Collecting Asia-Pacific: Museums, "Race," and the Anthropological Sciences in Imperial Germany

FAIN: FT-291820-23

Marissa Helene Petrou
University of Louisiana at Lafayette (Lafayette, LA 70503-2014)

Archival research and writing one chapter of a book about the history of a German museum and how its collecting practices were tied to the European colonization of Oceania and Southeast Asia in the 19th century. 

As European museums begin to address the harms they have caused and continue to cause descendant communities, "Collecting Asia-Pacific: Museums, 'Race,' and the Anthropological Sciences in Imperial Germany" examines the complex history behind one museum which aimed to prevent such harms at its founding. The Dresden Museum for Zoology, Anthropology and Ethnography was founded by A.B. Meyer (1840-1911), a German Jew who would use the museum's collections to propose an historical, non-essentialist approach to understanding racial and cultural difference because of his commitment to extensive field research, Darwinian evolution, anticolonialism, and experimentation with techniques of visual representation. Internationally, this historical understanding of ethnicity attracted the attention of Filipino nationalists and launched the careers of Meyer’s students and collaborators in European and Latin American museums.