‘Idols’ in the Museum
Year: 2024
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: BIrGIT MEyEr 'Idols' in the Museum Legacies of Missionary IconoclasmThings from the past are targets of conflicting political-aesthetic meanings that become sharply visible in moments of iconoclasm.Calls for the demolition of contested images and objects disrupt conventional mainstream understandings of the past, opening up inroads into alternative histories written from a subaltern perspective (Troelenberg, Schankweiler, Messner 2021).In this sense, the 're-emergence' of iconoclasm, which forms the central theme of this volume, entails above all a 're-emergence' of the past, with all its messy complexity and ugly dimensions, into contemporary public awareness.As "the past is no longer understood as one single story" (ibd.: 3), it has to be rewritten from a relational perspective.A focus on contested images and objects, found offensive by some and cherished by others, is a highly productive starting point for this endeavor (see also Kruse, Meyer, Korte 2018).The current critical evaluation of highly charged material reminders of national histories and calls for their removal occurs alongside a demand for the restitution of objects kept in European ethnological and other museums to the societies of origin (Sarr/Savoy 2018; Sandkühler, Epple, Zimmerer 2021).This is part of the increasing attention paid to legacies of European nations' colonial past for current postcolonial, plural societies.It befits open democratic societies to face this 're-emergent' and partly unacknowledged past, which leads deep into a European history of imperialism, colonization, and discrimination and its once heroic figures.In this sense, a focus on current instances of iconoclasm vis-à-vis colonial images challenges conventional narratives of national identity and belonging and poses pertinent questions about the crucial role of images in sustaining and potentially unhinging the political-aesthetic formations (Meyer 2009; van de Port/Meyer 2018) in which citizenship and belonging are forged. 1 This chapter calls attention to items belonging to a category of religious objects that were targeted by missionary iconoclasms launched in areas of European colonial outreach, yet were spared from actual destruction.These became part of colonial collections that have been kept and preserved in ethnological museums up to the present day.It focuses on a collection of items gathered around 1900 by missionaries of the Norddeutsche Missionsgesellschaft (NMG) among the Ewe in the German colony Togo and some parts of Gold Coast/Ghana for the Städtisches Museum für Natur-, Völker-und Handelskunde-today the Übersee-Museum Bremen.The missionaries strove to make Ewe people convert to Christianity and thus to reject their indigenous
Source: De Gruyter eBooks
Author: Birgit Meyer
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4398219403