Ambivalent Pasts: Colonial History and the Theatricalities of Ethnographic Display

Abstract

An installation by contemporary Berlin-based artist Peggy Buth, known for her critique of ethnographic museums as sites of colonial knowledge, shown at the Frankfurt Museum of World Cultures (Weltkulturen Museum) in 2014, presents four life-size figures of what appear at first glance to be four indigenous men standing next to one another in an otherwise empty room (fig.1). 1 Despite being dressed slightly differently-with a selection of tribal ornaments, red and orange loincloths, and spears in the hands of only two of these figures-these are indeed, unmistakably, four times the same man: "The Warrior as Multiple," as this part of Buth's installation is called.2 The figures on display are not sculptures made by a contemporary artist; rather, they are a peculiar kind of "objet trouvé" found in the storage spaces of ethnographic museums and brought together by Buth from where they lay more or less forgotten.In the exhibition catalog accompanying Buth's art installation at the Museum of World Cultures, photographs show the dark-brown figures at the sites of their discovery: naked and without hair in wooden crates at Frankfurt and Freiburg, partly dressed and upright in St. Gallen and Burgdorf.3 Manufactured and marketed from around 1904 by a Hamburg company called Umlauff, which specialized in selling "exotic" objects, skulls and skeletons, stuffed animals, and display mannequins to collectors, impresarios, film studios, and museums across Europe, these models of an indigenous warrior are paradigmatic for the culture of display that pervaded ethnographic museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.4 It was a culture of display marked by colonial practices of representation in which the figure of one indigenous warrior would typify a non-European culture rather than represent an individual, and where the irony that commercially produced plaster figures for display quite literally epitomized the objectification of non-Europeans, as well as their exploitation for cheap or unpaid labor, would be lost on most visitors to Victorian-era museums.Reviewing current practices of ethnographic curation, this essay explores the traces of that culture of display and asks how ethnographic museums today deal with the colonial legacy of their collections.When speaking about a culture of display to describe museum practice around 1900, I want not only to emphasize, as in Emma Barker's use of the term, that "museums and galleries are not neutral containers offering a transparent, unmediated experience" of their exhibits.5 Instead, within this context, culture of display also acknowledges a turn toward the spectacular in ethnographic and natural history museums that in the 1910s became increasingly compartmentalized, separating storage, research

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