Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

It is hard to make sense of Berlin without grappling with the visual, material, emotional, political traces of its contested past. Berlin bears the marks of difficult heritage, divisions, and conflicts, but also utopian visions and imaginations. Here, philosophers and anthropologists envisioned spectres of universal heritage; here, colonial and Nazi officials orchestrated genocides.These traces of political desires for an otherwise – imperial, fascist, socialist, liberal – continue to be mobilised, rehabilitated, and contested. Nostalgic revisionism and decolonial critique both leave their traces in the everyday heritage politics of Berlin. The city is composed of overlapping and contested heritage fields.

The spectres of this past structure and interrupt everyday life in the city. They are dug up, curated, conserved, but also ignored, silenced, or selectively remembered in museums, archives, collections, and libraries. These heritage spectres extend their reach into the objects and images we encounter in the urban fabric, into knowledge orders and classification systems, architectural logics, infrastructures and institutional arrangements, narratives of nature and culture, property and ownership, street names and façades. Our own institute’s street, building, and its collections and archives are no exception to this. But just as research on museums and heritage urges a situating in the concrete here and now, it also necessitates a reckoning with wider entanglements and global frictions, which extend into the Europeanisation and worlding of heritage across the globe. For that reason, our research grapples with the re- and de-centring of Berlin, Germany, Europe, and world. It does so not least by investigating the imperial spectres of modern German history and anthropology and the transition from post-Socialist to reunified East Germany through the lens of Brandenburg, for instance. 

The Centre for Anthropological Research on Archives, Museums, and Heritage (CARMAH) at the Institute for European Ethnology takes this peculiar positionality in the city of Berlin and its European and global implications as a starting point for reimagining ways of thinking and doing anthropology. It urges us to compose our research in a critical, reflexive, politically engaged, and ethically sensitive way. We are keenly aware that as anthropologists doing research in and with contemporary heritage politics, we are dealing with a complex past, but are also involved in civic struggles to co-create just futures. Our research area is committed to facilitating such recursive, porous, and careful collaborative environments with our interlocutors and ethnographic fields that extend into archival, artistic, curatorial, cultural policy, and museum practice. As such, our research area builds on the legacy of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (2015-2023), which was founded and directed by Sharon Macdonald, director of the Centre for Cultural Technique and the inherit. heritage in transformation Käte Hamburger Kolleg at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. 

Our research area brings together scholars, students, practitioners, professionals, and activists who are committed to a critical ethnographic perspective on archives, curatorial practice, heritage, and museums today. It includes anthropologists who work as artists and filmmakers, curators and mediators, shape heritage policy, co-create and question digital transformations in museums, archive and collect, and engage in memory activism and protest. 

For us, research on archives, museums, and heritage is public anthropology par excellence, where theory meets practice, and research doesn’t just observe but actively shapes the field it studies. Our research and curatorial interventions at the Institute explore how curatorial research can be used to engage with questions of accessibility and to investigate the history of knowledge production through our own awkward and difficult archival heritage. Many of us are involved in curatorial, heritage and memory labour, and teaching projects that extend outwards from the institute and into neighborhood initiatives, public museums, transnational grassroots networks or larger cultural policy developments.

Research on museums and heritage has the critical potential to address key societal challenges, revisit the fundamentals of collaborative anthropological practice, and to rethink the conceptual underpinnings of our discipline. We ask, in short: How does the past affect our present? What is heritage and what does it do in societies today? How can we practise ethnography to co-create heritage futures?