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14/09/20
 
About DCNtR:
DECOLONIZING COLLECTIONS – NETWORKING TOWARDS RELATIONALITY   Decolonizing – This blog is aimed at decentering the debate on colonial and ethnographic collections, archives, and museums. Its goal is to rethink colonial knowledges and dominant epistemic practices in an attempt to undo them. We seek to destabilize center-periphery divisions by providing a platform for diverse voices […]
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Felicity BodensteinCallum FisherMargareta von Oswald
17/07/18
From the brothers Humboldt to Jacques Chirac and back…
A report from the three-day work shop: Exchanging perspectives: anthropologies, museum collections and colonial legacies between Paris and Berlin (June 6-8, 2018) held at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) and at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW)
It was at the recently renamed ethnography museum in Hamburg (formerly Museum für Völkerkunde, today Museum am Rothenbaum, Kulturen und Künste der Welt) that a meeting was organized on the 18th of May, 2018 by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Goethe Institut with the rather long and awkward title: From “Frosty Deposits […]
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Faruzan AbulimitiArmin BestvaterKatharina FunkTobias GaschlerLea-Elisa JakobVanessa JüttnerCan KapcikAaron KlingerFelix LeikaufMarvin MarcksGesa MarxsenYosé-Gré ReendersKatharina SchrammCheyenne Thiel
10/07/18
Durch den Tunnel der Kritik zum Weitblick
Currently, this contribution exists only in the German version, translation under way.
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Souad Zeineddine
03/07/18
Imagine decolonizing the law – what would happen?*
*Translated by Jonathan DeVore and Julian Schmischke 7 June 2018: In the Schlüter courtyard of the German Historical Museum (DHM), I am waiting for interdisciplinary symposium “The Stone Cross from Cape Cross – Colonial Objects and Historical Justice,” to begin. I start to imagine what would happen if N’Jadaka, one of the main protagonists of […]
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Sarah van Beurden
19/06/18
The pitfalls of ‘shared heritage’
As a historian of museum institutions on the African continent, and as someone who has chronicled the histories of earlier disputes around restitution, I have been following the growing debates around the reinstallation of European museums with great interest. They are, at least in part, responsible for the recent revival of debates around the western […]
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Steffi de Jong
12/06/18
Lässt sich der koloniale Blick umdrehen?
Currently, this contribution exists only in the German version, translation under way.
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Andrea Scholz
29/05/18
Das Wissen der Anderen in der Provenienzforschung
Currently, this contribution exists only in the
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Fritz W. Kramer
22/05/18
Anthropological Collections
Not an apology but an amendment
Sometimes it needs a sensation to draw public and media attention to a problem that otherwise only experts are concerned with. Emmanuel Macron succeeded in doing so when on November 27th 2017 in Ouagadoudou he declared his intention to create “the conditions for a temporary or permanent restitution of African heritage to Africa within the […]
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Leonor Faber-Jonker
15/05/18
Touching history
Objects as witnesses, witnesses of objects
In Berlin, history is tangible. It strikes me every time I visit the city. Empty plots, fading shop signs, and crumbling facades bear witness to the city’s tumultuous past. Monuments bear scars. The bronze reliefs of the Siegessäule (moved to its current location by the Nazis) are pockmarked with 1945 bullet holes. After Germany’s reunification, […]
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Christian Kravagna
08/05/18
The museum of liberation
An excursion into the early history of reconquest
“Nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past. This at least the intelligent presentation of African Art will supply to us.” – Alain Locke, A Note on African Art, Opportunity, May 2, 1924 In his forward to the catalogue for the exhibition Blondiau – Theatre Arts Collection of Primitive African Art, which was […]
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Monica Juneja
01/05/18
What do we know when we see?
Or how can museums of “the world” renew cultural geographies? A view from the State Museums of Dresden
Museums that have built collections of “world cultures”, known to us today as either ethnological or the more encompassing, encyclopedic museums, have not ceased to be the subject of impassioned debates. Even a cursory glance through the diverse and insightful contributions to this blog give us a sense of the poles along which deliberations over […]
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