ABSTRACT
Taking point from Sarah Ahmed’s conception of “happy objects”, this chapter interprets ethnographic objects from colonial contexts in European museums as “unhappy objects.” As such, they both create unhappiness for different publics and are unhappy themselves. Focusing on ethnographic objects from Maasai communities in northern Tanzania, currently in the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin, this chapter explores the Indigenous conception of ing’weni, which understands these entities as “subjects” with agency that bring misfortune both to the Maasai and to German society. This conception is compared with the emotional debates on ethnographic museums, and especially on the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, in European publics. The analysis reveals that while Maasai conceptions gesture toward colonialism as a contemporary phenomenon, European affective publics tend to deny the full scope of ongoing colonialism.
