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Per capita, Switzerland is probably the country with the largest number of ethnographic museums preserving cultural artefacts from non-European societies. Although some of these institutions emerged from more broadly defined museums in the tradition of the Enlightenment, most were established during the heyday of nineteenth-century European colonial ventures, but in a country that never had colonies of its own (except for colonial communities such as the short-lived New Berne in early eighteenth-century North Carolina). Especially in Germany, the current discourse about ethnographic collections from this period represents a major yet belated recognition of that country’s colonial past, an admission of guilt and an attempt at reparation. The decolonization of museums and the associated dialogue with members of the source communities are coming to dominate the museological study of non-European objects, in part also because of the decline of an interest in historical material culture by an increasingly presentist anthropology. A counterbalance to this is the substantial increase in the funding for projects investigating colonial collection histories.
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