Material Culture in Transit

Zainabu Jallo is a Post-Doctoral Researcher and lecturer in Anthropology at the Universities of Basel and Bern, Switzerland. Her PhD in Anthropology is from the Institute for Social Anthropology, University of Bern. she is also a Visiting Researcher at the Department of Anthropology at USP - Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil. Jallo is one of the Principal Investigators of the" Sacral Architecture Africa" Project. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts England and a member of the UNESCO Coalition of Artists for the General History of Africa. Her scholarly interests include museum anthropology, diaspora studies, iconic criticism, and material culture.

• List of figures Contributors Preface AcknowledgementsMoving Matter: Worlds f Material Culture Zainabu JalloPart I Museology Representation and Colonial Liabilities1. After Interpretive Dominance Anna Schmid2. "Wo Ist Afrika?": Of Reflexive Museography, and Other (Productive?) Disappointments Sandra Ferracuti3. "Out of Context"- Translocation of West African Artefacts to European Museums: The Case of the Leo Frobenius Collection From Mali Cécile Bründlmayer4. The Museum as a Colonial Archive. The Collection of Victor and Marie Solioz and Its Role in Forgetting the Colonial PastSamuel B. Bachmann5. Museum Collections in Transit: Towards A History of The Artefacts Of The Endeavour Voyage Nicholas ThomasPart II Heuristic Materiality Meanings and Transformations6. "To Give Away My Collection For Free Would Be Nonsense": Decorations And The Emergence Of Ethnology In Imperial Germany Carl Deussen7. Discourse On Objectification And Personification: Modern Forms Of Material Cultural Identity In The Touareg Society Djouroukoro Diallo 8. The Material Culture Of Vodun: Case Studies From Ghana, Togo, Germany And In-BetweenNiklas Wolf 9. Ndambirkus and Ndaokus; Asmat Skulls In Transit Jan Joris Visser 10. On The Art Of Forging Gods: Techniques, Forces And Materials In An Afro-Brazilian Religion. Lucas Marques

"Material Culture in Transit offers a provocative reflection on the relationship between mobility and materiality, things and their social and historical trajectories. Starting with recent controversial public debates on museum inventories—salient questions on provenance and restitution—the book challenges the relative insularity of some of these debates. A key contribution of this essay collection, as I see it, is that it situates the circulation of museum objects—now at the center of so-called “provenance research”—within broader forms of material culture circulation. It explores what emerges along the paths of circulating things." - George Paul Meiu, University of Basel