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Forum as Laboratory 241
Forum as Laboratory
The Cross-Cultural Infrastructure of
Ethnographic Knowledge and Material
Potentialities
Philipp Schorch / Noelle M.K.Y. Kahanu
We visited the Humboldt Lab in early July 2015, shortly after the
conference Positioning Ethnological Museums in the 21st Century organ-
ised by the Volkswagen Foundation in cooperation with Deutscher
Museumsbund, which set out to discuss ‘the need for a critical ap-
praisal of the past, present, and future of ethnological museums’,1
as well as our own symposium Curatopia: Histories, Theories, Prac-
tices – Museums and the Future of Curatorship held at the Ludwig-
Maximilians-Universitiät München.2 The presented perspectives
and surrounding discussions, which also inform our commentary
here, seem to indicate that the ‘shifting sands of the museum world’
(Thomas quoted in Phillips 2011) have reached the shores of Germa-
ny. Moreover, the Humboldt Forum, one of the most significant and
contested cultural projects of the Federal Republic, has attracted
the critical attention of museum professionals, scholars, politicians
and Indigenous groups, among others, on a global scale, resulting
in a hotly debated spectrum that spans from (post)colonial celebra-
tion to (neo)colonial accusation. The coalition ‘No Humboldt 21!’,3
for example, demands moral redress, political concessions and le-
gal reparations associated with Germany’s colonial legacy which,
it is argued, gains further legitimisation due to the reincarnation
of the former imperial Berlin Palace as Humboldt Forum for the
world. This often polarising positioning is further exemplified in
a recent feuilleton ‘battle’ in Die Zeit (11.06.2015) sparring critic
Hanno Rauterberg and foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier
through the discursive confrontation of ‘Palast der Verlogenheit’
with ‘Weltvernunft!’ across a seemingly unbridgeable divide.
We suggest, however, that beneath this divisive expanse flows
an estuary of possibilities.
1
https://www.volks
wagenstiftung.de/
veranstaltungen/
veranstaltungsarchiv/
detailansicht-veran-
staltung/news/detail/
artikel/positioning-
ethnological-
museums-in-the-
21st- century/
marginal/4670.html
2
http://www.
assembling-the-trans-
pacific.ethnologie.
uni-muenchen.de/
curatopia/index.html
3
http://www.no-
humboldt21.de/
resolution/
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 241 10.09.15 19:04
242 Philipp Schorch, Noelle M.K.Y.Kahanu
The Humboldt Lab, entering into this volatile climate, has at-
tempted to negotiate the spaces in-between, on the one hand, the
radically changing and supposedly less Eurocentric world of the
21st century and, on the other, the corresponding museological re-
configuration of the so-called non-European collections of the Eth-
nologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst in the heart
of Germany. It does not take much insider knowledge and critical
awareness to recognise the enormous challenges associated with
such an ambitious mission. This makes it even more laudable that
the Humboldt Lab invited us as external observers to comment on
the project, with a particular focus on the opportunities and limits
of collaborative projects. Before we do so, however, such undertak-
ing needs to be qualified. We have not been directly involved in
any of the 30 projects constituting the Humboldt Lab over the last
three years. Both of us have worked and researched in and with
museums for many years in a variety of settings, and we are very
much aware of the complexities of museological work which can-
not – and should not be attempted – to be sufficiently addressed
in a commentary essay. Given this context, we found it refreshing
how openly Agnes Wegner, Managing Director, and Andrea Scholz,
curatorial member of the team, introduced us to the project and the
final exhibition ‘Prinzip Labor’, and shared with us some of their
successes and failures. The exhibited displays as well as the moder-
ated talks in this publication also attest to this transparent ethos
nurturing a ‘culture of critique’ which is much needed to lift the
quality of the above described discursive terrain but which, accord-
ing to Wegner (Talk 2), has been the main challenge even within
the institution itself. Our commentary, then, can only be seen as an
attempt to provide further food for critical thought rather than an
analysis of the underpinning structural arrangements. The inter-
related distinction between ‘Laboratory Concept’ and ‘Laboratory
Institution’, as suggested by Friedrich von Bose (Talk 2), is fruit-
ful for this purpose. That is, we approach the laboratory principle
through the double-lens of ‘infrastructure’ and ‘potentiality’ as well
as the cross-cultural resonances and dissonances in the spaces in-
between provoked through the presence of Pacific collections and
exhibitions in a German museum institution.
The three talks in this book reveal that it is still an open question
how the ‘Berlin Modell’ postulating ‘multiple perspectives’, ‘audi-
ence focus’ and ‘contemporary relevance’ can be realised as long as
the battles for ‘Deutungshoheit’ are fought from territorially con-
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 242 10.09.15 19:04
Forum as Laboratory 243
fined disciplinary positions and amount to a hermetically sealed
‘Burgenbau’, as Wegner (Talk 2) aptly put it. As we have argued else-
where, the desperate grip on Deutungsmacht, which continues to
paralyse museological discussions and practices, is often not only
politically and morally reprehensible but intellectually and method-
ologically flawed (Schorch and Kahanu 2015). What is much need-
ed, then, apart from a supportive infrastructural architecture and
intellectual geography of the institution, is a conscious awareness
of, and constructive engagement with, the inescapably interdiscipli-
nary and cross-cultural infrastructure of ethnographic knowledge
itself. That is, ethnographic authority can only be dialogically ne-
gotiated through a cross-cultural anthropology that is enacted not
only through its analytical focus on cross-cultural action, traffic
and appropriation, as research increasingly does, but at the level
of method, interpretation and representation of the anthropologi-
cal inquiry itself. How can this laudable goal but difficult task of
manoeuvring in-between different knowledge worlds, which we have
attempted in several instances (Schorch and Hakiwai 2014; Schorch
and Kahanu 2015; Schorch, McCarthy and Hakiwai forthcoming),
be accomplished?
Despite the limitations and failures emerging in the three talks, we
think that the Humboldt Lab has made significant progress on sev-
eral levels. Wegner’s notion or figure of a ‘Methodendolmetscher’
(Talk 2), for example, deserves to be institutionalised as an inte-
gral infrastructural component of exhibition teams. The Lab expe-
riences overall give empirical weight to scholarly claims that con-
temporary curatorship requires constant cross-cultural translation
(Clifford 2010; Schorch forthcoming), and that a museum should be
understood not only as an institution or collection but as a method
(Thomas 2010). Moreover, Wegner’s personal experience highlights
that disciplinary boundaries and positions can be as seemingly
incommensurable as their cultural variations. Disciplinary differ-
ences thus appear not only as intellectual constructions but as cul-
tural differences in their own right. They equally require translation,
which makes a ‘method translator’ a museological key figure for
facilitating the required decentring of interpretive authority and its
distribution across cross-cultural – including cross-disciplinary –
networks.
For this purpose, two of the Lab projects, ‘Sharing Knowledge’
and ‘Object Biographies’, seem particularly promising. ‘Sharing
Knowledge’ has begun to establish a virtual platform – through the
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 243 10.09.15 19:04
244 Philipp Schorch, Noelle M.K.Y.Kahanu
intervention of a museum experiment – for the consciously cross-
cultural configuration of ethnographic knowledge that is reminis-
cent of other innovative and successful projects such as the Re-
ciprocal Research Network and the GRASAC Knowledge Sharing
Database in Canada (Phillips 2011). ‘Object Biographies’ has offered
the material substance for such virtual co-constructions through
‘objects from the depot’ that ‘became the starting point for schol-
arly cooperation’. Both modules, it seems to us, could be fruitfully
developed in conjunction. The key thereby is scholarly cooperation,
which goes deeper than the surface engagement with communities
as sources, as rightly critiqued by Larissa Förster (Talk 1), towards
unsettling the prevailing grip on authorship and ‘Deutungshoheit’,
a conceptual goal that, according to Viola König (Talk 1), remains
to be realised.
It is vital to note that such envisaged, conscious cross-cultural
infrastructure of ethnographic knowledge must be built through
the translational dialectic of cross-cultural resonances and dis-
sonances. That is, serious cross-cultural study searches for reso-
nances between different culturally grounded analytical positions
and their respective articulation and movement through a common
sphere while opening spaces for cross-cultural dissonances pro-
voked through the ‘untranslatable’ (Bhabha 1994). Cross-cultural
dissonances thus become a cross-cultural finding throughout the
process of collaborative anthropological inquiry – and the produc-
tive and conflictual moments of laboratory failures (von Bose, Talk
2) – rather than an inhibition from the outset caused through Eu-
rocentric projections of anthropological imaginations. The ‘[Open]
Secrets’ project, for example, clearly shows that certain knowledge
cannot be shared but can still be exhibited through exhibitionary
tactics such as gaps and the presence of absences. Importantly, how-
ever, ‘these boundaries should be negotiated with representatives
from the cultures of origin’, as the project team rightly concluded.
Such thoughtful reflections, responses, and difficult conversations
were encapsulated in a series of discussions related to ‘[Open]Se-
crets’ that were conducted and then subsequently posted on the
Humboldt Forum website. A project with less successful exhibition
outcomes nonetheless leaves an important blueprint by conscious-
ly contributing to the establishment of an infrastructure towards
meaningful cross-cultural engagement. Given our argument, this
negotiation has to be performed at the level of cross-cultural schol-
arship rather than being confined to mere community consultation,
and as continuous engagements rather than retrospective gestures,
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 244 10.09.15 19:04
Forum as Laboratory 245
which in this case proved to be harmful and required sensitive cross-
cultural diplomacy. This partial laboratory failure emphasises how
fragile and potentially disastrous the dual focus on questioning the
own ways of thinking and being while opening to other epistemolo-
gies and ontologies can be. The resonating spaces in-between are
insidiously fraught with dissonances.
Our arrival in Berlin was heralded by a heatwave of historic
proportions. While walking in the shades of monolithic European
structures such as churches, government institutions and university
buildings, we were struck by how Native people often dwell within
these shadows; that the journey of the ‘Other’ to Germany, whether
embodied as so-called ethnographic material from centuries ago
or as contemporary academic individuals, is still largely one of dis-
placement and dissonance. The Humboldt Lab – through its numer-
ous projects – has explored various means of contextualizing and
remedying this displacement by connecting collections to contem-
porary communities of origin, facilitating exchanges that enabled
the museum to deepen its understanding of its historical holdings.
More importantly, however, these exchanges enabled Indigenous
communities to (re)connect to ancestral practices, some of which
had been lost for generations (see ‘Sharing Knowledge’). This dy-
namic flow of knowledge thus enables the museum – as instigator,
witness, and recorder – to perhaps replace some of what has been
(dis)placed centuries ago.
It is well documented that some of the most important Pacific
material resides not culturally in Oceania, but ethnographically in
Europe. A potential concern arising for Indigenous communities,
who are well represented – materially if not always contextually – in
the current Oceanic exhibition in the Ethnologisches Museum, is
that when moving to the Humboldt Forum these collections might
once again recede into the shadows. Moreover, many ethnographic
museums have shuttered the crowded cabinet of curiosities or ‘ar-
tefacts’ in favour of minimalist ‘art’ displays, a ‘post-modern recon-
textualisation’ through which Pacific material ontologies continue
to be reduced to, or equated with, Eurocentric categories (Schorch
and Kahanu 2015). Pilgrimages of visitation by Indigenous people
to these sites are often cost prohibitive but sometimes their evi-
dence can be seen in the shadows, like bundled offerings left behind
for the Hawaiian female image Kihawahine, indicating the belief
that the mana or power of these images as material manifestations
of Hawaiian people persists. While legitimate issues may exist with
regard to the initial collection of some of these cultural treasures
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 245 10.09.15 19:04
246 Philipp Schorch, Noelle M.K.Y.Kahanu
and whether ethical limits were reached or exceeded (Schindlbeck
2008), the more important conversation for us is whether the jour-
ney of these ancestral figures is indeed over.
In Hawai’i, Bishop Museum’s E Kū Ana Ka Paia: Unification, Re-
sponsibility and the Kū Images evidenced how a temporary exhibi-
tion of loaned material was capable of contributing to the Hawai-
ian community’s consciousness, engendering conversations around
politics and nationhood, masculinity, and kuleana or responsibility
(Tengan 2010, 2014). Opportunities for engagement that are thor-
oughly informed, envisioned, and implemented by community mem-
bers both within and external to the Bishop Museum may have once
been rare but are increasingly seen as the new norm. Applying such
a model in Germany, however, may be much more challenging as ef-
forts to even make inquiries of institutional material holdings, as in
the instance of iwi kupuna or Native Hawaiian human remains, have
– even in comparison to other European countries – often generated
little or no response. Indigenous communities might easily despair
under these circumstances, but we believe that the Humboldt Lab
offers a glimmer of hope by offering examples of true collaborations
and partnerships, thus (re)connecting histories with contemporary
legacies and (re)awakening hibernating relationships and shifting
genealogies (Schorch and Kahanu 2015). What the Humboldt Lab,
understood as a boundless museological principle rather than a lim-
ited temporo-spatial institution, provides, is a means of continued
cross-cultural exchange by creating an infrastructure of potentiality
for future engagement and activation, whether it is through exhibi-
tions, programs, or the collections.
Hawaiian scholar Manulani Meyer (2003), a proponent of the
depth and rigor of Indigenous epistemologies and knowledge sys-
tems, speaks of the muliwai, a place where fresh water and salt wa-
ter meet; where the river flows into the sea. It is a critical habitat
where marine life congregates as the muliwai ebbs and flows with
the tide, changing shape and form daily and seasonally. In meta-
phorical terms, the muliwai is a location and state of dissonance
where and when two potentially disharmonious elements meet, but
it is not ‘a space in between’, rather, it is its own space, a territory
unique in each circumstance, depending on the size and strength
of the river, the width of the opening, and the strength of a recent
hard rain. Rather than being a threat to encountering habitats, this
living, breathing, and changing muliwai is a source of life and po-
tentiality. The Humboldt Lab has offered concrete examples of how
so-called ethnographic collections within European museums need
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 246 10.09.15 19:04
Forum as Laboratory 247
to be viewed not as mere ‘contact zones’ (Clifford 1997) but as areas
of creative dissonance, capable of creating new life, new initiatives,
new encounters and engagements. Anthropological curatorship
and its exhibitory manifestation, we would like to conclude, is most
meaningful if it captures and opens the locations and moments of
the muliwai as the own space of potentialities arising from in-between
cultural worlds.
Museological labour thus faces the constant challenge of en-
gaging with the effects and opportunities as well as the limits and
risks of the cross-cultural dialectic of resonances and dissonanc-
es. There has to be a constant analytical movement between the
‘here’ and ‘there’, the ‘now’ and ‘back then’, to make sense of the
underpinning, messy entanglements (Talu and Quanchi 1995). To
be sure, anthropological knowledge production has never been a
linear affair, despite the undeniable power dynamics underpinning
such a concept as ‘colonialism’. That is, there have been processes
of co-creation since the moment of first encounter, the invention of
anthropology and the emergence of ethnographic collections and
museums. Museum work, then, has never been an exclusive busi-
ness since it has always relied on, and had to engage with, others as
informants, negotiators, interlocutors and so on. These processes
might not have entered official or public perspectives at the time but
they still took place. We need institutional histories to really delve
deep into these cross-cultural complexities, and museums need to
historicise themselves more radically through the medium of the
exhibition. At the same time, we cannot glorify the present in which
co-creation seems to become a trend and almost fashionable must.
Quite often, however, such initiatives can be unmasked as shallow
political gestures. They lack methodological rigor and thus fail
to address the key question we have followed in this commentary:
How can we seriously co-create knowledge across cultural bounda-
ries? This is a methodological question and we hardly run into ap-
proaches that are able to move beyond the ‘good old’ self-other-di-
chotomy and dissect the muliwai or own space in-between people, as
cultural human beings rather than essentialised ethnological types
(Schorch 2014), things, places and knowledge across their global
connections. The nature of such anthropological-curatorial inquiry
is, like ‘the very nature of exhibiting’, of course, ‘a contested terrain’
(Karp and Lavine 1991). The Humboldt Lab has not shied away but
has made some headway towards the great promise of museums,
that is, the potential for ‘making things public’ (Latour and Weibel
2005) by revealing the contested processes leading to the defini-
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 247 10.09.15 19:04
248 Philipp Schorch, Noelle M.K.Y.Kahanu
tion of categories and the interpretation of cultural worlds, and by
giving ‘faces’ to decisions and public expression to controversies,
in short, by conceptualising exhibitions as processes to be revealed
rather than products to be presented (Schorch 2009). If we want it
or not, museums inescapably are laboratories, and the infrastruc-
ture of ethnographic knowledge irreducibly is cross-cultural. It is
up to us, then, to release these realities from the shadows of their
often unconscious confinement and lift them to the conscious space
of potentialities.
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 248 10.09.15 19:04
Forum as Laboratory 249
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Karp, Ivan and Stephen D. Lavine (Eds.). 1991. Exhibiting cultures: The poet-
ics and politics of museum display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution
Press.
Latour, Bruno and Peter Weibel. 2005. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of
Democracy. Karlsruhe: ZKM
Meyer, Manulani Aluli. 2003. Ho’oulu: Our Time of Becoming. Hawaiian Episte-
mology and Early Writings. Honolulu: ‘Ai Pohaku Press.
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tices, Material Cultures, and Meanings. In: Brony Onciul, Michelle Ste-
fano and Stepahnie Hawke (Eds.), Engaging Communities, Engaging Herit-
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Behind the Scenes. Te Ara – Journal of Museums Aotearoa 33 (1–2): 28–31.
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museology: Reconceptualizing Engagement, Knowledge and Virtuality
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Schorch, Philipp and Arapata Hakiwai. 2014. Mana Taonga and the Public
Sphere: A Dialogue Between Indigenous Practice and Western Theory.
International Journal of Cultural Studies 17 (2): 191–205.
Talu, Alaima and Max Quanchi (Eds.). 1995. Messy Entanglements: The Pa-
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Tengan, Ty Kawika. 2014. The Return of Kū? Re-membering Hawaiian Mas-
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Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 250 10.09.15 19:04
((Ich hatte den Schorch_Beitrag
absichtlich nach 2 Seiten nach hinten
verschoben, damit nach allen Textbei-
trägen nur etwas Leerraum entsteht
und nicht am Ende 4 Seiten.
Aber es ist wohl Geschmackssache,
wie diese Seiten verteilt sind. Ich fän-
de gut, irgendwo zu vermerken, dass es
dem Zusammendruck geschuldet ist ...
sonst nimmt man es als Fehler wahr?.))
Buch H_Lab-englisch.indb 251 10.09.15 19:04
