{"id":10246,"date":"2022-10-25T16:00:35","date_gmt":"2022-10-25T14:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/?post_type=humboldt&p=10246"},"modified":"2026-06-01T11:35:26","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T09:35:26","slug":"the-post-colonial-museum","status":"publish","type":"dcntrdebates","link":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/dcntr-debates\/debate-3\/the-post-colonial-museum\/","title":{"rendered":"Introduction: Transforming the Post\/Colonial Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Post\/Colonial Museum. Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschaften, 2022. ISBN:\u00a0978-3-8376-5397-7. Covergraphik Post-Museen, Anna Habaschy aka Minaechx<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Much has been said in recent years about the colonial origin and enduring legacy of former \u201canthropological\u201d or imperial museums. Programmatic attempts to decolonize them by opening up (Snoep 2020, 2021), worlding (Modest et al. 2019, de Cesari et al. 2020), mobilizing (Oforiatta-Ayim 2015ff), unlearning (Azoulay 2019), repairing (Attia 2014), and restituting (Sarr\/Savoy 2018) have multiplied in the museum sector. At the same time, new centers of museum work have emerged, especially on the African continent. Be it in Dakar, Accra, Cape Town, or Nairobi, artists and curators have been working successfully to redefine the museum and to establish new hotspots of an increasingly globalized art scene.[1]<\/sup><\/a><\/p>\n

Following the \u201cMuseum Collections in Motion\u201d conference in Cologne, emerging and established museum practitioners and researchers from the African continent have come together to share how they, in their respective work, rethink \u201cethnographic collections\u201d and undo the problematic category of the \u201cethnographic object\u201d<\/p>\n

Contributions by Nelson Abiti (Kampala), Lynn Abrahams and Paul Tichmann (Cape Town), as well as Mary Mbewe (Mbala) are supplemented by a close reading of the exhibition \u201cBeyond Compare. Art from Africa in the Bode-Museum\u201d by Helen Verran who attends to the \u201clong overdue\u201d redesign of museum epistemics. In a second part, Richard Tsogang Fossi (Cameroun) and Bernard M\u00fcller (Togo) deal with the historical conditions and surviving memories of colonial collectivism and violence that bring about this sense of urgency that characterizes the ongoing museum debate. A third focus is on the historical trajectories, contemporary challenges, and utopian designs of museum work on the continent. We start this series of posts with two conversations with renown museum experts from the Ivory Coast and from Cameroun\/Paris\u2013 one with the former director of the Museum of Civilizations, Abidjan and current Director General for the Culture of the Ivory Coast, Dr. Silvie Kassi (with Nanette Snoep and Martin Zillinger), and another conversation with the artist and director of Bandjoun station Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my Toguo (with Anna Brus and Bernard M\u00fcller). A third contribution by our colleague Sabrina Moura looks at the history of the Museum of Black Civilisations in Dakar.<\/p>\n

All contributions, which will appear on the DCNtR blog over the next weeks, engage with objects and object practices in order to reach out to people. They can be read as part of the struggle to find new ways of \u201cfederat[ing] around a conversation\u201d that researchers and artists such as Kader Attia and Felwine Sarr have identified at the actual core of the restitution debate (Attia\/M\u00f6ntmann 2021).<\/p>\n

In various ways, instead of adding to the debate on the (im-)possibilities of addressing the colonial specters within collections in Europe, these contributions zoom in on this other phantom of the colonial past, the anthropological museum as it was implemented on the African continent as part of colonial governance and control. Their work testifies that by creating spaces for \u201cepistemic incommensurability\u201d and \u201contological happenings\u201d, anthropological museums can turn into what Helen Verran describes as sites of \u201cmultiversal relationality\u201d. This changes what objects \u201care\u201d, how they are categorized or \u201cknown\u201d, and what they allow for, once they cease to be merely modern \u201clumps of matter with particular attributes and qualities\u201d (Verran this debate), that illustrate and characterize \u2018ethnographic cases\u2019 (cf. Ingold 2017). With Helen Verran we contend that, to envision a postcolonial museum, it is necessary to describe its colonial modalities,\u00a0and to search for a postcolonial impulse that consists of and enables \u201cdifferent epistemics and their practicalities to come together to abut and abrade, to interrupt or to offer affordances\u201d in past and present (Verran 2019: n.p.).\u00a0Such impulses create a museum that is not only transforming, but that may also incite transformation well beyond its walls, as the authors of this debate demonstrate by engaging communities and their object practices in their museum work. We speak of a Post\/Colonial<\/i> museum to mark these and other attempts and ongoing struggles to deal with and ultimately oppose the colonial make-up of former anthropological museums and to interrupt the musealized epistemic, ontological, and social orders they embody.<\/p>\n

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Bandjoun station, front side with wall painting, Toguo et al. 2022, p.138, photo: Barth\u00e9l\u00e9my Toguo<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Object Lessons in Power<\/strong><\/p>\n

While the papers collected for this debate deal with museums on the continent, it would be misleading to speak of an \u201cAfrican museum\u201d. The historical, political, and economic contexts of the various museums, collections, and curatorial practices vary, as do the ways they remain entangled in the bequeathed transnational history of dominance and control on the one hand and of cooperation on the other (cf. Laely\/Meyer\/Schwere 2018)\u00a0Still, most of them struggle with colonial legacies and the continuous purification work of modernity that has separated \u201cart\u201d from \u201cethnographic artefact\u201d, \u201cculture\u201d from \u201cnature\u201d, \u201csubject\u201d from \u201cobject\u201d, and \u201cmatter\u201d from \u201cspirit\u201d.<\/p>\n

Built and run by white colonialists, former anthropological museums on the continent, served to define the Other within and, for a long time, have presented the deprived communities and their material culture in an unchanging ethnographic present (Fabian 1982), classified, ordered, and controlled by the invention of categories such as ethnicity, tribalism, and tradition. By transplanting the modern museum into colonized regions, the administrators and missionaries translated European imperial discourse on the Other into the societies they had to control. As we learned from Tony Bennett (1988), in Europe, the public museum served to provide \u201cobjects lessons in power\u201d to \u201callow people to know rather than be known\u201d and to thus interiorize the regulating regime of modernity and modern statehood. While object lessons in power were pursued by museum practitioners-cum-colonialists on the continent, too, in many ways, the museums they founded remained until very recently spaces of being known and were, for good reasons, perceived as the \u201cmuseums of the whites\u201d (see Kassi\/Snoep\/Zillinger, this debate).<\/p>\n

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Fig. 3: Artifacts labeles as \u201eWar Fetishes\u201d at the Ethnography gallery, Uganda Museum. From: Abiti 2022, p. 34, photo: Nelson Adebo Abiti<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Museums were part of technologies to turn people into colonial subjects that needed to be \u201ccivilized\u201d and adapted to the needs and constraints of extractivist colonial regimes. Europeans implementing the extractivist policies were often aware of the destruction they caused, but saw this as inevitable concomitants of their \u201ccivilizing\u201d and \u201csalvaging\u201d mission. As some of the contribution to this debate demonstrate, artifacts were either gathered by the colonizers to become objects of culture, and thus precious for anthropology and the colonial administrators, or they were not only not worth being preserved, but often, in a gesture of brutal demonstration of power, demolished and smashed. With independence, the museums of the colonizers passed into the hands of the postcolonial states. The racist and modernist regimes that structured the archive, the collections, the display, and the architecture of these citadels of colonialism have endured into the present and have long continued to prevent the appropriation of the holdings by the very people whose former subject-objects (Sarr 2019) they hold and whose histories and futures they claim to administer. The Post\/Colonial Museum<\/i><\/b> is therefore marked by a painful and paradoxical relation to the social place it inhabits. For the visitors, who often encounter objects from and histories of a past they have been deprived of, the museum experience oscillates between total alienation and intense affinity.<\/p>\n

Overcoming Spaces of Death<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the contributions to this debate show, museums are perceived by many as spaces of death for the objects they draw together and for the social functions and practices these objects symbolize and contain. The dynamics of <\/b>ritual practice and the delegation of authority, the memorizing of events, genealogies, and tradition, and the transmission and reinvention of knowledge constitute material objects as relational objects (cf. K\u00fcchler and Carroll 2021) and stand in stark contrast to the frozen and static storage of museum depots and the ethics of preservation that characterize the material culture in Europe\u2019s imperial museums.<\/p>\n

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Fig. 4. View into the Depot, Museum of Civilizations, Abidjan, from Kassi 2022, p.130, photo: Museum of Civilizations<\/em><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Much of the current debate on decolonizing the museum centers on how the immobilized and devitalized objects confined within museum walls (Marker\/Resnais\/Cloquet 1953) can regain an agentive quality and help rebuild the social fabric that has been distorted and disfigured by colonial and postcolonial violence. In their contributions, authors to this debate describe how objects in museums can be known, be enacted, and come to the fore differently from the way they were \u201cknown\u201d, preserved, and practiced in the long history of their colonialized, institutionalized, and museumized existence.<\/p>\n

Anthropological museums \u2013 and by extension anthropology as a discipline \u2013 have produced knowledge that continues to be in dire need of decolonization, as critical social and anthropological work has emphasized for decades (see, among many others, Assad 1973, Restrepo and Escobar 2005, Fabian 1983, Ganslmayr and Paczensky 1984, Harms 1984, Leclerc 1972, Owusu 1979, Rabinow 1977). But it is perhaps not by chance that museums \u2013 and academic anthropology \u2013 are currently both, hot spots of political and social controversies on colonialism and its afterlife, and spaces that provide decolonizing knowledge.<\/p>\n

These spaces are created whenever anthropology is pursued in a mode of mutual learning that aims at generating \u2018knowledge with\u2019, instead of generating \u2018knowledge of\u2019 (Ingold 2017), at establishing \u2018partial connections\u2019 (Strathern 2004) rather than universalizing classifications, and at decentering established orders of knowledge rather than legitimizing them. The contribution by the artist Catarina Sim\u00e3o, to be published in the next weeks as part of this debate, unearths histories excluded from the colonial narrative with her multi-layered juxtaposition of photos, documents, and films (Sim\u00e3o 2022).\u00a0She explores the work of the German-Portuguese anthropologists Dias, who headed an ethnographic mission to the Macondes. While their work is deeply enmeshed in the colonial matrix of applied anthropology of the time, Sim\u00e3o regards the collection generated by their mission as an \u201coriginal creative act\u201d. Although the photographic inventory fostered concepts such as \u201cauthenticity\u201d (sought by the anthropologists) and accounted for \u201ccoloniality\u201d (enacted through their work), she uncovers seeds of resistance in the documents of their cooperation with research assistants and translators, and particularly in art practices they encountered. Sim\u00e3o\u2019s experiments with different audience reactions to the sculptures of white Portuguese colonizers demonstrate that, today, the \u201cethnographic object\u201d cannot be perceived in any way near to the way its originators or its collectors saw it. The responses to the art works are situated in space and time, they differ from setting to setting and are part and parcel of the different ways a historical \u201ctruth\u201d is remembered.<\/p>\n

As all contributions to this debate testify, there is a long way to go to forge and shape partial connections that lend themselves to new forms of co-operation, in European as much as in African settings. We may be more successful if, along the way, we create spaces of mutual learning that, in the words of the grand dame in the anthropology of learning and change Jean Lave, provide for transforming the relations to our various past and future selves (Lave 2019).<\/p>\n

A longer version of this introduction is published in the Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschaften<\/i><\/a>, issue \u201cThe Post\/Colonial Museum\u201d<\/a>, 2022, p 11-28.\u00a0<\/span> In order to make the issue \u201cThe Post\/Colonial Museum\u201d<\/a> available to a wide readership, specifically on the African continent, we decided to use the long standing collaboration between boasblogs<\/i> <\/a>and the Zeitschrift f\u00fcr<\/i> Kulturwissenschaften<\/i><\/a> to simultaneously publish all contributions in print and online (as DCNtR debate). We thank the editorial boards of both, the Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschaften<\/i><\/a> and the boasblogs<\/i><\/a>, as much as the publishing house transcript<\/i> for embarking on this project together. Furthermore, our thanks go to the participants of the conference on\u00a0Museum Collections in Motion, which was generously supported by the Global South Studies Center, University of Cologne<\/a>, the research platform \u201cWorlds of Contradictions\u201d, University of Bremen<\/a>, the Museumsgesellschaft of the Rautenstrauch- Joest- Museum<\/a> and the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany. Most of all, we thank the contributors to this debate for four years of exchange, debate and intellectual companionship.<\/p>\n

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Footnotes<\/strong><\/p>\n

[1]<\/a>A longer version of this introducton is published in the Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschafen, issue \u201cThe Post\/Colonial Museum\u201d, 2022, p.11-28, https:\/\/www.transcript-verlag.de\/978-3-8376-5397-7\/the-post\/colonial-museum\/<\/a><\/p>\n

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Reference<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n

Abiti Adebo, Nelson (2022): \u00bbThe Uganda Museum’s Tribal Representation: Colonial Repositories and\u00a0Community Reconciliation in Uganda\u00ab In: Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschaften 2\/2021, 29-46.<\/p>\n

Asad, Talal (Ed.) (1973): Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter<\/i>, London: Ithaca Press.<\/p>\n

Attia, Kader (2014): The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures<\/i>, Berlin: The Green Box.<\/p>\n

Attia, Kader\/M\u00f6ntmann, Nina (2021): \u00bbThe Decolonizing Agency of Repair. Objects, Epistemologies<\/p>\n

and the Neoliberal Value System\u00ab. In: Museums in Motion Workshop Series<\/i>,<\/p>\n

https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/dcntr\/the-decolonizing-agency-of-repair\/ (23.07.2021).<\/p>\n

Azoulay, Ariella A. (2019): Potential History. Unlearning Imperialism<\/i>, London, New York: Verso.<\/p>\n

Bennett, Tony (1988): \u00bbThe Exhibitionary Complex\u00ab. In: new formations<\/i> 4:1, 73\u2013102.<\/p>\n

De Cesari, Chiara\/Goodwin, Paul\/Juneja, Monica\/Modest, Wayne\/Tiampo, Ming (2020): Trans-Atlantic Platform \u2013 Social Innovation (T-AP-SI) Grant \u2013 Worlding Public Cultures: The Arts and Social Innovation.<\/i><\/p>\n

Fabian, Johannes (1983): Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object<\/i>, New York:\u00a0Columbia University Press.<\/p>\n

Ganslmayr, Herbert\/Paczensky, Gert von (1984): Nofretete will nach Hause. Europa \u2013 Schatzhaus der\u00a0<\/i>\u203aDritten Welt\u2039<\/i>, Munich: Bertelsmann Verlag.<\/p>\n

Harms, Volker (1984) (Ed.): Andenken an den Kolonialismus. Ausstellungskataloge der Universit\u00e4t\u00a0<\/i>T\u00fcbingen Nr. 117<\/i>, T\u00fcbingen: Attempto.<\/p>\n

Ingold, Tim (2017): \u00bbAnthropology contra Ethnography\u00ab. In: HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory<\/i> 7:1, 21\u201326.<\/p>\n

K\u00fcchler, Susanne\/Carroll, Timothy (2021): A Return to the Object. Alfred Gell, Art, and Social Theory<\/i>,\u00a0Oxon, New York: Routledge.<\/p>\n

Laely, Thomas\/Meyer, Mark\/Schwere, Raphael (2018): Museum Cooperation between Africa and\u00a0<\/i>Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies<\/i>, Bielefeld: transcript.<\/p>\n

Lave, Jean (2019): Learning and Everyday Life: Access, Participation, and Changing Practice<\/i>,\u00a0Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.<\/p>\n

Leclerc, Gerard (1972): Anthropologie et Colonialisme<\/i>, Paris: Fayard.<\/p>\n

Marker, Chris\/Resnais, Alain\/Cloquet, Ghislain (1953): Les Statues Meurent Aussi<\/i>, Essay Movie, France.<\/p>\n

Memel-Kassi, Silvie\/Snoep, Nanette J.\/Zillinger, Martin (2022) \u00bbThe Post\/Colonial Museum: Rethinking the Past, Collecting the Present. A Conversation between Dr. Silvie Memel-Kassi, Nanette Snoep and Martin Zillinger.\u00ab In: Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschaften 2\/2021, 123-136.<\/p>\n

Modest, Wayne\/Thomas, Nicholas\/Prli\u0107, Doris\/Augustat, Claudia (2019): Matters of Belonging.<\/i><\/p>\n

Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe<\/i>, Leiden: Sidestone Press.<\/p>\n

Snoep, Nanette J. (2020): \u00bbDe la ConServation \u00e0 la ConVersation. Le Pari de la Carte Blanche\u00ab. In:\u00a0Multitudes<\/i> 78, 198\u2013202.<\/p>\n

Oforiatta-Ayim, Nana (2015ff.): \u00bbMobile Museums-Projects\u00ab, https:\/\/www.anoghana.org\/mobilemuseums (19.08.2021).<\/p>\n

Owusu, Maxwell (1979): \u00bb<\/i>Introduction\u00ab. In: Colonialism and Change: Essays Presented to Lucy Mair<\/i>,\u00a0ed. by Maxwell Owusu, Berlin: De Gruyter, 17\u201324.<\/p>\n

Restrepo, Eduardo\/Escobar, Arturo (2005): \u00bb\u203aOther Anthropologies and Anthropology Otherwise\u2039.\u00a0Steps to a World Anthropologies Framework\u00ab. In: Critique of Anthropology<\/i> 25:2, 99\u2013129.<\/p>\n

Rabinow, Paul (1977): Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco<\/i>, Chicago: Chicago University Press.<\/p>\n

Sarr, Felwine (2019): Afrotopia<\/i>, trans. by Max Henninger, Berlin: Matthes & Seitz.<\/p>\n

Sarr, Felwine\/Savoy, B\u00e9n\u00e9dicte (2018): The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage: Toward a New Relational Ethics<\/i>, http:\/\/restitutionreport2018.com\/sarr_savoy_en.pdf (19.08. 2021).<\/p>\n

Sim\u00e3o, Catarina (2022) \u00bbEvidence and Fiction: An Untimely Alliance with the Photography Archive of Margot Dias and Jorge Dias\u00ab In: Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschaften 2\/2021, 167-204.<\/p>\n

Snoep, Nanette J. (2021): \u00bbIt\u2019s Yours! 4 Autonomous Spaces\u00ab. In: Resist! The Art of Resistance<\/i>, Exhibition,Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum, Cologne 2021\/22, http:\/\/rjm-resist.de\/en\/its- <\/a>19.08.2021).<\/p>\n

Strathern, Marilyn (2004): Partial Connections<\/i> (Updated Edition), Oxford: Alta Mira Press.<\/p>\n

Verran, Helen (2019): Joke: Papua New Guinea, 1998<\/i>, unpublished manuscript, n.p.<\/p>\n

Verran, Helen (2022): \u00bbTrafficking Vague Cosmological Boundaries: Towards Knowing Experiential\u00a0Relationality in Museum Epistemics\u00ab In: Zeitschrift f\u00fcr Kulturwissenschaften 2\/2021, 149-166.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

Dr. Anna<\/strong> Brus <\/strong>is an art historian at the University of Cologne. In her research and curatorial activities, she works on the history of science of art (history) and ethnology, on exhibition practices of modernity, the entangled history of colonial collections and their echo in the post-migrant present. Most recently, she curated the exhibition \u201cSpectral-White. The Appearance of Colonial Europeans\u201d at HKW, Berlin (2019 \u2013 2020). She is a member of the DCNtR blog collective.<\/em><\/p>\n

Prof. Dr. Martin Zillinger <\/strong>is Professor for Social and Cultural Anthropology and Speaker of the Center for Media\u00a0Studies\u00a0and Modernity Research at the University of Cologne<\/a>. His recent publications include „The social origin of thought: Durkheim,\u00a0Mauss and the category project\u201c<\/a> (Berghahn 2022, ed.\u00a0with Johannes F.M. Schick and Mario Schmidt), „Rethinking the Mediterranean“<\/a> (Journal of Social and Cultural Anthropology 2020, ed. with Simon Holdermann,\u00a0Christoph\u00a0Lange and Michaela Sch\u00e4uble), and „Iconoclasm and the Restitution Debate“<\/a> with Anna Brus and Michi Knecht. In: HAU \u2013 Journal of Ethnographic Theory 10 (3): 919-927. He is co-editor of the boasblogs.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"autor":[35,40],"dcntrdebates_blog":[800],"class_list":["post-10246","dcntrdebates","type-dcntrdebates","status-publish","hentry","autor-anna-brus","autor-martin-zillinger","dcntrdebates_blog-debate-3"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates\/10246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/dcntrdebates"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"version-history":[{"count":50,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates\/10246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10349,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates\/10246\/revisions\/10349"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"autor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/autor?post=10246"},{"taxonomy":"dcntrdebates_blog","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/boasblogs.org\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/dcntrdebates_blog?post=10246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}