The Hutereau expedition

Research by Hannelore Vandenbergen

This project aims at studying an ethnographic collection in the Royal Museum for Central Africa, Tervuren, in a historiographic-anthropological way. The Hutereau collection was assembled during an expedition to the Uele and Ubangi region in the northeast of Congo from 1911 until 1913. The head of the ethnographic expedition was Armand Hutereau, a former military during Congo Free State with an eye for oral history and local genealogies of chefs.

In the light of an international interest in the Uele region and a competition between museums, exemplified by the Congo Expedition by Herbert Lang and James Chapin for the American Museum of Natural History in New York from 1909 until 1915 and the Duke von Mecklenburg expedition for the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin from 1907 until 1909, Hutereau collected approximately 8.000 objects for the Museum for Belgian Congo.

Next in trying to research how the history of the Hutereau expedition shaped the ethnographic collection, the focus more importantly is on how this collection continues to shape history and present. These objects were and are part of different social relations – for example the relation in which a researcher or restorer establishes by engaging with an object’s materiality – and this is what may be called their agency. There are different forms of agency present through what these objects signify or how they were used, through their materiality, their forms, information in conjoining archives, through their display or through people studying them, … These objects are not only passing on cultural or historical knowledge but they can renew relationships from the past today and this within the museum soon to be renovated.

Encountering these objects that are related to an early colonial past and a context of unequal power structures demands for an openness of method. An interdisciplinary and contextual approach is the backbone of this research. The Hutereau collection is situated in a historical, contemporary and future perspective by means of collection work, archival research, field work and literature study. A beautiful opportunity is to do research in the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin and the American Museum for Natural History as well.

Short bibliography

Appadurai, Arjun, ed.
1988  The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds.
2006  Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London & New York: Routledge.

Schildkrout, Enid, and Curtis A. Keim
1990  African Reflections: Art from Northeastern Zaire. New York: American Museum of Natural History.

Thomas, Nicholas, 1960-
2016  The Return of Curiosity : What Museums Are Good for in the 21st Century. London : Reaktion Books.