H. Glenn Penny

What is German history? Where did it take place? And what role did Germans living outside of Central Europe play in it? This polycentric history offers a new vision: It uses communities of Germans, from Austria to Chile to Russia, to rethink our narratives of modern German history. Focusing on the great plurality of Germans, and their interconnections around the world, it pointedly de-centers the nation-state while arguing that resisting its dominance in our historical narratives has high intellectual and political stakes. For within an unbound German history there are characteristics, clues, models, and precedents that can do much to undermine the return of violent, exclusionary nationalism. To that end, this book calls for a greater integration of mobilities, migration flows, different ways of belonging, and transcultural places into our narratives of Germans' histories. Ultimately, it reveals how embracing a range of narratives can help us to better understand people's actions, intentions, and motivations in particular historical moments.

From 1750 to the Present

German History Unbound

Penny argues that the scientists who created monumental ethnographic museums in Imperial Germany were driven not by imperialist or racist motives, but by the desire to demonstrate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections.

Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany

Objects of Culture

Laura R. Graham

This engaging collection of essays discusses the complexities of “being” indigenous in public spaces. Laura R. Graham and H. Glenn Penny bring together a set of highly recognized junior and senior scholars, including indigenous scholars, from a variety of fields to provoke critical thinking about the many ways in which individuals and social groups construct and display unique identities around the world. The case studies in Performing Indigeneity underscore the social, historical, and immediate contextual factors at play when indigenous people make decisions about when, how, why, and who can “be” indigenous in public spaces. Performing Indigeneity invites readers to consider how groups and individuals think about performance and display and focuses attention on the ways that public spheres, both indigenous and nonindigenous ones, have received these performances. The essays demonstrate that performance and display are essential to the creation and persistence of indigeneity, while also presenting the conundrum that in many cases “indigeneity” excludes some of the voices or identities that the category purports to represent.

Global Histories and Contemporary Experiences

Performing Indigeneity

How do we explain the persistent preoccupation with American Indians in Germany and the staggering numbers of Germans one encounters as visitors to Indian country? As H. Glenn Penny demonstrates, that preoccupation is rooted in an affinity for American Indians that has permeated German cultures for two centuries. This affinity stems directly from German polycentrism, notions of tribalism, a devotion to resistance, a longing for freedom, and a melancholy sense of shared fate. Locating the origins of the fascination for Indian life in the transatlantic world of German cultures in the nineteenth century, Penny explores German settler colonialism in the American Midwest, the rise and fall of German America, and the transnational worlds of American Indian performers. As he traces this phenomenon through the twentieth century, Penny engages debates about race, masculinity, comparative genocides, and American Indians' reactions to Germans' interests in them. He also assesses what persists of the affinity across the political ruptures of modern German history and challenges readers to rethink how cultural history is made.

Germans and American Indians since 1800

Kindred by Choice

In the late nineteenth century, Germans spearheaded a worldwide effort to preserve the material traces of humanity, designing major ethnographic museums and building extensive networks of communication and exchange across the globe. In this groundbreaking study, Glenn Penny explores the appeal of ethnology in Imperial Germany and analyzes the motivations of the scientists who created the ethnographic museums. Penny shows that German ethnologists were not driven by imperialist desires or an interest in legitimating putative biological or racial hierarchies. Overwhelmingly antiracist, they aspired to generate theories about the essential nature of human beings through their museums' collections. They gained support in their efforts from boosters who were enticed by participating in this international science and who used it to promote the cosmopolitan character of their cities and themselves. But these cosmopolitan ideals were eventually overshadowed by the scientists' more modern, professional, and materialist concerns, which dramatically altered the science and its goals. By clarifying German ethnologists' aspirations and focusing on the market and conflicting interest groups, Penny makes important contributions to German history, the history of science, and museum studies.

Matti Bunzl

Worldly Provincialism introduces readers to the intellectual history that drove the emergence of German anthropology. Drawing on the most recent work on the history of the discipline, the contributors rethink the historical and cultural connections between German anthropology, colonialism, and race. By showing that German intellectual traditions differed markedly from those of Western Europe, they challenge the prevalent assumption that Europeans abroad shared a common cultural code and behaved similarly toward non-Europeans. The eloquent and well-informed essays in this volume demonstrate that early German anthropology was fueled by more than a simple colonialist drive. Rather, a wide range of intellectual history shaped the Germans' rich and multifarious interest in the cultures, religions, physiognomy, physiology, and history of non-Europeans, and gave rise to their desire to connect with the wider world. Furthermore, this volume calls for a more nuanced understanding of Germany's standing in postcolonial studies. In contrast to the prevailing view of German imperialism as a direct precursor to Nazi atrocities, this volume proposes a key insight that goes to the heart of German historiography: There is no clear trajectory to be drawn from the complex ideologies of imperial anthropology to the race science embraced by the Nazis. Instead of relying on a nineteenth-century explanation for twentieth-century crimes, this volume ultimately illuminates German ethnology and anthropology as local phenomena, best approached in terms of their own worldly provincialism. H. Glenn Penny is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Matti Bunzl Assistant Professor of Anthropology and History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

German Anthropology in the Age of Empire

Worldly Provincialism

How do we explain the persistent preoccupation with American Indians in Germany and the staggering numbers of Germans one encounters as visitors to Indian country? As H. Glenn Penny demonstrates, that preoccupation is rooted in an affinity for American Indians that has permeated German cultures for two centuries. He also assesses what persists of the affinity across the political ruptures of modern German history and challenges readers to rethink how cultural history is made.

Germans and American Indians Since 1800

"The Berlin Ethnological Museum is one of the largest and most important anthropological museums in the world. Housing over 500,000 objects from non-western cultures assembled since the mid-nineteenth century, the museum's collection was assembled by men who were galvanized by the ambitious vision of Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859). Humboldt saw the multiplicity of human cultures as variations on a common theme and believed that natural science offered a means for understanding the essential unity of all people across space and time. What was needed, he declared, was to gather enough data to fashion a total history of humanity. After his death, Humboldt-inspired explorers, government officials, physicians, scientists, and even the sons of merchants fanned out across the globe to collect as much information as they could about all the peoples of the world. They used observation, discussion, inspection of written records, and, crucially, the collection and analysis of material culture from great monuments and art to simple crafts and everyday tools. Unlike their counterparts in the rest of Europe and in the United States, these early German ethnologists did not collect such objects to confirm or illustrate racist theories of human development. Rather, they began with a rejection of race science and an assumption that there are no inherent mental differences among peoples. They created these collections, and, later, founded their museums, not to support or illustrate politically-useful theories of human difference, but rather to foster the study of human cultures and histories in all their variations. In Humboldt's Shadow tells the stories of these ethnologists and the objects, collections, and knowledge they assembled - and of the tragic turn their museums took when their successors undercut their bracing Humboldtian motives. In this book H. Glenn Penny calls on museums to embrace anew this Humboldtian vision, while deepening their dialogue and engagement with indigenous peoples over the provenance and stewardship of these collections. While supporting repatriation of artifacts where appropriate, Penny argues that greater funding for the research and curation functions of contemporary museums would allow them to properly research the provenance of artifacts in their collections"--

H. Glenn Penny

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