5 Questions on the Collections

The Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich cares for about 50,000 objects and extensive archives of audio, visual, film and written documents as mosaic pieces of knowledge worlds from many regions of the earth. Originating in 1889 from an ethnographic, and, from 1914 university teaching collection, the Ethnographic Museum established itself as a University public museum in 1972.

On the occasion of our 50 Year Jubilee, we are looking ahead. What are the meanings of this cultural heritage today? We follow the British anthropologist Paul Basu. He refers to ethnographic collections as “object diasporas”, through which long-term relations have been established. These relations commit us. And the collections offer opportunities for developing understanding and a new approach to each other.

In our commitment to decolonisation, diversity and multivocality in museum practice, we ask: how can we sustainably share the knowledge that has been stored in the collections in part for over 100 years with the originators of the objects and their descendants? How do we interact with and meet each other?

In the workspace series we make our museum work visible. We invite you to experience different processes, to think along and to get involved. Through five questions on the collections the basis for dialogue and understanding are created:

Context
From which worlds of knowledge did the collections come to Switzerland?

Provenance
What is attached to the objects due to their history(ies)?

Skill
What should we talk about and agree upon?

Contemporaneity
Who was and is talking to each other at the same time?

Reconnecting
What is the collections’ significance to their originator communities?

Experience and discover for yourself how each collection can be read differently through these questions and how this changes and broadens our view on the objects.

Societies leave their traces in the material world: in the order and biography of their things; in material, technology and fabrication; in handling and the social attribution of objects; in the symbolism and meaning of things, in speech and gestures about specific artefacts. Humans take care to sustainably transmit the required knowledge. From childhood on we learn how to move in the material world which surrounds us. Each object is like a mosaic piece in its world of knowledge, which has its own legitimacy in parallel to many further worlds of knowledge.

However, ethnographic museums’ index cards or databases often only contain sparse information. The contexts of the knowledge which is preserved in a collection together with the objects have rarely been sufficiently documented. Thus, a major part of the museum’s work consists of exploring the objects’ contexts. With the originators’ communities, with their descendants, we communicate about their “object diaspora” preserved in the museum. Therefore, it is important to listen carefully to each other.

Without context the objects stay muted, and the knowledge preserved with them remains hidden. The workspace series looks for ways to collectively understand the contexts of collections.

Each object preserved in the ethnographic museum has its own history(ies). We are hardly ever familiar with their biography of creation and use, or know under which circumstances an object was handed over to whom. How did it arrive in the museum? The most that has survived are written reports or correspondence, which provide at least partial information about the contexts of origin and collecting. This is where provenance research generally comes in.

Where possible, object research today is carried out together with originators or their descendants. This also involves the sometimes problematic contexts of origin and appropriation. Ethical responsibility and the acknowledgement of originatorship oblige us to pursue the provenance of objects.

Our view of the collections changes, once we can reconstruct the objects’ histories. Immediately, questions arise about obligations that attach to an object because of its origin. The memories and perspectives of the originators and their descendants related to their object diaspora need to be listened to. The workspace series opens up to future-oriented provenance research. A new way of dealing with the preserved cultural heritage and its histories must, if possible, be found together. Restitution can also be an issue.

All societies have their own ideas about what abilities are needed to succeed in life in one’s familiar environment. Humans internalise skill as measure and value. This is as much about dexterity as it is about social competence or about how to carry out a ritual correctly with the right objects. Skill individually drives humans to ever-new challenges. As adults, we strive to help the next generation acquire proficiency.

Together with the collections in ethnographic museums the skills are preserved which were necessary to fabricate the objects, to use them or to transmit the knowledge related to them. Only when we know what expertise is in the objects, so to speak, can we enter into conversation with each other.

The workspace series opens up the museum to communicate about skill. Our view broadens if we address originators as skilful persons. Which of our skills are comparable to theirs? How has skill changed on site since the objects entered the collections? Does the museum possibly preserve evidence of skill that is important for the future? And finally, to whom does the expertise inscribed in the objects belong?

We call humans who have lived or are living in the same time contemporaries. The denial of acknowledging contemporaneity was a strategy of exercising power: colonialism and slavery were possible because many Europeans did not acknowledge their contemporaries in the conquered territories as equals. Instead, European policy and science located their societies as being in a pre-modern era, removed from their history, as it were.

Contemporaneity, diversity and multivocality are a valuable asset to us today. This has a sustainable effect on museum practice. A particular challenge lies in making contemporaneity visible for the past as well. Which contemporaries encountered each other at the moment of collecting objects? How do we give space to the multivocal views of the collections, the many memories of the objects today and in the future?

The workspace series opens up to a reflection on the encounter of people. The world and the objects preserved in the museum appear differently as soon as we understand the originators and collectors who encountered each other as contemporaries. How did they communicate with each other? How did the Europeans and the objects’ originators perceive each other? And how do these perceptions continue to have an effect today? How do we speak to each other today?

Ethnographic museums preserve mosaic pieces of material and immaterial knowledge and skills from many regions of the world–for whom actually?

Over a long time the task of ethnographic museums, including those in Switzerland, has been to inform visitors about the social and cultural life of people in other world regions. The objects therefore served as illustrative material. Those represented rarely had an adequate say. In the meantime, this European sovereignty of interpretation has come under criticism. Hence there is currently a debate about what role ethnographic museums should play in the future.

The British anthropologist Paul Basu refers to ethnographic collections as “object diasporas”. At the moment of collecting, reciprocal relationships were created. We see ourselves committed to these relationships. Which originators of the objects preserved in the Ethnographic Museum at the University of Zurich can be identified today? What do people know about the whereabouts of their cultural heritage in Switzerland and what value does it have for them today? Only they themselves can answer these questions–including whether their cultural heritage needs to be restituted.

The workspace series opens up to new forms of shaping relationships and in doing so also explores how research questions can be developed together in the future. So what conditions are needed for the reconnection of knowledge, of objects, of archival materials in the museums with their originators’ societies?