Material culture, collecting, consumption, and cultural appropriation; museology and decolonization

Sub-Saharan Africa, Switzerland

Dr. Alexis Malefakis is a curator at the Ethnographic Museum. He received his doctorate in ethnology from the University of Konstanz in 2015 with a dissertation on the sociality of street vendors in urban East Africa. Prior to that, he studied Social and Cultural Anthropology, Sociology and International Law at the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

As curator of the African collections at the Ethnographic Museum, a cross-cutting theme of his work is the study of ethnographic collecting and the museum as a European cultural practice and as a European cultural artefact. He is interested in how the legacy of these practices can be renegotiated today and what role museums, the original creators of collections, members of diaspora groups and other stakeholders play in this process.

• Benin Dues. Dealing with Looted Royal Treasures (German Version)