From the "Field" to the Metropolis of Knowledge

This project will investigate knowledge circulation between the "field" as a specific space of knowledge production and the city of Berlin as a historically established center for the production, exchange and archiving of knowledge from non-European regions. Using historical and recent fieldwork materials, it will seek to answer the following questions: What objects and media originate in the field with respect to the material legacies of the holistic knowledge process taking place there? How do people, objects, media and knowledge circulate between the field and the city of Berlin? How are the objects and media from the field recontextualized and reorganized in Berlin—that is, how are they divided up between the city’s different archives of knowledge (the Ibero-American Institute, Ethnology Museum, Natural History Museum, Museum of Medical History, etc.)? In addition to historical analyses concentrating on the first half of the twentieth century, the project will examine the role that knowledge circulation plays for archives of knowledge today. In so doing, it will shed light on the manner in which new forms and paths of knowledge, as well as differently structured relations between the center and periphery, affect archives of knowledge today. This project is related to the Cluster of Excellence "Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory" of the Universität Humboldt.