Johanna Hügel

The hidden life of things. A history of knowledge between Arts and ethnography in Petersburg at the turn of the century

The encounter with the ethnographic object revolutionised modern Arts. How did this encounter take place in the Russian Empire?

At the beginning of the 20th century, the St Petersburg artist Vladimir Markov wrote the first Russian-language writings on African, Oceanic and North Asian Arts. This book traces the objects depicted in these writings from their contexts of origin on the west coast of Africa, the shores of the Amur and the island of Rapa Nui in the south-east Pacific to St Petersburg. What did these objects have in common and what did the St Petersburg artists see in them? Using the methodological tools of Latour's actor-network theory, Johanna Hügel examines how the objects are given new meanings through their changing contexts in ethnography, museums and Arts.
These links and entanglements in the history of knowledge only take on their true significance against the backdrop of current debates in cultural theory on the definition of modernity: the fascination with objects lies in the fact that they embody something that should no longer exist in modernity: the vitality of things. Against this backdrop, new perspectives unfold on the reappraisal of colonial knowledge and objects and the question of their restitution.

The monograph will be published by Wallstein in summer 2026 in the series "Historische Wissensforschung". 

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