Abstract

Bettina von Briskorn's book on Bremen's Übersee‐Museum takes on the fascinating topic of the history of ethnographic collections. Briskorn follows recent scholarship on the topic in regarding the museum's collections as artifacts not only of the societies from which they were gathered but also of the societies that gathered them. Briskorn thus proposes using the ethnographic collections of the Bremen Übersee‐Museum to shed light on the history of ethnology itself.Briskorn finds that the directors of the Bremen museum pursued a “mimetic” exhibition style in their African sections, in which they sought to reproduce the scenes of daily life in Africa. Many displays included groups of life‐sized figures to show the artifacts as they were used, because the curators believed such a display would better instruct the general public. Briskorn points out that this sort of display differed sharply from that of the larger Berlin museum of ethnology and had more in common with popular ethnographic displays of the period. While this mimetic strategy in the museum gave directors a preference for groups of objects that would give a sense of the daily life of a group, it is unclear, Briskorn asserts, to what extent this preference shaped the actual collections. More than a third of the book is devoted to short entries on the individuals and institutions who donated or sold ethnographic objects to the Bremen museum. The entries also include serial numbers of each object given by an individual or institution. Briskorn has used these data to provide statistical tables related to the collection of ethnographic artifacts, including the total number of objects entering the museum, the proportion that were gifts, and the proportion that were purchased. Perhaps the most significant statistics are those relating to the profession of the donor: whether colonial military personnel, professional scientists, colonial merchants, or missionaries. Briskorn suggests that the predilections and range of expertise of these various groups affected the quality and reliability of their collections. Given the painstaking work of processing this information for a statistical database program, I would have liked to see further interpretation of the statistics, which are surely a rich source of wider historical correlations.Briskorn illustrates suggestively the practical role played by colonialism in the Bremen museum. She finds that 33 percent of the museum's pre‐1945 holdings—and 20 percent of its current holdings—were acquired directly in the course of colonial rule and that colonial interests shaped the museum's presentations, especially its interest in the Herero during Germany's genocidal war against that group. Briskorn hauntingly juxtaposes two 1905 photographs: one of a group of starving and emaciated Herero taken during the war and a second depicting an idyllic museum diorama of Herero. Ironically, the very genocidal war that stimulated Bremen's interest in the Herero also severely reduced the availability of artifacts that might satisfy this interest.The topic of anthropological collecting is of utmost interest to the history of anthropology and to the history of science generally. I would have been delighted had Briskorn more thoroughly assisted the reader in drawing connections between her very detailed account and the wider intellectual and political world in which the Bremen Übersee‐Museum accumulated its collections. As it is, the book will be primarily of interest to scholars interested in the history of anthropological collecting in the Bremen museum and, indeed, to those scholars using the collections themselves