The Reciprocal Research Network

Provenienzforschung zu

ethnografischen Sammlungen der Kolonialzeit

Positionen in der aktuellen Debatte

Larissa Förster, Iris Edenheiser, Sarah Fründt, Heike Hartmann (Hrsg.)

Elektronische Publikation zur Tagung »Provenienzforschung in ethnologischen Sammlungen der Kolonialzeit«,

Museum Fünf Kontinente, München, 7./8. April 2017

© Arbeitsgruppe Museum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie

ISBN: 978-3-86004-332-5 DOI: 10.18452/19029

English title: Provenance research on ethnographic collections from the colonial era

Gefördert durch die VolkswagenStiftung

Das Buch versammelt die Beiträge zur gleichnamigen Tagung am 7./8. April 2017 – veranstaltet von der AG Museum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie (DGSKA) und dem Museum Fünf Kontinente, München. He- rausgeberinnen und Autor_innen behandeln darin u.a. die Frage nach einer sinnvollen Systematisierung und Institutionalisierung von postkolonialer Prove- nienzforschung, nach internationaler Vernetzung, insbesondere zu den Her- kunftsländern und -gesellschaften, und stellen aktuelle Forschungs- und Aus- stellungsprojekte zum Thema vor.

The book collects the contributions to the conference of the same name that took place on 7th/8th April 2017, and was organised by the Working Group on Museums of the German Anthropological Association and the Museum Fünf Kon tinente, Munich. Editors and authors discuss issues such as meaningful sys- tematization and institutionalization of postcolonial provenance research, inter- national networking and collaboration, in particular with regards to source countries and communities, and present current research and exhibition proj- ects on the subject.

Inhalt

Grußwort 7

Adelheid Wessler

Vorwort 9 Hansjörg Dilger

Eine Tagung zu postkolonialer Provenienzforschung – Zur Einführung 13 Larissa Förster, Iris Edenheiser und Sarah Fründt

1

Challenges and Opportunities of Systematic Provenance Research

Introduction 38

Sarah Fründt

The Importance of Working with Communities –

Combining Oral History, the Archive and Institutional Knowledge in Provenance Research. A Repatriation Perspective 45 Amber Aranui

The »Africa Accessioned Network« – Do museum collections build bridges or barriers? 55 Jeremy Silvester

Recording Sámi Heritage in European Museums –

Creating a Database for the People 69

Eeva-Kristiina Harlin

The Reciprocal Research Network –

Working towards an Online Research Community 85 Susan Rowley, Nicholas Jakobsen and Ryan Wallace

Using the Reciprocal Research Network for both

Indigenous and Western Cultural Provenance Standards 91 Trevor Isaac

Digitally Analysing Colonial Collecting –

The »Return, Reconcile, Renew Project« 103 Paul Turnbull

2

Museumspraxis: Erfahrungen und Möglichkeiten

Einführung 116

Heike Hartmann

Historical Collections Research –

Some Experiences from the Past Decades 123

Christian Feest

Zur Provenienz der anthropologischen Sammlung

des Museums für Völkerkunde Dresden 133

Christine Schlott

Shared Research – Zur Notwendigkeit einer kooperativen Provenienzforschung am Beispiel der Tansania-Projekte

am Ethnologischen Museum Berlin 143

Paola Ivanov und Kristin Weber-Sinn Annäherungen an ein »Schwieriges Erbe« –

Provenienzforschung im Linden-Museum Stuttgart 157 Gesa Grimme

Afrika-Sammlungen als Gegenstand der Provenienzforschung – Erste Erfahrungen aus dem Projekt »Koloniale Spuren

im Übersee-Museum Bremen« 171

Christian Jarling

3

Einführung 184

Anna-Maria Brandstetter

Wertkonflikte und Widersprüche –

Anmerkungen zur Diskussion 193

Eva Raabe

Aurora Postcolonialis? Zum aktuellen Stand der Rückforderungsdebatten um den Kameruner

Schiffschnabel im Museum Fünf Kontinente in München 199 Stefan Eisenhofer

4

Provenienzforschung im Ausstellungsbetrieb

Einführung 206

Iris Edenheiser

»From Samoa with Love? Samoa-Völkerschauen im Deutschen Kaiserreich.

Eine Spurensuche.« Eine Ausstellung im Museum Fünf Kontinente, München, und die Kontextualisierung der Sammlung Marquardt 215 Hilke Thode-Arora

Die Ausstellung »Heikles Erbe. Koloniale Spuren bis in die Gegenwart«

im Landesmuseum Hannover« – Ein Versuch des Umgangs mit

kolonialen Provenienzen 227

Alexis von Poser

Andererseits – Zum Umgang mit Objekten in der Ausstellung »Deutscher

Kolonialismus. Fragmente seiner Geschichte und Gegenwart« 249 Heike Hartmann

Überlegungen zu einer Ausstellung über

Rassenkonstruktionen und Rassismus 265

Susanne Wernsing

5

Einführung 278

Larissa Förster

Keine Provenienzforschung ohne internationales Netzwerk – Der Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung e.V. als neues Forum

für die ethnologische Provenienzforschung 287 Johanna Poltermann

Netzwerke erweitern – Von NS-Raubgutforschung zur Provenienzforschung in ethnologischen Sammlungen der Kolonialzeit 295 Claudia Andratschke

»Ost-Probleme«? Enteignung und Entziehung in der

Sowjetischen Besatzungszone und in der DDR 311 Gilbert Lupfer

6

Herausforderungen und Perspektiven Das koloniale Erbe –

Zur Provenienzforschung am Übersee-Museum Bremen 318 Wiebke Ahrndt

Appell für ein beratendes Gremium

in der ethnologischen Provenienzforschung 323 Andrea Bambi

Ethnologische Provenienzforschung – warum heute? 327 Brigitta Hauser-Schäublin

People and Things –Things and People 335

Ivan Gaskell

Anhang

Abstracts 339

Autorinnen und Autoren 351

The Reciprocal Research Network

Working Towards an Online Research Community

Susan Rowley, Nicholas Jakobsen and Ryan Wallace

The Reciprocal Research Network (RRN) was conceived in the late 1990s as part of a broader agenda called »A Partnership of Peoples: A New Infrastructure for Collaborative Research at UBC’s Museum of Anthropology«. The grant pro- posal stated: »Collaborative museum research is grounded in the belief that originating communities should have a major voice in shaping research ques- tions and should benefit from the new knowledge that is produced. There is no doubt that collaborative research with communities will be the dominant mod- el for museums in the future. As yet, however, no existing museum facility ad- equately supports this research model.« (MOA 2001:2)

The RRN is the virtual research infrastructure component of this project. In keeping with the overarching philosophy of the project, the RRN has been and continues to be co-developed by four groups in British Columbia: the Mus- queam Indian Band, the Stó:lō Nation and Tribal Council, the U’mista Cultural Society and the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

Each of the co-developers had different reasons in making the decision to participate. The Museum of Anthropology at UBC (known as MOA) imple- mented visible storage in 1976 as a way to provide unmediated access to collec- tions. By placing a large percentage of the museum’s collection on public dis- play, visitors were invited to be researchers. This act was seen as democratizing access to collections and thus to knowledge. Over the years, the strengths and weaknesses of this space became apparent. Artists appreciated unmonitored access to the collections; however, many community members questioned the decontextualization of the collections and the western classification system em- ployed.

86 | Susan Rowley, Nicholas Jakobsen and Ryan Wallace In the »A Partnership of Peoples’ Project« MOA undertook to re-envision visi- ble storage working with communities to display cultural heritage in respectful, culturally appropriate ways using Indigenous classification schemata (Kramer 2015). The RRN is a natural extension both of visible storage and of MOA’s col- laborative practice. MOA hoped the RRN would »… overcome a major existing barrier to cross-cultural research by adapting electronic tools to culturally di- verse traditions of knowledge management and by accommodating indigenous rights to traditional knowledge« (MOA 2001:4).

The city of Vancouver has grown up in the unceded territory of the Mus- queam First Nation. This community has been, and continues to be, at the forefront of using the Canadian legal system to strengthen Indigenous rights.

Musqueam has also continually challenged the University of British Columbia (UBC) and MOA to reflect on its relationships with and behaviours towards Indigenous communities. In 2006 UBC and Musqueam signed a Memoran- dum of Affiliation to »formalize, expand and enhance« their working relation- ship (UBC-Musqueam 2006: 2).

The Stó:lō Nation and Stó:lō Tribal Council consist of over 20 First Nation communities whose territories are located in the Fraser River valley. The Stó:lō Nation and Stó:lō Tribal Council have for many years participated in academic field schools for undergraduate and graduate students. In this way they help to educate and train the next generation of historians, anthropologists and archae- ologists to work with Indigenous communities.

The U’mista Cultural Society, located in Alert Bay, is internationally known for the repatriation of the Potlatch collection – a collection of ceremonial regalia illegally seized from community members in 1921 and dispersed to museums and private collectors. The concept of bringing home continues to be important to them for their youth and for the future as a means to support ongoing cul- tural practice.

As soon as the grant was awarded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the co-developers signed a Memorandum confirming their commitment to the RRN. At this time, the RRN Steering Group, consisting of one member from each co-developer, was established. Their role has been to guide all as- pects of the RRN through to launch and beyond.

Twelve museums had submitted letters of potential interest in the RRN for the grant application including university, provincial, state and national institu- tions in three countries. Each of these original partner institutions had three primary responsibilities. First, to provide their input during the development process, through phone conferences, workshops, and working groups. This helped ensure each partner’s concerns were addressed before the launch of the

The Reciprocal Research Network | 87 system. Second, to electronically send their Northwest Coast collection records

to the RRN. Third, to agree that, if they had the capacity, they would receive and respond to users who sent additional information about their institution’s re- cords. This capability forms part of the reciprocal nature of the RRN. Since its launch in 2010, the RRN has grown and there are now 27 contributing institu- tions: 16 in Canada, eight in the United States and three in the United King- dom.

Development of the RRN began in 2005. The human resources of each co- developer were leveraged to hire staff to design and implement the project.

UBC students and recent graduates were hired to develop the software and conduct user testing. Community liaisons were hired from within each co-de- veloper community. These liaisons held workshops, attended conferences, demonstrated the RRN and gathered feedback to guide the development pro- cess. They were able to navigate their community’s political structure and en- sure community feedback was integrated into all aspects of the development process.

The software developers gravitated to the philosophy of »lean software de- velopment«, where one does not spend time refining an idea, until users have validated that idea. This differs from the more traditional »waterfall« software development model, where a project moves sequentially through the steps of requirements analysis, design, implementation, and testing. To spark conversa- tion, they built a small prototype that could continuously be added to and re- fined. The Steering Group embraced this agile approach as fitting better with the collaborative philosophy of the project.

Within two months, a workshop was held where a small group of users (First Nations community members, researchers, and museum staff) tested the prototype. Although only a rudimentary system with few features, this proto- type demonstrated an early version of the RRN’s exploratory search tools. This was the first test session. Attendees were interested and excited. Following this workshop, the prototype was released to the initial group of RRN members, where it has continued to evolve based on user feedback.

To integrate the data from the partner institutions, a series of conferences were convened. These were critical in eliciting concerns, holding frank discus- sions, and generating solutions. At the first meeting, attendees drafted a Mem- orandum of Understanding to guide the development of the RRN. This non- legally-binding document was then signed by the co-developers and directors of each institution to guide. When the RRN was ready for launch, a second Mem- orandum was implemented. Within this document, each partner institution has the ability to outline the level of ongoing support they can provide.

88 | Susan Rowley, Nicholas Jakobsen and Ryan Wallace Museums are perpetually short-staffed. To alleviate this concern, institutions are able to provide data in whatever format is most convenient for them, there- by minimizing the burden on IT staff. Today, it usually takes one day of a staff member’s time for institutions to join.

Institutions are also concerned over control of data and its authenticity.

Therefore, the RRN enables institutions to keep their data current by providing an update process, and giving them full control of their records. Institutions can add new records, update existing records, and delete records they no longer wish to provide.

To provide users with an intuitive search interface across collections, some data normalization is required. For example, some institutions provide infor- mation about the materials and manufacturing techniques of an item in a sin- gle field. In the RRN these fields are split to allow for consistent searching across institutions. This alters the authenticity of an institution’s record. To address this, a view of both the normalized and unnormalized data is provided for each record.

Sustainability of the RRN was a constant topic of conversation. Institutions do not want to invest time and effort in a system with a short shelf life. Fortu- nately, the CFI grant allowed for five years of operating funds post launch. This partially alleviated this concern. During the development process decisions were made to build a system with low ongoing costs. For example, all of the underlying software is open-source so there are no licenses to keep current.

In addition to carefully listening and taking proactive action on the con- cerns of the institutions, the potential benefits of the RRN were discussed. The major benefit for institutions is the ability to connect and exchange information with First Nations communities who possess deep cultural knowledge and ex- pertise. The community liaisons were the most effective at demonstrating this connection. They were able to show that real people in communities were en- gaged and were positively affected.

One of the first things users see when browsing the RRN is that it immedi- ately presents the user with all of the results, and then the user applies filters to retrieve records. Given that the RRN is a multi-institutional system, transpar- ency is especially important to gain the trust of the user. Specifically, users need to carry out exploratory searching without knowing specific institutional vo- cabularies. Once the user has filtered the results down, the RRN provides four visualization options: detail, slide table, spreadsheet, and map.

On the record page for each item users can see the museum record. They can also share information about this piece with other RRN members. Infor-

The Reciprocal Research Network | 89 mation submitted about records is sent to the institution where they can choose

to integrate it into their content management system.

The RRN also provides a feature called Projects. A project can be a private working space or a public collaboration, depending on the privacy settings cho- sen by the user. Projects provide collaborative research tools including notes, labels, message boards, file uploading, and writeboards.

The RRN is being used in a number of different ways: curators and com mu- nity members have developed relationships based on discussions started on the RRN; cultural treasures have been identified to community and maker; lost cul- tural treasures have been reconnected to their community of origin; kinship re- lations between creators have been added; exhibits have been created by groups working from different locations to write exhibit text, preview images and select materials; and the interface is being used to provide data to Indigenous websites.

An example of this is the Sq’éwlets: A Sto:lo – Coast Salish Community in the Fra- ser River Valley (http://digitalsqewlets.ca/index-eng.php) whereby data is pulled into the site using the RRN’s programming interface.

New features continue to be added to the RRN. RRN Publisher allows users to create online exhibits integrating records from the RRN with text, sound, video, and archival photographs. RRN Content Management System allows museums without collection databases to publish their objects online using the RRN.

Future plans include enhancing Indigenous Language tools, refining the help pages, and adding more institutions including smaller regional institu- tions and community centres. Information on how to join the RRN can be found at www.rrncommunity.org/pages/institution_how_to_join.

Bibliography

Kramer, Jennifer 2015 Möbius Museology: Curating and Critiquing the Multiversity Galleries at the UBC Museum of Anthropology. The International Handbooks of Museum Studies. 3:21: 489−510.

Museum of Anthropology (MOA) 2001 A Partnership of Peoples: A New Infrastructure for Collaborative Research at the University of British Columbia’s Museum of An- thropology. Proposal to the Canada Foundation for Innovation. Vancouver: Muse- um of Anthropology.

UBC Musqueam 2006 Memorandum of Affiliation between The University of British Columbia and The Musqueam Indian Band. http://aboriginal.ubc.ca/files/2011/01/

UBC-Musqueam-MOA-signed1.pdf (accessed 13.12.2017)