A01=Margareta von Oswald
Author_Margareta von Oswald
Category=JH
Category=JHM
colonial legacies
colonial museum collections
colonialism
eq_bestseller
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
ethnological museum
Product details
- ISBN 9789462703100
- Weight: 695g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 08 Nov 2022
- Publisher: Leuven University Press
- Publication City/Country: BE
- Product Form: Paperback
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Reckoning with colonial legacies in Western museum collections
What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin's Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections.
Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum's various work practices, this book highlights the Museum's embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum's everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum - the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections - and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum's present - processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn.
Free ebook available at OAPEN Library, JSTOR, Project Muse, and Open Research Library
Margareta von Oswald is a research fellow at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin.
