Subprojects
Overview of the subprojects.
In the PAESE sub-project at the Municipal Museum Braunschweig, the acquisition circumstances of the collection of Kurt Strümpell (1876-1947) under the conditions of German colonial rule in Cameroon were researched. Between 1901 and 1908, Strümpell gave the museum in his hometown about 700 objects for the ethnographic collection. These include objects from West, Southwest and Northwest Cameroon as well as today's Adamaoua, North and Extreme North Cameroon and parts of Nigeria...
The aim of the project was the reconstruction of trade routes and networks between Germany and its former colony in German New Guinea, now Papua New Guinea. Those networks and trade routes that are directly related to objects from the Ethnographic Collection of the University of Göttingen were examined and analysed....
The dissertation project was designed as provenance research and focused on the history of the impact of the Ethnographic Collection Göttingen from colonial contexts by analysing its documentation, use and interpretation history. University collections are understood as places with epistemological power, which have been and are still being interrelated with academic practices of teaching and research...
The PAESE sub-project currently under way at the State Museum Hanover was centred on an analysis of the genesis of the ethnographic collection of the museum, with a focus on colonial acquisitions of objects from Cameroon. Special attention was paid to the examination of the contexts of the object acquisitions, thus examining the social, cultural, economic, political and legal circumstances surrounding the change of ownership. The research took into account people involved in the process of object exchange, the accompanying social transfer of knowledge, the production of knowledge and the change in meaning of the objects, as well as collecting practices and forms of presentation at the Provinzial- respectively State Museum Hanover. It showed to what extent individuals exert influence on the social life and the attribution of meanings to the objects. In addition, it examined what role objects from the colonies played in general in the exhibitions of the museum in Hanover...
The main objective of the subproject based at the Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum Hildesheim was a study of individual, very heterogeneous collections as well as of their acquisition histories, which are a key aspect of the respective object biographies. Various approaches were used to shed light on strategies of collecting that were possibly employed before 1918: research at the Hildesheim City Archive, consultation of additional documents in other archives, and the study of other sources (colonial documents, travel reports, diaries, etc.) that had as yet received little attention. A special focus was on the collectors, many of whom are little-known, and their role in the context of the acquisition of collections in the colonial era...
The PAESE project at the State Museum Nature and Man Oldenburg investigated the origin – the provenance – and the circumstances of acquisition of ethnological objects from colonial contexts. The focus was on objects from former German colonial areas, as they form the main part of the colonial contexts from which the objects in the State Museum originate. This resulted in a regional focus on today's countries Tanzania, Cameroon and Papua New Guinea...
This subproject primarily deals with Tjurunga, the secret-sacred ceremonial Objects of the Australian Aboriginal People, which are housed in the collections at the Landesmuseum Hanover and at Lutheran Mission society at Hermannsburg, and which were likely collected in Australia and brought to the state of Lower Saxony in the late 19th and early 20th century...