Dr. Chris Zisis, Ph.D. in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Research Assistant Lecturer at EKW/Institute for Anthropological Studies in Culture and History at Hamburg Universiy, has published his e-thesis: “Visual and Material displays of Migration Histor(ies) in Museums/Exhibitions in Germany. Case Study: Greek ‘Gastarbeiter’ in Germany. Towards a Bottom-up archive of migration experience(s) and knowledge.”
Find the published thesis here: https://ediss.sub.uni-hamburg.de/handle/ediss/11305.
Abstract
Has the multiplicity and multilayeredness of labour migration histories been sufficiently represented in museums, public history and memory sites? Are there unknown, silenced and unseen stories of labour migration, which have been under-represented or remain totally forgotten in the realm of public history? Is there an active engagement, participation, and involvement of the real “protagonists” of labour migration in related museum/memory projects on migration histories?
My ethnographic research demonstrated that not only there is undiscovered historical material, but also stressed the need and due demand for a more nuanced, compact multifaceted re-activation, reworking, archiving and facilitating such stories in the intersections of museums, public history and memory sites.
Particularly, my on-going ‘multi-sided’ and focused ethnography’ in regards to my examined case study, post-war Greek labour migration in BRD/West Germany during the first phase of the recruitment agreement, 1960-1973, in the cities of Berlin, Hamburg, Munich can be placed in an effort to explore this on-going critical dialogue between oral-histories, testimonies, social memories, materiality, visual iconography, objects as ‘mnemonic devices’ (Jones 2010) and archives, be it official of unofficial documents, in its multiple layers formats and configurations and how these multiple intersecting ‘voices’ and agencies from both, unofficial and official sources and actors resonate with museum practice and displays regarding that often under-represented historical period. Adopting a mixed methods approach in this ethnography, I aimed at charting embodied experience(s) of labour migration through the prism of four different media; films on labour migration since the mid 1970s era, oral-histories and testimonies either contextualized in these films, as well as primary interviews with informants from the first and second generation of labour migrants, group discussion, as well as letters, photographs and material artefacts of migration.
Through this notion of a multi-vocal, polymorphic and poly-prismatic “bottom-up“ archive, it will be possible to describe spherically and comprehend ‘the multiple materialities of migrant worlds’ (Basu, Coleman 2008), enhance the notion of a dialogue-driven (Harrison, 2013), and relational museum, as well as finally collecting and configuring a ‘bottom-up’, alternative memory archive of migrants’ embodies experience(s) and knowledge.
Concluding, our study provides additional support for the conviction to re-imagine the archive as a research tool, a forum and laboratory that encompasses alternative ways of creating academic knowledge, re-activate existing visual and material archives in critical educational context, as well as performing the archive from the “perspective of migration”.
