Prof. Dr. Andrew Apter
Dr. Kelemework Tafere Reda
Archives, Collections and History
What is the significance of ethnological archives and collections today?
How can their potential as memory institutions for indigenous societies, museums and the public be reassessed?
As one of the oldest cultural anthropological research institutions in the German-speaking world, the Institute has been addressing these questions long before the current restitution debate. Developed primarily in the context of research trips since 1904, the Institute's extensive archives and collections form an essential part of its identity. The rock art archive, which has been nominated for recognition as a UNESCO World Documentary Heritage, has a special position in this context, as it documents many prehistoric picture ensembles that have suffered considerable damage through natural environmental influences and in the last hundred years through mass tourism, industrialisation, graffiti or other forms of vandalism. Comparisons with copies from the early 20th century show the often tragic decay of the originals. Some of them can only be accessed today through the illustrations kept at the Institute, which in turn have become something like “original copies”.
Completed and ongoing third-party funded projects:
(Richard Kuba, Jean-Louis Georget, ANR, DFG, 2018-2020)
The German ethnographic expeditions to the Australian Kimberley. Research historical significance, digital repatriation and shared interpretation of Indigenous cultural heritage.
Expansion of the Middle India Archive
(Roland Hardenberg, Peter Steigerwald)
Projects in the application phase:
Zimbabwean digital rock art archive
(Richard Kuba, Volkswagen Foundation, new submission planned)
European scientific heritage from Africa and research ethics: facing the current crisis of perceptions
(Richard Kuba, Sophia Thubauville, EU project Horizon 22)
The ethnographic archive. Indexing, evaluation and restitution of unpublished ethnological sources in university, museum and research collections in the German-speaking world
(Holger Jebens)
Film as process and ethnographic becoming through repatriation of archival footage
(Roland Hardenberg, Igor Karim, Sophia Thubauville, DFG)
Digitisation of the excerpt by Prof. László Vajda
(Richard Kuba, DFG)
Further information on the focus…
The Institute has been working on its rich holdings for over twenty years in the spirit of a strategy that has now also been accepted throughout Germany and was formalised in 2020 as the “3 Ways Strategy for the Acquisition and Digital Publication of Collections from Colonial Contexts in Germany” (Access - Transparency - Cooperation). These three paths are not understood as a predefined “top-down strategy”, but as an open process, after the Institute began early on to systematically transcribe, translate and partially publish unpublished original sources in close cooperation with scholars from the countries concerned as well as with local or indigenous societies. In addition, the corresponding image collections have been and will be presented locally within the framework of jointly curated exhibitions and made available digitally as well as in high-quality printouts - among others, in 2008 in Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso), 2012 in Abuja, Ife, Makurdi, Minna and Yola (Nigeria), 2015 in Addis Ababa and Jinka (Ethiopia), 2017 in Dakar (Senegal), 2019 and 2021 again in Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) and 2022 in Derby (Australia). In an ethnologically informed and thus culturally sensitive way, the Institute thus makes historical source material accessible to the people in the regions and countries where it was created in the course of the 20th century. In this context, the photographs and drawings from the otherwise very image-poor early period of the 20th century are just as important as the unpublished travel diaries, field notes and letters, which often serve as the earliest written sources on site.
The indexing of the holdings, which takes place in joint research work, benefits considerably from the fact that people from the countries of origin contribute their own ontologies and contexts of meaning on the basis of local knowledge. Prerequisites for this are long-standing and trusting relationships as well as openness and sensitivity towards the often problematic ethical contexts of the documents' creation as well as towards the specific local needs that the research should serve (history for whom?). The multi-perspective and self-reflective processing of the holdings leads to an understanding of how they should be indexed, published and used in the future, and ultimately to responsible digital restitution. In the process, the Institute's online databases are being further developed in accordance with the principles of FAIR (findable, accessible, inter-operable, re-usable) and CARE (collective benefit, authority to control, responsibility, ethics), and regional thematic portals such as the Ethiopia Database, the Middle India Archive (MIA) or the Kimberley Archive (Frobenius Expedition Material for the Wanjina Wunggurr Determination Area) (https://www.frobenius-institut.de/datenbanken) are being created.
In addition to their importance for those involved in the research work and for local or indigenous societies as a whole, the archives and collections also serve as source material for the Institute's members and external scholars when dealing with their own subject history. Worthy of mention here are, above all, more than two dozen researchers' personal papers and bequests, the Institute's administrative archives and the archives of the German Society for Ethnology, a total of around 200 metres of shelves, including approximately 50,000 documents of various types that are digitally recorded and searchable via an online database. In analysing these holdings, the aim is not least to objectify the often very emotional debate about the historical role of the subject of ethnology and to critically examine the institute's namesake. In addition, individual aspects of the history of research will be examined in large public exhibitions - for example, in 2016 in Berlin (Martin-Gropius-Bau), 2017 in Mexico City (Museo Nacional de Antropología), 2019 in Frankfurt am Main (Museum Giersch), 2021 in Zurich (Museum Rietberg) and 2023 in Darmstadt (Hessisches Landesmuseum) and Paris (Musée de l'homme).
Due to their expertise in dealing with archives and collections, two members of staff were appointed to the "Colonial Heritage in Hesse" commission set up by the Conference of Hessian University Presidents at the suggestion of the Hessian Ministry of Science and Art. In addition, there is close cooperation with the "Contact Point for Collections from Colonial Contexts" at the Kulturstiftung der Länder (Cultural Foundation of the Federal States), and employees of the Institute were or are active in the Germany-wide "Network of Colonial Contexts", where they have been instrumental in developing recommendations for "collaborative digitisation projects".
Currently, the Institute is involved in an EU Horizon project proposal on African materials in European memory institutions. For the future, it is planned to continue the work in the research focus “Archives, Collections and Subject History” with projects on the extensive and as yet not indexed excerpts by Leo Frobenius, Hermann Baumann and László Vajda, among others. Another, somewhat broader project deals with the relationship between subject and institution, i.e. between the former Ethnological Museum and ethnology as a whole, from a historical and specifically ethnological perspective. The close cooperation between the Frobenius Institute and the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt is also of great value here.
Indhubala Kesavan (MPhil)
Suneet Kumar (MPhil)
Economic dynamics
What kinds of linkages can be observed between local economic practices and global economies?
What coexistence of different economic practices can be observed when mobility and local embeddedness coincide?
These and other questions are being investigated by the staff of the research focus „Economic Dynamics“. They investigate transnational networks and their manifestation not only in terms of the market economy, but also in social, political and religious terms, i.e. ultimately it is about the intertwining of local economic practices and logics on the one hand and global economic models and contexts on the other. The corresponding projects are based on close cooperation with researchers from Ethiopia, Central Asia, the Caucasus, Pakistan, Israel and Switzerland, who are each at different stages of their careers. The research results are presented for discussion in the form of lectures and publications and made available for the promotion of young academics in the context of courses and the supervision of bachelor's, master's and doctoral theses
Completed and ongoing third-party funded projects
Resource Cultures of Rice and Wheat in South and Central Asia. Religious and (agrarian) economic dimensions of cereals
(Roland Hardenberg, SFB 1070, 2021-2025)
Cultural entrepreneurship and digital transformation in Africa and Asia
(Richard Kuba, as cooperation partner BMBF, 2021-2024)
The bureaucratisation of African societies
(Mamadou Diawara, Max Weber Foundation, 2017-2021)
The search for a "good life". Livelihood strategies in Iran and Germany.
(Mirco Göpfert, Roland Hardenberg, DAAD, 2020-2021)
Informal markets and trade in Central Asia and the Caucasus
(Susanne Fehlings, Volkswagen Foundation 2016-2021)
On the saf(v)e side: informal economic associations and future aspirations in the Ethiopian diaspora
(Sophia Thubauville, Elias Alemu, DFG, 2021-2024)
From “poor man's food” to “nutri-cereals": emergence of a new millet assemblage in Odisha, India
(Roland Hardenberg, funding period 2021-2023, DFG)
Completed project without additional funding
Village and city in Oceania
(Holger Jebens)
More information on the focus...
The insight into the fundamental importance of economic interests, ideas and practices is not new in the history of the Institute. As early as 1921, for example, Frobenius explicitly warned against “examining myths without including the economic system”, and accordingly Adolf Ellegard Jensen saw a connection between the globally widespread mythologem of the killed deity and the economy of the so-called “early planter cultures” in his book “Das religiöse Weltbild einer frühen Kultur” (1948) as well as in his major work “Mythos und Kult bei Naturvölkern” (1951). The monographs of the Institute members who travelled to Ethiopia, India, Bolivia or Venezuela between the 1930s and 1950s regularly contained chapters dealing with agriculture, pastoral nomadism or handicrafts, among other things, according to the classical pattern. From the 1960s onwards, the Institute's own series Studien zur Kulturkunde published more than twenty volumes on economic ethological topics, including economic roles in a Liberian village (1967), iron production in sub-Saharan Africa (1976) and pastoralism in Niger (1998). Questions of economics were also the subject of several essays by Eike Haberland, the last of which was published in 1984 in volume 30 of the journal Paideuma - a Festschrift for the nomadism researcher Rolf Herzog entitled “Wirtschaftsethnologische Studien”.
Compared to older research, the focus today is more on processes of international interdependence and globalisation or change in general. For example, a project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research deals with trade networks and migration between the Sahel and Southeast Asia. In addition, the sub-projects of the Collaborative Research Centre "Resource Cultures" led by Roland Hardenberg deal with, among other things, the consequences of British extractivism for local culture and society in Spain, the commercialisation and commodification of religious resources in South and Central Asia and, also in relation to South Asia, the question of how the global goal of sustainable development affects indigenous agricultural practices.
With the support of the Volkswagen Foundation, an interdisciplinary and international team with more than twelve participants, including BA, MA and PhD students as well as experienced researchers, is investigating small traders, informal markets and trade relations in Eurasia along the former Silk Road and in the Caucasus (Georgia and Armenia), in Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) and in China in seven subprojects under the leadership of Susanne Fehlings. An additional module focuses on the Covid 19 pandemic and its influence on informal trade and individual cooperation within Chinese-Eurasian business relations. In this context, the people involved in small-scale trade maintain complex relationships with various state institutions. On the one hand, they are anchored in local contexts, but on the other hand they are also strongly networked internationally and very mobile. Therefore, they appear to be important actors in the course of a “globalisation from below”.
Another international team led by Sophia Thubauville is researching informal savings and insurance associations in Ethiopia as well as in the Ethiopian diaspora in the USA, the United Arab Emirates, Israel and Kenya. Based on the thesis that such savings and insurance associations express ideas of a "good life" or a better future, the participants investigate how economic practices and social orders change when they encounter new framework conditions as a result of migration. The project is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and an additional postdoctoral fellowship from the Gerda Henkel Foundation. The University of Hawassa (Ethiopia) acts as an equal project partner with its own funds for research and equipment.
The work in the research focus “Economic Dynamics” is to be expanded and deepened in the coming years. To this end, the Institute is planning various studies of non-Western concepts and practices in the field of economics as part of the third funding phase of the Collaborative Research Centre “Resource Cultures”. An anthology to conclude this special research area as a basic work for the cultural-scientific consideration of resources is in preparation. Other book projects in which the Institute is playing a leading role are based on the research described above on savings and insurance associations in the Ethiopian diaspora and on the effects of the Covid 19 pandemic on small-scale trade in Eurasia. These impacts are also the subject of a planned follow-up project. In addition, the Institute is participating with a project on “(Neo-)Extractivism, Resistance Movements and Environmental Concepts” in an initiative supported by the Ruhr University Bochum and the German Mining Museum Bochum, which aims to establish a new Collaborative Research Centre entitled “GeoRessourcenVerflechtungen und WeltAneignungen”.
Cultural Anthropological Archaeology and Historical Ethnology
What cultural dynamics have contributed to the diversity of different population groups as well as to urban development, state formation and trade in Africa over centuries?
How does the interaction between indigenous and external agents in the management of resources in Asia manifest itself in political, social and cultural terms, and how does this interaction influence dominant forms of food and economic practices in the long term?
These and other questions are at the centre of research projects that examine the richness of human cultures in their current diversity as well as in their change through time. For example, topics such as human coexistence and the relationship between human cultures and their natural environment, not only with regard to the present, but also in a diachronic perspective as well as in relation to other epochs are looked at specifically under archaeological and historical aspects. The corresponding projects rely on local participation and local knowledge of the past, they are open-ended as well as multidisciplinary, and they ultimately aim to expand the spectrum of methods in cultural anthropology.
Completed and ongoing third-party funded projects:
Resource Cultures of Rice and Wheat in South and Central Asia. Religious and (agrarian) economic dimensions of cereals
(Roland Hardenberg, SFB 1070, 2021-2025)
The Lake Chad Region as a Crossroads. First studies on archaeology and oral traditions of the early Kanem-Borno empire and its intra-African connections
(Carlos Magnavita, Dangbet Zakinet, DFG 2019 2024).
Cultural entanglements on the lower Guadalquivir. Interacting resource cultures and socio-cultural change in the south of the Iberian Peninsula.
(Martin Bartelheim, Roland Hardenberg, SFB 1070, 2021-2025)
Loan words and objects of exchange. Archaeo-linguistic network analysis and modelling of cultural interconnections along the Niger, between Sahara and rainforest (700 1500 AD)
(Henning Schreiber, Nikolas Gestrich, DFG, 2019 2021)
The relationship between pottery form and function through lipid and protein analysis in West Africa (sub-project of the DFG project loan words and exchange objects).
(Soren Feldborg Pedersen, Nikolas Gestrich, 2021-2024)
Markadugu: the relationship of urbanism and trade to state power in the Segou region of Mali
(Nikolas Gestrich, Volkswagen Foundation, 2016-2021)
Use of landscape as a resource and socio-cultural change on the Iberian Peninsula
(Martin Bartelheim, Roland Hardenberg, subproject in SFB 1070, 2017-2021)
Salvage crops, “savage” people: a comparative anthropological and archaeobotanical investigation of millet assemblages in India
(Roland Hardenberg, Netherlands Research Foundation, 2021-2025)
From “poor man’s food” to “nutri-cereals”. On the emergence of a new millet assemblage in Odisha, India
(Roland Hardenberg, DFG, 2021-2023)
Projects in the application phase
Planting pomegranate trees, creating gardens, making paradise: from Ancient Mesopotamia to California
(Susanne Fehlings)
Extractivism, resistance movements and environmental concepts: The interweaving of environmental dispositifs in the highlands of Odisha, India.
(Roland Hardenberg, sub-project in the SFB initiative "GeoRessourcenVerflechtungen und WeltAneignungen" of the Montanarchäologie of the University of Bochum, application phase)
Further information on the research focus...
The research focus “Cultural Anthropological Archaeology and Historical Ethnology” has a long tradition at the Institute, since the cultural morphology founded by Frobenius was ultimately aimed at understanding the development of cultures without writing. Although Frobenius' assumption that each of these cultures went through the phases of comprehension, expression and application is at best of interest today in terms of specialist history, his insight into the historicity of Africa distinguished him from many of his contemporaries and was later to earn him the gratitude of African intellectuals such as Léopold Sédar Senghor. In addition, Frobenius repeatedly used decidedly archaeological surveys and excavations, for example in investigations of the Ife culture in Nigeria (1910), of Neolithic stone tombs in Algeria (1914) and of prehistoric ruins of the Mwenemutapa culture in Zimbabwe (1929).
Historical questions were also pursued at the Institute after the Second World War, for example in the research of Frobenius' student and successor Adolf Ellegard Jensen and of Hermann Niggemeyer on megalithic cultures in Africa, Southeast Asia and India. In the mid-1980s, Eike Haberland made a major contribution to the founding of the interdisciplinary collaborative research centre "Cultural Development and Language History in the Natural Area of the West African Savannah" and to the renaming of the Seminar for Ethnology as the "Institute for Historical Ethnology" at Goethe University. At the Frobenius Institute he supported archaeological excavations in southern Algeria. Haberland's successor Karl-Heinz Kohl participated (as did Holger Jebens after him) as an applicant in the research training group "Value and Equivalence" run jointly by representatives of ethnology and archaeology, and with Jens Lüning, a prehistorian was first a member and then chairman of the Institute's scientific advisory board for many years.
Today, the Institute hosts several third-party funded archaeological projects, in the context of which its own excavations and surveys are carried out. Among other things, those involved use the example of the Kanem-Borno Empire and its intra-African connections before the 15th century to investigate the formation of state politics and urban settlement systems in the Sahel region of Africa. In the process, processes are revealed that in part show clearly different patterns from Middle Eastern or European models and that exert considerable influence on the political culture of the region today. Long-distance trade in the West African Middle Ages with the beginning of supralocal economic systems, migration and the exchange of goods and ideas along the Niger River, the Sahel and Savannah Belt and through the Sahara (AD 500-1500) is also being studied. The corresponding projects each work at the interface of archaeology, written history, oral tradition and - in the case of West African long-distance trade - historical linguistics, so that they contribute to a methodological further development of African research into the past.
Studies with a stronger ethnological-archaeological orientation deal with landscapes on the Iberian Peninsula and the entanglements between the local population and immigrants in the use of resources such as ores. In addition, representatives of archaeology, archaeobotany and cultural anthropology have joined together to form a multidisciplinary research consortium under the leadership of the Institute and have developed their own web presentation in order to investigate, within the framework of several German-Dutch research projects, the cultural and social embedding of millet, rice and wheat in particular, i.e. cereal varieties whose importance is likely to increase significantly in the foreseeable future. The participating researchers exchange their respective special knowledge about the legal, religious and political aspects of dealing with millet, rice and wheat, using the concept of "assemblages" as a common focus or language.
For the next few years, it is planned to extend the current research on trade and globalisation in West Africa to Guinea, Nigeria and Chad. In addition, an interdisciplinary research group is in the application phase, which deals with the emergence and development of the state as well as urbanity and trade connections in the Central Sahel. Other projects, for example on the beginnings of pearl millet cultivation and on the effects of catastrophic climate change in Mauritania, are currently in the planning stage, as are various workshops and publications that should conclude by 2025 the research currently taking place in India, Kazakhstan and Spain as part of the Collaborative Research Centre “Resource Cultures” (SFB 1070), co-chaired by Roland Hardenberg. In addition, cooperation with archaeologists and historians working at the Goethe University will be further expanded through joint courses and the conception of joint research projects, with a particular focus on the already existing African focus of the Institute for Archaeological Sciences.
Cosmologies and religious practice
What are the dynamic relationships and tensions between different religious traditions, between religious and non-religious spheres, and between cosmologies and religious practice?
What influence do religions have on the emergence of conflicts, to what extent do they determine their shaping, and do they possibly contribute to conflicts being settled through negotiation?
These are just some of the questions addressed in the research focus „Cosmologies and Religious Practice“. With the phenomenon of Christian fundamentalism, the connection between Hindu religions and Indian kingship, as well as changes in lived Islam, the corresponding projects focus on various topics whose significance has been increasing worldwide in recent years, even beyond the academic framework. In this context, religions are understood as arenas in which different and often conflicting interests, emotions and convictions clash. With a decidedly religio-ethnological and praxeological perspective, it is primarily about expressions and actions, i.e. what people say about their beliefs, for example, and what they do concretely within the framework of rituals and everyday life...
Completed and ongoing third-party funded projects
From “poor man's food” to “nutri-cereals": emergence of a new millet assemblage in Odisha, India
(Roland Hardenberg, funding period 2021-2023, DFG)
Religious speech as a resource in South and Central Asia. Instruction, medialisation and commercialisation.
(Ruth Conrad, Roland Hardenberg, sub-project of SFB 1070, 2017-2021).
Resource Cultures of Rice and Wheat in South and Central Asia. Religious and (agrarian) economic dimensions of cereals
(Roland Hardenberg, SFB 1070, 2021-2025)
Long-term project without additional financial support
Christian Fundamentalism in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea
(Holger Jebens)
More information on the focus...
Looking at the history of the Institute, today's research on religious traditions and practices is part of a tradition that basically begins with Frobenius: he was in close contact with the religious scholars of his time, such as Karl Kerényi, who in turn published several times in the Institute's journal Paideuma. An excerpt created by Frobenius on motifs of “world mythology” is just as much a part of the Institute's archive holdings as the “African Myths and Fairy Tales Archive”, which goes back to Hermann Baumann and was expanded in the 1960s with the support of the German Research Foundation.
Adolf Ellegard Jensen, on the basis of research stays in southern Ethiopia and on the Moluccan island of Ceram, among others, dealt with fundamental commonalities in the development of the beliefs and religious actions of foreign peoples. His main work “Mythos und Kult bei Naturvölkern” (1951) found little resonance in the contemporary English-speaking scholarly world, but from today's perspective has the status of a solitaire. The “Ad.E. Jensen Memorial Lectures”, established in 1997, are dedicated to the memory of the second director of the Frobenius Institute. So far, the lectures have dealt with “The Colour of the Sacred” (Michael Taussig, 2004), “Cult and Art” (Fritz Kramer, 2010) and religion as a special form of the social (Maurice Boch, 2012).
Jensen was followed by C.A. Schmitz, renowned New Guinea specialist and editor of an anthology entitled “Religionsethnologie” (1964), and Eike Haberland. The latter's successor, Karl-Heinz Kohl, published numerous contributions on the ethnology of religion in eastern Indonesia from the mid-1980s onwards, with a particular focus on the "capacity for change" and “resilience” of local religion. His monograph “The Death of the Rice Maiden. Myths, Cults and Alliances in an Eastern Indonesian Local Culture” was published in 1998 as the first volume in the book series “Religionsethnologische Studien des Frobenius-Instituts”, which he founded.
Among the mostly long-term projects in the research focus “Cosmologies and Religious Practice” are Holger Jebens' study of Melanesian cargo cults as a special form of religiously based liberation movements, as well as his analysis of the relationship between local religion, Catholicism and Protestantism in the mountainous country of Papua New Guinea, based on stationary field research, which in part anticipated insights of the later established "Anthropology of Christianity". Research by Roland Hardenberg deals with the diversity of India's indigenous religions, the connection between Hindu religions and Indian kingship, and changes in lived Islam under the influence of various fundamentalist movements in Central Asia. The projects he is leading as part of the Collaborative Research Centre “Resource Cultures” examine the significance of economic practices and ideas for religious institutions (churches, mosques and temples), sermons (Christianity, Islam, Hindu religions) and rituals of agriculture (tribal religions and Islam) in India, Iran, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Within the framework of these and other projects, also funded by the German Research Foundation, doctoral projects on topics related to ethnology of religion are supervised, workshops are organised, seminars are held and publications on topics such as animism, perspectivism and ritual economy are presented. An interdisciplinary anthology co-edited by Hardenberg entitled "Speaking to God", for example, is expected to be published by Bloomsbury in 2023.
Although religious anthropology has a long tradition in the German-speaking world, represented by the works of Konrad Theodor Preuß, Carl Strehlow and P.W. Schmidt, among others, it has received little attention in today's university ethnology or cultural anthropology. The Institute therefore has a special role to play. However, the aim is not only to continue the relevant research, but also to consolidate and expand it. For example, together with representatives of ethnology and archaeobotany at the University of Groningen, the Institute is participating in the research network "Cereal Cultures in South and Central Asia", from which various externally funded projects on the study of the religious significance of cereals are to emerge. A broad research consortium, which includes various departments of the Goethe University in addition to the Institute and the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften, is concerned with processes of understanding and misunderstanding between the monotheistic scriptural religions as well as between these, other religious traditions and the secular world under the title “Dynamics of the Religious”. An initiative is currently emerging from this consortium for the establishment of a centre for the study of religious dynamics within the framework of the “Landes-Offensive zur Entwicklung wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz”. The foundation of another institution, namely a Käthe Hamburger Kolleg on the topic of “Toxic Religions”, is currently being planned by Roland Hardenberg and other scholars from the Goethe University.
Louise Bechtold (MA)
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