Dr. Richard Hölzl

Richard Hölzl is a provenance researcher at the Museum Fünf Kontinente (The Five Continents Museum) in Munich. His research interests include colonial material culture, the history of Christian missions, and the environmental history of forests and sustainability. He has previously taught at the Universities of Göttingen, Kassel, and Erfurt, as well as the New School of Social Research in New York.

At the Rachel Carson Center, he will work on environmental histories in ethnographic museums, which are currently increasing in prominence in Western countries. Provenance research, in particular with regard to colonial acquisitions, has become a necessity and an asset to museums. To a considerable extent, this relatively new line of inquiry is historiographical in nature and practice, and the unveiled histories go far beyond reconstructing acquisition and trajectories of museum objects. This research not only offers insights into recovering and representing past human-nature relations in a great variety of societies but also illustrates the violent incursions of colonial rule and the extraction economies of industrial capitalism. Hölzl’s research will explore this approach with regard to colonial museum collections from East and West Africa.

One case study examines the encounters of societies along the Wouri River, historically referred to as the Cameroon River, with German traders and colonizers around 1900. The Duala people, in particular, had a long history of transregional interaction and riverine trade (in ivory, enslaved human beings, palm oil). Their economy and society were violently transformed by German colonialism. Among some of the artifacts exhibited at the Five Continents Museum are boats, boat ornaments, and fishing gear, which represent the “blue” character of Duala society and its particular relationship to the Wouri River.

Selected Publications:

• “Missionary Masculinity and Ethnographic Collecting: The Gendered Context of a German Museum Expedition to Colonial Tanzania in 1927/28.” In The Gender of Ethnographic Collecting. Boasblogs Papers, vol. 3, edited by Carl Deußen and Mary Mbewe, 27–33. Bonn: boasblogs, 2021. https://boasblogs.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/bbp3_The-Gender-of-Ethnographic-Collecting_web.pdf.
• Gläubige Imperialisten: Katholische Mission in Deutschland und Ostafrika (1830–1960). Frankfurt/New York: Campus Verlag, 2021.
• with Jan Oosthoek, eds. Managing Northern Europe’s Forests: Histories from the Age of Improvement to the Age of Ecology. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018.
• with Rebekka Habermas, eds. Mission global: Eine Verflechtungsgeschichte seit dem 19. Jahrhundert. Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2014.
• Umkämpfte Wälder: Die Geschichte einer ökologischen Reform in Deutschland 1760–1860. Frankfurt: Campus Historische Studien, 2010.
• “Historicizing Sustainability: German Scientific Forestry in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries.” Science as Culture 19, no. 4 (2010): 431–60. https://doi.org/10.1080/09505431.2010.519866.