Ms. Raabe, the second Wednesday in April is Provenance Research Day.

Why is?

Catherine Deschka

Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Provenance research serves to clarify all previous ownership of an object as precisely as possible.

It traces its path from production through all previous owners to the museum.

Art history in particular was originally concerned with examining possible forgeries.

Provenance research was thus also a tool of the art market to increase the market value of works of art by proving originality.

Provenance research then became an indispensable research tool for identifying contexts of injustice when examining Nazi-looted art.

How does the Weltkulturen Museum research its ethnological collections?

As an ethnological museum, we have set ourselves the goal of critically reappraising colonial contexts.

In doing so, we initially follow the same methods as art history: We try to clarify the acquisition context using written documents such as purchase contracts, correspondence between the museum and previous owners and notes in historical inventories.

However, most of the objects in ethnological museums come from formerly non-literate societies.

There are only very few written sources on the interactions between indigenous owners and European collectors.

This is where a method specific to ethnology comes into play, namely field research and dealing with oral tradition.

Does museum ethnology always include some kind of provenance research?

When researching material culture, anthropology has always asked questions about the so-called object biography: Who made an object and how?

Who used it for what?

What function and significance did it have in the respective author society?

The focus was on field research.

In the 1990s - the book "Entangled Objects" by the Australian ethnologist Nicholas Thomas provided important impetus - German ethnology began to critically examine the intertwined path of objects into the museum, the changing ownership structure and the associated change in meaning.

What difficulties arise in the refurbishment specifically for your house?

Since the entire document archive with all written evidence, but also with field research documents such as photos and tape recordings, was destroyed in the Second World War, historical tracking is extremely difficult for us.

We have to do comparative research in the archives of other museums.

It may be helpful to evaluate published diaries or reports from the respective collectors.

But not all actually kept a diary or described their activities.

Another challenge is the amount of objects.

Our collection consists of around 65,000 objects, of which an estimated third comes from colonial contexts.

Thousands of indigenous societies and ethnic groups are represented.

How did you proceed in the Weltkulturen Museum?