We are pleased to announce that our Collections and Collecting Lunchtime Seminar will continue this year. We will again meet in the Sitzungszimmer of the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, which is on the 4th floor of the Neues Institutsgebäude. This semester, however, on Wednesdays from 13-14:30.
The dates and speakers for our Winter semester are:
- 18. October, Dr. Jaanika Vider (Inst. of Social and Cultural Anthropology), "Strangers in Storage: exploring Estonian 'foreign ethnology' collections” (abstract below)
- 15. November, Mariama De Brito Henn, MA (Centre for Transdisciplinary Historical and Cultural Studies), title TBD
- 17. January, Dr. Rebecca Kahn (Dept. of History), title TBD
"Strangers in Storage: exploring Estonian 'foreign ethnology' collections”
(Jaanika Vider)
In the newly built storage facilities of the Estonian History Museum in Tallinn and the award-winning building of the Estonian National Museum approximately 4,000 ‘foreign ethnology’ or ‘world cultures’ objects reside in a liminal space. Not classified as ‘ethnographic’ (term reserved for Estonian ethnographic material) nor part of the Finno-Ugric ‘kinspeople’ collections, they do not seem to belong.
The talk focuses on the circumpolar and Northwest Coast Indigenous objects associated with collecting activities of Baltic-German scholars, explorers, and government officials such as Alexander Theodor von Middendorff, Karl von Ditmar, Ferdinand von Wrangell, and Adam Johann von Krusenstern. In the light of recent interest in applying decolonial frameworks and processes in Eastern European representational practices, I look at questions these collections pose about Estonian self-identity and global relations. Looking towards the future, the paper asks what forms of relating to and caring for the environment these collections trace and afford.
