“Out of Context” – Translocation of West African Artefacts to European Museums

Abstract

Ethnological museums and their colonial entanglements are currently at the centre of heated debates. Due to their historical collecting and representation practices, the question arises as to how these collections should be treated and perceived today beyond a colonially influenced, Eurocentric frame of analysis. An in-depth examination of this question will be undertaken using the example of a hitherto unexplored collection of Bamana artefacts from southern Mali, acquired by the well-known German anthropologist Leo Frobenius between 1907 and 1909 now located at the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg. To this end, the collection will first be unpacked and historically processed along its object biographies. Primary questions include: What objects did Frobenius collect? How did he acquire them? What was their original significance? Which spaces did the objects traverse and what changes in meaning did they undergo when they arrived in Germany? While Frobenius originally referred to the objects in his collection as “ethnographic stuff,” contemporary society views the masks and sculptures of the Bamana as works of art due to their masterful workmanship. This is the result of a long process of shifts in meaning and value attributions, which shall be examined in this presentation. Compounding this shift is the growing recognition that museum professionals and members of civil society in the countries of origin conceptualize the movement of national artefacts as a loss that is inherently bound to the legacy of colonialism. Thus, this chapter aims to rehabilitate the history of a specific collection acquired in West Africa at the beginning of the 20th century and to re-contextualize it within current postcolonial discourses in order to find new strategies for dealing with ethnographic collections from former European colonies.