The project investigates the affective dynamics of transcultural property conflicts over ethnographic collections, focusing on the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and the Tanzania collection of the Ethnological Museum Berlin. We place the collaboration projects between museums and indigenous representatives of so-called societies of origin, which are increasingly emerging in Germany, at the centre of ethnographic research. In doing so, we ask, firstly, how different, affectively grounded presuppositions about the ontological status of objects and their attribution to human actors shape the negotiation processes around representation, restitution and decolonisation in the context of the collaborations and lead to affective dissonances between the participants. Secondly, we investigate how the affects and emotions associated with these different ontological understandings of the world themselves become the object of negotiation in the collaborations and to what extent indigenous orders of feeling can find room to develop and work towards a transformation of museum structures.

Our research shows that affective dissonances in transcultural collaborations around ethnographic collections are caused by the fact that museum institutions take for granted a modernist subject-object dichotomy and a Western capitalist understanding of property. This structurally devalues the emotions and affects of indigenous actors who, as in rural Tanzania, assume inalienable bodies or subjects with their own agency. This in turn leads to emotional reactions such as anger or indignation, which refer to divergent, partly normatively anchored emotional repertoires and sentiments. Accordingly, our thesis is that in collaboration and restitution processes, these complex socio-material and affective relationalities must be increasingly taken into account. Using the example of three collaboration projects of the Ethnological Museum Berlin with rural communities of origin in Tanzania, we will take the emerging affective dissonances as a starting point to understand how hegemonic emotional repertoires inscribed in the museum can be transformed to overcome persisting colonial power asymmetries.

By combining approaches from material anthropology and ontological anthropology with affect studies in our ethnographic research design, we present an affect-theoretical elaboration of the concept of a "relational ethics" (Sarr & Savoy 2019) towards which the new museum collaborations aim. From this, new forms of collaboration can be designed that make it possible to substantially question affectively grounded colonial power structures in museums. In this way, the project will make important contributions to the overall social discussion on the decolonisation of museums and knowledge.