The Ethnologisches Museum Berlin on the way to the future Humboldt-Forum Berlin
What is an ethnographic museum and what ought it to be – today, tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow? Though inspiring and stimulating the research, this question will be not be addressed directly in the dissertation. For this latter is not a philosophical treatise, but it is an anthropological investigation – with a focus on some discourses concerning the transfer of the „Ethnologisches Museum Berlin“ to the „Humboldt-Forum Berlin“, which is due to open in 2018.
In addition to this analysis of discourses, a number of loose chapters whose organizing principle is rather associative and rhythmic than logical will situate these discourses in a wider context. This is to say that the transfer of the „Ethnologisches Museum Berlin“ and its accompanying discourses are seen as phenomena of the contemporary, and the dissertation explicitly claims to make a contribution to an „anthropology of the contemporary“ (Paul Rabinow’s phrase; or see Marc Augé’s „anthropologie de la sur-modernité“). Therefore, theoretical considerations regarding the appropriate sociology as well as poetological reflexions about how to write about a fragmented present are crucial to the dissertation. It will be written in a deliberately postmodern style.
One of those mentioned loose chapters will be dedicated to the theme of economisation (Ökonomisierung). This phenomenon or condition marks a side-constraint of the ongoing process of the transfer of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin to the future Humboldt-Forum Berlin. The phenomenon will be interpreted as a key feature of advanced capitalism and as a signature of the contemporary. Therefore, the term of economisation serves also a historical marker.
Other loose chapters concern the following topics: virtualisation; musealisation; topoi of the museum; normativity; postmodern ethnography; epistemology of objects; etc. etc. And there will be some more concrete and more ethnographic chapters in which different explorations of the Berlin situation will be told. All these chapters will be written in a form that would allow each of them to stand apart. But at the same time, they are kept together by the theoretical concept of Fragmented Holism (FH). FH means that the idea of the whole cannot be abandoned, but that the whole has to be rethought as fragmented.
Of course, the overall topic of the dissertation – what are ethnographic museums for? – is rather common or even fashionable today. For many discussions and even conferences are organised around the following questions: What are ethnographic museums? Why do they go through a productive crisis (Vitus Weh’s wording)? What is their role in a globalising and globalised world? Must they restitute some or all objects? How to present the objects? Etc etc. Another PhD-thesis on the specific Berlin situation has already been completed by Friedrich von Bose in spring 2014, but is not yet published. The distinctive contribution that the planned PhD-thesis is supposed to make will consist in a kaleidoscopic way of seeing and presenting the Berlin situation. A certain distance, a distant gaze will be essential for rendering comprehensible the phenomena under study.
