Abstract
Contributing to current efforts to grapple with museums' colonial legacies, this article takes the question of evidence as an entry point to unlock the multi-layered make-up of African spiritual artifacts in missionary collections. Focussing on Dutch and German missionary collections of legbawo and dzokawo from the Ewe region in Ghana and Togo, we analyze how such artifacts were subjected to “practices of evidencing” by multiple parties over a span of 120 years. These collections enshrine coexisting, clashing ways of evidencing: multiple possibilities of knowing (about) the items, their trajectories, and their relations with humans and other-than-human beings. Next to analyzing the missionary and museal frames imposed on these artifacts, we investigate contemporary Ewe religious practitioners' ritual technologies of knowing about the presence, identities, and wishes of spirits as alternative modes of evidencing unseen presences. Pluralizing evidencing, we argue, offers opportunities for decolonial critique and rethinking established museum and research frameworks.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e70002 |
| Journal | Museum Anthropology |
| Volume | 48 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Early online date | 6 Mar 2025 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Apr 2025 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2025 The Author(s). Museum Anthropology published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Anthropological Association.
Funding
We wish to thank Ala Alhourani, Laetitia Lai, Manon Parry, Am\u00E9lie Roussillon, and the other participants and convenors of the workshop \u201CEvidence on Display,\u201D (December 14, 2023) at the University of Amsterdam, as well as Sela Adjei, Malika Kramer, and two anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Also, we are grateful to Silke Seybold, \u00DCbersee\u2010Museum Bremen, and the participants of the Legba\u2010Dzoka research project, Sela Adjei, Kokou Azamede, Kodzo Gavua, Angelantonio Grossi, Malika Kraamer, and Silke Seybold, and Christopher and Kofi Voncujovi for working together in September 2022 and agreeing with the use of pictures from our research in Bremen and Steyl. Research was generously funded by the Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research (NWO) through the Spinoza Prize that allowed Birgit Meyer to conduct the research programme \u201CReligious Matters in an Entangled World\u201D ( www.religiousmatters.nl ) of which Marleen de Witte is part; the NWA project \u201CPressing Matter: Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums\u201D ( https://pressingmatter.nl/ ); and the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste/German Lost Art Foundation. For more information about the legba\u2010dzoka project see: https://religiousmatters.nl/the\u2010legba\u2010dzoka\u2010project\u2010tracking\u2010and\u2010unpacking\u2010the\u2010collection\u2010carl\u2010spiess\u2010ubersee\u2010museum\u2010bremen/ . Recently, we received funding from the Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste/German Lost Art Foundation to study the \u201CCollection Spiess\u201D at the \u00DCbersee\u2010Museum: https://kulturgutverluste.de/projekte/unpacking\u2010colonial\u2010missionary\u2010collection\u2010tracking\u2010provenance\u2010and\u2010shifts\u2010meanings\u2010values .
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek | |
| Netherlands Foundation for Scientific Research | |
| German Lost Art Foundation | |
| Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste |
Keywords
- Ewe spiritual artifacts
- collaborative research
- decolonial critique
- evidencing
- missionary collections from Africa