Tracing the ‘Anti-Colonial’: Through the Ethnological Landscape of Museums
Amidst the waves of the enduring traces of colonial legacies in Germany, from ethnological museums—such as the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum in Cologne—to street names and the overlooked histories of German colonization in Qingdao, China, as well as the history of the Benin Bronzes in popular culture, narratives of colonialism tend to receive minimal reflection in ‘official histories.’
Ana Carolina Schveitzer, in her research, titled “Making Germany’s Hidden Yet Omnipresent Colonial Past Visible,” specifically talks about how the museum landscape hinders historical reparations in Berlin—for instance, she talks about the non-European collection of the Pergamon Museum or the Neues Museum and how it lacks an official reflection on how such objects ended up in Berlin and the ethical measures that the museums adopted to display objects of cultural and spiritual significance (Schveitzer 2024, pp.161–76). This erasure is carried out through various institutions and in different forms of knowledge production.
This blog discusses a very specific form of knowledge production—the knowledge that is produced by an ethnological collection—in Europe and beyond, through the Anthropological Collection in the Indian Museum, Kolkata, to the Humboldt Forum and Rautenstrauch Joest Museum in Germany, and explores the idea of visitors’ affect through such spaces shrouded with colonial violence through personal experiences and academic interests.
Ethnological museums in the last few decades have been considerably debated as being reproducers of neo-colonial power relations as well as knowledge orders by adhering to popular representational practices. Ethnological collections are shaped by histories of violent displacement through wars, plunder, and looting. Under such circumstances, it becomes ever important for the ethnological museums to bring their practices under immense reflection and scrutiny (Grigo and Laely 2022, pp. 119–51).
My exposure to colonial entanglements within museum spaces started with occasional visits to the Indian Museum in my hometown, Kolkata, India. Initially referred to as the ‘Imperial Museum of Calcutta,’ it was constructed in 1814 by the Asiatic Society of Bengal, while India was under British rule. It is the oldest museum in the country and the largest in Asia (GuhaThakurta 2004 pp. 236-242). Locally referred to as the “Jadu-ghar,” or the house of curiosities, the imperial museum in the colony catered to colonial epistemologies of classification and ordering—the ‘Egyptian Gallery’ attracts the most visitors as everyone marvels at the Egyptian Mummy exhibited along with a mummified hand, which was claimed to be a ‘gift’ to the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1844. Given the colonial context of 19th-century India under British rule and the fact that Calcutta (Kolkata) was the capital of British India, the question of how and why these objects were displayed invites answers that arguably corroborate colonial plunder and violent displacements of cultural objects. It almost felt sinful to ‘marvel’ at such objects, which were eroded off their context of origin, worship, and memory.
Figure 1: The Egyptian Gallery at the Indian Museum, Kolkata, India. Picture by Indian Museum, Kolkata https://indianmuseumkolkata.org/gallery/egypt-gallery/ .
With my theoretically aided ideas on how colonial power is echoed through museum spaces, I had the chance to visit the Humboldt Forum, an ethnological museum at the heart of Berlin, as part of an excursion organised by the BCDSS in the 2-year MA program. The Humboldt Forum represented a very different trajectory of colonial encounters (Steckenbiller 2019 pp. 99-116). The silencing of cultural and spiritual subjectivities within the space was discursive, which only highlighted the effort of building a master narrative that disrupts the history of the objects. For example, “A Processional Bull Nandi” under display in the Humboldt Forum is an artwork of spiritual and historicalsignificance. However, the museum’s statement that “This processional figure came in 1987 as a present from a Swiss collector to the, at that time, Museum for Indian Art, and is today a special eye-catcher in the Humboldt Forum” (Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, n.d.) obscures the journey of the object from its origin to the market for ‘sale’, displacing it not only from its historical but also the spiritual and religious context to which it belonged; I was constantly bombarded with the ethical question of how I am supposed to feel amidst the objects and their narrative that is constructed throughout the space.
Figure 2: Cultural Artefacts on Display at the Humboldt Forum. Picture by Klaudia İnanç.
Since my visit to the Humboldt Forum, the need for a decolonial thought and practice was no longer up for debate, but a necessity. My thoughts and ideas on the coloniality of ethnological museums were further refined and contested through my internship days at the Rautenstrauch Joest Museum (RJM) in Cologne, which simultaneously nudged me to learn, unlearn, and relearn the episteme of the de-colonial. The Rautenstrauch Joest Museum comes with the by-line, “cultures of the world,” which confirms the colonial agenda of representation of the ‘self’ through the ‘other.’ The RJM’s historical background reveals that it was founded in 1901 as the ‘Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum of Ethnology’ in Cologne’s Südstadt district and was born out of some 65,000 objects from Oceania, Africa, Asia, and America, along with 100,000 photographs, and a collection of 40,000 books (Rautenstrauch‑Joest‑Museum Köln, n.d.). My first impression of the museum was significantly shaped by the permanent exhibition, which displays objects from various temporalities and spatialities, often brought together in a place where they are stripped off their context. Although many objects are displayed alongside a curatorial text, their agencies are usually consumed through the massive monochromatic walls that construct the space.
A striking contrast, however, is posed at the ‘I Miss You’ exhibition, which forms the metaphorical and literal central stage of the museum. The exhibition started with a video footage of an interview with Dr. Peju Layiwola, an art historian and visual artist from Nigeria, who is also the granddaughter of Oba Akenzua II, the Oba of Benin who ruled from 1933 to 1978, and also happens to be the co-curator of this particular exhibit (Layiwola, n.d.). Displaying her interview allowed the accommodation of cultural memory of the Benin Bronzes while extensively discussing the colonial premise of eventual displacement through raids and loot by British soldiers in 1897. This narrative of colonial acquisition being talked about gives a strong political backbone to the exhibition. This attempt to facilitate an empathetic understanding of history through the lens of belongingness and cultural memory, ownership, and mutual respect, while fostering a scope for dialogue, came across as the first trace of decolonial thinking against the ethnological infrastructure (Layiwola 2021).
An addition to similar curatorial practice was seen in the temporary exhibit, ‘The Invisible City,’ an artistic intervention into the permanent exhibition of the RJM. Centred around the history of German colonialism in Qingdao, co-curated by Jimmi Wing Ka Ho, the primary objects of display were over 200 photographs from the archive of RJM. These were originally published in Kolonie und Heimat, the official publication of the Women’s League of the German Colonial Society, published between 1907 and 1919, which was taken to celebrate the triumph of urban planning and spatial segregation and became the embodiment of German colonialism in Qingdao. This exhibit critically reflects on the idea of colonial photography as the founding premise of these photographs in the RJM.
The dialogue started by Dr. Lawiyola, continued through ‘The Invisible City,’ from Benin to Qingdao, the RJM showed clear and promising traces of transformation as both the exhibits channelised the intent of the museum to critically engage with counter-hegemonic knowledge practices. These two installations function as visions of a future of ethnological museums, curated with empathy and historical sensitivity, which acknowledge not only the need for restitution of cultural belongings but, parallelly, the restitution of cultural knowledge that makes up the objects.
The main project that I worked on, along with a group of Fellows, was to curate a weekend aimed at initiating a long-term initiative to confront and critically approach colonial legacies in the RJM. The ‘Yellow Room,’ situated in an intersection between the ‘I Miss You’ and the ‘The Invisible City,’ had the spatial advantage of being architecturally central to the museum and hence the ideal position for a Third Space. It was envisioned to continue the dialogue on the restitution of erased histories of subjugation and oppression, handled with responsible knowledge mediation. Although coming from diverse backgrounds, the team of Fellows, along with Vera Marušić from the RJM, collectively opined that although exhibitions had individually addressed the question of the colonial, no collective effort had been made to critically engage with the space or the collection it houses. We aimed to envision a space amidst the ethnological landscape that would go beyond objects while altering the form of museum engagement that usually exists in ethnological museums through the inception of the weekend program, which we collectively titled “Tracing the ‘Anti-Colonial.” It was our primary goal for this weekend to design a practice-based method that tends to explore and enquire ways in which the visitors can exercise more creative agency within the museum by actively co-creating knowledge, thereby contesting the authoritative knowledge-making tendency of ethnological museums. We achieved this by using music and putting together an anti-colonial playlist titled “Scoring The Resistance,” making zines, or engaging with an ‘anti-colonial’ library—a collection of books that feature narratives of colonial power structures and dependencies.
Figure 3: The Third Space at the RJM, the Yellow Room. Picture taken by the author.
Figure 4: Collection from the ‘Anti-colonial’ Library. Picture taken by the author.
Figure 5: A fragment of the ‘Anti-Colonial’ library. Picture taken by the author.
Our vision was to encourage critical reflection and the emergence and continuation of new academic paradigms. MA students from the BCDSS who attended the program and have spent some time within the space have critically reflected on and engaged with it through their positionalities and research interests. As Sonia Tesfaye states, “It was a joy to encounter familiar works and books connected to topics we had explored in past seminars at the BCDSS. The cozy and colourful arrangement of the space made it feel warm and inviting, almost like stepping into a creative home. Overall, the exhibition was not only visually and intellectually engaging but also participatory, emotional, and profoundly memorable” (Sonia Tesfaye Abebe). However, the space similarly aroused very contrasting perceptions: “What is curated here is courage, not closure. I remember practicing neutrality while interning in RJM, but it never fit. Here, in the Third Space, surrounded by looted objects, I felt anger braided with care. It is a room for conversation, yes, but it is also a waiting room for restitution” (Adiam Tadele Abadi).
Figure 6: MA Students from the BCDSS during the Zine Workshop. Picture taken by Tobi Bolaji Idowu.
Hooper Greenhill talks about the “transmission approach” within museum spaces where the visitors are “cognitively passive” and how such practices constitute a linear model of knowledge production which caters to Western hegemonic knowledge production (Hooper Greenhill 2000 pp. 9-31). Klaudis İnanç states along similar lines, “Museums are often replete with an unknown, difficult-to-decipher past. Sometimes the museum space remains empty, ready to be filled with people’s experiences and new perspectives on important topics. This is exactly what happened during the zine-making session. It created an additional layer in the museum that allowed us, the participants, to respond creatively to the colonial heritage” (Klaudia İnanç).
To conclude on a personal note, this internship helped me explore possible avenues of decolonial practice within ethnological museums through research work and curatorial practices, while attending to the issue of empathetic curation to cater to the visitor’s affect. It simultaneously presents the premise to conduct further research through the lens of strong asymmetrical dependency, in terms of the triad of power and agency—the space, object, and the visitor—while the Third Space at the RJM thrives to represent voices from around the globe to acknowledge silenced yet violent colonial histories.
Figure 7: The RJM Fellows (from left to right) Tobi Bolaji Idowu, Nayra Ramos, Prateeti Mukhopadhyay, and Vera Marušić, explaining the ‘Anti-Colonial’ project to the visitors. Picture taken by Nanette Snoep.
