Anthropology’s Interlocutors. Hawai’i Speaking Back to Ethnographic Museums in Europe

The ferocious debates surrounding the developing Humboldt-Forum in Berlin indicate that ethnographic museums in the German-speaking world, where colonial histories are largely invisible in public discourses, are lagging decades behind the processes of political decolonization and critical reflections in their own academic discipline, as Christian Kravagna rightly asserts. Even such laudable critiques, however, while importantly alluding to the »symbolic colonialism« perpetuated through museological productions of »Otherness«, remain largely disconnected from indigenous critiques underpinning contemporary museum practices that are emerging e.g. across the Pacific as in Hawai’i. In other words, the critique itself often remains Eurocentric and approaches global, (post)colonial entanglements and their mutual albeit mostly asymmetrical constitution through one-sided lenses, even if these are (re)polished as post-colonial, post-modern etc. The problem, then, goes even deeper and, apart from the mostly justified claims for moral redress, political concessions and legal reparations, which dominate the discussions around the Humboldt-Forum, becomes intellectual and methodological (cf. Schorch 2015). For example, in the Hawaiian language there exist no words for ›art‹ and ›artifact‹. Hawaiians do have words such as waiwai (goods, valuables), makamae (precious) and waiwai alii (chiefly valuables), but do these equate to an artifact? Given the widely acknowledged beauty and skill in the creation of material culture, one might argue that the HawaiAnthropology’s Interlocutors. Hawai’i Speaking Back to Ethnographic Museums in Europe