Peggy Buth: Opening speech of Bernhard Hagen on the occasion of the opening of the Völkermuseum in Frankfurt am Main, held in the house Münzgasse no. 1 on the 22nd of October 1904, performance by Peggy Buth, video stills, HD video, 16:9, 37:57 min, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013

Peggy Buth: Opening speech of Bernhard Hagen on the occasion of the opening of the Völkermuseum in Frankfurt am Main, held in the house Münzgasse no. 1 on the 22nd of October 1904, performance by Peggy Buth, video stills, HD video, 16:9, 37:57 min, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013

 

Peggy Buth

*1971 in Berlin, lives and works in Berlin and Leipzig.

She studied Fine Arts at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, at Central Saint Martins in London, and the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She has exhibited widely nationally and internationally, including at the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen K21, Düsseldorf, the Exhibition Research Centre Liverpool John Moores University, the Parc Saint Léger centre d’art contemporain and the Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart. She is represented by Klemm´s Gallery, Berlin.

The installation by Peggy Buth was commissioned by Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main, in the context of the current exhibition »FOREIGN EXCHANGE (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger)«, 16th January 2014—4th January 2015. The text ALL OF US TRAUMA, REPRESSION, AND GHOSTS IN THE MUSEUM was commissioned by Weltkulturen Museum and published in: Clémentine Deliss, Yvette Mutumba (eds.), »FOREIGN EXCHANGE (or the stories you wouldn’t tell a stranger«, (Berlin, Zurich: diaphanes, 2014), pp. 269—286.

 

Peggy Buth: »All of Us«, Trauma, Repression, and Ghosts in the Museum, mixed media installation in 4 parts, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013, photo: Wolfgang Günzel

Peggy Buth: »All of Us«, Trauma, Repression, and Ghosts in the Museum, mixed media installation in 4 parts, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013, photo: Wolfgang Günzel

Kubai figure in the Weltkulturen Museum Depot, Osthafen, Frankfurt am Main 2013, photo: Armin Linke

Kubai figure in the Weltkulturen Museum Depot, Osthafen, Frankfurt am Main 2013, photo: Armin Linke

Installation view, Peggy Buth: Der Krieger als Multiple, 4 show puppets (Kubai-Figur) loans from the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, the Naturmuseum und Ethnologischen Sammlung des Städtischen Museums Freiburg, the Historischen und Völkerkundemuseum St. Gallen and the Museum für Völkerkunde Burgdorf, Switzerland, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013, photo: Wolfgang Günzel

Installation view, Peggy Buth: Der Krieger als Multiple, 4 show puppets (Kubai-Figur) loans from the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, the Naturmuseum und Ethnologischen Sammlung des Städtischen Museums Freiburg, the Historischen und Völkerkundemuseum St. Gallen and the Museum für Völkerkunde Burgdorf, Switzerland, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013, photo: Wolfgang Günzel

Historical postcard, »Papua from Astrolabe Bay, German New Guinea«, Städtisches Völker-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, published by Ludwig Klement, Frankfurt am Main, 1906, Weltkulturen Image Archive

Historical postcard, »Papua from Astrolabe Bay, German New Guinea«, Städtisches Völker-Museum, Frankfurt am Main, published by Ludwig Klement, Frankfurt am Main, 1906, Weltkulturen Image Archive

Report of the Rheinische Mission, Vol. 102, March 1952, No. 3, Archiv- und Museumsstiftung der Vereinten Evangelischen Mission

Report of the Rheinische Mission, Vol. 102, March 1952, No. 3, Archiv- und Museumsstiftung der Vereinten Evangelischen Mission

Installation view, Peggy Buth: Das Archiv der Missionare, 3 Pigment Prints (360 x 90 cm, 450 x 90 cm), glass, tables, a selection of pictures from the Weltkulturen Image Archive, typography: Till Gathmann, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013, photo: Wolfgang Günzel

Installation view, Peggy Buth: Das Archiv der Missionare, 3 Pigment Prints (360 x 90 cm, 450 x 90 cm), glass, tables, a selection of pictures from the Weltkulturen Image Archive, typography: Till Gathmann, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013, photo: Wolfgang Günzel

Peggy Buth: Das Archiv der Missionare, detail, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013

Peggy Buth: Das Archiv der Missionare, detail, in collaboration with the Weltkulturen Museum Frankfurt am Main, 2013

ALL OF US

TRAUMA, REPRESSION, AND GHOSTS IN THE MUSEUM

by Peggy Buth



INVITATION TO A CRISIS
The Weltkulturen Museum’s invitation to create an artwork as part of an encounter with its collections came at an anxious time for German ethnographic museums. Some described the institutions as crisis-ridden and outmoded, others as facing the challenge of new beginnings. In the past ten years, many ethnographic museums in Germany have reconceptualised and restructured their permanent exhibitions, rebuilt them completely or even dissolved them. Often, the museums’ names and leadership have changed.

There are many different visions of how these institutions can survive. Each of the museums is both willing and obliged to justify its own agenda, define the principles of its own continued existence and put them into practice. Recent years have seen numerous conferences and symposia on the reconception and presentation of anthropological collections. At one of these events, I was able to observe at first hand the discourse of the ethnographic museums as they worked to reposition themselves and deliberated on how to deal with the collections in the future.1

Without providing a detailed report or analysis of that meeting, I would like to outline some points that struck me during the discussion. It became clear, for example, that questions around representations of the »Other« are still perceived as being more urgent than questions around processing and portraying the history of such representations. There seemed to be no acknowledgement that the process of anthropology’s incorporation in the disciplinary landscape was closely associated with colonial history and, as such, inextricably linked to the history of the foundation of ethnographic museums and of their collections. Virtually no mention was made of the direct relationship between this act of repression and the profound crisis of the ethnographic museum as an institution. Whether we read this omission as vacuum or paradigm, the task of working through their own history has still not begun in most ethnographic museums in the German-speaking world. Their reluctance to face up to that task is expressed in both, the individual museums’ guidelines, exhibition proposals, displays and presentations, as well as in a refusal to think seriously and publicly about the possibility or necessity of repatriating objects.

The Weltkulturen Museum’s plan to bring together artists with the museum collections provoked heated debate at the Cologne conference. There were accusations that artists would take on the role of curators and tend towards an aestheticisation of  the museum objects, resulting in a lack of adequate context and information; that the »basic ethics« of anthropological scholarship were at risk; that transferring the museum’s rights of interpretation to artists would be nothing less than a »new form of Western appropriation«.

Many of these objections reflect the ethnographic museum’s fear of losing its monopoly on ownership and meaning. Equally, they reveal an anxiety not only that the museum could become the arena of multifarious and asymmetrical appropriations, but also that such appropriations could in future be initiated by actors internal to the museum as well as by outsiders. Ultimately, this is a fear of problematisation and change. It also signals a strategy of resistance and distancing that forms part of a long and remarkable tradition of repression. The workings of these defence mechanisms become visible in the exhibition proposals and in regulations and displays of the individual ethnographic museums. In turn, the process demonstrates the intimate connection between showing and hiding: concealing is an effect produced by the act of apparent disclosure. I will return to this later on.

In her essay »Critical Interrogation«, the U.S. cultural theorist bell hooks argues that »committed cultural critics – whether white or black, scholars or artists – can produce work that opposes structures of domination, that presents possibilities for a transformed future by willingly interrogating their own work on aesthetic and political grounds. This interrogation itself becomes an act of critical intervention, fundamentally fostering an attitude of vigilance rather than denial.«2 hooks insists that effective cultural critique is dependent on the self-critique of all those who claim that they want their struggle against structures of dominance to result in genuine, effective change. For Stuart Hall, regarding antiracism as a means of resisting hegemonic structures, »the struggle against racism is not primarily a struggle against other people in other communities, but a struggle within our own community, within our own movements and cultures«.3

Both bell hooks and Stuart Hall are concerned not merely with a reflection on one’s role, but with a self-critical approach to one’s own actions. The risk should not be underestimated that in the process of self-criticism, one will become part of the hegemonic framework, not just by being assigned a place within the structures of power but by gratefully accepting it.

As an artist, I too face this problem. Again and again, I encounter the assumption either that art needs no legitimation, or that »good« art by its very nature always brings with it – or should bring with it – an element of the illegitimate. I find these views more than dubious. They seem based on a fossilised notion of artistic work and an overly conventional image of the artist. The imputation that, precisely because of its supposed »essence« of illegitimacy, art is particularly well suited to a supervisory role in crisis situations is among the many components of the complex process of repression and problematisation. On the other hand, I can concur with the idea of bringing in art, as one of many producers of knowledge, to a situation of institutional crisis as a »raiser of problems«.4

FROM THE STORES, VIA THE STORY OF THE MUSEUM’S FOUNDATION, TO THE IMAGE ARCHIVE
In the context of my project Desire in Representation, whether the artist’s books5 or the intermedia installations, I am frequently asked – or feel indirectly asked by texts written in the field – questions such as: How come your artistic work is so concerned with ethnographic museums? What is your link with Africa? Have you ever been to Africa? Haven’t »we« already had enough institutional critique, isn’t it old hat by now? Do you see this work as a kind of moral obligation? By collaborating with ethnographic museums, aren’t you playing into their hands, offering a kind of service or even participating in the »dispossession of the Other« that takes place in the museum?6
 
For me, other questions are more relevant. How does art produce knowledge about historical processes? Or: In what ways does art participate in the writing of history or in representations of history?

The question of what I am doing as an artist in an ethnographic museum confronted me afresh when I was invited to Frankfurt. The circumstances of my work at the Weltkulturen Museum were completely different from those some years earlier at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. When I was at the Belgian museum, it was just beginning a much-heralded restructuring process – a renewed attempt to process its own colonial past by reevaluating its collections and the permanent exhibition. Over the years I asked this institution many times to allow me access so that I could carry out my archival research and photography in its various spaces. At the Weltkulturen Museum, in contrast, the very basis of the project was to grant me access to the institution with its staff, its various departments, and tits collection. This time, I found myself with a task premised on being able to research and think in situ and bringing those processes to the museum’s upcoming exhibition. That included access to the museum’s stores and the possibility of dialogue with the custodians worked there. I could select objects from the stores and consider them in the laboratory-style setting of the Weltkulturen Labor.7

This situation – the reverse of my experience in the Belgian museum – intrigued me. Yet when it came to my actual residency in the museum, I also felt a sense of disconcertment and oppression. The availability of the collection, the openness of the institution, the support and consideration for each of my requests all troubled me. I couldn’t find a route of my own into the objects in the stores. Just as in Belgium, I was more interested in the institution’s organisation of the objects, their arrangement in the stores, and the social space of the museum with its production sequences and its functional aesthetics. In the end, the history of the museum’s foundation its collection emerged as the keys to my project.

The founding of the museum in Frankfurt goes back to the colonial doctor Bernhard Hagen (1853–1919), who was its first director from 1904 until his death.8 A proponent of physical anthropology, Hagen carried out measurements of plantation labourers during his period of service as a plantation doctor in Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. He used the anthropometric methods of the day.9 His later publications clearly indicate the enthusiasm, ambition and meticulous care with which he applied himself to physical anthropology. Hagen’s research activities, like those of his contemporaries, contributed to the constitution and reification of »race« and »gender«. Around 1900, the collection of data and materials from bodies was given further momentum by the founding of numerous new anthropological societies.10 The measurement of bodies was intended not only to demonstrate the scientific character of anthropological discourse, but also to fulfil an ordering function: it supplied data that could be compared. Thus, »typical measurements« were produced and alleged »racial types« constructed from them. The sites of these forms of scientific racism11 were scholarly publications, universities, and not least museums.

During my research on the history of the foundation of the Frankfurt museum and on Bernhard Hagen, I found a museum postcard printed in 1906 that hints at these forms and procedures of scientific racism. It shows a display mannequin, captioned »Papua from Astrolabe Bay, German New Guinea«. As I later discovered, this mannequin is still in the museum’s possession. It seems that in preparation for its manufacture, the figure was modelled by a Berlin sculptor who »faithfully« copied a photograph of an indigenous inhabitant of colonial German New Guinea named Kubai. The photo was taken by Bernhard Hagen around 1895. The Hamburg trading company Umlauff12 had several reproductions of the figure made, which were sold on to collectors and museums as the »type« of a »warrior« or as »a Papua from German New Guinea«.

I asked the Weltkulturen Museum to find out for me where the reproductions of the Kubai mannequin had been sold and which present-day museums still held one. Answers came back from ethnographic museums in the southern German city of Freiburg, the Swiss towns of Burgdorf and St Gallen, and Stockholm in Sweden. The figures held by Freiburg, Burgdorf and St Gallen were brought to Frankfurt to be shown as part of my work alongside the version from the Weltkulturen Museum.

Bernhard Hagen himself reproduced two photographs of Kubai as plates in his 1899 book Unter den Papua’s,13 and used one as its cover illustration. In the caption to one of these portraits, Hagen calls Kubai »My Friend Kubai«. In the text, he refers to the Papua man as »Herr Kubai«, details his clothing and body, and describes his expression as »friendly« and »smiling«. Reading articles and talking to staff at the museum in Frankfurt, I was struck by the fact that Kubai was frequently referred to as a »friend« of Bernhard Hagen’s.14 The assertion or supposition that Hagen and Kubai were friends seemes to me to be little more than an anecdote based on skimpy evidence,15 and something that I regard as symptomatic of a defence mechanism: resisting the need to confront Hagen’s activities as a colonial doctor and well-known advocate of the racial discourses burgeoning at the time, the local political circumstances, and the colonial European interests in whose service Hagen placed himself. I do not mean to rule out the possibility that Hagen and Kubai really were friends; my point is rather the placatory impression that the statement creates, in the style of  that which Abigail Solomon-Godeau calls »humanist pieties«,16 a point I will return to below.

As further material, I used the transcripts of two speeches by Bernhard Hagen, held in 1904 for the museum’s opening and in 1908 for its reopening. I read out these two speeches in December 2013 as a performance lecture in several of the museum’s rooms (including the exhibition galleries and the stores. A video recording of the performance was later projected in the gallery alongside the Kubai display figures. The third part of my work arose in cooperation with the typographer Till Gathmann, with whom I developed a series of posters working iconographically with photographs selected from the Weltkulturen Image Archive. When choosing these pictures, I focused on the section of the archive dedicated to photographs taken by missionaries.

THE MISSIONARIES’ PICTURES AS ETHNOGRAPHIC PHOTOGRAPHS
The Image Archive contains photographic images that are generally described as »ethnographic« photographs. Such »ethnographic« photos are often regarded as descending from travel photography. It was only through their use, circulation and reception in an anthropological context – and thus their naming as »ethnographic« – that they acquired their particular status and classification. The Weltkulturen Image Archive did not begin to create systematic inventories of its photographs until 1987. The museum’s director at that point, Josef Franz Thiel, was committed to establishing an image archive as a specific, separate ethnographic source.17 The personal biography of Thiel18 and his activities before becoming director in 1985 help to explain the prominence within the Image Archive of photographs relating to Christian missions in areas including Africa, Indonesia, India, Papua New Guinea and South America. The missionaries often had the photos taken to order, or else they took the photographs themselves.19 Examples of the latter group include Thiel himself, who worked as a missionary in the Congo in the 1960s, Paul Schebesta (1887–1967), and Martin Gusinde (1886–1969). Like Thiel, Schebesta and Gusinde were trained as both anthropologists and theologians; alongside their work as priests and teachers, they undertook scientific research expeditions and later published their findings.20 I am interested not only in the sources of these pictures and the contexts in which they were taken, but also in the activities and self-image of the photographers in their dual role as missionaries and researchers.21

The invention of photography and its establishment as a medium of science coincided with the emergence of anthropology as a discipline. In this period, the photographic image was ascribed a form of mechanical objectivity. Photographs were preferred to drawings as a medium of representation because their mechanical, supposedly »unmediated« character seemed to exclude the elements of interpretation and subjectivity. Accordingly, the missionary picture archive includes a large number of photographs that can be described as anthropometric images,22 pictures of measurement procedures that served the »study of race« through the anthropological registration of bodily characteristics. Many of these pictures reappeared in later publications in the field of physical anthropology or eugenics. The archive also holds numerous pictures and series associated with anthropologists’ search for what they thought would be the »most primitive living race« or an »originary race«23

While contemplating and working with these images, time and again I felt a sense of great unease, similar to my experience in the museum’s stores. What was I looking for in these photographs?

One explanation for my disquiet is the physical presence of the photos, which has to do with the specific character of the photographic image as index. There is something in these pictures – something, as Walter Benjamin once wrote of a photo by David Octavius Hill, that »cannot be silenced, that fills you with an unruly desire to know what her name was, the woman who was alive there, who even now is still real«.24 Such ghostly »voices« draw their tenacious presence from what is left unsaid, unrepresented, from the blank spaces, the lost or never-told stories. The eerie voices – the revenants – haunt our thoughts and imagination. These »ghosts« demand entry into our texts, our systems of inscription and our representations, despite the frequent claims that apparitions are nothing but sensory illusions, even hallucinations.25

In this sense, the missionary photos are pictures that do in fact show the unshown, that show something not intended to be shown. My knowledge of the context of the pictures’ production is incomplete, and so are the records of their transmission. Yet the knowledge I have, and my continued confrontation with the available facts and the gaps in transmission, contribute to the entanglement I sense, to my unease. It is an unease that crept up on me when I looked at these images, and at the objects in the stores earlier on. My attempts to find a position within the process make my own limitations painfully clear. In her essay »Images Denied«, Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff writes:

»The visual archive of the unconscious not only stores what has been remembered and forgotten, but also images that incorporate the trace of memory as something physical that can be experienced once again when examined retrospectively. ... The cultural productiveness of a trauma that generates a masterly photographic narrative from the latency of denied images, a narrative in which the subject matter, narrative structure and perspectives are characterised with reference to what is unspoken and unseen and only acquires meaning in this context.«26

The presence of the photographed people in archival images is increasingly being examined within cultural studies, and it also forms part of my interest in the artistic processing of the Weltkulturen Image Archive. This questioning might address details of the image or its different points of view – whether the viewpoint of the photographer, of the person portrayed, or of the interpreting beholder. It might encompass the photographers’ self-portraits or the obviously staged »realistic« portrayals, the poses, the withholding of a gaze, the photographs that »went wrong«. And it includes the reception of the images: their differing physical presence as they are disseminated and deployed in various publications and contexts.

How can an archive – sealed in boxes, filed away in index cards, virtualised in the hypertexts of online databases – be made visible as such? On the one hand, the abundance of pictures has to be shown; on the other, consideration must be given to the ordering systems, the structures of cross-reference in which those images are embedded.

In my photographic work, I am concerned to find a reflexive and informed approach to the different forms of photographs’ circulation and presentation. I am interested in the material properties of the pictures as objects of reproduction, but also in making visible other potential connections and contexts through which a picture can be inserted into a different nexus. In this sense, working with the archive is not only a confrontation with a cultural repertoire of images or a contemplation of the historicity of media formats themselves; it also allows me to seek gaps and interstices, to take account of the »void« that so often testifies to destruction and censorship.

ALL OF US – THE FAMILY OF MAN
The photographs in an ethnographic museum’s image archive attest to the entanglement of the discipline of anthropology and its recording practices with historiography and politics. They also bear witness to the »crisis of anthropology« and the »crisis of representation«. There are pictures in the Weltkulturen Image Archive – for example the photographs taken by Thiel in the Congo in the 1960s – that I find strongly reminiscent of a »Family of Man« aesthetic,27 and that can, I believe, be read as symptoms of those twin crises. The photographs by Thiel no longer show people in a primitivist mode, as standing outside civilisation or modernity, but rather as a folkloristic community. The presence of the photographer and researcher is more personal here, because these are no longer pictures that were evidently taken against the subjects’ will. They often show smiling women, men and children: women at their housework, girls working in the fields, men building houses or felling trees or preparing for the hunt, the village community receiving aid consignments, schoolchildren, baptismal ceremonies of couples and children, girls dancing after their baptism at Christmas, or the village’s farewell party for Thiel. In part, these images of a happy Congolese village community in the 1960s are Thiel’s mythicised representation of himself and his »civilising« tasks as an emissary of the gospel. But they also, in my view, serve to postulate a »basically harmonious universe unriven by any essential difference«28 in the mould of the 1955 exhibition »The Family of Man«. In their form and execution, Thiel’s pictures recall the »human interest« photography of the post-war period. It is not Thiel’s objective to uncover traces of the destruction of indigenous social structures or of colonisation. In his pictures, he retreats into the portrayal of what appears to be harmonious intercultural contact. This places him in the tradition of the photographers before him who identified with the idea of photography as a global language or a universal, truthful language of the image.
However, what particularly interests me in these photographs is the possibility of interpreting them today as signs of the crisis in representation, or in anthropology, that began during the 1960s and has not yet been resolved.

In her discussion of the exhibition »The Family of Man«, Abigail Solomon-Godeau describes the universalist notion of »Man« as a figure of exclusion and oppression. She draws on Roland Barthes’s analysis of how the myth of the conditio humana absorbs history into nature. As Barthes writes, »This myth of the human »condition« rests on a very old mystification, which always consists in placing Nature at the bottom of History. Any classic humanism postulates that in scratching the history of men a little, the relativity of their institutions or the superficial diversity of their skins …, one very quickly reaches the solid rock of a universal human nature.«29 A discourse vindicating this representational scheme – the model informing the photographs I have described – may thus in effect assert that the world cannot be changed. At the same time, the homogeneity of the pictures also points to the gaps, the images that are missing from the archive.

Later analyses of »The Family of Man« describe it partly as a product of US propaganda and Cold War liberalism, partly as a symptom of repressed anxieties. The trauma of war emerges in the exhibition precisely to the extent that it is denied. In today’s world of global post-industrial capitalism and transnational companies, the exhibition as a format and the museum as an institution continue to play an important role in a society’s anxiety management.

The omission of political, economic or ideological contexts from museums’ exhibition proposals and self-portrayals, I believe, is not only often considered more profitable, but is also a sign of a hegemonic culture and cultural industry that – traumatised by its own deeds or its incapacity to face up to them – dedicates itself to continuing repression. Entertainingly staged exhibition tours that perpetuate the »banality of good«30 are an indication of that, as are major cultural-policy projects like the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. The ideological staging of an »All of Us«, of a »human community«, plays a key role in these as well.

Against the background of a society that is more and more strongly marked by fragmentation and exclusion, there is an unmistakably compensatory element to the ideology behind such large-scale ventures as the rebuilding of Berlin’s City Palace, destroyed by Second World War bombs and Cold War bulldozers. Equally, the recurrent talk of working towards ‘shared intercultural dialogue with everybody’ seems like an empty phrase. As a beholder or an author, as a scholar or an artist, it is a fallacy to imagine oneself external to such processes. There is no position outside these complex social and historical circumstances, and their systems of reference, to which one could withdraw.

Endnotes
1 Meeting of the museums working group of the German Anthropological Association, held on 29th and 30th November 2012 at the University of Cologne with the heading »Rethinking an Old Institution«. See www.dgv-net.de/museum.html (last accessed 6th November 2013). Here and throughout, translations from the German are my own unless otherwise attributed.
2 bell hooks, »Critical Interrogation: Talking Race, Resisting Racism«, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1990), 51–6, here 55.
3 Stuart Hall, »Rassismus als ideologischer Diskurs«, Das Argument 178 (1989): 913–21, here 916.
4 Susanne Leeb, »Asynchronous Objects«, Texte zur Kunst 91 (2013): 42–61, here 58.
5 Peggy Buth, Desire in Representation. Travelling through the Musée Royale (Jan van Eyck Academie: Maastricht, 2008) and Katalog. Desire in Representation (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2010).
6 Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie discusses not only the co-option of contemporary art into the process of dispossessing the Other, but also the suspicion of complicity to which contemporary artists become open when they »collaborate with Western museums in remediating their ill-gotten gains«. Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, »A Response to Susanne Leeb: Contemporary Art, Ethnology Museums and Relational Politics«, Texte zur Kunst 91 (2013): 72–81.
7 See www.weltkulturenmuseum.de/en/labor (last accessed 6th November 2013).
8 Bernhard Hagen founded the Frankfurt Anthropological Society in 1901. In 1904 he established the city’s Municipal Museum of Ethnology, which brought together private ethnographic collections with the ethnographic collection of the Historical Museum, the Anthropological Society and the Colonial Society.
9 Around the turn of the twentieth century, anthropometrics used statistical procedures and mechanical or objective visualisations to measure and categorise human beings. These data and procedures – the mechanisation of anthropology – served as a source of evidence for a discourse that propagated scientific objectivity.
10 See also Christine Hanke, Zwischen Auflösung und Fixierung. Zur Konstitution von »Rasse« und »Geschlecht« in der physischen Anthropologie um 1900 (Bielefeld: transcript, 2007); Kathrin Peters, Rätselbilder des Geschlechts. Körperwissen und Medialität um 1900 (Zurich: diaphanes, 2010).
11 The term »scientific racism« refers to »a construction of systematic procedures that produced social differentiation in line with racist schemes of selection, and in part put them into political practice. It included, especially, biology with the domains of racial anthropology, human biology, criminal biology, biological sociology, sociobiology, ethnogeography, genetics, racial hygiene and eugenics.« Heidrun Kaupen-Haas and Christian Saller (eds), Wissenschaftlicher Rassismus. Analysen einer Kontinuität in den Human- und Naturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), 9.
12 Umlauff, established in 1868 by J.F.G. Umlauff (1833−1889), traded in products and artefacts from the colonies, which it purchased from collectors, explorers, small museums or auctions. From 1900, the company also sold display mannequins, groups and components for dioramas and display cases. Umlauff maintained business contacts with numerous German and international natural scientists and anthropologists. Carl Hagenbeck (1844−1913) – zoo director, wild-animal merchant and famous operator of »human zoos« – was J.F.G. Umlauff’s brother-in-law.
13 Bernhard Hagen, Unter den Papua’s. Beobachtungen und Studien über Land und Leute, Thier- und Pflanzenwelt in Kaiser-Wilhelmsland (Wiesbaden: Kreidel, 1899).
14 For example an article by Dr. Eva Raabe, custodian of the Oceania department of the Weltkulturen Museum since 1985, calls the Frankfurt Kubai figure a »memorial to Hagen’s friend Kubai, the distinguished warrior« and speaks of an »individual history of the production of the sculpture and of Kubai’s identity«, a feeling of being »moved« by the »individual fate of the Papua figure« and of Hagen’s »person-to-person contact«. Hagen, she continues, »took the indigenous population into his heart« even if he also »described the island's inhabitants as »working material« «. Eva Ch. Raabe, »Kubai – ein vornehmer Krieger aus Neuguinea«, journal-ethnologie.de (2007), www.journal-ethnologie.de/Deutsch/_Medien/Medien_2007/Kubai_-_ein_vornehmer_Krieger_aus_Neuguinea/index.phtml (last accessed 6th November 2013).
15 Apart from the picture caption »My Friend Kubai« provided by Bernhard Hagen himself in Unter den Papua’s, I know of no other documentation of a friendship between Hagen and Kubai.
16 The phrase is Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s: »The Family of Man. Refurbishing Humanism for a Postmodern Age«, in The Family of Man 1955–2001, ed. Jean Back and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2004), 29–55, here 29.
17 »Right into our era, the ethnographic picture has mostly served only to illustrate texts. It was not discovered as an ethnographic source on its own account until a few decades ago. Even now, very few anthropologists use it as an independent source«, J.F. Thiel, »Vorwort«, in Kulturen im Bild. Bestände und Projekte des Bildarchivs, ed. Eva Ch. Raabe and Herbert Wagner (Frankfurt am Main: Museum für Völkerkunde, 1994), 5.
18 After studying theology and anthropology, Josef Franz Thiel (b. 1932) worked with the Steyler Missionaries in the Congo. He was the research director of the museum of ethnology run by the Steyler Mission in Sankt Augustin, western Germany, and for a while edited the journal Anthropos. From 1985–98 he directed the Museum of Ethnology in Frankfurt.
19 The Weltkulturen Image Archive contains a collection of missionary photographs assembled in cooperation with the Steyler order (SVD), the Anthropos Institute in Sankt Augustin, and the Jesuit Archives in Bonn.
20 Schebesta and Gusinde were Catholic priests in the SVD missionary order and students of Wilhelm Schmidt, the founder of the Vienna School based on the theory of »cultural circles« (Kulturkreise).
21 Most of the pictures currently in the missionary picture archive were taken in the 1930s. The archive also contains photographs taken by Martin Gusinde during his 1918–24 stay in Tierra del Fuego and in 1950 in South Africa, and pictures that J.F. Thiel took in the Congo in the 1960s.
22 For example among the photographs taken by Paul Schebesta in the Congo between 1930 and 1935, by Pater Josef Much in Papua New Guinea in 1939, or by Martin Gusinde in South Africa in 1950.
23 For example Martin Gusinde’s photos from Tierra del Fuego. In some of his series, Gusinde tried to construct an idealised picture of an »originary hunter society«, using a mixture of aesthetic naturalism and nineteenth-century scientific taxonomies. See Marisol Palma, Bild, Materialität, Rezeption. Fotografien von Martin Gusinde aus Feuerland (Munich: Meidenbauer, 2008).
24 Walter Benjamin, »Little History of Photography«, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter, in Selected Writings, ed. Michael Jennings, vol. 2, 509–30, here 510.
25 See also Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
26 Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, »Denied Images. The Family of Man and the Shoa«, in The Family of Man 1955–2001, ed. Jean Back and Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff (Marburg: Jonas Verlag, 2004), 81–99, here 89–91.
27 This was the title of a photo exhibition curated by Edward Steichen, then the director of the department of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Created for MoMA in 1955, it toured until 1962, visiting thirty-eight countries. The exhibition was originally funded by the Rockefeller family. Steichen regarded it as a kind of portrait of humanity. He arranged the 503 selected photographs (by 273 photographers from sixty-eight countries) into thirty-seven themes, such as love, birth, death, family, faith, war and peace. As Steichen wrote in the foreword to the catalogue, the exhibition »was conceived as a mirror of the universal elements and emotions in the everydayness of life – as a mirror of the essential oneness of mankind throughout the world« and in the spirit of an ardent love for mankind (The Family of Man, ed. Jerry Mason, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955). In 1996, Steichen’s exhibition was installed as a permanent exhibit at the Chateau de Clervaux, Luxembourg, and in 2003 it was added to the UNESCO »Memory of the World« register.
28 Solomon-Godeau, »The Family of Man«, 33.
29 Roland Barthes, »The Great Family of Man«, in Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), 100–102, here 101.
30 Viktoria Schmidt-Linsenhoff, Die Banalität des Guten. Zur fotografischen Re-Konstruktion der Menschlichkeit in der Ausstellung »The Family of Man«, Wiener Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte, Kultur & Museumswesen 3 (1997/98): 59–74.