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Taking its starting point from a socio-anthropological study combining biographical interviews, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic observations collected between 2016 and 2018 in Germany, France and the United States among Ovaherero and Nama activists, and also members of different institutions and associations, this article focuses on the question of human remains in the current struggle for recognition and reparation of the genocide of the Ovaherero and Nama from a transnational perspective. First, the text shows the ways in which the memory of human remains can be considered as a driving force in the struggle of the affected communities. Second, it outlines the main points of mismatches of perspective between descendants of the survivors and the responsible museums during past restitutions of human remains from German anthropological collections. Third, the article more closely examines the resources of Ovaherero in the United States in the struggle for recognition and reparation, the recent discovery of Namibian human remains in the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and the questions that it raises.
With an eye to recovering the experiences of those in frontier zones of contact, Savage worlds maps a wide range of different encounters between Germans and non-European indigenous peoples in the age of high imperialism. Examining outbreaks of radical violence as well as instances of mutual co-operation, it examines the differing goals and experiences of German explorers, settlers, travellers, merchants, and academics, and how the variety of projects they undertook shaped their relationship with the indigenous peoples they encountered.
Whether in the Asia-Pacific region, the Americas or Africa, within Germany’s formal empire or in the imperial spaces of other powers, Germans brought with them assumptions about the nature of extra-European peoples. These assumptions were often subverted, disrupted or overturned by their own experience of frontier interactions, which led some Germans to question European ‘knowledge’ of these non-European peoples. Other Germans, however, signally failed to shift from their earlier assumptions about indigenous people and continued to act in the colonies according to their belief in the innate superiority of Europeans.
Examining the multifaceted nature of German interactions with indigenous populations, the wide ranging research presented in this volume offers historians and anthropologists a clear demonstration of the complexity of frontier zone encounters. It illustrates the variety of forms that agency took for both indigenous peoples and Germans in imperial zones of contact and poses the question of how far Germans were able to overcome their initial belief that, in leaving Europe, they were entering ‘savage worlds’.
's studies, H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl's edited collection Worldly Provincialism. German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (2003) aimed to provide a corrective to the teleological trajectories of many of these accounts and shed new light on the development of German anthropology. In their introduction, Penny and Bunzl, like Berman, claimed that Germany was different, but they went a step further, declaring that German anthropology 7 in the nineteenth century was, unlike
focusing on microhistories and specific case studies, this book also seeks to reshape productively the contours of the ongoing debate about the nature of German interactions with non-Europeans, a debate perhaps best encapsulated by the line that currently divides historians of German anthropology such as Penny and Andrew Zimmerman. At issue has been the question of whether German liberal humanism exercised a mitigating influence that softened anthropology
century’. 32 Similar to economic activities, their work contributed to the existing structures of the colony (on which it depended), while it also formed an alternative to Spanish colonial knowledge. Given the ‘logical alliance between Western science and political power’ at work, 33 colonial competition also came to take place in the field of sciences. While operating in the colonial context, German anthropology provided Philippine nationalists with the building blocks of
understanding of their rights as human beings. 2 German physical and cultural anthropologists of the mid- to late nineteenth century have similarly been described as following a more humane, less racialising approach to the investigation of colonised peoples in general. 3 This chapter explores this idea, to offer a sense of how Indigenous Australians figured in German anthropological investigations. Australian Aborigines initially came to the attention of German
), pp. 188−219. 16 N. Sternfeld, Kontaktzonen der Geschichtsvermittlung. Transnationales Lernen über den Holocaust in der postnazistischen Migrationsgesellschaft (Vienna: Zaglossus, 2013). 17 B. Wastiau, ‘Comment: The Skeptical Commentator’, Museum Management and Curatorship, 23:3 (2008), 220–3. 18 H.G. Penny and M. Bunzl (eds), Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press, 2003); H.G. Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill: University of North
some, such as Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), who was the central figure in German anthropology in the late nineteenth century, all peoples shared the same ‘elementary thoughts’ ( Elementargedanken ), even if these were disguised by local cultures: [I think it likely that] we will find the same tight core of ideas in all places and times. There are definite analogies in mythological thoughts and world views amid
widespread that a number of postcards were made ‘showing soldiers packing skulls –as normal colonial life’.9 It should, however, be noted that human bones were collected under the tutelage of German anthropological research institutes and museums.10 Eugen Fischer,11 who later became an anatomist for the Nazis, travelled to German South-West Africa in 1908 to conduct research on the Rehoboth Basters, descendants of indigenous South Africans and Cape Colony Dutch, to prove that Mendelian laws of heredity applied to humans. During this time he also visited Riideritz Bay to
. 1970 : ‘ Stratagems and Spoils (Book Review) .’ American Anthropologist N.S. 72 , no. 5 : 1101 – 03 . Meyer , C. , F. Girke and M. Mokrzan . 2016 . ‘ Rhetoric culture theory .’ Oxford Bibliographies . DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199766567–0157 Pfeffer , G . 2016 . ‘“ Old” British versus “Old” German Anthropology: the Kond