The affects of imperial collecting The case of the German anthropologist Wilhelm Joest (1852-1897)

This dissertation proposes a radical rethinking of the study of imperial ethnographic collecting, moving from a preoccupation with the self-proclaimed “grand vision” of the collector towards the often less visible affective dimensions. Empire was an affective structure that functioned by shaping the desires of colonisers and colonised alike, and I argue that collecting was inevitably part of its many affective interactions. I base my argument on a microhistorical case study centred around the personal archive of the German anthropologist and collector Wilhelm Joest (1852–1897). In this way, I show how he created his imperial identity through the objects he collected, and how he used this self-fashioning to deflect and disavow the troubled affects that informed his actual collecting. I intimately engage with these emotions, ranging from longing to guilt to sexual desire, and demonstrate how each of these affective constellations shaped the collecting process. I emphasise the close connection between feeling and collecting in empire and highlight the importance of collecting as a strategy for regulating and rerouting affect. This dissertation offers a framework for interrogating the affective history of collecting in order to open up new avenues for meaningful decolonial transformation within and beyond the ethnographic museum.