Relationships Rather Than Ownership

The University of Zurich’s Ethnographic Museum is located at the entrance to the Old Botanical Garden, a small oasis of calm in the middle of a bustling city. It is Alice Hertzog’s new – and yet familiar – place of work. She previously worked here as a provenance researcher, before becoming its director in the fall of 2025. “Outside is Bahnhofstrasse, and behind us is the Hallenbad City,” she says, pointing out of the window of her first-floor office. “We’re right in the middle of the city. That’s a tremendous opportunity.” For Alice Hertzog, the museum is a place with special potential – a site where societal questions can be explored through concrete objects.

For the first years of her term as director, Alice Hertzog has set three priorities: renaming the museum, returning cultural property and increasing transparency by digitizing the collection. These three projects are linked by a common thread: the museum should be welcoming and open – to new visitors from different communities, to new relationships with the objects and to research by scholars from different fields.

Today, Zurich is more diverse than it was when the ethnographic collection was founded. According to Hertzog, this fundamentally changes the role of the museum as well. The museum is “a place where issues of decolonization must be discussed,” precisely because the city, the collection and its colonial history are so closely intertwined.

Keeping this in mind, the new director is eager to continue the process of renaming the museum. She explains that the German term for social anthropology, Völkerkunde, is rooted in the colonial idea that other cultures can be classified and described as clearly defined “peoples” – an approach that is rightly viewed critically today. This is why, three years ago, a question mark appeared in the museum’s signage: Völkerkunde?museum.

“The museum’s name no longer reflects our activities,” Hertzog explains. She sees herself as an anthropologist, not a Völkerkundlerin, and the term makes part of the audience feel unwelcome. Rather than commissioning an agency to come up with a new name, Hertzog is taking an anthropological and participatory approach to the renaming process. Together with students and colleagues from different disciplines, she intends to explore the cultural, historical and literary implications of renaming a place. An exhibition on the subject will follow in September, inviting visitors to participate in the process.

Hertzog’s understanding of museums is also shaped by her own path into anthropology. She studied at Cambridge – “rigorous theoretical training, but very much an ivory tower, just as one would imagine” – and discovered her passion for material culture during visits to the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. An internship in the research department of the Musée Quai Branly in Paris shaped her view of the museum as a place of public debate. It also led to an important realization: as a social anthropologist, you can communicate your ideas through academic articles, but you can also work in a museum and engage directly with the public. “It’s a question that has stuck with me ever since: what does it mean to be a public anthropologist?”

She later completed her doctorate at ETH Zurich on urbanization and migration in West Africa. Over time, Hertzog expanded her interest in how people circulate to include the question of how objects circulate as well – where they come from, how they entered Western museums, and responsibility that knowledge entails. She played a key role in the provenance research during the first phase of the Benin Initiative Switzerland (BIS), in which eight Swiss museums investigated the origins of objects from the former Kingdom of Benin in what is now Nigeria.

A first milestone of that initiative has now been reached. On 20 March 2026, the University of Zurich (UZH), together with Museum Rietberg and the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, announced the decision to transfer the ownership  of the Benin Bronzes. UZH is returning 14 objects from its museum to the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The objects reached Europe through looting and the international art trade after the British attack in 1897. Provenance research conducted in the scope of the BIS concluded that 14 of the 18 artifacts in the Ethnographic Museum were very most likely looted and are eligible for restitution. (“The other four objects turned out to be modern copies,” Hertzog noted in the interview.) The objects will be transferred to the Nigerian National Museum in Lagos in the coming months.

For Hertzog, this restitution marks a shift in perspective. For a long time, museum directors were defined by the collections they acquired. Today, however, the focus is increasingly on how institutions deal with the holdings already in their care. “It’s a shift from acquiring new collections to redistribution,” she says. At the same time, she emphasizes that returning 14 objects in no way diminishes the Ethnographic Museum’s collection, which comprises around 60,000 objects in total. Viewing the objects through the lens of their relationships rather than ownership can create new knowledge.

One anecdote from the provenance research on the Benin Bronzes made a strong impression on Hertzog and illustrates what creating new knowledge can mean in concrete terms. During a visit to the museum’s storage facility, Phil Omodamwen, a fifth-generation bronze caster from Benin City, held an original bell in his hands for the first time. This type of bell is still used on altars today to invoke the ancestors. He was shocked to discover that the reverse side looked completely different from what he had assumed and from how he himself had been making such bells. Until then, he had only images from European exhibition catalogs to work with. Those showed front views but not the details on the back that Omodamwen could now see on the original. In that moment, Hertzog understood what it meant for people to lack direct access to their own cultural heritage.

The encounter led to a joint project with Omodamwen, during which the bell was recast, documenting every single step of the process. This documentation became one of the highlights of the exhibition Benin Dues, which ended in early March. After the painful legacy of colonial history, Hertzog sees this project as an opportunity for a new kind of exchange on equal terms, creating new knowledge, new relationships and new forms of access together with the societies from which the objects originate. She calls this process “recasting relationships,” both literally and figuratively.

New perspectives and transparency are important to Hertzog. She wants to make the collection digitally accessible. “One of my goals is to make our database available online,” she says. This increased accessibility will benefit the interested public, researchers and partner institutions interested in continuing to work with the collection. Hertzog hopes this step will foster new research questions and invite broader engagement.

Hertzog appears at ease in her dual role as museum director and professor. “This is the perfect job because it combines theory and curatorial practice,” she says. “I don’t have to choose between working in a museum or academia. I get to do both.” She wants her students to engage in public dialogue as early as possible, rather than study in an ivory tower, as she did. They contribute to exhibitions, write their theses in the museum and participate as critical companions.

A particularly striking moment for her last semester was when she was spontaneously invited to participate in a panel discussion organized by the City of Zurich on dealing with the colonial legacy, hosted by the European Coalition of Cities Against Racism. Since the event conflicted with her seminar, she simply brought her students along. There, they found themselves sitting among delegates from other European cities and saw how their seminar topics fed immediately into public debate and political decision-making. “They realized that the museum is not a dusty collection, but a place where colonial entanglements are addressed,” says Hertzog.

This is a museum that welcomes exchange with students, visitors, diverse communities in Zurich and partners from the societies of the objects’ origins. As our conversation draws to a close, the first visitor group enters the building: French-speaking teenagers with their teacher, ready for their guided tour of the Benin exhibition, where they will learn about the traditional process of casting a ceremonial bronze bell. Hertzog holds the door open for them and beams: “Bienvenue tout le monde!”