Of course, not every practice lends itself well to actual re-enactment. Cer- tainly, the practices of interest for my research – the collecting, studying and
80 Marieke Maria Anna Hendriksen, Aesthesis in anatomy. Materiality and elegance in eight- eenth-century Leiden anatomical collections (Leiden University: dissertation, 2012), 199. 81 Ibid., 200–201.
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repatriating of human remains – do not. To study these practices from a ma- terial perspective, moving beyond the written source material, I will analyse ‘contact points’: material traces of these practices. In doing this, I build on the notion of a ‘contact point’ as understood by Jeffrey David Feldman in his work on plaster casts made by Italian anthropologists, integrating his no- tion in a praxiographic approach.83 Feldman argues that when the ‘embodied
experience,’ the unpleasant experience of casting that can actually be read from some of the faces of the people cast, is omitted, a key aspect of the re- lationship between Italian colonialism and material culture is lost.84 Racial
casts actually ‘epitomize’ the ‘mimetic contact point’ because they offer visual cues of the body. The casts open onto a much broader experience of ‘body’ and stand symbolically for the whole.85 It is this ‘embodied experience’ that
makes them valuable and allows for multilayered interpretation. For exam- ple, a 1996 exhibition about the image of Bushmen, featuring plaster casts, was criticized by Khoisan who recognized other embodiments in the plaster casts than the curators had. They used the museal images of their own rela- tives and ancestors ‘to reconstitute community, to fortify the value of their tourist performances and broadly speaking, to seek greater control of their own cultural capital.’86
Similarly, material traces of the practices of collecting, studying, and repat- riating the Namibian skulls can reveal the meaning they have and had in these practices. Material traces are contact points of the experiences of these practices and reveal how, by whom, and in what context they were physi- cally handled and discussed. Not only the skulls, the contact points them- selves acquire layers of meaning in different practices throughout the years. A photograph of a severed Nama head made by an anthropologist in the early twentieth century acquires a new layer of meaning when it is reproduced in a Namibian newspaper a hundred years later. Material traces like these are crucial for unravelling layers of meaning because it is in these contact points that different meanings and histories cross paths.
The series of photographs of Nama heads is one of the contact points I will analyse to answer how the skulls were encountered at different times and places in different practices. The first of these contact points is a postcard
83 Jeffrey David Feldman, ‘Contact points: Museums and the lost body problem’ in: E. Ed- wards, C. Gosden and R. Phillips, Sensible objects. Colonialism, museums and material culture (Oxford/ New York: Berg, 2006), 246.
84 Ibid., 248. 85 Ibid., 255–256. 86 Ibid., 258.
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of soldiers packing skulls ‘for shipment to Berlin museums and universities’ (c.1905), a key source for the process of acquiring, packing, and shipping the skulls. I will use this postcard as a focal point in my analysis of the practice of collecting. Even though the postcard is published in many books and articles dealing with the Herero and Nama genocide, it has not been properly ana- lysed as either an image or an object. The second contact point, relating to the practice of studying the remains in the early twentieth century, consists of several sets of scientific drawings and the photographs made of the heads in the early twentieth century. These images are contact points for the practice of studying preserved heads and skulls. Finally, I will turn to the transport boxes and glass cases in which the skulls were presented during the repatri- ation ceremonies in Berlin and Windhoek as a focal point for my analysis of the practice of repatriating.
I begin my analysis of each practice with a detailed description of the mate- rial trace(s). Next, I proceed to shed light on the background of each prac- tice: the colonial postcard trade and ‘power photography’ in German South- West Africa (collecting), the ‘turn towards race and nation’ and the growing popularity of anthropological visual material in Germany (studying), and the politics of remembrance and the Herero/Nama quest for recompense in Na- mibia (repatriating). Practices do not consist of materiality alone, but are de- termined by a variety of factors including (keeping in mind Glenn Penny and Bunzl, and Stoler, respectively) the personal motivations of researchers and scientific developments in the metropole as well as colonial circumstances. Finally, I analyse what the material trace (as a contact point) reveals about each practice. Rather than using the material traces as examples for a much larger whole (representation of race in twentieth-century drawings, for ex- ample) I try to zoom in on each specific practice. This resembles the method- ology of Elizabeth Edwards. In her study of photography and anthropology, she presents short case studies in which specific images or short series of images are considered in detail. In her view, this has the advantage of concen- trating on reading the image supported by contextual material, rather than using photographs to exemplify general statements.87
In addition to analysing these material traces of practices to answer how the skulls were encountered, I will rely for a large part on secondary literature to describe the background of the practices. Like Roque, Sysling, and Clever and Ruberg, I will read the writings of scientists who used the skulls as study
87 Elizabeth Edwards, Anthropology and photography 1860–1920 (New Haven, CT/London: Yale University Press, 1992), 5.
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objects in the early twentieth century ‘against the grain’, analysing the practice they subjected the skulls to, but I will do the same with the documentation of the Charité Human Remains Project. In addition, I interviewed the project leader of the Charité Human Remains Project, Prof. Andreas Winkelmann, about the repatriation process. He kindly explained to me how the skulls were physically handled in this process, which would have been nigh on im- possible to find out otherwise. In the spirit of M’charek and Hendriksen, I will keep in mind my personal experiences in the Windhoek Independence Me- morial Museum, where the skulls are stored, hidden from public view, and several Berlin museums, where references to the skulls are entirely absent. Before I begin my analysis of the practices of collecting, studying, and repat- riating the skulls, I want to emphasize that the twenty skulls discussed in this thesis are the mortal remains of actual human beings, who suffered greatly at the hands of German colonial forces. They should have been buried ac- cording to Herero or Nama custom. In order to get a grip on the sentiments involved in the practice of repatriating the skulls and underline the transgres- sive nature of the practices of collecting and studying them, I will first discuss the context of colonial genocide in which the skulls were collected.
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