum itself as a form – whether it can (or should) be rescued from the potentially Charged concepts damning critique of its roles in ‘othering’. And if it can – how? To address this and All of these concepts, then, are charged related questions, the discussion focused in the sense that they carry particular primarily on the role of research, and more semantic load from the debates and con- particularly, the role of anthropology, within texts in which they have already been such museums. To all of this, the interlocu- deployed. They are, however, also charged in tors brought some creative suggestions as a second sense, namely that they carry the you can read below. equivalent of an electrical charge – a burst of energy that can spark activity as well as Engagement is a concept that could debate. How powerful that is – or whether it be seen as relevant to all kinds of museums might just fizzle away – remains to be seen. and heritage institutions, concerning as it Doing that seeing is what our fieldwork – our

Introduction 9 Making Differences project – enables. In roles of concepts. In recent years, for exam- effect the work allows for an analysis of ple, Mieke Bal’s notion of ‘travelling con- concepts in action, to see which do what and cepts’ has been widely welcomed, especially how. for the impetus that it provides for working across and between disciplines, allowing That words can be performative has and recognizing the transformations that been recognised at least since J.L. Austin that brings in the process. Paying attention used the term in How to do things with words to the journeys of concepts across schol- (1962). It is worth remembering, however, arship and culture is, suggests Bal (2002), that he was at pains to point out that ‘per- more productive than trying to pin down formative utterances’ are just one kind of shared definitions.8 That the term ‘travelling ‘speech act’, to use his terms – and quite an concepts’ has been productively used by unusual one. Indeed, none of the concepts scholars in such a range of disciplines is that we discuss here is a performative utter- itself testimony to the approach for which ance in the sense in which Austin used it. she argues.9 Nevertheless, in an interestingly self-exem- plifying manner, his term has itself prompted Perhaps one of the most extensive uses a productive extension of thinking about of giving primacy to concepts as method, what terms might bring about, exemplified, as well as methodology, can be seen in for example, in Judith Butler’s deployment Reinhard Koselleck’s conceptual history of the term.7 All the same, however, it is (Begriffsgeschichte). Arguing that “concepts worth recalling Austin’s original intention, are like joints linking language and the namely to investigate different kinds of extralinguistic world” (Koselleck 1996: 61), words and the different sorts of roles they he promotes an approach to history in which can play, and, moreover, to do so through the identification of key concepts, such as, close attention to what he and the group for example, ‘progress’, ‘emancipation’ or of philosophers who shared this conviction ‘crisis’, and their transformations is central called ‘ordinary language’. And even though to an analysis of social and political change. the terms on which we are focusing are not His seven volume co-edited (with Brunner always ordinary in the sense of everyday, and Conze) Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: they nevertheless open up the potential for Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen an ethnographic tracking and examination Sprache in Deutschland – among other works in a way that seems fully congruent with – presents its analysis as a lexicon, glossary Austin’s proposal – even if not quite what he or dictionary with extended entries, as its had in mind. subtitle indicates; though these do not seek to pin down the meanings through definition A considerable body of scholarship but, rather, constitute short essays tracing in the humanities and social and cultural changes in meanings of terms and the social studies has given attention to the meanings, and political changes with which they are transformations and active or constitutive implicated. At this point, I should probably

10 hasten to add that our own research project also fed directly into discussions that does not intend to emulate this gargantuan followed, being relevant especially to discus- and impressive effort, not least because sions of provenance and translocality. this approach is only part of our larger programme of work. It might, however, At the end of the symposium, we invited possibly come to approximate more modest Duane Jethro and Erica Lehrer to reflect similar projects, such as Raymond Williams’ on the proceedings. In doing so, they not Keywords (1985), whose second volume only enriched the discussion by identifying contains 131 entries, so we still have some threads and posing further questions but considerable way to go. also by suggesting some other concepts and perspectives that might have been given critical attention. These included postcolo- More otherwise-ing niality, race and emotion, as well as empathy.

Contributing further important concep- In making these suggestions, our col- tual work at the Otherwise symposium, in leagues were contributing to our aspiration addition to the panels at which the above both to identify other circulating concepts concepts were discussed, was further stimu- deserving of more analysis and to open up lating content that shaped our collective to other ideas, especially to concepts or thinking. First, to kick us off, we invited Haidy approaches that have as yet been given rela- Geismar from University College London to tively little attention in museum and heritage give a lecture relevant to our theme. Entitled studies but which might have transforma- Object Otherwise, this tackled a core issue tional potential – potential, that is, either for for museums and heritage – namely objects analysis or practice or both. For this reason, in museum collections – to draw on her own we also held a competition for early career extensive expertise as an anthropologist in researchers to submit such ideas and we the Pacific and as also working in the area invited the seven best of these to also come of digital anthropology.10 As she showed, and participate in our symposium, each through four fascinating examples of new hosting a table in a World Café format. They mediation of mostly old objects in collec- were joined too by our own more recently tions, what these new interfaces – of medi- begun Making Differences PhD researchers, ated objects – afford was often unexpected Nazlı Cabadağ and Chiara Garbellotto, who but not necessarily only on account of presented on queering. capacities restricted to new media. Impor- tantly, they often allowed for establishing new relations – and new kinds of relations – between people across space, sometimes rethinking notions such as authenticity, materiality and cultural difference in the process. Her inspiring and nuanced thinking

Introduction 11 The other ideas – whose headline participation were some of those. All would names do not always speak to the originality certainly be worthwhile to subject to analy- of the suggested perspective – were: sis in the same way as those here. So too are others that our fieldwork is raising. These • Artification: Edilson Pereira (Rio de include, for example, multiperspectivity, Janeiro State University) shared heritage, source community and the • Dialogic communication: David world, as well as key terms that shaped the Francis (University College London design of our project itself, such as citizen- and British Museum) ship, science, difference and diversity. • Hauntology: Colin Sterling (Univer For now, however, these must wait their sity College London) time and perhaps other formats, including • Infrastructure: Sowparnika Balas ones in which they are more integrated into waminathan (UC San Diego) fuller ethnographic accounts rather than • NGO-isation: Claire Panetta pushed so much into the foreground. There (CUNY) is no doubt, however, that this has been • Virtual heritage: Saima Akhtar (Yale a very productive approach for our larger University) project and that it will flow into refining and • Wasted Legacies: Francisco improving our future work. We hope too, Martínez (School of Arts, Design however, that it will also flow into future and Architecture of Aalto discussion in the museum and heritage field University) and itself contribute to making a difference to both discourse about concepts and to All of these – together with a review of practice itself. the symposium by early career researcher Anna Weinreich (New York University) – can be found on our website.11 They are evidence Acknowledgment of a remarkable creative energy among such early career researchers – promising hope The symposium on which the writing for the future. here is based was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation as part of Sharon Macdonald’s Professorship. All of Other the researchers writing here are funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Concepts with the exception of Christine Gerbich, who is funded by the Prussian Cultural Heritage There are, of course, many other con- Foundation. We are grateful for all of this cepts that we could have chosen, some of financial support. Organizing the symposium which were contenders earlier on or that and the writing were collective efforts, make bit part appearances here. Restitution, also including some of our colleagues in mobility, post-migrant, post-colonial and the Centre for Anthropological Research

12 on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), to Macdonald, Lidchi, and von Oswald 2017. whom we also wish to offer sincere thanks. 6 See, for example, Gerbich 2013; Bluche, Gerbich, Katarzyna Puzon and Jonas Tinius took a Kamel, Lanwerd, Miera 2013. lead in the organization of the symposium, 7 See, for example, 1997. and Christine Gerbich and Margareta von 8 This point is made in the introduction and at various Oswald in that of the world café. Jonas other points in 2002. It is, perhaps, also worth pointing Tinius has galvanized us to produce this out that Bal’s discussion is also directed specifically to publication, undertaken most of the editorial exhibitions later in the book, a topic with which she has labour, and has organized it into fruition with also dealt elsewhere, e.g. Bal 2007. assistance from Farina Asche. 9 E.g. Neumann and Nünning 2012. 10 Geismar’s arguments and examples are drawn from We also thank the other colleagues her forthcoming book. who took part in the symposium, whether 11 They are published as individual essays on our reflec- as named speakers or in the lively open tions blog: http://www.carmah.berlin/reflections/. discussions and world café. To those whose contributions especially helped refine our ideas for this publication – most particularly those who presented and commentated directly on the concepts here and whose names appear in the texts that follow – we are especially grateful and do hope that they will like the result. Sharon Macdonald is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Social Endnotes Anthropology in the Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt- 1 More details about the Making Differences project Universität zu Berlin. She founded and about the Centre for Anthropological Research on and directs CARMAH. In addition to Museums and Heritage can be found at: www.carmah. directing the Making Differences berlin. The project and the Centre are funded primarily project, she directs the Contentious by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, with further Collections workpackage of the Horizon support from the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, the 2020 project TRACES: Transmitting Berlin Museum of Natural History and the Prussian Contentious Cultural Heritages Cultural Heritage Foundation. with the Arts: From Intervention 2 See, for example, Förster 2016, 2016a; Förster and to Creative Co-production; and the Stöcker 2016; Förster, Edenheiser, Fründt and Hartmann Profusion theme of Heritage Futures. 2018. Within Making Differences, she 3 See, for example, Puzon 2016; 2017. conducts fieldwork on the making of 4 See, for example, Tinius 2017; 2017a; 2018. the Berlin exhibition in the Humboldt 5 See, for example, von Oswald and Rodatus 2017; Forum.

Introduction 13 Literature cited

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14 Macdonald, Sharon, Henrietta Lidchi, and Warstat, Florian Evers, Kristin Flade et al. Margareta von Oswald. 2018- “Introduction: 205-235. Berlin: Theater der Zeit. engaging anthropological legacies towards cosmo-optimistic futures.” Special Issue, -----. 2017a. “Art as ethical practice: anthro- “Engaging Anthropological Legacies.” In pological observations on and beyond Museum Worlds, edited by Sandra Dudley theatre.”World Art 7 (2): 227-251. and Conal McCarthy, 97-109. New York: Berghahn Books. -----. 2018. “Artistic Diplomacy: On Civic Engagement and Transnational Theatre.” In Neumann, Birgit, and Ansgar Nünning. Eds. Performance and Civic Engagement, edited 2012. Travelling Concepts for the study of by Ananda Breed and Tim Prentki, 269-300. Culture. Berlin: de Gruyter. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Puzon, Katarzyna. 2016. “Memory and Artis- tic Production in a Post-War Arab City.” In Post-Conflict Performance, Film and Visual Arts: Cities of Memory. Contemporary Per- formance InterActions, edited by Des O’Rawe and Mark Phelan, 265-283. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

-----. 2017. “Saving Beirut: heritage and the city.” International Journal of Her- itage Studies [pre-print online]. DOI: 10.1080/13527258.2017.1413672.

Tinius, Jonas. 2017. “Anthropologische Beobachtungen zu künstlerischer Subjektiv- ierung und institutioneller Reflexivität: Das Theaterprojekt Ruhrorter mit Geflüchteten am Theater an der Ruhr” In Applied Theatre – Frames and Positions, edited by Matthias

Introduction 15 PROVENANCE

An essay based on a panel with Ciraj Rassool, Paul Basu, and Britta Lange by Larissa Förster

The age of from the Technische Universität Berlin, a provenance scholar of the history of art plunder, stated publicly that provenance research should Over the past few years the talk of be “the thing” in the Humboldt Forum, but provenance has gained astounding momen- had been neglected for too long – causing tum in public as well as academic debates her to pull out of the advisory board of the on art and ethnographic collections in Humboldt Forum (Süddeutsche Zeitung Germany. There have been at least three 2017). Her move provoked a long and heated events or projects that came to provide debate on the provenance of ethnographic catalytic moments for this conjuncture. In museum objects in the German media during 2011, the ‘discovery’ of human remains of the summer and early autumn months of indigenous Australians and Namibians in 2017, which did indeed make provenance various German collections resulted in a – “the thing”, at least for a while, even if so far still ongoing – debate on colonial collections, with no concrete and manifest outcome for their provenances and their repatriation the Humboldt Forum.17 (see Stoecker, Winkelmann and Schnalke 2013).12 A year later, in 2012, the Munich Altogether, the concept of provenance artworks discovery sparked a heated debate created and continues to create a lot on Nazi-era looted art and led to an acceler- of dynamics in museum debates and in ated institutionalisation of Nazi-era prove- museum practice, with “problematic prove- nance research in Germany.13 Another year nances” (Förster 2016) like those of colonial later, in 2013, the campaign NoHumboldt21! loots being foregrounded and issues like organised by an alliance of Berlin’s postco- return being addressed increasingly (e.g. lonial NGOs and aiming at a moratorium for Snoep 2018). As a result, provenance the Humboldt Forum, put the provenance research has even made it into a political of Berlin’s ethnographic collections on the document lately, namely the German coa- agenda of the city’s museum debates.14 lition agreement of February 2018 where it is stated that the “we will promote working As a consequence, the debate on through the provenances of cultural heritage the Humboldt Forum and on German of colonial origin in museums and collec- ethnographic museums in general has tions […] with a special focus”18 (CDU, CSU been shaped considerably by public and and SPD 2018). It remains to be seen what academic discourses on provenance,15 by the effects of provenance in the political pleas for more provenance research, and arena will be – in particular after the French eventually by provenance research projects president’s foray on the restitution of implemented in ethnographic museums in African artworks (Macron 2017). Bremen, Stuttgart, Berlin, Hamburg and in other places.16 And it was only shortly before the Otherwise symposium, i.e. in July 2017, that renowned art historian Bénédicte Savoy

16 Questioning provenance

As useful as the concept of provenance the beginning of a broader epistemology of has proven, the transfer of the term from the provenance that extends, for example, the field of art history to museum anthropology fruitful comparison between art history’s has also been commented on critically by and archaeology’s conceptions of prove- anthropologists emphasising the amount nance and provenience that Rosemary A. of work that has been done around Appa- Joyce (2012) has undertaken. durai’s and Kopytoff’s concept of ‘object biographies’ and ‘social lives of things’ If, in the years to come, provenance over the past decades (see e.g. Feest 2018; research is deepened and broadened (in Hauser-Schäublin 2018). In this light, it can terms of the range of historical contexts be seen as a very interesting convergence covered) and institutionalised as a field in that art historian Anne Higonnet points to German universities (as a sign of which the the Eurocentric history of the term prove- recent establishment of four (temporary) nance and, as a consequence, argues that professorships for NS-era provenance provenance should rather “be re-named the research at the universities of Hamburg, social life of art things” (Higonnet 2012: 201). Bonn and Munich can be interpreted), we So it seems high time to ask: What do we have to also ask in how far we need a ‘theory gain from working with the term provenance, of provenance’ that creates a framework for what does it enable, what or whom does it reflecting on provenance(s) in the context of bring to museums? And on the other hand, new museology, (global) history, (museum) what do we lose when adopting it as a key anthropology, and the anthropology of law. In concept? What perspectives does the term particular a more nuanced and theoretically maybe obstruct or obliterate, what sort of informed (and not only politico-cultural and in- and exclusions does it create? practical) critique of provenance would help to weigh the pros and cons of the term, alert Measured against the current vibrancy to its shortcomings, equip us to counteract of the term in the (German) museum world, the latter and eventually create a space there is a remarkable lack of theoretical for thinking through alternative terms and engagement with it.19 Provenance, or concepts, as they came up in the panel and provenance research respectively, is often the panel discussion. treated as only a methodology, and a subfield of art history. With the conference I will briefly touch upon a couple of panel we wanted to go beyond that and points that could feature in such a more probe provenance as a concept in museum thorough critique of provenance. First of discourse and practice. First of all, it seemed all, one of the problems of conceptualising necessary to investigate the ‘history of provenance seems to be how to strike a provenance’ not only from within art his- balance between the ‘routes’ and the ‘roots’ tory or anthropology, but across different of an object, which, as Paul Basu (2011: 29) disciplines engaged in historicising their argued in his essay on object diasporas, museum collections. Such endeavour can be speaks to issues lying at the heart of

Provenance 17 anthropological thought. Interestingly, in ‘death’ in the museum. However, scholars both disciplines, in art history as well as who write people’s biographies – historians in anthropology, provenance research has and literary scholars – have already hinted been criticised for its overemphasis on the to the difficulty that such an approach routes – usually framed as the succession/ poses: It stands to lose sight and sense of chain of ownership – and its neglect of the the alternative paths that a life could have roots of objects. However, foregrounding the taken (and that an object in the museum roots of objects runs certain risks, too. For storage could still take). 20 example, the term’s close link with debates and practices of return invokes a rather Another challenge when using the term straight, two-directional model of traffic provenance is to deal with temporality, where objects are taken from an identifiable or temporalities respectively. European point A, the often so-called “original con- historiography – be it political history, social text” or “source community”, to point B, a or art history – usually comes with specific European or ‘Western’ museum collection, understandings of time and temporality and sometimes back again. In this mac- (Palmié and Stuart 2016). Since provenance ro-historical model of thought both sides research very often starts in European insti- tend to be taken as rather stable entities tutions and archives, it is prone to reproduc- with not much room for past and present ing the temporal regimes created by these manœvre in between and beyond. Deviations very institutions, becoming insensitive to and circulations, multi-facetted entangled alternate conceptions of time, the passage histories, multi-directionality and multi-lay- of time and the passage of objects through eredness, as we frequently encounter them time and place as they may be formulated on the micro-level of provenance research, and imagined in the sociocultural contexts i.e. when following actors and transactions in which objects were produced. This may be and reconstructing the dispersal of objects, particular relevant in the context of trans- cannot be accommodated easily. cultural discussions on the age of objects, on the temporal impact of culturally-laden Therefore, provenance researchers things from the past, on reciprocity, e.g. have to reflect more thoroughly on the between donors and receivers of objects, or question of which parts and aspects of an on the temporal validity of claims (for owner- object’s past, an object’s trajectory they ship or return of objects). can or cannot zoom in, on and why. Often the emphasis is still put on the moment of This leads to another aspect of the acquisition of an artefact by a European notion of provenance that must be ques- individual or institution (mostly for a lack of tioned from an anthropological point of view: documentation on the parts of the object’s the concept of property itself, which prov- biography). This means that the artefact’s enance is tied to so strongly through the history is more or less told ‘from the end’ – idea of a chain of title. Anthropologists have from the viewpoint of its final deposition, its outlined that European notions of property

18 are rooted in economic and legal construc- with the traffic of things. tions of either (exclusive) individual/private property or collective property/commons that neglects the manifold and multi-layered Presentations and property relations that an object may be embedded in sociocultural contexts that do discussion not or not solely subscribe to the private property model. In the latter, different actors Starting from the observations and can hold different rights regarding the same question laid out above, the panel brought object; or rights and claims are nested and up a series of pertinent critical reasonings cannot easily be separated, attributed to and suggestions. South African historian one single person/group and boiled down Ciraj Rassool 21 (University of Western Cape) to an all-encompassing ‘right of disposition’ cast a look at how the term provenance as implied in European notions of title and operates in the German debate, which he ownership (Hauser and Lankau 2015: 168). has had the opportunity to witness over a couple of years during his repeated stays in As indicated above, questions of origin Germany, and in particular as a member of and of return are often closely linked with the Luschan Advisory Board; the latter was certain ideas of property and in particular called together to look into what has become with discourses of legitimate vs. illegitimate known as the S-Sammlung in the possession property and ownership. As important as of Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, i.e. the this is in the context of dealing with redress collection of skulls that Felix von Luschan for expropriation and colonial exploitation, it assembled when employed at the Ethno- may fix our interest on moral/ethical, polit- logical Museum in Berlin.22 Rassool (2015) ical and legal debates and overcast more expressed his dissatisfaction with how ontological questions of what an object is the “radical idea of rethinking the object” and can achieve – questions that have been through provenance is often misunderstood addressed very productively in material as an empirical project only – a matter of culture studies, in the anthropology of art adding information to existing classification and of exchange. There is a line of anthro- systems, of trying to unearth the ‘real story’ pological thought – from Marcel Mauss to and hence of improving collection manage- Alfred Gell and Marilyn Strathern – that has ment. In contrast to that, he argued, prov- emphasised very convincingly that giving enance must be understood as not only an things is about creating relationships and empirical, but rather a critical project aimed distributing personhood (Hoskins 2006). It at decolonising museums, deconstructing seems that this analytical lens needs to be and questioning their classificatory systems sharpened again, in particular with regard and generating new forms of understanding to non-sensitive or ‘not-so-sensitive’ collec- objects and the social relationships sur- tions in order to explore the multiple kinds rounding them (ibidem). How can we engage of agencies and intentionalities connected with the evidentiary in a critical and not only

Provenance 19 empirical way, Rassool asked – referring to of documentation prevent new forms of the closing down of the Ethnography Hall at knowledge, be it artistic, activist or even col- Iziko South African Museum (Cape Town) as laboratively produced (i.e. multi-authored) a way to start rethinking outdated museum knowledge and expertise, to enter the epistemologies. In order to address issues museum documentation and thus institu- of provenance in such a critical way, Rassool tional memory. Provenance research, one suggested the term of the forensic – but may conclude from the debate on epistemol- not in the narrow sense of the work that ogies, still needs to be provincialized. denotes a scientific methodology employed in bioanthropology, but in the wider sense The contribution of second speaker Paul (derived from Latin forum) of an engaged Basu (University of London) was based on museology, a space of citizenship and of his above-mentioned thought-provoking, negotiating histories of origin, belonging, widely and well-received essay diaspora access, circulation, authority and coloniality. of objects (2013) in which he draws on his Academic disciplines making claims for experience in researching the history and their competence in the field of provenance the potential of museum collections from should be involved in this forum according Sierra Leone dispersed across European to their abilities to speak not only to the museums. Reminding the audience of Anne methodologies of provenance, but also – or Higonnet’s example of how much history even rather – to its ethics. can lie buried in short-spoken museum labels (2013: 197ff.), he zoomed in on the Ciraj’s criticism of the epistemologies years immediately after the plunder of the underlying museum practice was shared Benin palace in 1897, finding indications of by many in the audience. Two aspects were how “local producers started to control the emphasised in the discussion. First, it was market [of Benin brasses] and were able argued that given the disciplinary violence to exploit European and North American embodied in museum documentation and competition” for objects. His plea was to classification practices contemporary, prov- recognise “the broader context of colonial enance research – or whatever we may call it relations, with its more (or less) subtle – must seek and find ways to accommodate forms of coercion”. As for the debate on alternative forms of knowledge, for example origins, Basu detailed his concept of object indigenous epistemologies that may chart diaspora, pointing to the gradual shift in the different types of genealogies for the conceptualisation of the term diaspora over object under investigation. Second, current the past 30 years, which replaced ideas of inventorising and documentation practices origin, autochthony and return with ideas need to be questioned, too, because they of a lived “inbetweenness” (Basu 2017). He determine the ways in which objects can reminded the audience that “assertions of be researched, provenanced, interpreted purity, indigeneity and autochthony” must and exhibited in the future. It was criticised not be taken as “essential properties, but that the rather rigid, standardised forms as political positionalities”. Building on

20 the concept of remittance corridors (along notions and pertinent practices intended to which migrants share their income with their broaden the discussion can as well be used families of origin) as developed in migration to close down discussions, it was observed. studies, Basu argued that “migrant things”, For example, while Basu’s diaspora argu- too, may ment, on the one hand, is highly inspiring for museum work, it could, on the other serve their erstwhile homelands hand, be instrumentalised in order to reject better from their diasporic claims for the relocation of object as in the locations, than if they were returned. much-criticised Declaration on the Universal Museum issued in 2002, it was warned. The Borrowing from anthropological analy- ambivalence of how innovative notions and ses of gift exchange, he argued, that remit- practices are adopted by (conservative) tances generated by museum objects can be institutions became even clearer when it understood as “reciprocation”: was remarked that, at the same time, the very discourse and practice of return may The responsibility of museums be used to free museums from further then becomes one of consider- obligations to work through their history and ing what ‘gift’ they can return, in hence allow them to desist from engaging order to maintain or, in most cases, in long-term processes of dialogue and establish or re-establish relation- engagement – a diagnosis that invoked Nora ships with source communities. Sternfeld’s notion of the ‘transformism’ of museums (2009) and Friedrich von Bose’s Basu ended by introducing the notion of analysis of the ‘strategic reflexivity’ of the “stolen gift” or “solicited gift”, bringing institutions (2016). Finally, the suggestions together the above-mentioned aspects of to have a closer look at the intellectual, but rupture, violence and coercion with ideas of also historical context ‘in’ which and ‘on’ reciprocity, responsibility and relationality, which ideas of provenance as well as object and provoking museums biographies were produced (like for example the German contexts with its experience to be more creative in re-activat- in NS-era provenance research) prompted ing the historical pathways along Basu to speculate how provenance would which collections have travelled, be formulated in the context of for example facilitating the return flow of value. Caribbean (postcolonial) cultural theory with its emphasis on creolisation rather than on The discussion that followed Basu’s origin, authenticity and purity. presentation raised a general point about the usage and circulation of (new) terms In commenting on the two larger talks and notions across fields of discourse and respondent Britta Lange, head of the sound spheres or interest. Even if they appear archive of Humboldt University (together convincing and unequivocal at first sight, with Sebastian Klotz), pointed to some

Provenance 21 commonalities of the two talks. Both linked Or rather, how we need to reconceptualise things to people more generally, but at the provenance as anthropologists if we want same time looked at the specific processes it to help us rethink ethnographic museums through which people and things were linked for the future? in the museum world: processes of objec- Finally, Lange also suggested to use tifying human remains, of rehumanising the figure of theempty museum, which is ‘objects’ as well as of anthropomorphising usually employed to defend the retention things. She suggested that it would be worth of museum collections, in order to provoke putting more effort into reflecting on these imaginations on what else museums could processes as they were not only going on in be filled with – other than objects –, as museums, but also in our theorising about for example stories, ideas etc. The empty museums. Against the background of her museum, she argued, may become a concep- experience with sound recordings in their tual space for advancing critical and creative various mediated forms, she emphasised museology. that objects do “not come alone, but with their remediations/reproductions”, which makes it necessary to think about the Outlook relevance of materiality and substance. As proposed in the book Sensible Sammlungen If we recognize the multiplicity of [sensitive collections] coedited by Lange historical, geographical and social trajecto- (Berner et al. 2011), sensitivity is not (only) ries and agencies that each object’s disposal a question of materiality or ontology, but at the museum storage is a result of, we of context, of the means, conditions and arrive at a notion of not only the museum in effects of the acquisition of an object. general as a translocal site – as discussed in Therefore, Lange argued, provenance should Katarzyna Puzon’s panel ontranslocality –, not be left to certain disciplines, but could but in particular of the museum storage as rather be considered a whole new paradigm a radically translocal site. Keynote speaker of engaging with collections. Her plea raised Haidy Geismar even asked, whether, as a the question of whether the post-ethno- consequence, we should rather speak of graphic or post-ethnological museum, as trans-provenance instead of provenance. By discussed in the panel organised by Marga- this, she argued, we may be able to avoid reta von Oswald, could indeed be brought the risk that provenance is defined and about by such a historical turn in the world over-determined by the local, i.e. the idea of of ethnographic museums, which are often local origins. In my view, the resulting ques- perceived as culturalising and essentialising tions must be how to re-animate the many diversity. Consequently, I would argue, we translocal agencies sedimented in museum may have to explore how much provenance storages so that people, places and things we ‘need’ to break up with older modes of can be reconnected. What if we set objects ethnographic collecting and exhibiting? free, not for sporadic loans, exhibition

22 exchanges and the like, but systematically, 11.7.2009., http://www.sophiensaele.com/archiv. as a methodology of inquiring into the cul- php?IDstueck=668&hl=de. tural, economic and political processes and 15 The author, for instance was co-organiser of a con- practices that start surrounding things once ference entitled Provenienzforschung in ethnologischen they move from hand to hand? Of course, Sammlungen, published by Förster et al. (2018) such a projection of provenance into the 16 For overview of current projects and recent con- future – a production of future provenances ferences on the topic see Förster, Edenheiser, Fründt – turns the idea of the museum storage on & Hartmann (2018), in particular the introduction. its head (maybe even provoking fears of an Conferences, a formal working group of the German empty museum). But it may throw into sharp Museums Association and an informal working group of relief how provenance could contribute to curators of ethnographic museums are all part of – and future-making in and through ethnographic contribute to – these new dynamics. museums in a globalised world (cf. Harrison 17 See for example a Stellungnahme (statement) et al. 2016). circulated via e-mail by the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss on 21 July 2017 as well as newspaper comments by Jürgen Zimmerer (2017), Viola König, Endnotes Karl-Heinz Kohl (all 2017) and Katharina Schramm (die tageszeitung 2017), a panel discussion organised by Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz, https:// 12 The six resulting repatriations of human remains from www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/event-detail/ the Charité and the University of Freiburg – including news/2017/09/20/gehoert-provenienzforschung-zur- a repatriation to Paraguay – were followed by returns dna-des-humboldt-forums.html as well as the confer- from the Weltkulturen Museum and Senckenberg ence »Prussian Colonial Heritage«, organised by Berlin Naturmuseum in Frankfurt (2011 and 2017), Berliner Postkolonial on 14/15 October 2017, and Förster 2017. Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und 18 Original German version: „Die Aufarbeitung der Urgeschichte (2017), Übersee-Museum Bremen (2017) Provenienzen von Kulturgut aus kolonialem Erbe in and Landesmuseum Hannover (2017) to Australia, New Museen und Sammlungen wollen wir [...] mit einem Zealand, Hawai’i and Japan. Übersee-Museum Bremen eigenen Schwerpunkt fördern.“ had already returned human remains to New Zealand in 19 So far only Feigenbaum and Reist (2013) have set out 2006. See Fründt and Förster (forthcoming). to explore the history, usages and capacities of the term 13 For further information, see the homepage of the and the methodology more systematically. German Lost Art Foundation: https://www.kulturgutver- 20 See for example Blamberger (2017). I am grateful to luste.de/Webs/DE/ProjektGurlitt/Index.html Günter Blamberger and my former colleagues at the 14 For further information on the campaign, see http:// Centre for Advanced Studies Morphomata (University of www.no-humboldt21.de and the recent publication by Cologne) for inspiring discussions in this regard. AfricAvenir (2017). The moratorium was preceded by 21 See Rassool (2015) for his seminal work on some earlier events organised as a critical comment repatriation. on the Humboldt Forum plannings, see the public 22 See for more information on this collection: http:// discussion Der Anti-Humboldt. Eine Veranstaltung www.universitaetssammlungen.de/sammlung/1396. zum selektiven Rückbau des Humboldt-Forums, Berlin,

Provenance 23 Speaker bios and original paper titles Author and chair

Provenance Politics Larissa Förster is a postdoctoral Ciraj Rassool is Professor of History research fellow at CARMAH. Her at University of Western Cape, South current research focuses on Africa. He was chair of Iziko Museums provenance research, restitution of South Africa and the District Six and repatriation in/from European Museum and serves on the Advisory (ethnographic) museums. Her latest Board of the Luschan Collection, co-authored/-edited books are Haut, Berlin. His latest co-edited book Haar und Knochen. Koloniale Spuren is Unsettled History: Making South in naturkundlichen Sammlungen African Public Pasts (2017). der Universität Jena (2016) and Provenienzforschung in ethnografischen Provenance Beyond Origins and Return: Sammlungen der Kolonialzeit. Thinking Through the Metaphor (and Positionen in der aktuellen Debatte Politics) of Diaspora (2018). Paul Basu is Professor of Anthropology at SOAS University of London. A core strand of Paul’s research has been to explore the intersections between migrations of people, things, ideas and histories. Recent books include The Inbetweenness of Things (2017) and Museums, Heritage & International Development (2014). Discussant

Possible Locations Britta Lange is a lecturer at the Institute of Cultural History and Theory at Humboldt- Universität zu Berlin and heads the Lautarchiv of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin together with Sebastian Klotz. Together with Margit Berner and Anette Hoffmann she published Sensible Sammlungen. Aus dem anthropologischen Depot (2011).

24 Literature cited

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Macron, Emmanuel. 2018. “Le discours die tageszeitung. 2017. “Das Humboldt-Fo- de Ougadougou d’Emmanuel Macron”. rum sollte viel proaktiver werden”. Interview In Le Monde, 29.11.2017. Avaliable at: with Katharina Schramm, 7.10. Available at: http://www.lemonde.fr/afrique/arti- http://www.taz.de/!5452183 cle/2017/11/29/le-discours-de-ouagadou- gou-d-emmanuel-macron_5222245_3212. html#JeGOH2peuQ4xodJj.99 Palmié, Stephan, and Charles Stewart.

26 TRANSLOCALITY An essay based on a panel with Beverley Butler, Banu Karaca, and Paola Ivanov by Katarzyna Puzon

By way of whether translocality opens new avenues introduction for re-thinking museums25 and heritage, and if so, how. Addressing a variety of ways The impulses and intentions behind in which translocality is manifested in the diving into the concept of translocality as movement of people, objects, practices, and part of our collectiveotherwising (see discourses, I draw attention to the salience Macdonald, this volume) were informed of socio-spatial dynamics and the promise by current discussions on mobility and of thinking with scale about museum and migration, as well as my own research and heritage developments. Translocality brings practice, both within and outside museum together the local (broadly defined), the and heritage contexts (Puzon 2016; 2017). national and the global, along with their var- Although translocality is not necessarily a ious interconnections and interactions. And widely used concept by museum and her- in this respect, my concern is also with how itage scholars and practitioners – and is a translocality can enable a non-Eurocentric relatively new approach – it seems to fit into understanding of museums and heritage, the ongoing debates. This is exemplified in and in what ways it opens up space for the theme of the 4th Biennial Conference of multiple articulations of movements. the Association of Critical Heritage Studies. 23 The organising committee have selected Based on a panel with three invited Heritage Across Borders as a guiding scholars whose work spans East Africa, concept to think about and through bor- Egypt, Germany, Jordan, Palestine and Tur- ders, broadly understood, in relation to the key, this essay puts forward a set of ideas role of heritage in today’s world. The aim is that I have found useful in thinking about to reflect upon recent and future attempts and with translocality. It is not intended as at ‘transcending boundaries’ and ‘crossing a review of scholarship on the concept.26 I frontiers’ of different kinds within heritage engage in ruminations about translocality studies, and to look into other ways of that centres on movement and captures thinking and doing museums and heritage overlapping locales or localities, rather than that surpass divides, such as east-west, situating certain phenomena either ‘here’ tangible-intangible or rural-urban.24 or ‘there’. My contribution probes into its meaning and possible use as a theoretical In that vein, this essay deals with the tool and a methodological approach, in binary conceptions of the local versus the particular in museum and heritage devel- national or the global, as well as seeking opments, including the field sites of my to move beyond the understanding of ongoing research. translocality as a type of transnationalism. My contribution offers a critical reflec- tion on the concept of translocality and asks how it can be useful for the current museum and heritage transformations, and

Translocality 27 Translocality as a heuristic concept

The translocal approach holds the situatedness across different locales” (ibid: potential to challenge a fixed idea of loca- 4) that encompasses both situatedness and tion and to enliven local-local connections connection to other locales or localities and and place-to-place relationships, as does entails ‘being’ in several places and spaces the transcultural in relation to the notion at the same time. This involves a multi-scalar of culture. There are, however, various take on the concept that is not restricted to understandings of what translocality might the national. Still, it acknowledges its pres- actually imply. For example, Clemens Greiner ence and importance, and as such, includes and Patrick Sakdapolrak (2013: 380) look inter-regional and inter-urban movements at it as “an approach in its own right” as well as those within a city or a neighbour- that builds upon transnationalism, and so hood. Adopting scale, both as a category of does Katharyne Mitchell (1997) who puts analysis and a category of practice, helps to special emphasis on the agency of places avoid the pitfalls of flattening place, space, and spaces in mobility practices, as well as and time. their relational dimensions. Translocality is considered by some as a kind of transna- Some scholars make a distinction tionalism that although it does not centre on between the prefixes ‘trans-’ and ‘inter-’, the the nation-state, it nevertheless includes a former implying ‘within’ or ‘across’, the latter transnational perspective. Peggy Levitt sees suggesting ‘between’. This differentiation it as regards ‘trans-’ as having a more transfor- mational character (e.g. Munkelt et al. 2016). critical to examine how these [i.e. ‘Trans’ words bring to the fore the notion transnational] connections are inte- of fluidity, and unpacking the prefix ‘trans’ grated into vertical and horizontal indeed provides some productive insights. systems of connections that cross It connotes the notion of transfer, moving borders. Rather than privileging one across or going through. It is also associated level [for example the local] over with a change from one form or condition to another, a transnational perspective another, as in the case of transformation or holds these sites equally and simul- transition. ‘Trans’ as used in ‘transgender’ taneously in conversation with each encompasses these two interpretations by other and tries to grapple with the bridging being across and in-between, as tensions between them (2004: 3). well as belonging beyond the dichotomies. In addition, it deals with body in terms of scale, By questioning place-boundedness, as a location of transgression and a locality translocality strives to reconcile rootedness of difference. Through the lens of translo- with mobility. In this vein, British geogra- cality, one views, I contend, multifarious phers Katherine Brickell and Ayona Datta interconnectedness and interdependence (2011) define it as a place-based concept of spaces, places, and scales. This includes reflected ingroundedness during movement. an important role of the concept of engage- They discuss translocality as “simultaneous ment, the subject of one of the symposium

28 panels (see Engagement, this volume), as position of power, the concept of “power-ge- an essential dimension of transformative ometry” applies to knowledge production processes. too, and highlights how some discourses and practices travel freely whereas others While the primary focus of translocal- have limited power to do so. This shows how ity seems to be on space and place, it is movements are also about the dynamics also concerned with time and particular that reflect power relations interwoven moments of situatedness, connections and into mobility, which is in turn linked with movements, which refer to both mobility and the position in which people, objects and the consequences thereof. Contextualisation knowledge are placed, often in distinct and remains a key attribute of any anthropologi- differentiated ways, within and in relation to cal endeavour. The concept’s use and useful- these flows and interconnections. ness is of course contingent upon context that is geographical and historical, spatial The aforementioned approaches have and temporal. In addition, it is not just about their possibilities and limitations, which are whether it is applied, debated and thought not necessarily mutually exclusive. Thus, through in museums or heritage, but also rather than adopting one particular perspec- what these museums and heritage are, as tive, what interests me is both mobility and well as when and where these developments the tensions between order and movement unfold. (see also Freitag and von Oppen 2010). I do not see translocality as a unidirectional phe- Translocality has been frequently con- nomenon, that is, movement from one place nected to globalisation processes,27 which to another, but rather as embeddedness in manifest, as Anthony Giddens notes, more than one location. In other words, I am interested in the ways in which people, the intensification of world-wide practices, objects and ideas are located – or social relations which link dis- locate themselves – in “networks of move- tant localities in such a way that ment, communication, and imagination” local happenings are shaped (Bowen 2002: 9). 28 by events occurring many miles away and vice versa (1990: 64).

Such processes are part and parcel of what Doreen Massey (1993) calls the “pow- er-geometry” of global flows and movements whereby the “time-space compression” exposes difference and differentiation that accompany them. While Massey examines how the capacity of the mobility of social groups and individuals are connected to a

Translocality 29 Translocality in museum and heritage contexts

Mapping productive tensions between Justifying the need for such examina- translocality and museum and heritage tion, Savoy posits that developments, the concept of translocality takes as a point of departure mobility rather the field of translocations as than stasis. Also, by means of translocality, such – that is, not the history of I direct attention at scale as fluid and fixed the transferred object, but the at the same time. It brings to the fore spatial actual phenomenon of the trans- dimensions and applications of museum and fer itself, with all its traumas, heritage practice by asking how museums discourses, actors, gestures, and heritage are shaped, reconstructed techniques and representations and transformed via the mobility of people, – has hardly been recognised, ideas, artefacts, and discourses. and certainly not fully researched (ibid: 3, emphasis in original).30 Within museum and heritage contexts, this notion often conjures up displacement Holding the promise to address the or dispossession, which links it to debates dynamics that reflect power relations on restitution and provenance – the concept interwoven into mobility practices, trans- discussed by Larissa Förster (see Prove- locality deals with the interplay of the local nance, this volume). Along these lines, art and the global. Such an approach implies an historian Bénédicte Savoy formulated the attempt to include flows and movements, rationale of her current project entitled including their effects, in the museum and Translocations. Historical Enquiries into heritage context. Looking through the lens the Displacement of Cultural Assets and of translocality, I suggest, might be useful to based at Technische Universität Berlin. examine not only the circulation of ideas and Conceptualising translocations in terms concepts, but also gaps and silences that of “displacements of cultural assets”, the occur as a result of these movements and project centres on “the actual phenomenon flows, often represented as a rather sani- of the transfer itself”29 from a historical tised history, largely devoid of what could perspective (2016: 2-3). be considered “difficult heritage” (Mac- donald 2009). Such endeavours exemplify an attempt to ‘anaesthetise’ the complex history of interactions and relationships between the so-called west and non-west (see also Winegar 2008). In this vein, the translocal approach might engender alterna- tive historiographies and it can also contrib- ute to silencing some phenomena by ampli- fying mobility and silencing the unfavourable effects of those particular movements, for instance in the contexts in which violence is

30 central to the displacement of people and I could not agree more with Michael artefacts. Lambek who argues that

Given the growing presence of the the novelty of translocality should digital in museum and heritage practices, it not be exaggerated any is also important to include the role of new more than the polyphony of tradi- media as a vital contribution to this dis- tion should be overlooked (2011: 3). cussion and examine how this yet another scale of locality adds up to the reconcep- All the same, examining museum and tualisation of locality and a multi-scalar heritage transformations through the lens of understanding of translocality. Rather than translocality enables to map out productive reinforcing the binary of the real and the tensions as well as expose and recognise virtual, I see the potential in translocality to translocal dynamics and manoeuvres explore the interdependency and dialectics that are inscribed in those tensions and of online and offline contexts. transformations.

As CARMAH’s Making Differences project demonstrates, translocality seems to be embedded in our current research on museum and heritage developments in Ber- lin. Here researchers investigate processes happening simultaneously at different loca- tions in one city, albeit not only. This involves new media and digital technologies too, as it is explored by Christoph Bareither and Nazlı Cabadağ whose work falls within the Media and Mediation research area of the Making Differences project. Dealing with the ways in which Islam is constructed through museum work and heritage-making, my research is situated within and across places, spaces, and scales. It thus exemplifies a multi-scalar and multi-sited examination of museum and heritage developments in Berlin, which encompasses the Museum of European Cul- tures, a neighbourhood, urban and national institution, and local actors operating within one district, such as the Neukölln Museum. And in this sense, I see translocality also as a methodological approach.

Translocality 31 Figure 1 Kunstasyl’s exhibition daHEIM: Einsichten in flüchtige Leben at the Museum of European Cultures. Photograph by Katarzyna Puzon.

32 Session contributions and discussion

With the aim of discussing the concept Butler argued that “everything about the of translocality as part of the Otherwise Palestinian case, in a sense, tests the notion symposium, I invited scholars whose of what a refugee is, and what translocality work revolves around the questions of and heritage might be.” Heritage is pharma- displacement, dispossession, mobility, and konic, as she put it using Derrida’s term, and translocality. The session was conceived as as such it can be both poison and cure. an invitation to critical reflection upon the concept, both its limits and its possibilities, Arguing against the opposition of the as the speakers’ contributions sought to local to the national, Butler contended that illustrate. The panel asked, among other “popular heritage rites” indicate the crisis questions, how “constellations of differ- of the latter. She continued by saying that ence” (Macdonald 2016) and the production these rites and reproduction of locality play out in the intensification of movement. And how is emerge as significant expressions translocality put to work in museums and of refugee agency and as synon- heritage, or how might it be? In what ways ymous with activated heritage might translocality create new avenues for forms, powerful ritual acts of re-thinking museums and heritage? communion – including magical thinking and wish-fulfilment – that In her presentation Heritage Rites – ultimately create new ‘factness’ Translocality, Creativity & ‘Acting Back’ in and ‘realities’ on the ground. Refugee Camp Life, Beverley Butler, Reader in the Institute of Archaeology at University This chimes with the view of translocal- College London, addressed the interrela- ity as kind of space where the ideas of the tionship between heritage and translocality national and the local fall apart. The case in Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. She of the refugee camp provides an especially discussed heritage efficacy and how place thought-provoking example because “it and space play out in movement and immo- keeps the local in the national as well as the bility whereby translocality does not emerge global in the imaginary”, as Butler formu- solely in terms of scale and space. It thus lated it, and exposes the simultaneity of the resonates with Appadurai’s definition of past, the present, and the future. locality (1996: 178) as chiefly contextual and relational. In her ethnographic examples, she associated translocality with creativity and heritage rights to show how both mobility and fixity manifest in the refugee camp life. By recounting the practices of enforced displacement and “objects acting back”, her contribution sought to problematise the ideas of origin, homeland, and elsewhere.

Translocality 33 credits etc.

Figure 2 Photograph by Beverley Butler. Permission courtesy of the author.

The second speaker, sociocultural Speaking about their displacement, she anthropologist Banu Karaca (Sabancı asked: “what kinds of loss [do] ‘missing’ art University), concentrated on dispossessed, works engender?” and “how do you sustain lost and looted art works, as well as other this economy of forgetting despite all that cultural assets in the Ottoman Empire and we know about it?” the Early Turkish Republic. Her contribution drew on her project Lost, not Found? Missing Her presentation, Diasporic Trajec- Provenance, ‘Lost’ Works, and the Writing tories, Art Historical Taxonomies: Dikran of Art History in Turkey, which probes into G. Kelekian and Islamic Art, focused on the distribution of those art works into the the Met’s31 collection of Islamic art, more Islamic collections of different institutions in specifically the south side of the gallery, and Berlin, New York, and London. the figure of Dikran Kelekian (1868–1951),

34 an Ottoman-Armenian art dealer and col- preceding speakers’ presentations and lector, and his translocal trajectories. She offered her own reflection on the concept of talked about the Damascus Room, gifted by translocality, both in East Africa and Ger- Kevorkian, and a new room for Ottoman art, many, more specifically Berlin. In her work on supported by Vehbi Koç, as the ones that do the Swahili Coast of East Africa, she focused not address multi-religious and multi-ethnic on aesthetics and translocality in Swahili backgrounds of those who contributed to and Zanzibari societies. This allowed her to those collections, which puts it in contrast approach the phenomenon of translocality to other sections of the museum. She argued as a way of living that is not that much influ- further that enced by the idea of the nation-state, as it is very characteristic of the coastal communi- without this history being at all ties of the Indian Ocean. She highlighted the reflected within the museum, importance of relating translocality to other it produces certain silences in ‘trans’ concepts and suggested that this physical adjacency that are really, I think, telling of the field of in the focus of the concept of Islamic art and the taxonomies of translocality are not only the Islamic art, and what they obscure mobilities between localities as in terms of their producers and well as interconnections created their audiences at one time. by these mobilities, but always and at the same time, the ques- Drawing a distinction between trans- tion how locality is created in the locality and translocation, she suggested context of interconnectedness. that the translocations of art works had been embedded in state violence and the Referring to Berlin’s context, she main- category of Islamic art had been complicit in tained that museums had not sufficiently excluding the category of Turkish art history. dealt with mobility. As one of the prominent In this respect, the question of translocality exceptions, she pointed out the Objects in pushes towards the process of rethinking Transfer exhibition trail at the Museum für archives and collections. It amplifies move- Islamische Kunst. The reasons for this status ments and silences. This holds promise to quo, Ivanov argued, is the classification disturb certain categories, such as the one system that still dominates in museums and of Islamic art. reflects a 19th-century model of culture. She raised the salience of the current political In the final panel contribution, entitled context as another factor, in particular the Conceptualising and Exhibiting Translocality reemergence of identity politics and new as a Corrective to Dominant Narrative, Paola nationalisms in Europe, along with the Ivanov, an ethnologist and a curator of so-called ‘refugee crisis’. Speaking about the Africa collections at the Ethnological the idea of translocality as a “corrective to Museum in Berlin, responded to the two dominant narratives”, she emphasised its

Translocality 35 capacity to “provincialise” the dichotomous people move, but also how categories are understandings of identity and belonging disrupted. Indeed, as was addressed during and challenge them with multiple “logics the Q&A session, the challenge remains: of belonging”. The simplified ordering of how do we act with this knowledge? And, belonging is reflected in museum practices. as Paola Ivanov added on a final note, in In one of Berlin’s museums, she mentioned, what ways can we make translocal concepts some artefacts from the East African Coast more accessible in museums? Discussing were included in the Islamic collection translocality in the anthropological tradition, because they were classified as of Arab Lambek maintains that it is “a product of descent. horizon clearing” (2011: 5). Although he links it with ability to look at phenomena more During the ensuing discussion, broadly, rather than holding transcending anthropologist Haidy Geismar, the keynote qualities, the idea of “horizon clearing” could speaker of the symposium, addressed the offer another starting point for discussion close interrelationship between provenance that would take on a different significance in and translocality. Juxtaposing these two the museum and heritage context, and thus concepts, she brought up for considera- potentially open new avenues to think and tion the possibility and potency of their do museums and heritage otherwise. connection. Geismar put forward the term trans-provenance that could potentially enable us to look at origins as both fluid and evidentiary at the same time. Futuring remarks

Doing and thinking with translocality makes it possible to engage in ‘otherwising’ that might transform the ways in which museums and heritage have so far been predominantly conceptualised and practised. This is not to say that this concept holds revolutionary promise, but rather to highlight its heteroge- nous potential and liberatory capacity, which does not necessarily lead to paralysis or flat- tening of certain phenomena, such as space and time. This conceptual exercise and the concept itself, which can and hopefully will be put into practice, have sought to bring to light not only how artefacts, ideas and

36 Speaker bios and original paper titles

Heritage Rites – Translocality, Endnotes Creativity & ‘Acting Back’ in Refugee Camp Life 23 The conference will be held in Hangzhou, China, on 1-6 Beverley Butler is Reader in Cultural September 2018. For a full description, see http://www. Heritage at University College London. criticalheritagestudies.org/hangzhou-conference/. Her research focuses on critical 24 The term traverse offers yet another take on this heritage perspectives, heritage in issue that will be explored in relation to mobility, herit- refugee camps, ‘heritage wellbeing’ age and postcolonialism as part of the eventTraverse and transformative ‘efficacies of Heritage: Voice, Body, Movement at Amsterdam Museum heritage’, especially in contexts in May 2018. This includes an interactive performance of marginalisation, displacement, of the interdisciplinary artist collective Moving Matters illness and extremis, as well as the Traveling Workshop, which I am a member of. Middle East. She is the author of the 25 This concerns museum storage, too. For a recently monograph Return to Alexandria – An published study on museum storage areas, see Brusius Ethnography of Cultural Heritage, and Singh (2017). Revivalism, and Museum Memory (2007). 26 For a comprehensive review paper on translocality, Beverley is C.I. on a joint ESRC/ see for example Greiner and Sakdapolrak (2013). AHRC Global Challenges Research Fund 27 Ulf Hannerz’s research (e.g. 1998) has been con- research project which looks at the cerned with placing local issues in a global context. role of creative arts and cultural 28 See also, for example, Leichtman 2015 and Mandaville activities in improving health and 2001. wellbeing. She is currently writing 29 In German, it says “das Phänomen des Abtrans- a monograph Possessing Palestine - A ports”, which could be translated as the phenomenon of Quest for the Efficacies of Heritage removal or relocation. (IoA/ Routledge). 30 For a full draft, see http://www.kuk.tuberlin.de/ fileadmin/fg309/bilder/Forschungsprojekte/Transloca- Diasporic Trajectories, Art Historical tions_DEUTSCH_WEISS_FINAL.pdf. Taxonomies: Dikran G. Kelekian and 31 The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Islamic Art popularly known as the Met, is one of the world’s largest Banu Karaca is a sociocultural museums and the oldest one in the United States. anthropologist and Mercator-IPC Fellow at Sabanci University. She works at the intersection of political anthropology, art and aesthetics, nationalism and cultural policy, and museums and commemorative practices. Her manuscript Decivilizing Art: Cultural Policy and Nationalism in Turkey and Germany examines the entrenchment of art in state violence

Translocality 37 Author and chair based on extensive research in the art Katarzyna Puzon is an anthropologist worlds of Istanbul and Berlin. Some and a postdoctoral research fellow of her recent publications interrogate at CARMAH. Her main interests lie at the politics of intercultural the intersection of heritage, memory, exchange programs in the EU, freedom mobility, and the city. In her current of expression in the arts, the research on Berlin, she examines the visualisation of gendered memories of politics and poetics of representation war and political violence, and visual and recognition, primarily in relation literacy. to Islam and heritage-making. Her recent publications include “Saving Beirut: heritage and the city” in Discussant International Journal of Heritage Studies (2017). Conceptualising and Exhibiting Translocality as a Corrective to Dominant Narratives Literature cited Paola Ivanov is an ethnologist and a curator of the collections from Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. “The Production East, North East, Central, and South of Locality.” In Modernity at Large: Cultural Africa at the Ethnological Museum Dimension of Globalisation, edited by Arjun of the National Museums in Berlin. Appadurai, 178-199. Minneapolis and London: Her research, publications and University of Minnesota Press. exhibitions focus on art, aesthetics, visual/material culture, museum Bowen, John. 2002. “Islam in/of France: theory, provenance research, as well Dilemmas of Translocality.” Paper presented as on African history and global at the 13th International Conference of interconnectedness. One of her main Europeanists, Chicago, 14-16 March 2002. research interests is the relationship between translocality, aesthetics, Brickell, Katherine and Ayona Datta. 2011. and space on the Swahili Coast of East “Introduction: Translocal Geographies.” Africa. Recently she has co-edited In Translocal Geographies. Spaces, Places, the volume Humboldt Lab Tanzania: Connections, edited by Katherine Brickell Objects from the Colonial Wars in and Ayona Datta, 3-20. London: Routledge. the Ethnologisches Museum, Berlin – Tanzanian-German Perspectives (2018), Brusius, Mirjam and Kavita Singh. Eds. 2017. with Lili Reyels and Kristin Weber- Museums Storage and Meaning. Tales from Sinn. the Crypt. London: Routledge.

38 Freitag, Ulrike and Achim von Oppen. Eds. Museumscape.” Museum Anthropology 39 2010. Translocality. The Study of Globalizing (1): 4-19. Processes from a Southern Perspective. Leiden: Brill. Mandaville, Peter G. 2001. Transnational Mus- lim Politics: Reimagining the Umma. London: Giddens, Anthony. 1990. The Consequences Routledge. of Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Massey, Doreen. 1993. “Power-geometry and a Progressive Sense of Place.” In Mapping Greiner, Clemens and Patrick Sakdapolrak. the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change, 2013. “Translocality: Concepts, Applications edited by Bird Jon et al. 60-70. London: and Emerging Research Perspectives.” Routledge. Geography Compass 7 (5): 373-384. Munkelt, Marga, Schmitz, Markus, Stein, Hannerz, Ulf. 1998. “Transnational Research.” Mark, and Silke Stroh. Eds. 2013. Postcolonial In Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthro- Translocations: Cultural Representation and pology, edited by Harvey Russell Bernard, Critical Spatial Thinking. Leiden: Brill. 235-256. London and New Delhi: Altamira Press. Puzon, Katarzyna. 2016. “Memory and Artis- tic Production in a Post-War Arab City” In Lambek, Michael. 2011. “Reflections on Her- Post-Conflict Performance, Film and Visual meneutics and Translocality.” ZMO Working Arts: Cities of Memory. Contemporary Per- Papers 4: 1-7. formance InterActions, edited by Des O’Rawe and Mark Phelan. 265-283. London: Palgrave Leichtman, Mara A. 2015. Shi’i Cosmopoli- Macmillan. tanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal. Blooming------. 2017. “Saving Beirut: heritage and ton: Indiana University Press. the city.” International Journal of Her- itage Studies [pre-print online]. DOI: Levitt, Peggy. 2004. “Transnational Migrants: 10.1080/13527258.2017.1413672. When ‘Home’ Means More than One Coun- try.” The Online Journal of the Migration Savoy, Bénédicte. 2016. Leibniz-Project Policy Institute. October 1. Cluster Translocations. http://www.kuk. tuberlin.de/fileadmin/fg309/bilder/ Macdonald, Sharon. 2009. Difficult Heritage: Forschungsprojekte/Translocations_ENG- Negotiating the Nazi Past in Nuremberg and LISH_WEISS_FINAL.pdf. Beyond. London: Routledge. Winegar, Jessica. 2008. “The Humanity Macdonald, Sharon. 2016. “New Constella- Game: Art, Islam, and the War on Terror.” tions of Difference in Europe’s 21st-Century Anthropological Quarterly 81 (3): 651-681.

Translocality 39 ALTERITY An essay based on a panel with Henrietta Lidchi, Katharina Schramm, and Alya Sebti by Jonas Tinius Anthropology This reflection thus begins with the and alterity simple observation that alterity – or other- ness – is not a singular, clearly defined entity The Oxford English Dictionary offers ‘out there’. Rather, as an anthropologist, I a straightforward entry into the concept. cannot help but notice and be curious about ‘Alterity’, we read, describes the state of “the diversity of ways in which ‘otherness’ ‘being other or different’, a sense derived has been constituted, communicated and etymologically from the Latin word ‘alter’, transformed in contemporary and historical meaning ‘other’, or ‘the other’ (here also ‘the contexts” (Hallam and Street 2000: 1). other of two’). To alter is to make or become To some extent, alterity is a foundational different, the alter ego is an ‘I’ different from concept to any critical anthropological our conscious self. self-reflection. We ask how cultures, socie- ties, and practices differ from one another in Unsurprisingly, such a basic dictionary order to appreciate their singular complex- definition conjures up questions: To what ities, to recognise their values, but also to extent does the construction of alterity compare them, rendering visible patterns of imply a comparison, a relation, and a norm? self-differentiation and self-determination, From whose perspective is something but equally structures of discrimination, ‘other’, or someone an other? Is alterity racialization, and Othering. The study of necessarily a relational and situated con- and challenge to alterity is, for better or for cept, and if so, who or what inscribes and worse, one of the founding preoccupations recognises difference? Can we even speak of the various iterations of the discipline of alterity as a ‘thing’, or is it always enacted of anthropology (social, cultural, European, in the act of normative comparison? Or can and ethnological) and likewise one of the I become other to myself, divide the self principal ways in which anthropologists into multiples, as in the psychological state have gone about answering the question of schizophrenia (Biehl 2005; Biehl and of what makes us human and what doesn’t. Locke 2010), the phenomenon of ‘phantom From kinship to hospitality, nation and pain’ (Billé 2014), or the much-discussed statehood, culture and heritage, religion Melanesian-derived notion of the ‘dividual’, and ethnicity, questions of the ‘other’, of according to which “persons are frequently otherness, and alterity, therefore also of constructed as the plural and composite site identity and similarity, have been central to of the relationships that produced them”, key anthropological theorising about social thus affording that “the singular person can and cultural phenomena, and, in turn, to the be imagined as a social microcosm” (Strath- critique of its own practices and rhetorics of ern 1988: 13). representation themselves (see e.g. Clifford and Marcus 1986; Hastrup 1990). Evolution- ary and racist ideologies of biological dif- ferences constructed and deployed alterity

40 to justify inequalities between persons and Alterity has remained a contested entire groups of people. Yet the notion has terrain central to the practice, politics, and also been mobilized and modified in relativ- theory of anthropology. The principal reason ist and post-colonial theories, orientalist cri- for conceiving a panel session for this tique. Furthermore, it has been at the heart conference on the subject of alterity was of creative ways to challenge reifications of not, however, to rehearse anthropological difference, being central to crucial recent histories or to collect eclectic uses of the critiques of cultural hybridity, representa- notion; rather, it was to recognize that the tion, and ontology. Still in other ways, this notion of alterity has re-entered anthropo- debate has taken further turns, away from logical discussions through impulses from questions of what we might call ‘subal- outside the discipline that might reinvigor- terity’ (minor forms of politically charged ate our conception of it. Challenges from alterity, from subalternity, Spivak 1988) critical museologists, curators, and artists to those of radical alterity and ontological to anthropology museums and ethnographic difference (for the most recent exchange collection display in Europe, and particularly on this debate, see Holbraad and Pedersen in Germany and Berlin – the ethnographic 2017; Laidlaw 2017). The debate around the focus of our research – have led to a so-called ontological turn has raised per- rethinking of the display and engagement tinent questions about theoretical experi- with alterity. As my colleagues Margareta mentation, political self-determination, and von Oswald and Larissa Förster explore in the conceptual creativity of anthropological their research projects, and discuss with research. Is it the case that “people see regard to other key concepts included in the world in different ways, but the world this collection, the quest, for instance, for is still the same” (Heywood 2017)? Or do we greater and more systematic research need to recognise that, as proponents of the into provenance poses relevant and com- ontological turn suggest, “worlds, as well as plementary challenges about the identity, worldviews, may vary” (ibid.)? Again, others origin, and also the different classifications may find that this debate has taken so many of difference that objects afford and invite turns that it might be time to ask whether, – and which may evoke new framings of in the end, “radical alterity is just another anthropology museums, e.g. as ‘post-eth- way of saying ‘reality’” (Graeber 2015). Or, nological museums’. In different but equally as it was posed to participants of the 2008 pressing ways, the representation of Islam Group for Debates in Anthropological Theory in museums and heritage institutions, as a few years earlier in Manchester, whether studied by my colleagues Katarzyna Puzon “ontology is just another word for culture” and Christine Gerbich, urges new questions (Venkatesan 2010), bringing us all the way about religious differentiations; what mes- back to debates about cultural difference. sage will the Christian cross, to be erected on the cupola of the Humboldt Forum – a contested site for the display and ‘encoun- ter’ of the world’s cultures – send to Muslim

Alterity 41 Difference, heritage, and new populisms citizens? As a focal point for debates about In Berlin, the Humboldt Forum and other the past, present, and future of German and current museum, art, and heritage develop- indeed European identity with regards to ments thus position themselves in urban non-European heritage, religion, and culture, “constellations of difference” (Macdonald the Humboldt Forum acts as a performa- 2016: 4), witnessing, reflecting on, and tive projection screen for debates about creating constantly new civic, religious, and inclusion and exclusion, cultural Leitkultur cultural differentiations and ways of thinking and social Erinnerungskultur, awkward and through alterity. However, another devel- difficult heritage (Macdonald 2009, Tinius opment intersects with these institutional 2018a). And again, alterity becomes a means processes. The pressing issue of new pop- through which the Humboldt Forum and ulisms that have swept across Europe since its brokers refract discussions on German 2015, creating new alliances and right-wing identity. As the three founding directors of coalitions in governments, have also created the Forum, Horst Bredekamp, Neil MacGre- new challenges for dealing with the question gor, and Hermann Parzinger (2017) write in a of alterity in the context of heritage, citizen- position statement on the issue of symbols ship, and belonging today that are at the on the Forum, discussing the various fram- heart of our multi-ethnographer research ing symbols that acted as important signifi- projects at CARMAH. How do we respond as ers over the course of the previous palaces’ anthropologists to populist movements and existence: centre-right parties, who recycle notions like Volk and Heimat, mobilizing nativist and The eloquence of the word ‘doubt’ identitarian narratives to incite fear and together with the powerful visual hatred against variously essentialised ‘oth- symbolism of the Sanchi Gate and ers’ within and at the threshold of European the cupola cross invite us to view borders? What does it say about the public the world not just through the awareness of anthropological critique if eyes of our own selves. That is the the German Federal Ministry of the Interior message of the Humboldt Forum. is soon to receive the suffix – andHeimat , while anthropology museums and faculties In some ways, both the two abandoned are busy renaming and distancing them- palaces as well as the ‘anticipated castle’ selves from antiquated notions of Heimat, thus haunt the city with their manifold Volk, and Ethnos (Vermeulen 2018). These signifiers, driving activist challenges as are new challenges that need to be under- well as artistic responses to the retrospec- stood, and yet historically and comparatively tive architectural structure as well as its contextualised in longer trajectories of Humboldtian imaginaries for an encom- German and European identity formations passing post-ethnological museum future and movements that strategically entangled (Tinius and von Zinnenburg Carroll, 2016; heritage, nationalism, and a scepticism forthcoming). towards diversity. Heritage has long been an instrument in these debates, used for

42 Alterity between museum practice and theory claiming difference within similarity,32 but it But rather than exhausting ourselves also serves as a way to challenge histories of in a single definition of the notion of alterity, German-ness, not least through geographi- for instance, as just an ontological ascrip- cal activism which repeatedly calls to rethink tion of radical difference or a decolonial the very location and naming of the street on critique of Othering, the panel conceived which the Institute of European Ethnology for the symposium and its speakers tried to here in Berlin is situated, but which has had think through the multiple ways in which the a broader impact on the theorising of urban notion of alterity has entered and been given space (Ha 2014). new meanings in the fields of exhibition and museum practice. In my own previous doctoral research on professional German public theatres For this purpose, I invited Henrietta and their engagement with migration, it Lidchi, Chief Curator of the Nationaal has been particularly noticeable to what Museum van Wereldculturen in Leiden and extent the German theatre landscape (itself until very recently Keeper of the Department recognised, since 2014 as UNESCO intan- of World Cultures at the National Museums gible cultural heritage) has responded to Scotland in Edinburgh; Katharina Schramm, the so-called ‘refugee crisis’, creating new Professor for the Anthropology of Global initiatives, funding structures, and aes- Inequalities at the Freie Universität in Berlin, thetic reflections (Tinius 2017b and 2018b). and Alya Sebti, director at the gallery of More than that, the “refugee as theatrical the institute for foreign cultural relations in character” has, as Pedro Kadivar (2017: 11f, Berlin. Lidchi opened her talk by reference to my translation) recently noted, for a long alterity, change, and metamorphosis, making time acted as a looking glass for reflections us think about how perceptions of space and on German cultural identity. While Kadivar time – working environments, objects, insti- writes about the refugee as a recurring char- tutions – can transition from being familiar acter on the well-funded stages of German to seeming other, different, or strange. public theatres, a similar observation has How, then, she asked, can such change and been made by Thomas Thiemeyer (2016) metamorphosis lead to feelings of otherness regarding the performative impact of the as an “inhabited, embodied experience” nascent Humboldt Forum, and the postco- – especially when one assumed to have lonial critique levelled against it, on German become oneself very much part of a place memory culture; both arguments that will and space, in her case as a curator whose not surprise social philosophers, such role had become that of “embodied corpo- as Thomas Bedorf (2011), who have been rate memory” and an “ambulatory human reflecting for quite some time on the mutual archive” (Lidchi 2017)? What is the conse- constitution of an ‘other’ or Anderer with quence, she continued, of “overfamiliarity” regard to whatever might be considered as in one environment of display and curation ‘familiar’ or Eigen in a given social or cultural as opposed to “comparative ignorance” context. to questions of why and how in another?

Alterity 43 Confrontations with such bracing alterity, disruption of an academic comfort zone”, here understood as relations of difference Schramm outlined her own positionality as between people in unfamiliar environments, a researcher and collaborator. It developed be they museums or fieldwork contexts, is into a space “where students who ‘felt’ thus at least for a while a transformative marginalized could talk openly about their “embodied and reciprocal process”. Drawing struggles and experiences”, a “place of on work with Stuart Hall on questions of refuge from the militarized campus environ- signification and her research on Native ment, and the social tension and polariza- American Art and exhibition-making (Lidchi tion” (ibidem). Their joint reflection opened 2013), she underlined the differences and up strongly contrasting and highly politi- parallels between such characterisations cized antagonisms over difficult heritage, of fieldwork and immersion to the historical protest performance, and identity politics in and epistemic violence committed through institutionalized spaces. acts of Othering. When we conceived of the panels Schramm co-authored and presented a on which we based these essays, it was contribution with curator, scholar, and artist important to us that the third speaker could Greer Valley, whose work as a graduate contribute a different perspective onto student of Visual Art degree at Stellen- these themes; one that would reflect on the bosch University focused on curatorial professional and practical curatorial issues interventions in exhibition spaces that at stake and on the significance of these remember South Africa’s past. In their paper, discourses in the context of Berlin’s museum they problematized the institutionalized and heritage landscape. We chose to com- reframing of postcolonial resistance as it plement perspectives in this way so as to crystallised around the #rhodesmustfall find a correspondence to theMaking Differ- campaign, which ignited at The University of ences project, in which researchers focus on Cape Town. Focusing on what they described the urban dynamics of Berlin, with a strong as “postcolonial heritage politics”, they emphasis on collaborative methods and analyzed in their talk the student protests institutional changes. As part of this project, in South Africa since 2015 through the lens I have been investigating the significant role of “epistemic disconcertments” and social played by notions of alterity and otherness solidarity. Embedded in a broader inquiry in contemporary art spaces, curating, and about the slippery and problematic social exhibiting in Berlin at the moment. For this life of concepts of race and inequality, they work, I am accompanying curators in three discussed creative processes, exhibition contemporary art institutions in Berlin – the projects, and collaborations for interrogat- independent project space SAVVY Contem- ing whiteness in institutionalized contexts of porary, the district gallery of Berlin-Wedding, Higher Education. Thinking of collaborative and the state-funded gallery of the Institute activist participatory art collectiveOpen of Foreign Cultural Affairs in Berlin-Mitte Forum and their residency program as “the – who are investigating and dealing with

44 questions of alterity, asking how these might supremacy of a national, European challenge or create other forms of approach- majority and its powers to define, ing these issues in museums, particularly ascribe, or withdraw cultural stand- against the backdrop of the Humboldt ards of ‘normality’ (ibidem: 213). Forum. Reviewing artistic and curatorial Curating alterity responses to an emergent figure they call and art the “post-Other”, they suggest that [i]t is worth situating the post- Amid the hype and scandals about the Other or at least the intent to reflect anticipated reconstruction of this contested on and quest to comprehend this site, my research project seeks to highlight concept, from the framework of how these smaller, less canonical albeit artistic practices. In many ways, certainly not ‘peripheral’, sites for the artists and art exhibitions have, production and exhibition of contemporary consciously or unconsciously, art engage in ‘reflexive theorising’, that is, a tried to tackle the notion of the kind of theoretical creativity that responds post-Other by deliberating on to one’s own practices and one’s personal, the evanescing of the ‘border’ or one’s institutional situatedness. One between the ‘self’ and the ‘Other’ such context has been the role of curato- in contemporary art (ibidem: 215). rial concepts as creative spaces for the production of ‘emic’ theory that is relevant But of course, such work cannot entirely to anthropological concerns. In relation to be limited to a single location, but rather will alterity and shared curatorial-anthropo- be affected by broader debates that come logical knowledge production, the initial in and out of Berlin. Through this fieldwork curatorial concept of the Galerie Wedding and the curators I work with, among them Post-Otherness Wedding, for instance, took Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung from inspiration from an article co-authored by SAVVY Contemporary, I was thrust into Bonaventure Ndikung and anthropologist discussions, for instance around this year’s Regina Römhild, entitled The Post-Other as documenta14, one of the world’s biggest Avant-Garde (2013). Therein, they take issue contemporary art exhibition, which took as with the ways in which its theme during 2017 the phrase “Learning from Athens” and which took place in both [u]ntil today, constructing an its birthplace Kassel and post-crisis ridden Other that is constantly kept in Athens. The mega exhibition, some argued, the waiting position of yet to be was thus reinscribing not only a sort of integrated - at the culturalized internal European relationship to its south- borders of the nation-state and ern ‘other’ and a kind of ‘crisis chic’ or ‘ ‘ruin the EU - is constitutive for the pornography’ into contemporary art,

Alterity 45 Figure 3: Olu Oguibe’s Monument for strangers and refugees (2017), Königsplatz, Kassel. Photographs by Jonas Tinius.

but, as others responded, was also situated poignantly in Kassel’s central creating a platform for combining an Königsplatz as a public reminder of respon- engagement with questions of migration, sibilities and virtues of hospitality. Refer- hospitality, and alterity with those of encing, as Nora Sternfeld (2018) intimated contemporary colonialisms. Some of these in a recent lecture, established canons of debates revolved around the sculpture of imperial inscription and loot, the phallic hat year’s Arnold Bode documenta14 award- obelisk acted as a quasi “para-monument” winner Olu Oguibe’s Monument for strangers embodying and problematizing itself. and refugees (2017),

46 Figure 4 Olu Oguibe’s Monument for strangers and refugees (2017), Königsplatz, Kassel. Photographs by Jonas Tinius. A different, equally ambivalent, and to think about Blackness in Europe – and yet provocative artwork that was much about immigration, in general” (Ndikung and discussed at documenta (and in 2018 Tinius 2017). Ndikung furthermore stated also in Berlin’s Galerie-Wedding) is artist that the beer Emeka Ogboh’s dark and strong stout beer Sufferhead Original, which he promoted all also plays with the purity com- over Kassel with a difficult albeit humor- mandment, which is the most ous reference to the fear for the dark or important thing when you brew black (advertisements, for instance, asked beer in Germany. He uses this dis- ‘Wer hat Angst vor Schwarz?’). I discussed course on the purity of the beer to Ogboh’s works with documenta14 curator-at- talk about the politically charged large and founder of SAVVY Contemporary, and historically connoted ideas Bonaventure Ndikung, for whom the artist of the purity of blood and issues was “using this beer not only as a possibility of race in Germany especially, but for people to drink, but also using the beer also in Europe at large (ibidem).

Alterity 47 Figure 5 Advertisement billboard for Emeka Ogboh’sSufferhead Original beer in Kassel. Photograph by Jonas Tinius.

48 My fieldwork in Berlin thus connects about similarities and difference of prac- to issues pertaining to urban planning tice (Tinius 2017a). The collaboration also, and cultural heritage in the city, but it also however, constantly recurs to issues of extends beyond it. All three of my fieldwork alterity and the other, be it in our session on sites articulate such forms of relatedness time (Fabian 1983) on space (Glissant 1981 and imbrication. With Alya Sebti, I devel- [1997]), on feminism and intersectionality or oped a form of collaborative interlocution the politics of identity construction. Crucial for which we use her programming in the for this collaborative relationship is that we ifa-gallery in Berlin-Mitte as a way to think seek to base the encounters in the space of through the relation of anthropology and the gallery and in an intention not to level curating and to practise new forms of the differences between anthropological ethnographic fieldwork. At the gallery, Sebti and curatorial practice, but rather in a has been active in rethinking questions of practised recognition of the fact that we are international and global relatedness with a “on speaking terms” (Schneider 2015: 27). diverse team of interlocutors and curators. While it is part of the educational aspect She has done so from a curatorial point of of sparring to learn from each other’s skill, view, dealing intensely with the question techniques and even tricks, its aim in this of how and why certain concepts, such as case was a change of institutional and otherness, circulate in museums and her- disciplinary habitus – which, far from being itage today, and what they allow and what merely cognitive, involves practical, emo- they inhibit. The two of us have been setting tional, communicative, and spatial learning up a series of collaborative discussions as well. These are all aspects of a trained around central themes of the programme, conduct that any collaborative anthropologi- centering on issues of representation cal practice affords, but their value added is and artistic engagement, which we called the feedback into the very perspective and gallery reflections. Through conversations I stance of the discipline itself: confident to moderate with activists, artists, and writers, venture out of its own comfort zone, but with these gallery reflections have problematized the greatest respect and attention to the issues of diasporic urban space (#1), time, movements, thoughts, and reflections it can temporality, and heritage (#2), intersec- learn from others. tional feminism (#3), and identity politics and protest (#4). A central aim of these discussions and the collaboration in general is experimental. We hope to generate con- cepts and practices that allow us to frame our encounter as one between “Sparring Partners”, as Bonaventure Ndikung once referred to it in conversation, who train and keep each other on their feet, but also question our respective assumptions

Alterity 49 Outlook: Empathy and collaboration

Curator and director Alya Sebti opened alterity along pathways of intersubjectivity, the discussion of the panel introduction and empathy, and the recognition of the mul- the two presented papers by emphasising tisensory. Asking not just on behalf of and the distinct possibilities of such anthro- for whom but also in resonance with whom, pological and curatorial work in the arts. and in dialogue with whose perspectives Exhibitions in contemporary art spaces exhibitions are made and experienced, the are frequently conceived with less time for discussion led us to explore power dynamics preparation and engagement than anthropo- in museal and curatorial representation. logical research. However, these limitations Whether alterity can thus be retranslated also offer possibilities. Instead of aiming at into a productive notion and practice rather the holistic representation of other cultures, than a violent inscription of difference, epis- people, or ways of living, she underlined the temic or otherwise, through the language we important of personal enunciation, subjec- use, became apparent as a crucial question tivity, and empathy. Citing specific exhibition and shared conflictual terrain between art, projects that emphasised the vulnerability anthropology, and curating. Iterating in of both artist and spectator, the discussion writing, exhibition, and discussion forms of opened the notion of alterity to questions representation and intersubjectivity, both about mutuality and understanding: How anthropology and exhibition-making (or can I consider ‘others’ as already part of curating) can be understood as practices my own sense of self, think identity through of performative concept-work. This imbues relations of difference, and alterity as a them with the responsibility but also with constant tension and movement between critical potential for reciprocal interrogation self and other – not as distinct but as intri- of each other’s conceptual undergirding, for cately and ungraspably related, as porous. generative disturbances and experimenta- Her analysis raised a significant question tion that may allow other ways of thinking about the possibility of thinking ‘otherwise’ alterity in museums and heritage today and about anthropology, museums, and heritage, tomorrow. namely from where we can think and see differently. Can we think otherwise about transformations of curatorial knowledge through metamorphoses of ourselves and our epistemic habitus, as Henrietta Lidchi suggested? Or does thinking otherwise require more radical collaborations such Endnotes as those between Schramm and Valley to unearth normative constraints and allow 32 Matei Candea’s Corsican Fragments (2010), for for self-critical disruptions of institutional instance, offers a complex case study of how national heritage discourses? Sebti explored some of heritage is implicated through negotiations of alterity the consequences of thinking through and and identity in the Mediterranean. expanding out concepts for understanding

50 Speaker bios and original paper titles Discussant

Bodies Changed into New Forms: Alya Sebti is Director at ifa-Galerie Metamorphosis and Museums (Institute of Foreign Cultural Prof Henrietta Lidchi is the Chief Relations), Berlin. She has curated Curator of the Nationaal Museum van several exhibitions in Europe and Wereldculturen, Leiden and until 2017 North Africa and was the Artistic was the Keeper of the Department of Director for the 5th edition of the World Cultures, National Museums Marrakech Biennial (2014). She has Scotland, Edinburgh. Here she led the written and lectured extensively on redevelopment of the World Cultures art and the public sphere. In 2018, galleries at the National Museum of she will act as a Guest Curator of the Scotland (reopened in 2011). Trained Dak’Art Biennial. as an anthropologist, she has worked in museums for twenty years, starting at the British Museum. Author and chair

After the Fire: Disrupting Whiteness Jonas Tinius is a postdoctoral Towards New Forms of Collaboration research fellow at CARMAH. His in the Space of the South African research explores how curators in University (Joint Reflection with contemporary art spaces in Berlin Greer Valley) negotiate questions of difference and Prof Katharina Schramm is alterity. He has previously worked on Professor for the Anthropology of theatre and migration and has most Global Inequalities at the Freie recently published the article “Art Universität Berlin and Honorary as ethical practice: anthropological Senior Research Fellow at the observations on and beyond theatre” Archive and Public Culture Research (2017) in the journal World Art. Initiative of the University of Cape Town. Her theoretical focus is on conceptualizing race as an unruly and slippery object in politics and science. She has carried out extensive fieldwork in Ghana and South Africa. Her current research in South Africa is situated at the interface of classificatory practices, the materiality of scientific objects and emerging political subjectivities.

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54 POST-ETHNOLOGICAL An essay based on a panel with Clémentine Deliss and Dan Hicks by Margareta von Oswald

Progressively used by museum in which, for example, postcolonial theorists and practitioners, the post-eth- theory comes into existence through nographic or post-ethnological has been a critique of a body of theory (Hulme employed with reference to museums in Hall 1996: 253; my emphasis). and/or practices linked to ethnographic collections. My point in selecting the term Concerning the post-ethnographic, I was not to position myself for or against its had come across the term on several occa- use. It was, rather, to sense how the ‘post’ sions, employing the term in exactly those was used to distance and dissociate oneself different dimensions. from past ways of doing and thinking the ethnographic museum, and, in doing so, to draw visions for future practices. More The ‘post- particularly, I was interested in the relation between the ethnographic museum and its ethnological’ and founding discipline, anthropology.33 Res- onating with CARMAH’s Transforming the ‘post-ethnographic’ Ethnographic theme,34 I thus asked myself: Where, how and what is ‘anthropology’ in the in literature and ethnographic museum today? What could the ‘post’ in the ‘post-ethnological’ stand for museum practice in the context of ethnographic museums? What was, then, considered to be ethnologi- In his articleCan French anthropology cal or ethnographic? outlive its museums? (2015), Benoît de L’Es- toile uses post-ethnographic in the temporal, The prefix ‘post’ means ‘behind’, ‘after’, rather descriptive sense by tracing the inter- ‘later’, ‘subsequent to’, ‘posterior to’, and dependent relationship between the history thus can refer to a temporal dimension. of anthropology and its museums in France. However, in other contexts, such as in Focusing on the Musée du Quai Branly discussions around the post-colonial or the (MQB)35 in Paris, he concludes by describing postmodern, different dimensions of the the museum as post-ethnographic, depicting post have been highlighted. Peter Hulme has a shift from the ethnographic to the art argued that the post in the post-colonial museum. For him, the post-ethnographic MQB is, in effect, a “National Museum of the has two dimensions which exist in Other, a monument to ‘cultural diversity’ tension with each other: a temporal as the ‘common heritage of mankind’” (De dimension in which there is a punc- L’Estoile 2015: 100)36. tual relationship in time between, for example, a colony and a post-co- lonial state; and a critical dimension

Post-ethnological 55 He asserts that ethnographic collections.38 This trend not only highlights the collections’ redefinition the objects have lost their status as ‘art’ collections – at least of those objects as scientific data, gaining instead deemed worthy of exhibiting – but also their alternative values as art and her- progressive ‘historic’ character, with most itage that challenge anthropolo- European museums disposing of little or no gists hold on them (ibidem: 99). resources to collect.

Here, the post-ethnographic is thus The abovementioned changes – a equated the post-anthropological – an reorientation of the ethnographic museum ‘after anthropology’. The progressive loss towards museums of art, the lack of anthro- of importance of anthropology within pological skills in the profile of personnel, the museum, depicted by De L’Estoile the changing of museum names - could be concerning the French case, seemed to interpreted as the museums’ reorientation be confirmed by other ongoing changes in in a context in which museums in general similar museums all over Europe and North are progressively being requested to refo- America. One development was the name cus on financial success, and to produce changes of ethnographic museums in the blockbuster exhibitions to attain large context of recent transformations and visitor numbers. With such priorities, critical rebranding strategies, in which words such (anthropological) approaches are likely to as ‘anthropological’, ‘ethnological’, ‘ethno- be neglected. Such a situation seems to find graphic’, ‘Völkerkunde’ have progressively resonance with some of the developments been discredited and (as a consequence) at the MQB, which regularly leaves space disappeared from their titles or they have for private collections to be exhibited and is been disguised in acronyms. This has most generally known to have become a museum recently concerned Hamburg’s Museum adored by art market professionals rather für Völkerkunde, currently in search of a than one highly regarded for its cutting-edge new name (Mischke 2017)37. Another devel- anthropology.39 opment has concerned the recruitment of personnel. In Tervuren (Belgium) or in In 2016, on the occasion of the MQB’s Vienna (Austria), director positions have 10th birthday, James Clifford spoke of this been taken over by managers rather than threat, which he had detected at the muse- researchers. The current advert for the new um’s opening, namely that the MQB would ‘director of collections’ of the Humboldt replace the project of ethnology in favour of Forum, who will be responsible for both the “primitive arts” (Clifford 2007). collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum for Asian Art, does not mention a requirement for anthropological expertise (Bernau 2017). Similarly, art historians have progressively been appointed as curators of

56 In view of the museum’s evolution, In Clifford’s understanding, as he stated in he evaluated the situation differently, Paris, the post-ethnological consisted thus pondering whether the museum’s con- in the “‘following from’ with a difference”. temporary practice could be qualified as post-ethnological: Focusing on the term’s critical dimen- sion, the usage of the post-ethnological has I am ready to adopt the prefix as not only to do with the contextualised use long as ‘post’ does not mean simply of ethnography, ethnology and anthropology ‘after’. Post refers to something depending on specific places, times and new that we can’t name yet. Post purposes. In Germany, for example, the means ‘following from’ with a dif- term Ethnologie is still most largely used to ference, still very much entangled denominate the academic discipline (even in what is been displaced. So we though it is progressively put into question). are not talking about an ethical 40 In France, it’s ‘anthropologie’ that is most shift, a whole new kind of museum. commonly used, ‘social anthropology’ in Working in a time of transition the British and ‘cultural anthropology’ in without a trustworthy sense of the US-American context. In contrast to direction is what I hope to refer to placing the ‘anthropos’ (the human) at the as post - ethnological - a time of discipline’s centre, ‘ethnos’ evokes the possibility and constraint, invention sometimes fatal history of classification and contradiction (Clifford 2016). and categorization of peoples into ‘races’ or ‘ethnic tribes’. This understanding can also The post-ethnological is used here be seen in the following reflections on the as a notion filled with potential, not as post-ethnological by Wayne Modest, director description. Clifford’s use of post-ethno- of the Research Center for Material Culture logical rather than post-ethnographic, was in Leiden (NL). Envisioning the collections as not insignificant in this context. He stated a place where “questions of redress, where that with the post-ethnological’s “fusion repair can be inaugurated”, he went on to of ‘ethnos’ and ‘logos’, the name evokes a explain: crucial vocation for the changing institutions we are discussing today, the question of I am interested in a transition in serious cross-cultural research and inter- which we move away from a rep- pretation, inextricably ethnographic and resentation that says this is who historical” (ibidem). The term post-ethno- those people are, or a practice that logical then, more explicitly than the term hides from its historical violence, post-ethnographic, held the potential to and continues to conscript certain address the critical dimension of the ‘post’, humans into what I call the ‘deep by addressing theory-making through the cultural’ and incommensurably dif- ‘logos’, as well as the discipline’s ambivalent ferent. I am more interested in a shift (theoretical) history through the ‘ethnos’. towards a place that acknowledges

Post-ethnological 57 the museum’s implicatedness and what anthropology is in the museum within certain pasts and uses this to today. For me, one of these contradictions reposition it as a space where ques- consists in the stark contrast of what is still tions of redress, where repair can imagined as an ‘ethnographic exhibition’ and be inaugurated (von Oswald, Soh what is actually happening in contemporary Bejeng Ndikung, and Modest 2017). knowledge production in anthropology. The definition of such an exhibition has been The ‘post- clearly set out by Henrietta Lidchi: So in referring to ‘ethnographic ethnological’ as museums’ or ‘ethnographic exhi- bitions’, one is identifying institu- indicator for a tions or exhibitions which feature objects as the ‘material culture’ of discrepancy peoples who have been considered, since the mid-nineteenth century, between to have been the appropriate tar- get for anthropological research. anthropological Ethnographic museums produce certain kinds of representations research and its and mobilize distinct classifica- tory systems which are framed by representation in anthropological theory and ethno- the museum graphic research (Lidchi 1997: 161). For her, ethnographic exhibitions The different usages of the term show include the following characteristics: how malleable it can be, serving different arguments for different visions of what an Ethnographic exhibitions most usu- ethnographic museum might be(come). One ally adopt the format of contextual- could conclude that similarly to the ethno- izing and reconstructing. Curators graphic museum’s acclaimed ‘crisis’, the work with objects and contextu- post-ethnological has been drawn on by peo- alize them so that these assume a ple in the field to depict a moment of change, purposive role; objects are com- differentiation, and turbulence. In contrast monly selected as representative, to this declaration or desire for ongoing rather than unique, examples […]. change within ethnological museums, I Since the primary purpose of such would argue that we are witnessing above exhibitions is the translation of all the contradiction that Clifford refers to, difference – to acquaint the viewer which has at its heart the question of how with unfamiliar concepts, values

58 and ideas – their key motive is Berlin, for example during their programme communication through under- on Animism (2012)41 or the Anthropocene standing and interpretation. (2013-2014).42 Contemporary anthropologi- Ethnographic exhibitions are typ- cal knowledge-production has not found its ically syncretic (pulling together way into the ethnographic museum yet, at things from different sources). least not to an extent in which other cultural Nevertheless, though their osten- institutions have mobilized it.43 To phrase sible forms is that of mimesis, the it differently, anthropological research imitation of ‘reality’, their effec- seemed to run against the grain of anthro- tiveness depends on a high degree pological representation, seemingly trapped of selectivity and construction in Lidchi’s characterizations. And the (Lidchi 1997, 171–72; my emphasis ). question that I believe remains unanswered - as hinted at in Sharon Macdonald ‘s text This form of exhibition-making has on the Humboldt Lab Dahlem – is whether been extensively criticized, as has the a future of anthropological representation, understanding of anthropology underlying a ‘post-ethnological’ representation, was this notion of ethnographic exhibitions. imaginable ‘within’ the institutional walls Few curators today, would characterize (Macdonald 2015)? their way of exhibition-making as above, or they would at least reject some of the points in the characterization. Still, the post-ethnological as contradiction reveals the flagrant discrepancy between what the ethnographic exhibition is imagined to be and contemporary anthropology. Whereas the abovementioned characteristics of the ethnographic exhibition - as representative, focused on difference and ‘other’, and mimetic - carried a decade long tradition of being challenged within and outside anthropology, the majority of exhibitions in ethnographic museums still resembled Lidchi’s characterization. In contemporary art, in contrast, recent knowledge pro- duction as well as its ongoing debates in anthropology have been successfully used, problematised and displayed. Debates, (co)-produced in anthropology departments, have attracted large crowds in institutions such as the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in

Post-ethnological 59 The ‘post- ethnological’ at ‘Otherwise’

An attempt to rethink the relation relationalism (“the museum is full of social between anthropology and its museums was relations”), and most recently, multinatu- at the core of the panel on the post-ethno- ralism, perspectivism, relativism and the logical during the Otherwise symposium. ontological turn (“the museum is full of The invited speakers, Dan Hicks and knowledge and ideas”). For him, these con- Clémentine Deliss, addressed the relation ceptions were not consecutive but layered. by presenting their own practice and the- Suggesting that we rethink and “invert” the oretical approaches. This also concerned museum in the form of reverse anthropol- their positioning and (non-)use of the term ogy, the museum’s potential consisted in the post-ethnological. objects’ versatile “transformativity”.

At first glance, their presentation and Unlike Hicks, Deliss had used the arguments differed or even opposed each notion of the post-ethnological in her own other. Their styles of presentation were also work. I had first encountered the term very different, Hicks showing a detailed post-ethnographic when she introduced powerpoint with highlighted arguments and it as an integral part of Frankfurt’s Welt- Deliss delivering a personal and analytical kulturenmuseum, which she directed from account of her experiences as director of 2010 to 2015.44 In her take on the term, she Frankfurt’s Weltkulturenmuseum. Hicks, challenged what she framed as “the logos archaeologist and curator at the Pitt Rivers of ethnos” through Paul Rabinow’s term of museum, Oxford, started the discussion by remediation. For her, rejecting the term of post-ethnological as “retro”, stating that it was curious to “talk “one can no longer be content about something doesn’t exist”. For Hicks, to use earlier examples of mate- the post-ethnological was understood as an rial culture for the purpose of “after anthropology” museum. He argued depicting ethnos, tribe, or an instead for the transformative nature of existing range of grand anthropo- such museums – highlighting their ability logical themes” (Deliss 2012, 63). to, first, respond to changes, and second, to affect transformation. He centred his As she highlighted during the sym- presentation around anthropological posium, she used the notion above all to knowledge-production in relation to material dissociate herself from former practices: culture in ethnographic museums, employ- the post-ethnological served as a simple ing the concept of a reverse anthropology “heuristic device to suspend”. Deliss by Roy Wagner (1975). Focussing on the Pitt took her own trajectory as an example to Rivers and its collections, Hicks chrono- problematize current challenges facing logically reviewed different conceptions of ethnographic museums. She challenged material culture in the museum: materialism the idea of “anthropology’s authority and (“the museum is full of things”), (multi-) sole right to the interpretation of the col- culturalism (“the museum is full of people”), lections”, as well as anthropology’s right to

60 For an inversion of priorities: from representation to research define access to them. In addition to the idea The necessity of an undeveloped object of the post-ethnological as “post-ethnos”, definition and the call for research reso- she suggested what one could frame as the nated with my own experience in Berlin’s post-anthropology museum, in which the Ethnological Museum. In Berlin, the Africa question of different forms of interpretation, collection alone consists of 75 000 objects. including anthropology’s, was at the core of I still remember working in the collections, the museum’s policies, paired with a delib- being overwhelmed by the sheer number, erate opening up of access to the museum beauty and histories of the objects, stowed storage spaces. away in shelves. One could imagine how it looked like around 1900 in the museum, However, ultimately, the arguments when the collection became so large “it went in the same direction. When it came had begun”, as the museum’s director to the definition of what was at the core of Adolf Bastian put it, “to escape all control” the panel – the question of research – the (Bastian in Zimmerman 2001: 190). In 2013, two speakers seemed to agree, even though more than 100 years later, a post-doctoral they framed it differently. Hicks’ subsuming student offered his help to do research of the current theory-making about material on the objects to the collection’s curator culture, translating as the museum being full during a visit of the storage spaces. Out of of ideas and knowledge, where “the objects curiosity, he asked what the priorities for in the collections [are understood] as forms research were. The curator answered, laugh- of knowledge as much as they are forms ing, stating that he could pick any object, of culture or material or personhood”, was given that all that stuff got collected, but implicitly a call for research. Deliss explicitly no research had been done on them. Even argued for a multiplication of interpretation though this was obviously exaggerated, it and approaches in research, incorporated raises the question of what we ‘do’ actually in the idea of the museum-university, in know about those collections. In the press reference to the French musée laboratoire and public opinion, at least when it comes suggested by Georges Henri Rivière (1968: to the Humboldt Forum, this not-knowing is 18). Both took the museum’s collections framed as an accusation, as wrong-doing, as their point of departure, arguing for as mistake. However, it can also be seen as object-based research within the museum. potential, as both Deliss and Hicks framed it. Their conception of object-hood in the museum was similar, thinking of objects as Still, no one knows better than people ‘provisional’ and ‘unfinished’, as ‘amputees’ working with those collections, that they and thus, as possessing the potential to be can turn into burdens. But as Beverly (re-)made. Referencing Claude Lévi-Strauss, Butler illustrated during the symposium’s Hicks described knowledge as partial, “in Translocality panel, it is the paradox of that it is not total, and […] in that it is not heritage that makes it so interesting: burden impartial.” and potential, cure and poison at the same time. If the post-ethnological consists in

Post-ethnological 61 the negotiation of anthropology’s role within several tens of thousands of objects. Berlin’s ethnographic museums, then my conclusion collections are neither fully inventoried nor would be that there needs to be more of digitized. They are not safely stored.45 The it. What ethnographic collections thus call archives are currently due to be transferred for, what they demand, is a conversion, to be centrally archived in Berlin’s Central an inversion of priorities. An inversion of Archive, away from the museum staff who priorities would mean a turning away from knows them best. These decisions are not an exclusive focus on exhibitions towards questions of curatorial responsibility but of collection-based research: an inversion larger institutional priorities. away from representation towards research. These developments need to be However, current development tends nuanced by rather recent developments. to move in another direction, concentrating Projects that enable and foster research – resources in favour of representation. The the digitization of the museum’s archives,46 major cultural institutions in which I have a research project in cooperation with the done fieldwork, the Humboldt Forum in National Museums of Tanzania47 – have been Berlin and the Royal Museum of Central funded, but mainly as a result of individual Africa in Tervuren in Belgium, both spent curators’ efforts to acquire funds. Projects the majority of their financial capacities, such as the proposed Research Campus personnel and efforts in representation Dahlem (Parzinger 2017), or a Central Insti- and exhibition-making. They did so, first, by tute for Provenance Research (Parzinger renovating and rebuilding imperial buildings; 2018) have been publicly announced, but and second, by installing costly permanent whether and how these will be realized is exhibitions that are, contrary to what is still unclear. For object-based research sometimes claimed, immobile, fixed and to take place, however, the collections built to last; and third, by progressively and archives need to be accessible, which closing their storages to wider access. demands ‘sustainable’ funding, time and In Berlin, as reported in theSüddeutsche personnel. Zeitung in November 2017, the Humboldt Forum Kultur GmbH, a company that is Discussion of the post-ethnological responsible for events, communication seems, then, to prompt rethinking the and management, will grow to 350 people museum by rethinking the role of research in 2019, the Humboldt Forum’s scheduled within its walls. One suggestion, that we opening (Häntzschel 2017). In contrast to actively pursue at CARMAH, is to work within these numbers, as of today, the museum’s museums as field sites, turning the behind- ‘Africa’ department has two permanent the-scenes into the front stage. Approaching curators (which is an exception in the the museum as a field includes taking it seri- museum, usually each department has one ously as a place of knowledge-production – curator), as well as one storage manager, observing practices within those museums, who is responsible for the collection’s institutional frameworks and makings, and

62 processes of meaning-making, today and in ‘French heritage’ during their relocation to the Musée du the past. However, this only partly answers Quai Branly, which made them “indestructible, impre- the questions of what anthropology can do scriptible and inalienable” (Beltrame 2015: 109). The new in the ethnographic museum today. Another legal status of the objects allowed the French state to focus in research has been the recently officially decline the Republic of Benin’s request for the strongly requested provenance research on restitution of objects from the Kingdom of Dahomey in the collections (Savoy 2017), which has its 2017 (Buffenstein 2017). origins in art history but takes another, pos- 37 Examples of these developments in German-speaking sibly more holistic form in anthropology, as countries are the Weltkulturenmuseum Frankfurt am discussed in this volume by Larissa Förster. Main, the Museum der Fünf Kontinente, Munich, or the However, the possibilities of research on and Weltmuseum Wien. For a discussion and more detail with collections and museums don’t stop on the recent name changes and restructuration of here. International as well local research European museums with ethnographic collections, see projects, artistic and curatorial research are (Macdonald 2016: 10–12). just some of the ideas that emerge when the 38 Jonathan Fine, appointed curator of the Africa collections are made accessible, thus offer- collections at Berlin’s Ethnological Museum in 2015, or ing the potential to transgress the multiple Yvette Mutumba, curator of the Africa collections at boundaries between the university and the Frankfurt’s Weltkulturenmuseum from 2012 to 2016, are museum, and what is done and discussed in just two examples of this trend. front and behind the scenes of the museum, 39 See for example the exhibition Éclectique. Une as well as, across the boundary between the collection du XXIe siècle (2016-2017), an exhibition museum’s inside and outside. of Marc Ladreit de Lacharrière’s collection, http:// www.quaibranly.fr/fr/expositions-evenements/ au-musee/expositions/details-de-levenement/e/eclec- Endnotes tique-36838/; https://www.lesechos.fr/21/11/2016/ LesEchos/22322-092-ECH_marc-ladreit-de-lacharriere- 33 In this text, I will refer to the collections and muse- expose-sa-collection-au-musee-du-quai-branly.htm ums as ethnographic, not as ethnological. In view of the 40 As the recent name change of the German Ethno- debates surrounding the terms, I prefer the notion of logical Society (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Völkerkunde, ethnographic, more often used in the English-speaking DGV) to the German Association for Social and Cultural world. Anthropology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozial- und 34 Transforming the Ethnographic is one of the four Kulturanthropologie, DGSKA) shows, ‘Völkerkunde’, research areas constituting CARMAH’s Making Differ- but also ‘Ethnologie’ are progressively dismissed in the ences in Berlin project. More information here: http:// German-speaking context. As Han F. Vermeulen argues www.carmah.berlin/making-differences-in-berlin/ in his discussion of the name change, terms referring 35 The museum has, since June 2016, been called Musée to the Anglophone context are adopted despite the du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac. historic burden of the term ‘Anthropologie’ and more 36 This development, as one could describe it, has been explicitely ‘Sozialanthropologie’ in Germany, in favour of confirmed by the change of legal status of the ethno- an international alignment (Vermeulen 2018). graphic collections from scientific objects to objects of

Post-ethnological 63 41 The travelling exhibition was accompanied by a seminal anthology: http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/ projekte/2012/animismus/start_animismus.php 42 The project on the Anthropocene started in 2013 and has been continued in the HKW’s current programme: http://www.hkw.de/en/programm/projekte/2014/ anthropozaen/anthropozaen_2013_2014.php 43 Exceptions are exhibitions such as Persona (MQB Paris), which aimed at challenging the borders between subject and object. It successfully questioned several of the ethnographic exhibitions characteristics, making use of historic ethnographic collections whilst integrat- ing contemporary anthropological thought and theory, as well as newly acquired collections and contemporary art. 44 Recently, she has rather referred to the ‘post-ethno- logical’ museum. 45 The West African collections are currently not accessible because they are not secured from fire. 46 The German Research Council (DFG) confirmed the project’s funding in December 2017. More information here: http://www.smb.museum/nachrichten/detail/ deutsche-forschungsgemeinschaft-ermoeglicht-digi- talisierung-des-historischen-archivs-im-ethnologische. html 47 At the point of writing, the project is still described as a pilot-project running until late 2018. More information here: http://www.smb.museum/museen-und-einrich- tungen/ethnologisches-museum/sammeln-forschen/ forschung/tansania-deutschland-geteilte-objekt- geschichten.html

64 Speaker bios and original paper titles Author and chair

On the Treatment of Dead Enemies Margareta von Oswald is a doctoral Dan Hicks is Associate Professor in research fellow at CARMAH and at the the School of Archaeology, University EHESS Paris. Analyzing two major of Oxford, and Curator of Archaeology museum restructuration processes at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and (2017- (Berlin’s Humboldt Forum; Tervuren’s 2018) Visiting Professor at Musée de Royal Museum for Central Africa), her Quai Branly. He has published widely research focuses on the negotiations on material culture, historical around contested material legacies archaeology, heritage, museums, and in the present. Recent publications the history of anthropology. His include ‘Objects/Subjects in Exile’ Twitter handle is @ProfDanHicks. (L’Internationale, 2017) and the special issue of Museum Worlds on Conceptualising a Museum- ‘Engaging Anthropological Legacies’ University: Repositories as sites (co-edited with Henrietta Lidchi and for Transdisciplinary Research and Sharon Macdonald). Cultural Exchange Clémentine Deliss is a curator, publisher, and cultural historian. She studied contemporary art and semantic anthropology and holds a PhD from the University of London. Her work addresses historical and contemporary iterations of global artists’ networks, the remediation of ethnographic collections, and the articulation of artistic practice and interdisciplinary through publishing. She lives in Berlin.

Post-ethnological 65 Literature cited

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De L’Estoile, Benoît. 2015. “Can French ———. 2016. “New Constellations of Differ- Anthropology Outlive Its Museums? Notes ence in Europe’s 21st-Century Museums- on a Changing Landscape.” In Anthropology cape.” Museum Anthropology 39 (1): 4–19. at the Crossroads. Views from France, edited by Sophie Chevalier, 81–94. The RAI Country Mischke, Joachim. 2017. “Warum das Series, Volume 1. Völkerkundemuseum einen neuen Namen bekommt.” 18 December 2017. https://www. Deliss, Clémentine. 2012. “Performing the abendblatt.de/kultur-live/article212884015/ Curatorial in a Post-Ethnographic Museum.” Warum-das-Voelkerkundemuseum-ein- In Performing the Curatorial: Within and en-neuen-Namen-bekommt.html. beyond Art, edited by Maria Lind, 61–75. Berlin: Sternberg Press.

66 Oswald, Margareta von, Bonaventure Soh Vermeulen, Han F. 2018. “History of Anthro- Bejeng Ndikung, and Wayne Modest. 2017. pology and a Name Change at the German “Objects/Subjects in Exile. A Conversation Ethnological Society Meeting in Berlin: between Wayne Modest, Bonaventure Conference Report.”History of Anthropol- Soh Bejeng Ndikung, and Margareta von ogy Newsletter 22 February 2018. http:// Oswald.” In . L’Internationale Online. http:// histanthro.org/news/history-of-anthropolo- www.internationaleonline.org/research/ gy-and-a-name-change-at-the-german-eth- decolonising_practices/89_objects_sub- nological-society-meeting-in-berlin-confer- jects_in_exile_a_conversation_between_ ence-report/. wayne_modest_bonaventure_soh_bejeng_ ndikung_and_margareta_von_oswald Zimmerman, Andrew. 2001. Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany. Chicago: Parzinger, Hermann. 2017. “Museum- University of Chicago Press. skomplex Dahlem Wird Zum Forschungs- campus - Stiftung Preußischer Kul- turbesitz.” 17 March 2017. https://www. preussischer-kulturbesitz.de/newsroom/ dossiers-und-nachrichten/dossiers/ dossier-sammlungswelten/museumskom- plex-dahlem-wird-zum-forschungscampus. html.

———. 2018. “Das Museum als Universum.” 10 January 2018. https://www.tagesspiegel. de/kultur/stiftung-preussischer-kulturbe- sitz-das-museum-als-universum/20829962. html.

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Post-ethnological 67 ENGAGEMENT An essay based on a panel with Bonita Bennett, Ute Marxreiter, and Laura Peers

by Christine Gerbich

The English word ‘engagement’ has Translating the meanings of engagement been teasing me for a while. My first encoun- from on language and professional context ter with it was during an international into another always brought to light simi- conference, The Mediation of Art – The Art larities and differences between museums, of Mediation, held in Germany in 2010, that museumscapes, professional practices I attended as a novice to the museum field. and the networks they are entangled with. Over the conference’s dinner, I got into a ran- Translation always did its job as an “agent of dom conversation with a colleague from Brit- difference” (Haverkamp 1997, 7). ain who introduced herself as representative of an organization called Engage. I struggled My first humble attempt to trace the to find an adequate translation. I only knew meaning of the term back then highlights an the term in the sense of formalizing a rela- important aspect ofengagement that makes tionship before getting married, that is, in it different to other, more abstract concepts the sense of committing one to another. Did discussed in this volume. Unlike alterity, Engage! propose that people should fall in post-ethnographic, or translocality, the love with museums? The term certainly had term is used in theoretical discourses, but to do with some kind of relating. So, was it also in day-to-day museum practice and in used in the sense of ‘sich engagieren’, the quotidian language. The good thing about German expression for getting involved into this is that everyone involved in a discussion something? Or was it referring to political about engagement in museums brings participation? As the conference was about an initial understanding of what could (or art education in museums, the woman should) be meant. The difficulty is that its looked at me rather surprised, when I asked mundanity runs the risk of obscuring its her for clarification. An experienced German meanings and the complexities of profes- colleague jumped in to explain that, in the sional engagement practice which rely on a British museum context engagement was deep theoretical knowledge and experience used in the field of museum education, in the to be successful. These competences sense of helping the visitor to learn about include: psychological and pedagogical the meanings that have been attached to knowledge, the ability to quickly dive into objects. Our colleague immediately rectified other experts’ ways of thinking, to critically this, by saying that what ‘they’ meant did reflect the relevance of the questions that even encompass more: increasing the they ask for non-experts, and social skills to accessibility of the collections for each connect, coordinate and negotiate meanings individual, make them enjoyable, and to between communities of practitioners help them understand the visual arts48. whose motivations to engage with museums Obviously, the term engagement was not differ from another. An example of a prom- easy to grasp, and working for and reflecting inent, and very old, conflict is the ‘dumbing about museums in countries as different as down’ issue. Those whose hearts have been Germany, the United Kingdom, Yemen and devoted to research on a specific theme Egypt, I experienced many similar situations. might fear oversimplification, while others

68 who want to engage people with expert neutral hosts of mankind’s heritage (Vergo knowledge are keen to distil the quintes- 1989; Mensch 1995; Macdonald 1998) and sence of a large body of knowledge to make confronted museums around the world it understandable to non-experts. with the aftermaths of their imperialist and colonial practices, their politics of non- or The range of possible theories at work mis- representation and their exclusionary becomes visible in the short dialogue engagement practices (O’Neill 2002; Sandell between the two colleagues who referred 2002; Dodd und Sandell 2001; Hoop- to two very different ideas about museum er-Greenhill 1992). This critique called for learning. “Helping the visitor to learn” some new methods to allow for a critical reflection kind of knowledge is rooted in a behaviourist of authorship, institutional ways of knowl- understanding to learning, which considers edge production and the contents derived it as the acquisition of expert knowledge by out of it (Lindauer 2007; Mörsch 2009, 2014; means of transmission through an expert Peers und Brown 2003). Museums around (Watson 1913; Skinner 1972). Engagement in the world initiated or participated in a the sense of increasing accessibility of col- wide range of consultative, collaborative, lections, making them enjoyable and helping co-productive projects with groups from visitors to understand, refers to constructiv- the margins of the museum world that went ist ideas (Glaserfeld 1985), which consider beyond traditional ways of museum educa- learning to be a complex activity of self-mo- tion. Rather, engagement was understood tivated meaning-makers, who construct in the sense of building up and nurturing knowledge on the basis of and through their relations that reach outside institutional own experiences with an environment. Here, boundaries. learning in museums is facilitated rather than transmitted, and includes not just cog- Most of the literature on engagement nitive, but also affective characteristics that work in museums and on heritage sites are dependent on individual interests and reflects the theoretical discussions and motivations, attitudes, and emotions (Falk experiences from museums and heritage und Dierking 1992; Falk 2009; Csikszentmi- institutions in the Anglophone Global halyi and Hermanson 1995; Watson 2015). North - Great Britain, the United States Contrasting, often only implicitly expressed, of America, Canada, and Australia. The theoretical ideas may lead to very different stimulative character of the publicly funded modes of engagement, as Hohenstein and institution our British colleague repre- Moussouri (2017) argue with respect to sented – Engage! – was telling, in that it concepts of museum learning. revealed the political attention attributed to engagement work in the cultural sector. Learning, however, is only one aspect At the time of the conference, the concept of engagement in museums. In the late had become one of the buzz words in many 1980s critical museology started to question Anglophone liberal democracies. In the museums’ innocent status as objective and British case, museums had come under

Engagement 69 Engagement Otherwise scrutiny through the government in the early My reflections so far are in line with 1990s and called on to demonstrate public those of Onciul (2017: 1) who points to the accountability (Macdonald 2002: 32). Making fugitive, and sometimes even contradictory museums accessible to as many people as character of the concept. Engagement possible had become a necessity for muse- withstands a single, fixed definition. Its ums’ survival. It was not at least this need multiple meanings rather suggest that it for accountability, e.g. with regard to the be understood as a process during which cultural sector’s macroeconomic benefits,49 humans and non-humans are being set into which had led to changes in the field of a relation with each other. The aim of the professional engagement work in museums Otherwise panel, thus, was not to search for and heritage sites: an increased number of a final definition, but rather, to complicate staff responsible for different aspects of things by contrasting experiences from very engagement work (e.g. interpretation, edu- different institutional settings. WithBonita cation, outreach) in museums, a nation-wide Bennett, director of District Six Museum in advocacy and training network for gallery Cape Town in South Africa, Ute Marxreiter, education practitioners (which our colleague research associate for education and medi- was representing),50 and an investment in ation from the National Museums in Berlin academic research on museums and other who is involved in the planning of the future heritage institutions. In comparison, the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, and Laura Peers, debates about the social responsibilities professor at Oxford University and curator of cultural institutions had been rather for the Americas Collections at its Pitt Rivers silent in Germany. While engagement in the Museum, three professionals joined the sense of participation had been promoted panel who are well aware of the theoretical in the 1970s, e.g. through Hilmar Hoffmann’s debates around engagement work, and famous demand Kultur für Alle!( Culture for know what’s going on on the ground. Their All!), its renaissance was in its beginnings.51 presentations revealed similarities, but also Funding for reflexive engagement work was differences regarding institutional values, limited and only slowly did new museological kinds of expertise mobilized, the ways of discourses spread in the field. dealing with collections, the interconnec- tions with wider networks, and also the ‘feel’ that was attached to each of the processes described.

70 Mindful and experienced, with some bruises and scars

The first example presented on the named after the Haida First Nation People in panel was engagement work conducted in Canada who have established a Committee Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, an institution that is working to locate ancestral remains founded in 1884. The museum hosts the and material culture in Canada, Europe, and university’s collection of archaeological the United States and to initiate repatria- and ethnographic objects collected during tion. In the Haida Project, representatives the late 19th and early 20th century, in the of the Haida Repatriation Committee and context of colonial and imperialist political museum professionals from the UK are enterprises of the British Empire. Laura working together to build up relationships Peers, who, together with Alison Brown that are mutually beneficial (Krmpotich (2003), has produced inspiring discussion of und Peers 2013). The engagement work work with source communities, referred to she describes through this example has engagement’s original meaning by character- evolved out of long-standing co-creative izing it through “battles” over resources and work with people who brought contrasting power, “mutual obligations” between people, motivations to the project. Institutional and “sometimes difficult relationships”. representatives felt responsible to deal with A lot of the Pitt Rivers’ engagement work, colonial collections and wished to share she said, was with “minority groups who objects and negotiate knowledge, but were have lost access to power and resources, bound by institutional regulations and needs either within the narrow nation state or (something that Peers described as, “tick geopolitically”. the box” for funding bodies). And the Haida people who requested to assert control over Peers departs from a critique of muse- their material heritage, did so by “invad[ing] ums as spaces for “symbolic restitution” respectfully, without backing down”. Peers (Phillips 2003: 158). This, Peers argues, emphasized the importance of time for the creation of solid engagement between goes back to the idea of the civiliz- stakeholders and how this process required ing museum, as imparting culture, a patience to develop trustful relationships, one-way-model of communication. ingenuity and diplomatic skills. She used the We engage them und they pop out example of the renegotiation of institutional of the other side transformed. It is a regulations for handling objects to empha- lot more complicated than that […]. size her point:

From her perspective, transformation Haida delegates asked just as they through engagement work is not about always do, to dance with treasures changing the participants, but about insti- as a way to show respect to ances- tutional change. To illustrate an alternative tors and reconnecting with them. approach, and the complexities that come This was something we had never with this she provides the example of the done and we had to work the whole Haida Project. This collaborative project was issue starting from the directors

Engagement 71 The community member

office through conservation, col- What does engagement look like in an lection management and then back institution which does not have to deal with up again, but we finally worked with its own problematic histories? The District respect, very slowly, patiently with Six Museum in Cape Town resulted out of a Haida people and people around movement of people who “understood the the museum to arrive at a way role of importance that memory could play in where this could happen, where restitution and reclamation” as we learned there was a way of holding objects from Bonita Bennett. Before establishing and physically moving with them itself as the first anti-apartheid museum in that honoured both sets of con- South Africa, the privately funded museum cerns and we managed to do that. existed in different places and formats in Cape Town. Its collections were assembled This mindful process of engagement to commemorate District Six - as a cos- relied on reflexive practice, experience and mopolitan area in the city until 1966, when expertise about Haida artifacts and tradi- People of Colour were forcefully removed tions, as well as the contemporary struggles under the Apartheid-regime. Bennett points of collaboration partners. It managed to to the specifics of the collections, which build up trustful relationships between she describes as having grown out of an parties involved. It did not spread out into absence that in itself tells a very interesting, the museum’s surrounding community, and important story. In the early days of but dug deep into institutional structures the museum, there was no traditional way and values. This process may have caused of having a collection and then forming an bruises to the initial formal layout of the exhibition or the story around the collection. project. However, what evolved out of the The focus, as she remembers, was on the key long and intensive encounters, were robust features of this community that needed to and mature relationships. be commemorated, a lot of it being located in the sphere of the intangible. Bennett provided two examples to illustrate how the museum engaged with its communities. The first one, an oral history project, started off as a storytelling around rituals of food, and food-making, and rituals of the home in District Six. The second project aimed at collecting memories of people from various backgrounds regarding a specific place in Cape Town, the Peninsula maternity hospital.

In the case of District Six Museum, engagement is an essential aspect of the institution’s identity that draws on critical

72 pedagogical approaches like Paulo Freire’s those who have been marginalized. and constantly invests in close relationships. Possibly because I’m not located in Reciprocity is a key aspect of the museum’s an academic context, the scholarly daily work and very much needed in a discipline is neither the first nor the situation of political conflict and instability. only way in which I identify myself. Bennett points to the need to create spaces So the question that I always ask that facilitate opportunities for people to myself in my daily life, particularly really learn from each other, that encourage in my professional life is always diverse voices to speak out, especially those about how does my work contrib- from marginalized groups. ute towards supporting a culture of human rights, building a better “What do they of museums know who humanity which includes a better only museums know?“ - adopting writer’s me as well, which is ever more C.L.R. James’ quote52 to the museum engaged, informed, and caring. context, Bennett asked museum profes- sionals with this question to acknowledge District Six, it became clear, has a very the political dimensions of their individual different purpose and comes out of a differ- practices. Bennett’s ‘confessions’ about her ent origin than institutions organized around own disciplinary origin in sociolinguistics, collections and disciplinary knowledge. and her holistic understanding of expertise “But”, she says, referencing earlier discus- being comprised of both, professional sions during the Otherwise conference on knowledge and personal experiences as the challenges of decolonizing museums, activist, religious person, mother, provided “I offer it as an example of what is possible food for thought about the powers attrib- when one is freed from all of the other uted to disciplinary knowledge in museums. tensions.” Rather than approaching the museum as a keeper of knowledge, her point of entry was to use the museum “as a vehicle for doing so Providing services much good.” As for many people working in District Six, she is part of the community the and struggling with museum has been created for. This shapes engagement work in a way different from transformation other museums: What do engagement processes look My formative years as an activist like in one of Germany’s most prestigious in the 80’s has contributed greatly museum projects? Ute Marxreiter started towards shaping how I engage with out by presenting the institutional architec- the world: consciously, holistically ture of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, which and intentionally present to the oth- is going to open its doors to the public in ers in such engagement, especially autumn 2019. This massive project is led

Engagement 73 by a Gründungsintendanz, a group of three founding directors who were appointed On the other hand, the collections of the by the Federal Government Commissioner Ethnological Museum and the Museum of for Culture and the Media. Each of the Asian Art are going to be represented within institutions involved in this project, as the future Humboldt Forum, and Marxreiter Marxreiter exemplified by locating herself and her colleagues are busy developing within the organizational structure of Prus- and expanding the institution’s ways of sian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK), is engaging with publics. An example for this “supercomplex in themselves”: SPK unites is the development of an exhibition project five institutions under one roof, one of them in the Humboldt-Box, a temporary exhibition being the National Museums of Berlin (SMB), space, which is used to experiment with which houses 15 museum collections and ideas for the future Forum. As Marxreiter four institutes. Within SMB, professional explains, the idea for the project was pushed engagement work is considered a service forward by one of the founding directors provided by a cross-sectional unit, the who told the team to use objects from six Department for Education, Mediation and collections to create an exhibition on the Visitor Services. This is where Ute Marxreiter protection of children. Working together in is located, being assigned responsibility a new multidisciplinary team that had been for engagement work in the Ethnological setup top down and not yet able to develop Museum and the Museum of Asian Art. Her a common language and a concept to follow daily work includes juggling with stakehold- was challenging and time-consuming. ers from several institutional units. On the However, drawing on existing networks set one hand, engagement is steered through up by collection specialists with teachers in a central service unit that aims to apply the the Global South, a small co-creative project same standards for each museum. These was set up which resulted in a “library on standards are based on constructivist education”, in which pupils from Venezuela ideas about learning, framed around the reflected critically about ideas of education idea of a dialogue and put into practice and a movie about one of their core narra- through action-oriented projects. However, tives of partners. in contrast to District Six Museum, they are not inspired by ideas of critical pedagogy. As much as Marxreiter was convinced Working within the rather strict hierarchies by the transformative potential of the of a large national institution “limits your project for the future, she nevertheless spaces of agencies and what you can do”. reflected on it critically and with ambiguous In this setting, new museological claims feelings. for participation – while valued by many colleagues – has a ‘bad taste’ as this would When I look at the pictures of the run counter the institution’s logics, which installation we did for the exhibi- asks for services to be provided for as many tion, I always have these kinds of people and groups as possible. mixed feelings, because I’m not

74 presenting this here as a means the values and idea of (wo)man underlying it, to say that I’m ticking the box. (…) which are deeply ingrained in the (cultural) I’m very much interested in building political realities and institutional traditions up relations, taking time, listening of each museum. The panel clearly revealed and doing something very discrete the significance of national politics, but and slow and letting things emerge. more so those of the specific institutions But I’m very aware that these kinds presented. The institutional action of the of images, where experiences are District Six Museum, described by Bennett, turned into objects, or commodities, is aimed directly at overcoming racist struc- or spectacles, this can very easily be tures in contemporary society and is com- tokenized as a legitimization, say- mitted to deliberative democratic values. ing ‘we are doing the right thing at Commitment in this context means to allow the Humboldt Forum’. I don’t know ‘even the softest voices’ to speak out, and how this will play out in the future. leadership describes itself as peer among equals. The example from the Pitt Rivers Museum describes a representative-dem- Conclusion ocratic process in which delegates of the institution and an indigenous group negoti- We only had a little time to dive with our ate new rules of cooperation. It is notewor- panellists into their museum worlds, but thy that in both examples, engagement is what came out of all contributions was that understood as a cross-sectional task that a engagement work in museums has indeed range of professionals is involved in – “start- to do with personal commitments to people, ing from the director’s office through con- ideas, objects, and with being emotionally servation, collection management and then involved in different worlds at the same back up again”, as Peers describes it. Both time. It is about experiencing the liberating, examples show in an impressive way the limiting, or brutal effects of museum work, fruits of long-term, respectful and mutual and also battling over resources, rules, or cooperation to overcome asymmetrical structures. The term engagement, thus, power relations. If museums are able to work describes well the ambivalence of daily this way, the insecurities and feelings of dis- practices. satisfaction that the last panelist mentioned may be resolved. In the Humboldt Forum As a theoretical concept, however, the example, the character of engagement term appears too spongy and requires spec- work appears to be strongly determined by ification. This applies not only to different representatives of institutional elites, while theories and methods concerning learning comparatively little power, resources (e.g. in and education, but what becomes obvious terms of time) and scope for action is being is that we need to develop a vocabulary attributed to those working on the ground. that allows us to better grasp engagement’s This makes joint renegotiation of rules and political and sociological dimensions, e.g. social and epistemic privileges in the ways

Engagement 75 Speaker bios and original paper titles that, for example, Sternfeld (2012) suggests, Building knowledge, building community rather unlikely, or at least, very difficult to in District Six (Cape Town, South manage. Africa) Bonita Bennett was appointed as It is challenging to think museums director of the District Six Museum in otherwise, but it is even harder to ‘make’ 2008. Her professional training is as them otherwise. One way to understand an educator with strong anti-apartheid exactly what the difficulties with this are, activist roots. She completed her might be to develop a more comprehensive M.Phil in Applied Sociolinguistics at analytical vocabulary for these socio-polit- UCT in 2005, focusing on narratives of ical dimensions of engagement. This would trauma of people who had been forcibly need to reflect the fact that the concept, at removed from various areas in the its very core, is always about social rela- Western Cape. tions, and thus, about how museums and the professionals who work in them relate to Obligations, battles, relationships: one another and the worlds with which they museum anthropology and the praxis of are connected. engagement Laura Peers is Curator for the Americas Collections, Pitt Rivers Endnotes Museum, and Professor of Museum Anthropology, University of Oxford. 48 For more information on engage, see: https://www. Her research concerns historic engage.org/ (last accessed 18.4.2018. Indigenous visual and material culture 49 See for example the report onThe contribution of arts in North America and its roles within and culture to national economy (https://cebr.com/wp/ Indigenous societies today. Recent wp-content/uploads/2013/05/CEBR_economic_report_ work has included: The Great Box web_version_0513.pdf Project - Learning from the Masters: 50 See https://www.engage.org/advocacy facilitating the carving of a new 51 https://www.kubi-online.de/artikel/kultur-alle-kul- version of a masterpiece Haida box in turpolitik-sozialen-demokratischen-rechtsstaat the collections of the Pitt Rivers 52 In 1963, Trinidadian C.L.R. James, a cricket player, Museum, by Gwaai and Jaalen Edenshaw. commentator and writer wrote Beyond a Boundary, a In 2016, this partnership project memoir on cricket in which he pointed to the political won the Vice-Chancellor’s Award for aspects of the sport, especially its impact on racial Public Engagement with Research. Laura politics. Asking “whaWt do they of cricket know who only Peers has published various books cricket know?” suggests to consider the political as an and articles about public engagement integral part of each social activity. work, among them Museums and Source Communities (2003, together with Alison Brown) and This is Our Life: Haida Material Heritage and Changing

76 Author and chair

Museum Practice (2013; together with Christine Gerbich completed her Master Cara Krmpotich). in Sociology at Mannheim University and is currently a doctoral researcher at CARMAH. She is part of a team which Discussant focuses on ways in which Islam is represented in museums and heritage, Ute Marxreiter received a training looking at the transformation of in Theater Studies, Art History and engagement strategies within the English Literature. Before working Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. for several major museum institutions Her publications include the volume as curator of education (among them Neuzugänge – Migrationsgeschichten in Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Berliner Sammlungen (2013, together and documenta 12), she was involved in with Laurraine Bluche, Susan Kamel, several collaborative art projects. Susanne Lanwerd, and Frauke Miera), Since 2014 she has been working and Experimentierfeld Museum. as an educational curator for the Internationale Perspektiven auf Ethnological Museum and the Museum Museen, Islam und Inklusion (2014, of Asian Art in Berlin where she is together with Susan Kamel). responsible for the concept of the family-spaces of both museums in the Humboldt Forum.

Engagement 77 Literature cited

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly and Kim Herman- Krmpotich, Cara A. and Laura L. Peers. 2013. son. 1995. “Intrinsic Motivation in Museums: This is Our Life. Haida Material Heritage and Why Does One Want To Learn?” In Public Changing Museum Practice. Vancouver, BC: Institutions for Personal Learning. Establish- UBC Press. ing a Research Agenda, edited by John H Falk and Lynn D Dierking, 67–78 Washington, D.C.: Lindauer, Margaret A. 2007. “Critical American Association of Museums. Museum Pedagogy and Exhibition Devel- opment.” In Museum Revolutions. How Dodd, Jocelyn and Richard Sandell. Eds. Museums Change and are Changed, edited 2001. Including Museums. Perspectives on by Simon J. Knell, Suzanne MacLeod and Museums, Galleries and Social Inclusion. Sheila Watson, 303–314. London/New York: Leicester: RCMG. Routledge.

Falk, John H. 2009. Identity and the Museum Macdonald, Sharon. Ed. 1998. The Politics of Visitor Experience. Walnut Creek, California: Display. Museums, Science, Culture. London/ Left Coast Press. New York: Routledge

Falk, John H. and Lynn D. Dierking. 1992. Macdonald, Sharon. 2002. Behind the Scenes The Museum Experience. Washington, D.C.: at the Science Museum. Oxford: Berg. Whalesback Books. Mensch, Peter von. 1995. “Magpies on Mount Glaserfeld, Ernst von. 1985. “Reconstructing Helicon.” In Museum and Community, edited the Concept of Knowledge.” Archives de by Martin Schärer, 133–138. Stavanger: Psychologie (53): 91–101. Norway (ICOFOM Study Series).

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Engagement 79 Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH)

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin Faculty of Arts and Humanities Institute of European Ethnology Unter den Linden 6 10099 Berlin www.carmah.berlin

Acknowledgement We would like to thank all presenters and participants of the ‘Otherwise’ Symposium for their stimulating contributions. We are grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for financial support for the Symposium and this publication.

Text production and editing The essays in this collection were written by CARMAH researchers, based on panels they conceived and chaired during the ‘Otherwise’ Symposium held between 26 – 28 June 2017. All collectively played a role in reading, and commenting on, the texts, with extra editorial input from Sharon Macdonald and Jonas Tinius. The coordination of the publication was led by Jonas Tinius, with Farina Asche assisting with graphic design and layout.

Photographic material The photos in this report were taken by CARMAH researchers or by the panelists of the ‘Otherwise’ Symposium and have been included with their permission.

Graphic design www.milchhof.net

Typeface Graebenbach

Publication date 2018

Imprint CARMAH is grateful to receive support from multiple national and international partner organisations:

The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation is the main financial supporter of CARMAH. The majority of the centre’s work is funded through the prize money awarded to Sharon Macdonald as part of her 5-year Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. This includes, in particular, the activities of flagship projectMaking Differences.

CARMAH is a research centre of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (HU Berlin), which provides the infrastructure of CARMAH and employs our research and management staff. Moreover, the HU Berlin funds additional positions for CARMAH. The Institute of European Ethnology (IfEE) is the intellectual and physical home of CARMAH.

The Museum of Natural History Berlin (MfN) is a valued partner of CARMAH, funding a junior professorhsip in museum and science studies in order to support our research collaboration.

As the home of the National Museums in Berlin (SMB) and many other Berlin cultural institutions, as well as its role in the Humboldt Forum, the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (SPK) is a natural partner of CARMAH. The SPK funds a research position at CARMAH.

The European Commission funds the TRACES project, which employs two research positions for two Work Packages at CARMAH, via its Horizon 2020 Reflective Societies programme.