Adolf Bernhard Meyer [1840-1911] and Colonial Era Museum Collections in Dresden – Germany | Indonesia | Philippines | Switzerland
Themed tours
Margaret Slevin, 2024
Adolf Bernhard Meyer (b. Hamburg 1840, d. Berlin 1911) was a German scientist who served as the director of the Royal Zoological and Anthropological-Ethnographic Museum Dresden (Königlich Zoologisches und Anthropologisch-Ethnographisches Museum Dresden) for 30 years. Importantly, he founded the Ethnographic Cabinet at the Royal Museum between 1875 and 1878 and directed the collection of ethnographic materials from Southeast Asia and the Pacific over his 30-year tenure.
Prior to his appointment in 1874, he amassed zoological, anthropological, and ethnological collections on private research expeditions (1870-73) to present-day Indonesia and the Philippines. During his directorship his collections were purchased by the Royal Museum, among other institutions across Europe, and remain in the successor museums’ holdings today. While Meyer was predominantly interested in zoological research, he also did partake in anthropological and ethnographic fieldwork. In nineteenth-century Germany, anthropology referred to physical anthropology, whose racist goal was to study variation in human physical characteristics, especially skulls, and provide empirical evidence for racial difference. Ethnology referred to cultural anthropology which focused instead on the study of the material culture of different groups. Studying both fields was common for scientists like Meyer and his contemporaries.
Despite Meyer's travels taking place before the official colonial period of Germany (1884-1918), his travels and publications can help us understand how colonialism and German anthropology and ethnology were intertwined. They show the way that scientific ideas were travelling across Europe and the colonial world, as well as the kind of scholarship and public presentations that would have informed German views of indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia and the Pacific, some of whom would soon come under German colonial rule.
References:
GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig: “Decolonisation, restitution, and repatriation.” Webpage.
Howes, Hilary: Anglo-German Anthropology in the Malay Archipelago, 1869-1910: Adolf Bernhard Meyer, Alfred Russel Wallace and A.C. Haddon, in: Anglo-German Scholarly Networks in the Long Nineteenth Century, 2014, pp. 126-146.
Howes, Hilary: ‘Shrieking Savages’ and ‘Men of Milder Customs’: Dr Adolf Bernhard Meyer in New Guinea, 1873, in: The Journal of Pacific History, 2012, pp. 21-44.
Martin, Petra: The Dresden Philippine Collection as Reflected in the History of Research, in: Delfin Tolentino, jr. (Ed.): Traveller and Collector. 19th Century Germans in the Cordillera. Forthcoming.
Museum für Völkerkunde Dresden: “About Us.” Webpage.
Petrou, Marissa Helene: Disciplines of Collection: Founding the Dresden Museum for Zoology, Anthropology and Ethnology in Imperial Germany. Doctoral Dissertation, 2016.
Stationen
Education of a Nineteenth Century Naturalist
From Translation to Fieldwork
German Anthropological Interest in the Philippines
Meyer Meets Different Local Resistance
Meyer's Royal Zoological and Anthropological-Ethnographic Museum
The Royal Museum Today
Institutional Decolonization