Sammlungen der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Dr Erika Sulzmann started the department’s ethnographic collections in 1950. From 1951 to 1954, she spent more than two years in the Belgian Congo (now Democratic Republic of Congo), carrying out fieldwork among the Ekonda and Bolia in the equatorial rainforest together with Ernst Wilhelm Müller, who was a Ph.D. student in anthropology at the time. They collected more than 500 objects, which formed the original core of the department’s holdings. Erika Sulzmann constantly expanded the collections during subsequent research trips to the Congo between 1956 and 1980.

Today, the Ethnographic Collection preserves approximately 3,000 objects, primarily from Central and West Africa, as well as Australia, Papua New Guinea, and other parts of Oceania. This diverse collection is comprised of a wide range of objects, including weapons, basket, musical instruments, textiles and religious objects. It is the only collection of its kind in Rhineland-Palatinate and one of the largest university collections at Mainz University. Since 1992, Dr Anna-Maria Brandstetter has been the collection’s curator. The collections’ items are used in teaching. Students learn how to handle ethnographic objects according to ethical considerations, how to conserve them, and how to design small exhibitions around them.

About 1,680 objects were translocated to Europe in a colonial context from the end of the 19th century to the mid-20th century, in many cases by using pressure, extortion, and violence. They are therefore historical objects that refer to past life worlds and at the same time tell of their appropriation in Europe in the context of the colonial conquest of Africa or Oceania.

In the digital collection "Gutenberg Objects" of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz about 300 objects from colonial contexts (mainly from Cameroon, Papua New Guinea, Kenya and Tanzania) in the Ethnographic Collection will be available from October 2021.