Collections as Relations Contestations of Belonging, Cultural Heritage, and Knowledge Infrastructures

Introduction: Collections as Relations—Contestations of Belonging, Cultural Heritage, and Knowledge Infrastructures

HANSJORG DILGER, BARBARA GOBEL, LARS-CHRISTIAN KOCH, STEPHANIE SCHUTZE, AND ALEXIS TH. VON POSER

PART I Politics of Identity and Belonging

1 Shared Soundscapes: Everyday Archiving and the Collaborative (Re)activation of Anthropological Collections

INGRID KUMMELS AND GISELA CANEPA KOCH

2 Curating and Creating Relations between Lived Worlds: A Practice-Oriented Methodology for Museum Engagements with Indigenous Communities from Amazonia

THIAGO DA COSTA OLIVEIRA AND ANDREA SCHOLZ

3 Making Kin, Reanimating Relations in the Museum Collection

MAGDALENA BUCHCZYK

PART II Constructions of Cultural Heritage and Property Disputes

4 Cultural Heritage from Colonial Context as Disputed Heritage: The Case of Cameroon and Germany

RICHARD TSOGANG FOSSI

5 The Ayoreode Collection at the BASA Museum as a Glocal Place: On Movements and Displacements

NAOMI RATTUNDE, KAROLINE NOACK, AND CARLA JAIMES BETANCOURT

6 Towards Democratising the Formation of Knowledge: Researching Sensitive Collections from Namibia Collectively

JULIA T. S. BINTER

PART III Epistemic Cultures and Knowledge Infrastructures

7 The Afterlives of Gold Antiquities from Southeast Asia: Digging and Collecting for the Art Market in Indonesia

MAI LIN TJOA-BONATZ

8 Challenging the Jacobsen Collections from the American Northwest Coast and Alaska: A Long Duree of Multilateral Engagement and Complex Relationships 1881–2021 198

VIOLA KONIG

9 Vegetal Entanglements: Flowers and Medical Herbs as Wissensfiguren in Chinese Art and Visual Culture

JULIANE NOTH

10 From Index Cards to Digital Catalogues: Incomplete Object Documentation as Reflection Space

QUOC-TAN TRAN

Biography

Hansjörg Dilger is Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany.

Barbara Göbel is Director of the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut (Stiftung Preusischer Kulturbesitz) and Honorary Professor in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany.

Lars-Christian Koch is Director of the Ethnologisches Museum and Museum fur Asiatische Kunst (Stiftung Preusischer Kulturbesitz) and Director of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin’s collections at the Humboldt Forum. He is also Professor of Musicology at Universitat zu Koln and Honorary Professor at Universitat der Kunste Berlin and Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin, Germany.

Stephanie Schütze is Professor of Cultural and Social Anthropology in the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany.

Alexis Th. von Poser is Deputy Director of the Ethnologisches Museum and Museum fur Asiatische Kunst (Stiftung Preusischer Kulturbesitz) and Honorary Professor in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universitat Berlin, Germany.

“Now that colonial objects can no longer be seen as mute, but speak to us in multiple voices, it is acute to attend to the roles they play and relations they establish. Collections as Relations is a rich and novel approach to think the complex politics of collections.”

Amade M'charek, University of Amsterdam

“Tailored for scholars and professionals in anthropology, history, art, and cultural heritage, the book explores nuanced facets of cultural identity, colonial legacies, and museum ethics, fostering interdisciplinary dialogue across multifaceted subjects in cultural studies and heritage preservation.”

Maryam Mansab, Department of Museum and Antiquities, Zanzibar

“Collections as Relations is itself a fascinating collection that shows just how productive collections can be for exploring relations of multiple kinds. These include those that reveal forgotten, suppressed and ambiguous histories, as well as those that open up possibilities for activating new relations.”

Sharon Macdonald, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin