An exploration of the under-tapped potential of ethnographic museums for thinking critically about planetary pasts, in relation to questions of colonialism, and more sustainable, liveable, plural futures.

Alarming environmental shifts and disasters have raised public awareness and anxieties regarding the future of the planet. While planetary in scale, the negative effects of this global crisis are distributed unequally, affecting some of the already most fragile communities most intensely, thus contributing to rising global inequality. The pairing of environmental crises and a sense of inadequacy facing hitherto celebrated models of citizenry informs a current spirit of the times. The contributors to this volume place ethnographic or world cultures museums at the centre of these debates these museums have been embroiled in longstanding debates about their histories, collections, and practices in relation to the colonial past.

Autorentext
Wayne Modest (Prof. Dr.) is the director of content at the National Museum of World Cultures and the Wereldmuseum, Rotterdam, in the Netherlands (NMVW/WMR). He is also head of the Research Center for Material Culture, the research institute of these museums, and professor of material culture and critical heritage studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, he works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean.Claudia Augustat (Dr.) studied ethnology, art history and Indian art history at Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn and was awarded her PhD from the Goethe-Universität Frankfurt. She worked at the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt a.M. and at the Ethnological Museum in Berlin before she became the curator for South American Collections at the Weltmuseum Wien in 2004. Since 2019 she has been the project leader of »Taking Care. Ethnographic and World Cultures Museums as Places of Care«. Her research focuses on Amazonian collections from the 19th century, material culture and cultural memory, on collaborative curatorship and the decolonization of museum praxis.