35032 Marburg, Universitätsstadt
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Philipps University of Marburg’s Ethnographic Collection, established in the 1920s, includes objects from the Wiesbaden Collection of Nassau Antiquities, which sold its non-European collections in the 1960s. These are predominantly objects from the 19th century that colonial civil servants and officers gifted to the Wiesbaden Museum. The Ethnographic Collection also includes the scientific collections of Theodor Koch-Grünberg (1872-1924), a scholar who studied South America. Between 800 and 1,000 objects are presumed to have originated from formal colonies, while another 2500 potentially originated from colonial contexts outside formal colonial rule. Together with the Ethnographic Collection of the Oberhessisches Museum (Museum of Upper Hesse) in Gießen, UMR’s Ethnographic Collection is currently investigating the colonial origins of some of its sub-collections thanks to funding from the German Lost Art Foundation. One objective of the research project is to reconstruct the biographies of around 60 objects from the East African region (particularly Tanzania) and Cameroon.