The title clearly has two meanings: it refers to our melting ice caps for one, but also to the ‘thin ice’ undergirding our fumbling efforts to answer complex questions – ice that’s not yet quite ready to bear weight. The latest workshop in the “Asking Questions” series was dedicated to the second sense of the phrase, posing questions like: how do we adapt to environmental phenomena, what is the sustainability of the “environmental” concept as such, and what role do discourses about climate change and resource extraction play within anthropology? Finally, the workshop laid a special emphasis on exploring how ethnological museums might represent environmental and climate-related phenomena through media in future exhibitions.

The structure was as follows: lectures, panel discussions, artist presentations, and group discussions (in the form of both assemblies and working groups), organized by geographic region as well as considerations of content. The events, which featured anthropologists and cultural-studies scholars from various museums and universities as well as independent artists, were open to the public on October 13 and 14, 2015, while the working groups that met on October 15 were not.

Prologue: What Do Indigenous Actors Expect of the Ethnologisches Museum?

Viola König, director of the Ethnologisches Museum, summed up the situation briefly in her welcoming speech: ethnological institutions are seeking to reflect critically about their own history and role in dealing with indigenous people and their cultures; more than ever, they must confront the debate over colonialism head on. Yet at the very same time, circumstances like the emergence of new regional powers (like China, for example) are seriously compromising the interests of indigenous groups – through the extraction of raw materials, alteration of the landscape, and the ramifications of climate change.

The opening talk by Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, elaborated on these findings, tying them to sustainable development goals (SDGs) and the global climate agreement. She has been seeing a new quality to collaboration: indigenous peoples aren’t simply demanding that ethnological museums return their artifacts – even though these were often collected in colonial, imperialist fashion – instead, they have come to respect the museums as institutions that preserve cultural testimony and insight about the lands of origin, where often such testimony is no longer available. However, this respect is tied to the expectation that the knowledge will be harnessed in close exchange with indigenous knowledge to trigger radical changes in how we face global challenges. The only approach suitable for the future is a participatory approach, which is expressed wonderfully in the form of the Humboldt Lab.

Ethnological knowledge can support indigenous peoples as they grapple with processes of cultural and natural transformation. As a concrete example of this, Tauli-Corpuz mentioned “cultural mapping” as a means to successfully exert pressure on regional decision makers to respect indigenous rights. In short: ethnological museums are a “human memory.”

The opening evening concluded with a presentation of film clips exploring the relationship between man and nature in different forms, drawn predominantly from the Ethnologisches Museum’s Archive of Visual Anthropology. The primarily black-and-white film clips depicted the dichotomous perceptions of this relationship, laying a vivid foundation for discussions the following day.

Perceiving and Conveying Environmental and Climate Changes

In her keynote speech, Fiona Cameron of Western Sydney University (linked by video broadcast from Australia) criticized the traditional Western distinction between “human” and “non-human,” which automatically slots the non-human (animals, plants, environment) into purely passive roles. Conceptually separating humanity and nature, she argued, serves to cement a claim to superiority that disadvantages cultures where humanity, nature, and the environment are conceived as a holistic whole. Using an exhibition on climate change at the Science Museum in London as an example, Cameron criticized a scientific approach that claimed equal authority for the “non-human” realm. In such an exhibition, Cameron explained, nature is portrayed as a passive object, and the problems of climate change are seen as purely technical (and thus solvable through technology). Cameron, in contrast, advocates for a way of perceiving and depicting humanity and nature that no longer treats them as separate, dichotomous, but that instead accepts “human” and “non-human actors” as an enormous multitude of independent yet mutually beholden actors.

Cameron’s talk was followed by intensive workshop discussions across four panels split up geographically, each with a different focus. These focuses corresponded to the Humboldt-Forum’s concrete exhibition modules: “Perceptions of Climage Change in Oceania,” “Resource Extraction in the Amazon,” “El Niño in Archaeological Research,” and “Sharing Knowledge: The Arctic Habitat.” The thread tying all these diverse themes together was the effort to integrate as many specific cultural perspectives, practices, and interests into the discourse as possible.

Here are some key topics from the discussions (unfortunately, attempting to recap the panels minute-by-minute goes way beyond the bounds of this report): Indigenous peoples shouldn’t be stylized as victims; instead we should explore their possible agency and interests. The possible impact of climate change and environmental intervention shouldn’t be depicted in a single shade of utter catastrophe. Migration shouldn’t exclusively be seen as flight, but should instead be understood as a rational sovereign decision. We must question our own terminology (“What we understand as climate change is perceived differently, and triggers different reactions in Oceania”). We must incorporate indigenous knowledge. We must identify and name the losers of transformation processes – but also the winners (“El Niño as a driver of cultural transformation in Peru”). We must pay attention to different priorities within cultural communication (“For our people in Alaska, the relationship issue between the people discussing is much more important than the work issue”).

Central questions: How can such interdependencies be depicted in museum exhibitions that are predominantly based on objects pried out of their historical, cultural, and social contexts? What voices should and must be heard – and how can they be depicted for the public? How much additional information beyond the object can visitors to an exhibition be expected to process? Should/must an ethnological museum’s work aim toward a “call for action?” What role can artistic projects play for developing themes in tactile and emotional form? One panelist observed that fictive images often hue closer to reality than documentary images, and another one gave the following advice: “Contextualize as much as you want – but, please, be poetic in doing so.”

Layers of Struggle

On the third day, the concepts of the Humboldt-Forum’s four exhibition modules – “Oceania: The Meanings of the Ocean,” “Resource Stripping in the Amazon,” “Along the Humboldt Current,” “Sharing Knowledge: Arctic Lifestyles” – were applied to the workshop topics. Four workgroups met and brainstormed: How can the approaches addressed in the lectures – approaches promoting contextuality, diversity of knowledge and experience, participatory inclusion of indigenous stakeholders, transparency of information sources, poetry, and more – be brought to bear when implementing the modules in the Humboldt-Forum, where the spatial architecture and the selection of objects has already largely been defined? Can the use of digital media still be expanded? How can light and sound be used to emotionally convey connections between things? What interactive features make sense? How can water and atmosphere, for example, be used in the Oceania exhibition area to portray an element that is global and border-spanning? How can the history and impact of resource-stripping and landscape-intervention in the Amazon be made tangible – and how do indigenous peoples work around it? And what does all this have to do with us? Who are we talking about when we say “we?” Is there a global and a local “we?”

Feedback from the Curators Responsible for the Humboldt-Forum’s Planned Exhibition Areas:

Dorothea Deterts: “I enjoyed the workshop and the fruitful discussions in our group because they emphasized some topics and links, and gave some unexpected ideas for the realization.”

Andrea Scholz: “For our planning process, the most important takeaway is probably that the workshop themes of climate change and environmental destruction can’t be discussed separately from the historical collection in the future exhibition. It should rather be part of a continuing narrative, told in close conjunction with the exhibits. We’re developing the preliminary ideas for such an ‘exhibition inside the exhibition.’”

Ute Marxreiter: “The workshop was a gift for me. The workgroups in particular matched my idea of how I’d like to develop content and concepts for such a complex group of tasks among heterogeneous teams. The work was exciting, extremely productive, and an enormous amount of fun. It would be a dream come true to continue working with the teams at regular intervals, and give concrete form to our ideas – now, on the museum side, we’ve got a big challenge to go at it with our ‘normal’ resources.”

Viola König: “The workshop made clear that we’re dealing with a topic that affects every region, and finds itself expressed in different ways in each. Since the beginning of the planning process, we’ve been discussing ‘major human themes’ in the Humboldt-Forum. Climate change and the environment is one of them. The challenge is to implement the overall thematic construct and make it discernible in the exhibitions. In doing so we’ll continue to be in urgent need of advice”

Observer’s conclusion: In the end, everyone was quite exhausted, but it was a good exhaustion. “Asking Questions” as a discursive mode of working, spanning disciplines and cultures, has once again proven to enrich an individual’s world of thinking and knowledge and be useful for all the participants involved.

Translated from German by Rob Madole

Hans Jessen is a journalist who covers culture and the environment. He lives in Berlin.

Link Program Symposium "Thin Ice" (PDF)

The workshop “Thin Ice: Facing the Environment and Climate Change in Ethnological Museums“ took place from October 13 to 15, 2015 at the Dahlem Museums.

Speakers:
Volker von Bremen (Brot für die Welt, Misereor)
Fiona Cameron (Western Sydney University)
Dorothea Deterts (Ethnologischen Museum, Berlin)
Iris Edenheiser (Reiss-Engelhorn-Museen, Mannheim)
Manuela Fischer (Ethnologischen Museum, Berlin)
Ulrike Folie (Ethnologist)
Susanne Hammacher (Übersee-Museum Bremen)
Gabriele Herzog-Schröder (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)
Wolfgang Kempf (Georg-August-Universität Göttingen)
Silja Klepp (Sustainability Research Center artec, Universität Bremen)
Viola König (Ethnologischen Museum, Berlin)
Tong Lam (Historian and Artist)
Indra Lopez Velasco (Ethnologischen Museum, Berlin)
Elizabeth Marino (Oregon State University, Cascades)
Myriel Milicevic (Artist and Interaction Designer)
Paul Ongtooguk (University of Alaska Anchorage)
Daniel Sandweiss (University of Maine, Orono)
Andrea Scholz (Ethnologischen Museum, Berlin)
Anna-Sophie Springer (Curator and Author)
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz (UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples)
Agnes Wegner (Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin)
Andreas Womelsdorf (Student)
Claudia Wosnitza-Mendo (former Instituto del Mar del Perú – IMARPE, Lima)
Elizabeth Wurst (Artist)
Monika Zessnik (Ethnologischen Museum, Berlin)
Moderation:
Gabriele Herzog-Schröder (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München)

Concept of the workshop:
Indra Lopez Velasco, Andrea Scholz, Alan Prohm, Nathalie Keurmeur, Ute Marxreiter, Gabriele Herzog-Schröder, Ilja Labischinski