Objects of Culture

Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany

Browse Return to Previous Page       Related Subjects All Subjects Cultural Studies European History History

by H. Glenn Penny

University of North Carolina Press

Due/Published December 2002, 272 pages, paper

ISBN 0807854301

In the late nineteenth century, Germans spearheaded a worldwide effort to preserve the material traces of humanity, designing major ethnographic museums and building extensive networks of communication and exchange across the globe. In this study, Glenn Penny explores the appeal of ethnology in Imperial Germany and analyzes the motivations of the scientists who created the ethnographic museums.

Penny shows that German ethnologists were not driven by imperialist desires or an interest in legitimating putative biological or racial hierarchies. Overwhelmingly antiracist, they aspired to generate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections. They gained support in their efforts from boosters who were enticed by participating in this international science and who used it to promote the cosmopolitan character of their cities and themselves. But these cosmopolitan ideals were eventually overshadowed by the scientists' more modern, professional, and materialist concerns, which dramatically altered the science and its goals.

"By examining the history of ethnographic museums in Germany with attention to the specificity of local institutional processes, at the same time placing them in an international market framework and the role of conflicting interest groups and audiences, Penny offers an historically grounded contrast to what are by now the somewhat predictable tendencies of post-colonial critical literature."--George W. Stocking, University of Chicago

"The achievement of this book is to trace the makeover of a polymorphous science of ethnology and of a budding ethnographic museum culture in Germany . . . from cosmopolitan and humanist ideals into an anti-humanist politics of envisioning global order in a hierarchy of races."--Michael Geyer, University of Chicago

Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter 1. Modernist Visions and Municipal Displays: The Founding and Development of German Ethnographic Museums
Chapter 2. The International Market in Material Culture
Chapter 3. The Cultures of Collecting and the Politics of Science
Chapter 4. The Audience as Author: Museums in Public
Chapter 5. Museum Chaos: Spectacle and Order in German Ethnographic Museums
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index


Illustrations
Adolf Bastian
Benin bronze casting--a warrior and his companions
Benin bronze casting--memorial head of royalty
Benin bronze casting--"set" of bronze figures
Ivory tusks from Benin
Bella Bella (Heiltsuk) canoe
Nootka eagle mask
Kwakiutl mask of the crooked beak
Indian exhibit, 1912
Floor plan of the Hamburgisches Museum fÄr Vûlkerkunde, 1893
Cabinets in the Hamburgisches Museum fÄr Vûlkerkunde, 1905-10
Permanent display in the Hamburgisches Museum fÄr Vûlkerkunde, 1905-10
Grassi-Museum in Leipzig
Right side of the vestibule in the Grassi-Museum
Central stairwell in the Grassi-Museum
Floor plan of the Museum fÄr Vûlkerkunde Berlin
Museum fÄr Vûlkerkunde Berlin
Entering the Museum fÄr Vûlkerkunde Berlin, 1887
The Lichthof on opening day
Cabinet containing materials from Amazonion Indians
Magical implements from the Batak in Sumatra
Exhibition of non-Europeans in Castan's Panoptikum
Tripoli display at the Munich Oktoberfest, 1912
A "Bedouin show" at the Munich Oktoberfest, 1901