Glenn Penny: Persistent Collecting Networks – Explaining the History of Hamburg’s Central American Textile Collections

The lecture will explain how German museums, and many others, were filled with objects by networks of collectors, in many cases, multi-generational, the collecting process continuing for unexpectedly long time. A case study of the extensive collections of Guatemalan textiles in the Hamburg ethnological museum (the largest collection outside Central America) will be used as a starting point to talk about how collecting networks established around 1900 persisted across the twentieth century despite the world wars, regime changes, and radical political ruptures in Europe and Central America.