The Flying-Swan Mask

Public controversies swirling around ethnological museums in Europe and North America today have illuminated a largely forgotten history of knowledge. That is not only a history embedded in colonialism and empire but also one driven by convictions that a total history of humanity could be discovered and written, that the second half of the nineteenth century marked a tipping point in that history, and that the records of the past had to be assembled as rapidly as possible before it was too late. This book tells the emotional tale of German ethnologists’ pursuit of variations on a unitary human history across the globe. It is meant to explain to a broad audience why there are more than a half million non-European objects in the Berlin Ethnological Museum and millions more in similar museums across Germany. It explains how those objects came to German cities; what the people who collected these objects thought they were doing; and what we could and should be doing with them today. This is ultimately a tragic tale. It is the story of the excitement that led Adolf Bastian, the father of German ethnology, and the thousands who joined him, to follow Alexander von Humboldt’s example while attempting to construct a total history of the world. It is the story of how they began with a belief in the psychic unity of humanity; how they embraced the promise of harnessing material culture as alternative historical texts; how they believed that everything from religious objects to clothing and tools offered them windows into the worldviews of people who produced and used them; how they developed a vision of museums as archival work spaces dedicated to an unprecedented scientific project meant to reveal a complete history of humanity free of evolutionary hierarchies; how the Faustian bargains they agreed to along the way undermined their goals; and how a confluence of forces curtailed, undercut, and ultimately buried that project over the last century.