Archiving the Ephemeral: Dance in Ethnographic Films from the Hamburg South Seas Expedition 1908–1910

On 15 May 1908, the Hamburgische Südsee-Expedition, organized by the new director of the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology, Georg Thilenius, set off on a two-year ethnographic voyage to German colonies in Melanesia and Micronesia. The goals of the expedition included the study of the relationships between Melanesian and Micronesian and Polynesian peoples (Thilenius, "Plan" 29; see also Fischer 23), of migration and contact in the region (Buschmann, "Tobi Captured" 319–20), and the acquisition of objects that would promote this study as well as enhance the collection and reputation of the museum (Buschmann, "Tobi Captured" 321–23; Fischer 28–29; Kelm, "Im ersten Jahr" 92–93). In addition, Thilenius made the seemingly competing claims that study of native peoples in the German colonies would assist the colonial administration with the "native question," "native politics," and the management of its native workforce (Thilenius, "Plan" 23; Thilenius, "Einführung" V, VIII; Thilenius, letter to Fülleborn, 24 Aug. 1908, qtd. in Kelm, "Im ersten Jahr" 102; see also: Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism 241) and that by visiting numerous costal locales and collecting as much raw material as possible, his expedition would preserve the remains of cultures that were "Europeanizing" ("Plan" 4, 12–13, 22; see also Kelm, "Im ersten Jahr" 106). While today these claims may seem mutually at odds, it was typical of the time for "German anthropologists [to] participate […] in 'salvage' operations even as they actively contributed to the decimation of non-Western cultures through collusion with colonialism" (Oksiloff 61).

As this article will show, the filming of dance was a central component of the Hamburg expedition's salvage mission, a component that is interesting not because of its success, but because of the way it failed. The surviving film does not make clear what any of the dances it depicts and their original functions were. In fact, Dr. Herbert Tischner, head of the Oceania Department of the Hamburg Museum of Ethnology from 1936–1968, who studied and recompiled the footage in 1939, was stumped by most of them (3–5). The original dances were transitory, embodied cultural events, and when they were reproduced and spatially and temporally relocated, they lost their original meanings. Nevertheless, this footage still has significance; it tells a story about the roles of native dance and new cinematic technologies in early twentieth-century German ethnography. A more detailed discussion of the footage and its context will explain how the Hamburg South Seas Expedition attempted to integrate native bodies, movements, and emotional and spiritual essences, particularly through the filming of dance, into its salvage and collection missions, a task for which the new motion picture camera seemed ideal. This attempt to salvage dance, to sever its image from the dancers' bodies and societies and preserve it as a collectible object, reflects some of the paradoxes and tensions in both this specific undertaking's salvage mission and in early German ethnographic filmmaking as well as the expedition's contradictory attitudes towards the peoples encountered.

In the case of the Hamburg expedition, the concept of "salvage" ethnography (Buschmann, "Colonizing Anthropology" 246; Buschmann, "Tobi Captured" 320; Fischer 105; Oksiloff 61–62) not only justified the project, as did the claim of colonial applications, but also enhanced the prestige of the undertaking and the museum. This function took primacy over concern for the actual well-being of the cultures to be studied. In an unpublished manuscript from 1905, Thilenius wrote that he wanted to bolster the significance of the museum with a sponsored project that would create "eine Spezialsammlung, welche so vollständig ist und das zu wählende Gebiet völlig erschöpft, daß ein späterer von anderer Seite etwa zu planender Versuch der gleichen Art von vornehin als aussichtlos erscheinen muß" (unpublished memorandum 2–3; qtd. in Fischer 29). In an era when German museums of natural history competed to amass material collections and rescue objects from allegedly dying cultures (Buschmann, "Colonizing Anthropology" 234–35; Penny 103, 119), the Hamburg collection would be more scientifically and competitively valuable if the cultures studied would...