“It’s the outsiders, after all, who do things. Who discovered the North Pole? Not the Esquimaux, but an outsider. Who are trying to climb Mt. Everest, the highest peak in the world? Not the natives of the Himalayas, but outsiders. And I’m willing to bet that an auto expedition across the Sahara would add more to the world’s knowledge than all the contributions by Arabs since the world began.”
“It may be, it may be, Frank,” admitted the professor.
—Victor Appleton (aka John W. Duffield), Don Sturdy on the Desert of Mystery (1925)
Despite his apparent ignorance of the origins of algebra and astrolabes, the professor is, we are told, a famous scientist whose chief pursuit is researching “the relics of dead civilizations.” He joins his big-game-hunting brother Frank and nephew Don in the Sahara to chase down objects from the “City of Brass” and the “Cave of Emeralds” for his employer, the International Museum and Menagerie Collection Corporation. The Don Sturdy series (1925–1935) is often mentioned as an inspiration for Indiana Jones, but Don was not the only fictional juvenile to be accompanied on his adventures by a kindly yet well-armed academic. In the early twentieth century the boldly venturesome ethnologist was a trope. And the fictional corporation mimicked real institutions in merging natural history with the artifacts of “old and dead” cultures, and in being none too particular about how they were acquired.
In the cause of “adding to the world’s knowledge,” human-made objects, human remains, and things that are both (like mummies and shrunken heads) were amassed in astonishing profusion by European and North American museums. These institutions had arisen within societies that saw nothing strange about Europeans and their dispersed progeny governing other peoples (but not the other way around), or making other peoples the subjects of academic study (but not the other way around), or taking loads of other peoples’ things (but not the other way around).
In its idealized self-vision, the discipline of ethnology aimed to document the cultural variety and evolution of our species. But “evolution” could be—and often was—twisted to suggest a hierarchy of Homo sapiens, from primitive to advanced. The inventors of this hierarchy naturally placed themselves at the top, and the Venn diagram overlap between the subjects of ethnology and the subjects of colonial occupation speaks for itself. This history is now the cause of embarrassment and public apology on the part of museums. But the collections are still with us. Adjustments have been made to the signage: the word “primitive” has been retired, and institutions that once proudly announced themselves as repositories of the colonized have been rebranded as “world museums.” Yet many still struggle to articulate a mission that doesn’t smack of fusty scholarship, cultural condescension, and worldviews best not mentioned.
No institution, perhaps, embodies more fully the field’s past optimism and present moral perils than Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum. Founded in 1873 with holdings from the Prussian royal Kunstkammer, it was envisaged as a resource for the analysis of Weltanschauung—a group’s shared way of understanding the world, expressed in everything from the nature of its gods to the making of its tools. The avid collecting habits of the museum’s first director, Adolf Bastian, received an important boost in the 1880s, when Germany entered the global empire game, grabbing bits of Africa, East Asia, and the South Pacific. By 1908 Bastian’s protégé, Felix von Luschan, could boast, “Our museum is the richest by a wide margin, and particularly from Africa we have ten times the amount of any other institution.”
The remainder of the twentieth century was harder on the museum. Important pieces of its African and Oceanian holdings were sold off during the inflation of the 1920s, and while most of the collection survived World War II, it was scattered between West Germany, East Germany, and the Soviet Union. An elegant new building opened in 1970 in the West Berlin suburb of Dahlem, adjacent to the Free University and the museums of Asian art and European painting. Reunification brought the collection back together, but in the twenty-first century the Dahlem building was deemed too small and, some argued, too out of the way. With the resurrection of the city’s historic Museum Island as a touristic showcase for German erudition, the decision was made to park the ethnology and East Asian collections in the Humboldt Forum, the spanking new replica of the onetime royal city palace.1
The funding, building, and filling of the Humboldt Forum were contentious matters in Germany, and the insertion of the ethnology collection in particular was widely seen as a cynical attempt to put a multiculti spin on a dubious exercise in Prussian nostalgia by furnishing the faux palace with objects purloined from German colonies. The timing of this local contretemps coincided neatly with growing international discussions about whether such stockpiling of other people’s belongings had ever been a legitimate endeavor, whether ethnology was a valid discipline, and what should be done with all the stuff collected in its name.
H. Glenn Penny’s In Humboldt’s Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology2 and Götz Aly’s The Magnificent Boat: The Colonial Theft of a South Seas Cultural Treasure3 appeared in Germany at the height of the Humboldt brouhaha and have recently been released in English. Together they give a good sense of the headwinds such museums face: both books dig into the history of the Ethnologisches Museum and its holdings, and both present strident solutions for how it should move forward. But apart from their disdain for the Humboldt Forum, they agree about nothing.
Penny, an American historian, is a defender of the ethnological faith, and Adolf Bastian is his hero. Inspired as a youth by the observational precision and comprehensive vision of Alexander von Humboldt’s travels in South and Central America, Bastian had set out in search of “the interconnection of all things,” Penny writes. And just as Humboldt had returned from his adventures with thousands of plants, hundreds of minerals, and at least one jar of guano, Bastian amassed examples of the things people make.
Chapter 1 of Penny’s book opens with the spectacular feather cloak sent as a diplomatic gift from the Hawaiian king Kamehameha III to the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm III in 1828. The story of the cloak’s passage from royal collectible to public ethnological exhibit is used to illustrate a central point: Kunstkammern had been intended as repositories of the strange and surprising—exceptions to a rule rather than data from which a rule could be derived. A museum that gathered large numbers of similar specimens, on the other hand, could reveal shared attributes and distinguishing features, as in botany, mineralogy, or zoology.
Bastian imagined a museum that would be to the history of the human mind what Berlin’s natural history museum was to the history of the universe. “It is only necessary,” he wrote, “to have a statistical arrangement of all the details before we may proceed to draw conclusions, once the compensatory formulas are found.” And as with any statistical analysis, the more data points (pots, totems, spears, feather cloaks), the better. He harried his superiors constantly for more space, but his collection outgrew it all.
There is a touch of Casaubon’s “Key to All Mythologies” in this pursuit of knowledge through accumulation, but where the fictional Casaubon shunned assistance, Bastian welcomed—indeed fostered—collaborators of all stripes. Penny describes with admiration the global network of German government officials, navy officers, and expat businessmen Bastian recruited to secure objects for his museum. Though not keen on colonialism in principle, Bastian recognized how German engagement in far-flung places could benefit his collection. He sent out wish lists with warships and suggested that ethnographers accompany the German campaign in China during the Boxer Rebellion, on the model of Napoleon’s savants in Egypt.
Felix von Luschan, Bastian’s assistant (and later director of the Africa and Oceania departments), was equally pragmatic. His careful study of human physiognomy and cultures had convinced him that racial “science” was self-serving hokum, but he happily pursued the skulls of victims of Germany’s first genocide, in present-day Namibia in the early twentieth century.4 Recognizing the Benin Bronzes as “the equal of contemporary European art,” he bought as much as he could of the loot that entered Europe after the British sacked the royal court in Benin City.
Both men were conscious of the destruction being visited on colonized people: “European influence acted like a poison that decomposes,” Luschan observed. But their awareness of these human tragedies only drove them to acquire more. Many ethnologists viewed Indigenous cultures as incapable of adaptation and therefore doomed to extinction. Such peoples—the “dead civilizations” pursued by Don Sturdy’s uncle—would be erased from history unless someone stepped in to preserve their artifacts. Bastian and Luschan seem to have seen their actions as akin to rescuing things from a burning house, though one might also see them as the museological equivalent of destroying the village in order to save it.
Penny admits that Bastian and Luschan entered willingly into “Faustian bargains” with colonial authorities, civilians, and the military. Yet the devil of his tale isn’t one of their dubious procurers but the respected turn-of-the-century director of the Berlin museums, Wilhelm von Bode. Bastian’s ideal museum was a place where viewers could see masses of specimens in one place and draw their own conclusions. But Bode was an art historian. His ideal museum was a place where objects were clearly organized, masterpieces highlighted, and visitor interest piqued through appealing displays. He was endlessly exasperated by what he considered the “intolerable overfill” and “senseless acquisition” of the ethnology collection.
This is the “tragic history” of Penny’s subtitle: in the bickering over institutional real estate, the ethnology collection was never granted enough space to display all its holdings at once. Art world practices were foisted on Bastian’s museum, he complains, in a “victory of form over substance” that forced it to betray its scholarly purpose by cherry-picking the material data on show. Given that it’s a book about German history, you might have braced yourself for something more horrific.
Götz Aly’s The Magnificent Boat, by contrast, is full of murder, kidnapping, forced labor, and engineered starvation—the laissez-faire genocide meted out in the decades leading up to World War I to Indigenous people in German New Guinea. A journalist and historian, Aly is best known for his work on the Third Reich, and his bailiwick is crimes against humanity, not comparative Weltanschauungen. His book documents various predations of the German Imperial Navy, acting on behalf of colonial plantation owners and traders, but its focus is the island of Luf, a two-square-mile smidge of land in the Hermit Islands atoll. “German intruders committed countless violent crimes in Papua New Guinea,” Aly writes, “but hardly any place was so thoroughly ruined as the small island of Luf.”
In retaliation for a skirmish with residents who objected to the establishment of a German trading station, the naval command in 1882 ordered warships to conduct a strategically disproportionate punitive attack. An unknown number of islanders were killed on the spot, and many more died in the aftermath from starvation and floods, from which they no longer had protection. Their main village was obliterated, and their houses, boats, tools, and food stores were destroyed. Some things nonetheless survived in good enough condition to be sent back to the museum in Berlin. Bastian later wrote, “As far as Oceania is concerned, the commendable service of the Imperial Navy should be celebrated.” One can question how much Bastian knew about what actually happened on Luf, though neither Aly nor Penny suggests he was prone to looking gift horses in the mouth.
The “magnificent boat” of Aly’s title was built on Luf some years after the attack and is one of the glories of the Berlin museum: a fifty-foot-long, two-masted outrigger vessel, intricately ornamented from stem to stern, assembled without a nail and capable of carrying dozens of people across open ocean. Unhappily, by the time the boat was finished, there were no longer enough men on the island to sail her. Or so the story goes; Aly has his doubts. What is certain is that in 1903 an executive of the same company whose trading station had indirectly triggered the Luf carnage took possession of the boat. (Aly concludes that he stole it.) Luschan—who recognized the boat as further proof of the technical and aesthetic genius of non-Europeans—bought it.
For Aly, the boat serves as a handy metonym for the museum itself—spectacular in its presence, with a legacy of German criminality, augmented by present-day relevance: in 2018 photos of the boat being hoisted through an unfinished wall in the Humboldt Forum made it an emblem of either cultural renewal or institutional hubris, depending on your politics.
Reading these two books back-to-back can induce a kind of moral whiplash. The academic discipline that Penny celebrates as the admirable product of Humbolt’s benign philosophy is Aly’s “child of colonialism.” Penny’s object-based “knowledge production” is Aly’s “compulsive collecting…reconceived as scholarship,” and Penny’s victimized institution is Aly’s “monument of shame,” founded not by a heroic humanist but by the ringleader of “‘Bastian’s network’ of thieves.”
They agree that the Humboldt Forum is a travesty, but for opposite reasons. Penny is outraged that most of the museum’s 500,000 items are still sitting in storage; Aly is outraged that it still has things to show. Arguing that there is no meaningful difference between an object seized by force and one acquired by trade from people made destitute by the buyer, Aly posits that “all items in all collections from the former German colonies were acquired illegally,” and proposes a prove-it-or-lose-it rule by which the museum would have to demonstrate the legal acquisition of all holdings or send them back to as near a rightful heir as can be found. The Luf boat, he suggests, could be ceded to the state of Papua New Guinea to “put it in a museum, sell it, or give it away.”
If Aly is darkly suspicious of just about everyone, Penny is disconcertingly blithe. He likes stories of Indigenous people—the king of Hawaii, a German family’s Guatemalan cook—who happily give away their belongings to white folks. He cites a 1997 visit from four Yup’ik elders to see their ancestors’ tools, clothing, toys, and weapons in Berlin, “collected just as Bastian had instructed…a cornucopia of memories and knowledge, all tied up in the physical articulations of Weltanschauungen.” The elders provided curators with information about a mask but did not ask for it back (it had been created for a onetime use). “The process of joint knowledge production is what most matters,” Penny notes approvingly. The question of why the onus of travel should fall on the Yup’ik to see their own creations is not raised.
What does get his goat are questions of display: as evidence that “not all was well” with the Dahlem museum in the 1970s, he quotes numbers showing that little more than 6 percent of the museum’s South Sea objects were on view. Equating off-site storage with incarceration, he argues that “it is time to set the collections free,” and suggests that adopting Bastian’s original plan for an open space with glass cabinets would allow viewers to “take in the totality of the collections.”
As most museum people know, however, 6 percent is not bad for a major collection. The American Museum of Natural History manages about 10 percent of its anthropology collection; at the Field Museum in Chicago the overall number is less than 1 percent. These numbers reflect the realities of floor space but also of human bandwidth. Glass cabinets or not, it’s hard to see how anyone could “take in the totality” of half a million objects. And yet all these institutions manage to be globally important sites of various forms of “knowledge production.”
Curiously, neither book discusses the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, though it is one of the most famous ethnological museums in the world, and arguably the one closest to fulfilling their divergent desiderata. Much of the Pitt Rivers collection is presented Bastian-style, chockablock in glass cabinets in a large atrium ringed with balconies that support more glass cabinets stuffed with more things. It looks nothing like an art museum and quite a lot like Humboldt’s mineral collection in the Berlin museum of natural history. At the same time, the Pitt Rivers curator Dan Hicks has been at the forefront of arguments for repatriation, having called, in his widely read 2020 book The Brutish Museums, for “the physical dismantling of the white infrastructure of every anthropology and ‘world culture’ museum.”
Pitt Rivers may be skirted because it shows the reality-tested limits of both writers’ proposals: all those densely packed vitrines make it possible to show about 5 percent of the collection, and while Hicks’s book sparked a lot of discussion about repatriation, very few Pitt Rivers artifacts have left the museum’s custody. It’s all more complicated than either writer has patience for. But the Penny and Aly books are not serious policy publications. Both have the feel of pithy, hot-take magazine pieces, tagged to the newsworthiness of the Humboldt Forum and padded out to justify a spine. In Germany both were chastised by specialists for factual errors, sloppy research, and misrepresentations.
This is too bad, because the questions they raise are important to all kinds of people in all kinds of locations. Whom should these collections serve? And how? It is important to expose heinous deeds of the past, but what is the best way to make amends in the present? In the name of justice, Aly wants to see the Berlin cultural machine exposed, shamed, and stripped of wealth; he is less concerned with where that wealth would go or whom it would benefit. In the name of knowledge, Penny thinks the collections should somehow be shoehorned into a single public space, but he never shows the math for how that might be done.
As it happens, though, they are both right about ethnology’s parentage: it is really the love child of colonialism and high-minded attempts to understand the structures of the human psyche. And like many an offspring of an unhappy marriage, it has gone off in search of “healing.” That’s a word often used in discussions about colonialism and collections. On the one hand it signifies a desire to remedy wounds inflicted on communities in places like Luf; on the other hand it refers to a more psychoanalytic attempt to force institutions to confront their own dark pasts. Clémentine Deliss, the controversial former director of Frankfurt’s Weltkulturen (World Cultures) Museum, described her institution in 2010
as a complex body with a severely ailing metabolism, afflicted organs, and blocked channels of circulation. To transform this condition would require careful nurturing, but also radical operations.
Deliss’s shock therapy involved reimagining the collection as a laboratory for contemporary artists and designers from around the world. The idea of using overlooked and underused bits of a collection to generate new meanings has obvious attractions. Art museums have been inviting living artists to play with their collections for decades, pulling obscure things out into public view, energizing audiences, and enticing them to see familiar things in a new way. Deliss’s interventions, however, brought her into conflict with conservators, and also with people who still connected with the objects’ original meanings: when told that visitors from Papua New Guinea would be “horrified” at the display of an Indigenous mask on a mannequin as part of a show by Australian fashion designers, Deliss was unfazed: “I replied that this assemblage represented a contemporaneous model of diasporic appropriation and hybridization common among the younger generation today.”
To her supporters, Deliss was prioritizing the needs of the living over the racist, colonialist, and entirely suspect ideas of dead ethnologists. But indifference to the past can look like disregard not just for the people who acquired an object but for the people who made it. Her abrupt firing in 2015 made Deliss a martyr in the eyes of reformers, though mainly of those within the world of contemporary art, where the imposition of new meanings on old things is part of the job description.
The rhetoric of healing, meanwhile, rolls on. Sometimes it means granting a degree of agency to people from places represented in a given museum’s holdings—inviting their involvement in research, public panels, or the creation of new art that responds to a collection and its history. All too often it just means noisy displays of remorse. Very, very rarely it means excising an object from the collection and sending it home.
Perhaps taking critiques like Aly’s and Penny’s too much to heart, the Humboldt Forum includes a display called Open Storage Africa: Appropriating Objects and Imagining Africa, in which artifacts and artworks are jammed together into display cases blazoned with information about colonial collecting and collectors—names, dates, locations—in a kind of postmortem doxing. The objects themselves are identified only by inventory number. With no information about who made them, when, or why, they are silenced—the weapons, the divination trays, the Nkisi Nkondi power figures bristling with nails, now just a mute chorus of anonymous victims. It’s not a great look.
The evidence of violence committed in pursuit of the “relics of [supposedly] dead civilizations” is beyond cavil, as is the possession by Western institutions of far more of those relics than is fair. Penny misidentifies the sin of storage—the real tragedy is that in amassing more things than they could reasonably use, ethnologists denied other people in other places access to meanings, histories, experiences, and “knowledge production” of their own. Increasing display space in Berlin does nothing to solve that.
The question is not whether Western museums should return some of their holdings but how many, and via what legal and social mechanisms. This is too big a question to tackle here. But in no conceivable universe is everything in all the museums going back home. So what are we to do with the rest? At the very least we owe some respect to the people who made these things, dead and gone though they may be, and also to their heirs. This means paying attention to the ideas and skills, the love and sorrow, the power they put into what they made.
The museum in Berlin has taken some useful steps toward transparency: a six-year-long digitization project has made 588,000 archive pages detailing provenance and acquisition histories accessible online. (It’s all in German, but still.) And together with its Humboldt housemate, the East Asian museum, it launched CoMuse: the Collaborative Museum, whereby “materialised relationships between the institutions and the communities of origin of these belongings are reactivated in a sensitive and just fashion for all involved.” Whether this is all just window dressing, time will tell. Meanwhile, this much seems clear: the “outsiders” have some explaining—and a lot of listening—to do.
English (US) · 