Geheime Ethnographie. Von der wunderbaren Transzendierung des Fetischs
Baessler-Archiv XLVI.1998:443-455
On the miraculous transcending of the fetish
##Ethnographic objects were and are collected to document objectively the material culture of other peoples. The process of musealisation of these objects changes these "things" into "objects" and consecutively new meanings are attached to them. By recontextualising ethnographic objects in scientific frames, ethnographic museums "reinvent" other cultures, cast them into our own molds. They produce alter worlds that are, for a number of reasons, constitutive aspects of our history of thought. The myths of others are substituted by western myths of "tribal worlds" as they should (have been) be and are eventually destroyed in the perspective of logos. Myth and logos are, however, not competing and mutually exclusive systems of thought, but rather two different ways of "speaking about". Whatever progress in the question of the representation of the Other has been made in symbolic anthropology has not been taken up by ethnographic museums in Germany. In the light of ethnographic museums' failure to represent others either objectively or in their own terms they should give up the fallacy of objective documentation but rather 'narrate myth" of others and ourselves and make clear how and why such myths are produced.##
Keywords: myths, museums, objects and myths, objectivity and myth
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