Working Through Colonial Collections

Ethnological museums, including those housing colonial collections, face ongoing challenges in reckoning with their colonial legacies. This study reveals how the Ethnological Museum in Berlin navigated substantial transformations during its transition to the Humboldt Forum, grappling with debates over German colonialism and its impact on museum practices. Through two years of ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and oral histories, the research exposes the museum's embeddedness in colonial logics, highlighting how these manifest in everyday activities such as preservation, curation, and research. The findings offer insights into the laborious processes of confronting colonialism within museums, providing a case study for other ethnological and Western institutions to learn from.

von Oswald, M. (2022). Working Through Colonial Collections. https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461664242