Mapping the Object

Eine Case Study zu außereuropäischen Objekten in kleinen Museen

Abstract

Over the last decades, museums in large cities and in places known for their colonial entanglements such as Berlin, Bremen, Cologne and Hamburg have often been the focus of studies to determine what non-European objects are in their collections. Smaller museums and museums in places far from these larger centers remain on the margins of research. This is partly because small museums often have limited budgets and not the personnel to undertake the time-consuming task of examining records and checking deposits for non-European objects. With our project Mapping the Object we wished to gain an overview of the number and diversity of non-European objects in Westphalian-Lippe museums. The project contributed to the important task of creating an overview of objects with colonial contexts in small museums by (1) examining and reviewing the collections both through the creation and cleaning of databases and through the physical viewing of objects in a number of collections (2) supporting museums in making their collections broadly accessible through the museum:digital online database and (3) presenting our results as part of an educational program. Through our research we were able to identify some 1.700 non-European objects in 44 museums in Westphalia-Lippe. Of these objects, under 10% are likely to have a connection to the German colonies. This result suggests that colonial objects were also collected in small museums, although not systematically. In this article we explain the context of the study, our working steps and what requirements are needed for this project to be expanded. Our study provides a first quantitative overview of the number of non-European objects in small museums and underscores the further need for qualitative analysis to be undertaken to determine more exact origins of these objects.