German Colonial Heritage in Swiss Ethnographic Museums. Traces, Trajectories, and Transformations

The core interest of the Ph.D. is the investigation of colonial provenances of ethnographic collections in Switzerland. On the basis of a cross-institutional approach, with quantitative and qualitative collection surveys, the material heritage from colonial acquisition contexts of different ethnographic museums in Switzerland is assessed and related to one another. The two central areas of investigation are, on the one hand, the context and the events of collecting itself and, on the other hand, the institutionalization processes of resulting ethnographic collections. The surveys’ samples, which simultaneously delimits the specific context of concern, consist of collections originating from African and Pacific regions that were part of the German Colonial Empire between 1883 and the end of the First World War.
On the one hand, archival collection data in the concerned museums is analyzed as primary sources for the investigation of the moments of exchange in a colonial context. On the other hand, the analyses of the data serve to identify institutional histories of collecting, documentation, and outreach strategies, while object-focused provenance histories of certain artifacts are occasionally pursued as well. Eventually, this research is an investigation of the colonial entanglements of Swiss ethnographic museums. This goes hand in hand with an understanding of their potential as colonial archives, embeds this research in the debate on colonialism without colonies and provides a post-colonial approach to Swiss historiography.