Awkward archives are those that generate disquieting frictions, sitting uneasily within the contemporary world. Yet what makes an archive ‘awkward’ cannot be determined in advance. Awkwardness is a relational category, contingent on the ethical, political, and historical frames through which an archive is approached—on our own judgments and on the archival grammars that decide what is considered good, wrong, violent, or problematic. To call an archive awkward is to acknowledge its instability: it is an archive whose meaning shifts with its use, an archive always at risk of tipping out of place. As poet Mary Capello evocatively puts it, it sits like a book on the edge of a shelf—potentially dangerous, perhaps merely misplaced, maybe easiest just to ignore.
In this paper, I present Awkward Archives (2022), a volume I co-edited with Margareta von Oswald, and outline its theoretical grounding and modular set of Berlin-based archival portraits. I propose that awkwardness is a productive lens through which to approach a particular set of ‘photo-objects’ in the collections of the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin: the so-called Hahne–Niehoff Archive. This archive, also featured in the book, contains some 41,000 photographs taken between 1920 and 1945 by the prehistorian and NSDAP supporter Hans Hahne and his assistant, the photographer Heinz Julius Niehoff. Their pseudo-ethnographic project was animated by the racist search for an ‘authentic’ German culture, an attempt to document what they perceived as original German-ness. Confronting this material today means confronting the awkwardness of its persistent uneventfulness: overexposed film strips, meticulously kept; animals in fields, absent of human presence; unromantic landscapes, strangely resistant to ideological mobilisation. What do we do with such images, whose banality complicates attempts to instrumentalise or redeem them? This seminar will problematise the tendency to approach such collections predominantly as visual archives, arguing instead for an attentiveness to their silences and absences. By attending to what is missing as much as to what is visible, I aim to open up a broader reflection on how we might engage anthropological archives more widely—always incomplete, often uncomfortable, and necessarily entangled in the histories they transmit and occlude.
Pitt Rivers Museum Research Seminar in Visual, Material and Museum Anthropology, Michaelmas Term 2025
Fridays, 12pm-1.30pm (Weeks 1-8)
In person at the Pitt Rivers Museum Lecture Theatre (entry via Robinson Close).
Convened by Paul Basu and Elizabeth Hallam.
