National Showing Off and Telling Off

Abstract

This article considers the implications of using ethnological collections in the making of a national museum. It focuses on the case of the recently opened Ethnological Museum within the Humboldt Forum, Berlin, Germany, about which there has been much public debate and criticism, including about Germany's own colonialism. Through an analysis of the modes of display used by the Ethnological Museum, the article identifies how these variously engage in unreflexive “showing off” while others involve what is here called “telling off”— criticism directed at the German national self. The implications of the forms that these take, as well as their coexistence, are discussed, as is the case for replacing an ethnological approach with an anthropological one.