In Humboldt's Shadow

A Tragic History of German Ethnology

H. Glenn Penny

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780691216447, 9780691211145
• eBook ISBN: 9780691216454
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Museum Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A compelling history of the German ethnologists who were inspired by Prussian polymath and explorer Alexander von Humboldt

The Berlin Ethnological Museum is one of the world's largest and most important anthropological museums, housing more than a half million objects collected from around the globe. In Humboldt's Shadow tells the story of the German scientists and adventurers who, inspired by Alexander von Humboldt's inclusive vision of the world, traveled the earth in pursuit of a total history of humanity. It also details the fate of their museum, which they hoped would be a scientists' workshop, a place where a unitary history of humanity might emerge.

H. Glenn Penny shows how these early German ethnologists assembled vast ethnographic collections to facilitate their study of the multiplicity of humanity, not to confirm emerging racist theories of human difference. He traces how Adolf Bastian filled the Berlin museum in an effort to preserve the records of human diversity, yet how he and his supporters were swept up by the imperialist currents of the day and struck a series of Faustian bargains to ensure the growth of their collections. Penny describes how influential administrators such as Wilhelm von Bode demanded that the museum be transformed into a hall for public displays, and how Humboldt's inspiring ideals were ultimately betrayed by politics and personal ambition.

In Humboldt's Shadow calls on museums to embrace anew Bastian's vision while deepening their engagement with indigenous peoples concerning the provenance and stewardship of these collections.

CHAPTER ONE

Hawaiian Feather Cloaks and Mayan Sculptures

COLLECTING ORIGINS

IN 1828, LONG before he became the head of one of the most powerful trading houses in Hamburg, Wilhelm Oswald visited Hawai‘i as a young cargo officer on the Prussian merchant ship Prinzessin Louise. Filled with Prussian cloth, linens, finished clothing, glassware, textiles, and other trade goods, this sailing vessel stopped at what Europeans still called the Sandwich Islands on its way between the Americas and China. Hawai‘i was only one of many ports along a four-year route meant to help Prussia establish trade connections throughout the world, an ambitious venture in an age of imperial competition for territory and trade. Less than two decades after a devastating defeat by Napoleonic forces, when Prussia’s very survival had hung in the balance, this state had no real navy, no fleet worthy of note. It could hardly compete with even the Hansa cities, such as Bremen and Hamburg, whose transoceanic trade networks had been active for centuries. By the time the Prinzessin Louise passed though the dangerous and daunting (as it still is) Strait of Magellan while rounding the tip of South America, those cities already had merchant houses and consuls in many of the ports it visited. Meanwhile, the major sea powers, England, France, and increasingly the United States, dominated the Pacific.

Still, as American and European ships visited the islands, they brought rumors of Prussian military prowess to Hawai‘i, and Oswald soon found himself drawn into the Hawaiian Royal Court and pressed for information by King Kamehameha III. Although still a teenager, he had been ruling there for three years. The young king eagerly listened to Oswald’s tales of European warfare. He wanted to know more about Prussian exploits, about Frederick the Great’s many wars and Field Marshal Blücher’s heroic role in Napoleon’s defeat. Oswald’s stories spurred the Hawaiian ruler to ask about the Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm III, and these led him to make comparisons between Field Marshal Blücher and his father, Kamehameha I, who had been a formidable warrior, uniting the Hawaiian Islands through force of arms.

While Kamehameha III could appreciate the military and political importance of Oswald’s tales, it was difficult for him to imagine the hundreds of thousands of soldiers mobilized in Europe’s wars. The numbers were so big. By that time, the entire population of native Hawaiians numbered only about 150,000 people. How were these large armies organized, supplied, and transported? How could leaders such as Blücher control their movements or orchestrate a cavalry’s charge? These questions fascinated him, and he frequently visited the Prinzessin Louise to speak with Oswald about them. The Prussian ship always celebrated the king’s arrival, greeting him with a royal salvo from their cannon, which the harbor fort consistently echoed with its own guns. Over time, the information he gathered caused Kamehameha III to regard his homeland as poor in comparison to the industrial states that manufactured the goods flowing into his islands from ever-greater numbers of ships crisscrossing the Pacific.¹

In early March 1828, when the Prinzessin Louise was ready to leave the islands, the Hawaiian ruler came to the ship with a brilliant red-and-yellow cloak, painstakingly made from the feathers of local birds. Such feather cloaks were among the most prized possessions of the Hawaiian nobility, and his father had worn this one frequently. Before Europeans began arriving in the islands in 1778, and for several decades afterward, such cloaks were visual symbols of military power and political might. Only ranking male chiefs could possess them, and they wore them only in battle or on state occasions. They were often taken as war prizes from losing chiefs, and so, powerful chiefs and a king such as Kamehameha I might have many. These cloaks were handwoven by men of high rank from feathers collected as part of the commoners’ taxes. The largest of these scrupulously produced cloaks might require millions of feathers.

By the time of Oswald’s visit, however, Hawaiians had given away substantial numbers of these cloaks to ships’ captains. Very few were left in Hawai‘i by 1854, the last year of King Kamehameha III’s reign. In fact, by the time of his death, far more were in European museums than in Hawai‘i. In part, that is because so many were given away, but it was also because times had drastically changed. The king’s elder brother, Kamehameha II, during his short reign (1819–24), had destroyed the islands’ ancient kapu system, the social code of religious laws/taboos. To solidify his power, he put an end to the social class of priests and eradicated idols, images, and temples across Hawai‘i.²

FIGURE 1.1. King Kamehameha’s feather cloak. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Ethnologisches Museum (VI 366). Photo: Martin Franken.

Until Europeans began arriving in large numbers, chiefs had occupied themselves with the production of weapons, war cloaks, and helmets under the auspices of kapu. However, as they became acquainted with European commerce, money economies, and learned to read and write, the ruling classes shifted their occupations. Gunpowder, not clubs, knives, and spears, increasingly drove Hawaiian battles of unification and consolidation. Consequently, in 1899, William T. Bingham, the director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, could locate only five feather cloaks on the islands. Yet there were hundreds in museums and private collections in Europe and North America.³

That history, however, did not diminish the moment in March 1828 when King Kamehameha III presented the cloak to Oswald. It was a poignant act of diplomacy, a gift from one sovereign to another, meant to initiate relations. The cloak and the king’s letter to Friedrich Wilhelm III traveled around much of the globe before arriving in Berlin in September 1829. The Prussian sovereign and his court were impressed by the cloak’s beauty—its delicate feel, the colors, and the painstaking labor that produced it. It was magnificent. They also recognized its diplomatic significance.

Friedrich Wilhelm III first encountered the cloak during a presentation of goods and artifacts gathered during the voyage: ivories, lacquer work, lamps from China, porcelains, sandalwood boxes, silks. and teas, as well as a variety of minerals, plants, and products of nature that would eventually make their way into Berlin’s Natural History Museum. The feather cloak, however, was special. Kamehameha III’s letter, which stressed that the cloak was one of the finest things his islands had to offer, moved the Prussian king. He instructed his ministers to notify him if another of his ships were to venture to the Sandwich Islands, so that he could arrange for a commensurate gift for Kamehameha III.

Thus, when the Prinzessin Louise returned to Hawaii in 1830, it took with it a saddle and riding equipment complete with pistols in holsters, a guard’s uniform like the one Friedrich Wilhelm III often wore, oil paintings of himself and Field Marshal Blücher, a map of Prussia, drawings of important buildings of state, metal busts of European leaders and military men, and various products of Prussian industry, ranging from clothing to jewelry to porcelains. The Prussian sovereign detailed these items and their uses in a personal letter to the Hawaiian king, affirming their shared nobility. The gracious tone of Kamehameha III’s response underscored his delight with the gifts.

After the initial viewings, the feather cloak was separated from the natural curiosities and trade items. Prussian ministers placed it in the Kunstkammer in the Royal Palace, in the section devoted to “non-European rarities.” There it took its place among an eclectic assembly of a few thousand things, many collected over centuries to satisfy Prussian rulers’ curiosity about other cultures. Some Chinese, Indian, and Japanese items had been among the collections since the time of Great Elector Friedrich Wilhelm (1620–88), although the French seized most of those when Napoleon occupied Berlin in 1806.

The feather cloak entered a somewhat smaller collection of “non-European rarities” than existed at the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the collections were quite varied. They even included other items from Polynesia. Prussian officials had brought some back from the Pacific; others had purchased, at London auctions, objects collected during James Cook’s famous worldwide voyages. There were also objects from Asia, Brazil, Mexico, and New Zealand, gifted to the royal collections by private individuals and state employees.

By 1851, the Royal Ethnographic Collection boasted some 5,192 items, and after 1856, after the Kunstkammer was dissolved and its holdings redistributed into the state’s growing complex of museums, the collection became independent. In 1859, the feather cloak and the rest of the collections were presented to the public in three large halls in the New Museum, the second classical museum building erected on Museum Island, just north of the Old Museum and the Lustgarten in central Berlin. There, as part of a “universal museum” with scientific pretensions, they joined the collections of plaster casts, copies of statues ranging from ancient Greece and Rome through to Gothic and Renaissance Europe. These arrived together with the collections that became the basis for the Egyptian Museum, the Collection of Copper Engravings, and the Museum of Early and Prehistory. On the top floor of the building, one could also find odds and ends from the Kunstkammer, such as architectural models and small art works from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which later found their way into the Kunstgewerbemuseum (Arts and Crafts Museum) when it opened in 1875. The New Museum offered visitors a window into the arts and cultures of the world.

Since 1844, the objects in the ethnographic collections had been organized geographically and systematically. They retained that scientific order in their new locations surrounded by polished marble, under the brightly colored ceiling of the Flachkuppelsaal (flat-dome hall), and near the Dorian columns. They were arranged according to the continents of America, Australia (including Polynesia), Africa, and Asia. More than half the objects came from Asia, and many of them caught the viewer’s eye through their “tasteful and even artistic implementation.”⁴ These were delightful wonders from around the world in an eminently fashionable setting.

These were not simply cabinets full of aesthetically pleasing items. Many things were larger and stranger than the feather cloak. An eight-foot tall painted leather tipi from North America, for example, stood in the middle of one hall near a semicircular window niche. There was also information: to help orient visitors, each object had a numbered label, color-coded according to its continent, with details about the object and the collector. In addition, in 1861, the guide meant to help visitors negotiate the displays listed these objects individually. Within those regional groupings, there were also hierarchical orders.⁵ Like most museums in Europe and the Americas at this time, they offered visitors evolutionary trajectories by displaying objects in a linear progression, from less- to more-advanced technologies.

Weltanschauungen

Almost everything changed after Adolf Bastian became directorial assistant of the ethnological collections in 1869, and then took over as director in 1876. The geographic arrangement of objects continued to dominate Berlin’s ethnological displays right through the twentieth century, and some objects, like the feather cloak and the tipi, continue to be counted among the collection’s highlights even today. Yet Bastian brought a radically different vision to the collections. Unlike his predecessors, he had spent years traveling the world; he had extensive experience living among non-Europeans, and he added to those experiences over the course of his life. As a result, he was not interested in simply curating a collection of noteworthy objects. He was interested in using them to expose and compare Weltanschauungen—worldviews.

Much like the English natural scientist Charles Darwin, who became famous for his extensive travels and his contributions to the science of evolution during the middle of the nineteenth century, Bastian left Europe on his first voyage in 1850 with Alexander von Humboldt’s writings on his mind. As he crisscrossed the globe over a period of eight years, encountering an astoundingly diverse mix of cultures, languages, and religions, Bastian thought about Humboldt’s desire to write a total history of the cosmos, drawing on all areas of knowledge and all the fields of science. He thought too about the harmony Humboldt had glimpsed: the interconnection of all things, revealed through patterns in nature across space and time.

Bastian returned from that first set of voyages in 1858 with a passion for one area of Humboldt’s cosmos: the history of humanity. For Bastian, that meant the history of the human mind. Within two years of his return, his enthusiasm and his restless energy drove him to publish his first major work, the three-volume The Human in History: Toward the Founding of a Psychological Worldview (Der Mensch in der Geschichte: Zur Begründung einer psychologischen Weltanschauung, 1860).⁶ In it, he argued that all the components of human thought coursed through the minds of the great varieties of people he had encountered. There were harmonious patterns in that thought as well, which he believed extended across space and time. “Far from Europe, and for a long time limited in linguistic intercourse,” he exclaimed, “the ideas laid down here germinated under the perception of the manifold circumstances in which the people of the globe live together. In the quiet of the deserts, on the lonely mountains, across wide oceans, in the sublime nature of the south, they gestated over the years and joined together in a harmonious tableau.“⁷

Bastian dedicated his work to Humboldt, who passed away in May 1859, just as Bastian was finishing his text. Humboldt, Bastian wrote, had not only inspired him to travel but also provided him with a research method. Bastian became a staunch advocate of inductive science: Humboldt had trekked through deserts and forests and climbed volcanoes in Central and South America making empirical observations. He went to see everything nature would show him—animals, birds, insects, ve...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Kihawahine: The Future in the Past
• Chapter 1: Hawaiian Feather Cloaks and Mayan Sculptures: Collecting Origins
• Chapter 2: The Haida Crest Pole and the Nootka Eagle Mask: Hypercollecting
• Chapter 3: Benin Bronzes: Colonial Questions
• Chapter 4: Guatemalan Textiles: Persisting Global Networks
• Chapter 5: The Yup’ik Flying Swan Mask: The Past in the Future
• Epilogue: Harnessing Humboldt
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index