Suchergebnisse

The Indian Ocean looks back on a long history of exchange concerning luxury goods that were primarily used for personal and interior decoration as well as in performative situations. In view of the primarily aesthetic dimension of the items of trade, Ivanov's article examines the role of aesthetics for creating social ties within the Indian Ocean. Based on a praxeological approach and phenomenological considerations, the article understands social space as a transitory nexus of people, things, and aesthetic forms, which is continually generated anew through social practice. Taking today's Swahili coast as an example, Ivanov argues that the translocal space of the Indian Ocean evolves from practices of mimetic appropriation, in which aesthetic properties of partners in transoceanic exchange are embodied. In doing so, translocal Swahili culture reveals a nondichotomous, complex way in which both the person and society are aesthetically constituted, a way that is at once reflexive and imaginative, bodily and material.

This article aims to reflect on the aporias and paradoxes of a postcolonial, collaborative research approach to ethnographic collections dating from colonial times. While, at least in Germany, 'provenance research' and 'collaboration' have become politically opportune, important questions concerning the possibilities or impossibilities of overcoming colonial categories, epistemologies and imbalances of power remain to be answered. Based on research and collaboration with stakeholders over the course of two projects on the Tanzania collections of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, this article asks how far 'collaboration' and 'decolonization' risk remaining merely empty, fashionable phrases, if, on the one hand, today's concern with the colonial context of collections in European museums seems to be to a great extent self-referential and avoiding radical criticism of today's power asymmetries; and, on the other, the deconstruction of colonial class, gender, race, and ethnic categorizations, and of the resulting representations is hindered – if not made impossible – by the epistemologies implicit in the order of the collections themselves but also by identity politics

The discursive programme WIR SIND ALLE BERLINER: 1884-2014 commemorated 130 years of the Berlin Conference and proposed a space for deliberation on the repercussions of this crucial event, offering thereby an occasion to analyse the ideological, economic, political, and humanitarian justifications that underlay colonialism and still frame the asymmetric relations between the West and the non-West today. The symposium accompanied the exhibition WIR SIND ALLE BERLINER: 1884-2014 at SAVVY Contemporary. The discursive programme took place from 26 February – 1 March 2015 at three different locations: ICI Berlin, KuLE Theater, and SAVVY Contemporary. ; Wir sind alle Berliner Part II: 1884-2014. Programme in Commemoration of the Berlin Conference , conference, ICI Berlin, 27–28 February 2015