Regina Sarreiter explores the Meinulf Küsters collections

Regina Sarreiter, APC fellow and PhD candidate based at the Freie Universität in Berlin, was in South Africa from January to April on a research visit, hosted by the APC during her time spent in Cape Town.

Sarreiter’s subject of enquiry is the ethnographic research conducted by the Benedictine missionary and anthropologist Pater Meinulf Küsters in South Africa and Tanzania during the 1920s. At times simultaneously working for the Catholic mission’s congregation and as an assistant at the ethnographic museum in Munich, Küsters put together a comprehensive collection of phonographic recordings, objects, photographs, films and ethnographic notes that served as ethnographic findings about the colonised societies as well as to legitimate the missionary efforts. His various occupations are reflected in the spatial dispersion of the collected objects and documents, as well as in their respective careers, thus indicating a difference in their signification and value as artefacts.

Sarreiter’s project investigates the role of epistemic interest in the practice of ethnographic collecting and the afterlife of the emerging collections. Based on the assumption that, beyond their materiality, collections always comprise a network of persons, localities and objects, the project approaches the ensuing questions from a perspective that puts those relations into focus.

Apart from her time in Cape Town, Sarreiter has also been in KwaZulu-Natal at the Abbey of Inkamana and the surroundings. Sarreiter presented some of her new findings and work in progress from this trip at an APC research lab on 24 March.