Globalization, Nautical Nostalgia and Maritime Identity Politics. A Case Study on Boundary Objects in the Future German Port Museum

Abstract

The German Port Museum is scheduled to open in Hamburg in 2020 as one of Germany’s biggest and best funded museum projects at present. Unlike most comparable institutions, the museum is not only supposed to display the historic dimensions of ports and seafaring, but to assess ports as hubs of globalization and thus help the understanding of a globalized world. This article approaches the Port Museum’s first and central artefact, the historic four-masted barque Peking, as a crucial organizational and epistemic object in the museum’s development process. The Peking is of significant interest to actors from diverging social worlds, allowing them to approach the ship as a starting point for a critical discussion of globalization, as an artefact of nautical nostalgia and as a symbol for Hamburg’s maritime identity at the same time. Relying on the concept of boundary objects by Star and Griesemer, it is argued that due to its interpretive flexibility, the Peking is capable to reconcile these potentially conflicting individual agendas. It allows actors from different communities of practice to cooperate and to bring the Port Museum into being as a suspenseful, yet stable organizational entity.