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Abstract:
Current debates about the restitution of items in collections assembled in the context of European imperial outreach pay much attention to “looted art”. However, not all of such items were “looted” in the strict sense of the term, nor were they qualified as art at the time they were taken to Europe. The gap between the prevailing discourse in the present debate, and the mode of collecting and qualifications employed at the time when colonial collections were established, is the starting point of this lecture. It will take the case of a collection of spiritual artifacts – legba, dzoka, aklama – assembled by a Protestant missionary from the Ewe-speaking area in what is today South-East Ghana and South-Togo kept in the Übersee-Museum Bremen, which stands central in the research of the Legba-Dzoka project in which I have been participating since 2022. I will explore the multiple categorizations of these spiritual forms as “fetish”, “idol”, “Zaubermittel” (means-to-do-magic) or “ethnographic object”, and discuss current attempts of recategorizing them as “forces”, “cultural assets” or “aesthetic forms”. My central point is that the use of such categories, and the translations ensued by them, are of central concern for a critical postcolonial history of “art” in Africa, the point being to scrutinize and critique the grounds for the in- or exclusion of artifacts into or from the domain of art.

Profile:
Birgit Meyer (PhD, 1995) is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she studies religion from a material and postcolonial angle. She directs the research program Religious Matters in an Entangled World (www.religiousmatters.nl) and co-directs the collaborative Legba-Dzoka research project (https://religiousmatters.nl/the-legba-dzoka-project-tracking-and-unpacking-the-collection-carl-spiess-ubersee-museum-bremen/).