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This chapter explores how Felix von Luschan's African and Oceanic division at the Berlin Ethnological Museum met with resentment among other German anthropological institutions. Shortly after the turn of the century, Adolf Bastian's theoretical visions came under attack for their impracticalities. Similarly, Luschan's division within museum was blamed for maintaining a monopoly position among German institutions. Combining theoretical argument with an increasing ability to solicit local civic support for their efforts, museum officials in Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Leipzig soon outflanked Luschan in Berlin. Increasingly isolated, Luschan built upon the methodological innovations developed through his disagreements with commercial agents in German New Guinea.

The Phonogram Archive (Phonogramm Archiv) built the world’s first global archive of music. It did so by relying on three networks of knowledge: an older one of circulating texts; the mid-nineteenth century’s imperial movement of people, knowledge and commodities; and the twentieth century’s circulation of recordings. Stumpf, Erich von Hornbostel, and their collaborators turned their recording collection into a central archive for music; Felix von Luschan at the Berlin Ethnological Museum helped them get funding and phonographs. Correspondents from abroad sent in wax cylinders and forged personal ties to Hornbostel, including Boas and George Dorsey from America, Rudolf Pöch from Austria, and Bartók from Hungary. Most recordings, however, came from Germans involved in colonial projects or scientific expeditions, for example Theodor Koch and Richard Thurnwald. By 1908 Stumpf could point in writing to the Archive’s considerable achievements as a research institute for salvage anthropology. Stumpf used his familiarity with the Archive’s fieldwork methods and empirical data for his critique of faulty fieldwork accepted by Wilhelm Wundt. Building on the writings of Stumpf and his disciples, Max Weber analyzed the rationalization and commodification of music.

Despite his opposition to colonial expansion and annexation, Berlin Ethnological Museum founder Adolf Bastian realized the possibilities for research emerging from German imperial ventures. Bastian and his assistants at the museum saw the import of Oceania and New Guinea for anthropological endeavors. Supposedly isolated for centuries, Oceanic regions promised unspoiled cultures that were fit to salvage and display in museum hallways. This “salvage” project, however, also required Bastian and Berlin's future director of the African and Oceanic division, Felix von Luschan, to engage the very agents who threatened the cultural continuity of Oceanic cultures. In short, the ethnographic frontier needed to interact with the colonial periphery. Such interaction could hardly avoid an intersection with German colonial projects. This engagement brought about a split between theory and practice of ethnographic collecting that would ultimately inform the development of the anthropological discipline in Germany. This chapter chronicles how Bastian and Luschan attempted to control German colonial agents' collecting practices. This practice triggered resentment among other museum officials not affiliated with the Berlin institution.

This chapter focuses on Felix von Luschan's attempt to engage the commercial frontier in German New Guinea for the purposes of his African and Oceanic division at the Berlin Ethnological Museum. His attempt to secure the prominent German commercial presence in German New Guinea soon clashed with the traders' “colonial project” of securing profits from the exchange. The chapter illustrates that the conceptual clashes over indigenous artifacts separating science from commercialism predated Luschan's predicament by a century. The disagreement over the conceptualization soon became a widening gap, as Luschan demanded artifacts to be accompanied by exact descriptions. Such qualitative demands on artifact collection contradicted the quantitative German merchant commercial project. In his attempt to gain independence from colonial agents, Luschan now searched for new alternatives, pushing the anthropological field into new directions.