Fellowship Programme

As part of the research project Sensitive Provenances, there has been a call for seven research fellowships in order to enter into a close dialogue with scholars from the Global South. In this way representatives of the countries of origin, from which the human remains originally came, become closely involved in the project and bring in their different perspectives on the human remains of the so-called Blumenbach Skull Collection and the Anthropological Collection.

The seven guest researchers from Cameroon, Tanzania, Hawaii, Palau, New Zealand, and Papua New Guinea will stay in Göttingen for 2-3 months each in autumn/winter 2022.
They come to Göttingen with various interests and different key activities of their work. Some are working with historical methods on the origin and acquisition contexts of certain skulls from the two collections. Others are trying to use cultural anthropological and artistic methods to work through and reflect on current discourses about human remains from colonial contexts in Germany and in the societies of origin. And finally, still others are trying to initiate the return of the ancestors to the communities of origin. This coincides with the long-term goal of the project to open-up ways for potential repatriation of the human remains and to accompany this process ethnographically.

Fellows