16 January 2025, from 13:00 (s.t.)

 

Room 107a, Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University

M*hrenstraße 41, 10117 Berlin

 

 

13:00  Regina Römhild, Jeehye Kim, Margherita Tess: Welcome and Introduction (Margherita Tess)

 

13:15  Jeehye Kim: Photography for Jinshugaku

 

14:15  Han Gil Jang: Changga and the Formation of Global »Musical Modernity«

 

15:15  Xiaoxuan (Chén Sī) Chen: The Representations of WWII Asia Theater at Royal Museum of the Armed Force and Military History

 

 

 

 

This symposium aims to reflect on the discipline of European Ethnology by drawing on research into the entangled colonialisms of Asia and Europe.

As students investigating the intertwined histories and narratives of Asia and Europe within an institute of European Ethnology, we felt compelled to ask not only what constitutes »Europe« in the discipline of European Ethnology (Löfgren & Bendix, 2008) but also what »Asia« represents in this context. Specifically, we are interested in highlighting the often-overlooked connections between European colonialism of Asia and colonialism within Asia, such as Japanese imperialism. This approach underscores the necessity of critically examining colonial modernity, which encompasses diverse perspectives and complex colonial configurations beyond Eurocentric discourses.

To address these questions, PhD candidates Jeehye Kim and Xiaoxuan (Chén Sī) Chen, along with guest artist Han Gil Jang, explore neglected narratives and representations of colonial pasts in and of Asia through different forms and media: photography, music, and museum curation. Furthermore, we consider how these stories not only emerge from media forms that go beyond written texts but also require diverse modalities for research outputs challenging the traditional primacy of the written article in academic discourse.

 

Margherita Tess is a PhD candidate at IfEE, HU Berlin and a research member at SFB 1265 Re-Figuration of Spaces. Margherita holds a Bachelor's in Japanese Studies and a Master's in Cultural Anthropology from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Their PhD research focuses on how cities in Japan are adapting to extreme summer heat and which spatial changes adaptive infrastructures engender. In particular, they are interested in the scientific knowledge production around concepts of climate and heat, circulating across Germany and Japan from the 90s on.

 

 

 

The focus of this research project is an anthropological photo archive from Torii Ryūzō’s expeditions in colonized Korea during the 1910s. The Japanese anthropologist took over one of the first research projects ordered by the Japanese General Government and left nearly 4.000 photographs from his fieldworks. His study spanned from archeology through ethnography to physical anthropology, as reflected in the photographs. As he stated in 1912, he aimed to complete a “jinshugaku”, a term of the time that presents challenges in translation, as it can be rendered as ‘ethnology’, ‘study of race’, or ‘study of nation’. What was his concept of jinshugaku? What were the roles of photography and its epistemological status in his jinshugaku? This project seeks not only to reveal the process of anthropological knowledge production by means of photography – while considering the changing anthropological discourses of the time in Japan –, but also to shed light on the global processes of appropriation, transformation, and circulation of scientific photography.

 

Jeehye Kim is a doctoral student in the Department of Art History at the University of Salzburg and currently visiting Institute of European Ethnology, Humboldt University of Berlin. Her research project is supported by the Doctoral Fellowship Programme of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Marietta Blau-Grant of the OeAD. After her training as a photographer at the Kaywon School of Art & Design in South Korea, she studied art history and history at the Free University and the Humboldt University of Berlin. She was an ÖAW ifk Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna (2023-2024).

 

 

 

This work examines conflicting notions of »national (traditional) music« in the phonographic recordings of Korean-Russian POWs during WWI at the Berliner Phonogramm-Archiv. These recordings were part of the work undertaken by the Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, which was organized around a clearly colonial agenda: to amass oral and musical specimens of as many ethnic groups across the globe as possible. For this goal the German POW camps were not only an exemplar of the imperial »contact zone« but also an ideal »field« where soldiers of diverse—especially non-European—ethnic groups, conscripted from the colonies of the Allied Forces, were held prisoners. As these recordings are products of complex dynamics involving (multiple) colonizers, colonial intellectuals, and the colonized, this study seeks to point out the inadequacies of the West v. the Rest framework and highlight instead inter-regional entanglements reflected in them. Such an approach necessitates looking at both sides of the globe and how different discursive trajectories surrounding music—itself a modern construct—and ŭmak (音樂; JPongaku; CH yīnyuè) came to leave their mark on the wax cylinders.

 

Han Gil Jang is a writer and artist based in Berlin. Currently enrolled in Art and Media at the Universität der Künste Berlin, Jang received Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Master of Arts in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Between his time in Chicago and Berlin, Jang worked in Seoul as a researcher and investigator for the People’s Tribunal on War Crimes by the South Korean Military during the Vietnam War. Jang is also a recipient of the 5th SeMA-HANA Art Criticism Award (2023).

 

 

 

Royal Military Museum Brussels serves as one of the fieldwork sites for Chén Sī’s multi-sited ethnographic research project, which examines representations of the World War II Asia theater in European museums. Among the museum's various war-related galleries, the Second World War gallery has undergone significant renovations in recent years. Notably, it now features a dedicated section highlighting the Asia-Pacific theaters of the Second World War. Preliminary observations indicate that this section brings attention to lesser-known groups, such as Congolese veterans under Belgian command who participated in the Burma Campaign, and the 1st American Volunteer Group (commonly known as the Flying Tigers, 飛虎隊 Fēi Hǔ Duì), which defended the Republic of China against Japanese forces.This research seeks to further explore how transregional and transcultural war-related narratives are constructed and presented in museum spaces, with a particular focus on the encounter between European colonial powers, such as Belgium, and Japanese imperialism in the Asian theater of World War II. By examining the entanglements of colonialism and imperialism within specific historical and spatial contexts, the study explores how museum exhibition techniques—including installations, artifacts, soundscapes, and visual imagery—mediate and materialize these complex narratives, offering insights into the ways museums shape collective memory and historical consciousness.

 

Xiaoxuan (Chén Sī) Chen is a doctoral student at IfEE, HU Berlin. Her research explores representations of the Second World War’s Asia theaters in museums and public spaces in Europe. She has studied cultural anthropology and ethnology at Jagiellonian University and Minzu University of China, and has also participated in an advanced programme in computational social science at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. Apart from museum anthropology, her broad research interest includes: WWII and popular culture, Post-Punk landscape in China during COVID-19.