Glenn Penny, "In Humboldt's Shadow: A Tragic History of German Ethnology"

 Dienstag, 25.6.2019, 17.15 Uhr, GEIWI, 11. Stock, SR 4DG14

Der Vortrag wird auf Englisch gehalten.

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In Humboldt's Shadow
A Tragic History of German Ethnology

Current controversies swirling around ethnological museums in Europe have illuminated a forgotten history of knowledge.  That is a history, however, most of the pundits are unable to see.  The debates surrounding Berlin’s Humboldt Forum are exemplary.  In the German case, the pundits’ rhetorical strategies and their eagerness to ignore the vast majority of the objects in German ethnological collections have done a great deal to reify the collections’ histories and perpetuate the fugitive character of the knowledge hidden in the objects.  Primary among the victims in these debates is the conviction, shared by the people who built the German museums, that a total history of a unitary humanity could be discovered and written, that the 19th century marked a tipping point in that process, and that the records of the past, hidden in objects, had to be rapidly assembled before they vanished.  The central point behind Penny’s recent project is that without an understanding of those convictions, it is impossible to comprehend German ethnologists’ actions across the globe, and without a clear understanding of their intentions and actions, it is impossible to explain why there are more than a half million non-European objects in the Berlin Ethnological Museum or make cogent recommendations about what we could and should be doing with them today.

Glenn Penny ist Professor für Modern European History an der University of Iowa. Er ist Autor von Objects of Culture:  Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (UNC Press, 2002), Kindred by Choice:  Germans and American Indians since 1880 (UNC Press, 2013), und In Humboldt’s Shadow:  A Tragic History of German Ethnology (C. H. Beck, 2019).  Des Weiteren ist er Herausgeber (gemeinsam mit Matti Bunzl) von Worldly Provincialism:  German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (University of Michigan Press, 2003), und (mit Laura Graham) Performing Indigeneity:  Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences (Nebraska University Press, 2014). Zurzeit arbeitet er an einer Studie über deutsche Beziehungen mit Guatemala sowie an einem Buch mit dem Titel Unbinding German History, 1760s-1960s for Cambridge University Press. 

Bild: Glenn Penny