About "German-Rapanui Entanglements"
Newly published open-access book about Rapanui history. Links in story.
On April 9th, 1722 a German corporal from Rostock, Mecklenburg was, according to his own testimony, the first European (or Westerner) to set foot on the island they named “Easter Island”. This is the beginning of a web of entanglements between Germans —let’s say, people of Germanic culture, German-speakers, either before or after the modern political entity named “Germany”— and Easter Island —or whatever the inhabitants of the place called their small ocean-bound land where they lived—. Interestingly, way before Germany, some people defined themselves or were defined by others as “Germans”. In the case of Rapa Nui the island, and Rapanui the people, this is a recent construct as the name was never used before 1863 and the demonym only became something around 1888 and widely used from the 1980s onward. As you can see, embarking in such a book with more-or-less strict categories “German” and “Rapanui” is not as simple as you imagine.
It was on a hot summer in 2023 that the idea of creating a “coffee-table” book about this topic was developed during a visit to Rapa Nui by two scholars: German anthropologist Philipp Schorch, a Professor at LMU-Munich with a deep interest in the Pacific islands, whom I first met in 2016 in Hanga Roa; and the Chilean anthropologist Diego Muñoz Azócar, from the École des hautes études en Sciences Sociales (School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences, in France), whom I know personally since 2008 and prolific author of academic papers about Rapa Nui. We discussed it over several meetings that often included legal fermented stimulants. I joined the IndiGen project as an associated researcher, getting a small stipend to fund my research for the book and work as coeditor. The book was originally supposed to be somwhat of a handbook of German-Rapanui connections as well. Of course we wanted to have a substantial Rapanui presence among the authors of the chapters, but some of the collaborators unfortunately abandoned this highly demanding ship along the way.
The project took three years of effort, more or less, and connected scholars living in Rapa Nui, Germany, Chile, France and the United States (including Hawai’i) as well as some nomadic ones who spent time at different latitudes and longitudes. The different backgrounds, working schedules, lived experiences and tolerance to cortisol levels certainly made things challeging from time to time. This was of course not a full-time project and every editor and author had to juggle multiple other things while working on this. Peer-reviewing, commentaries, copy-editing, fact-checking, new revisions after new revisions, making sure to obtain rights for the images or using public domain ones and so many other things. Seeing the book’s birth, though, made all these pains worth it.
The book offers the first systematic study of German-Rapanui historical relations. Similar exercises have been done before between Rapa Nui and other spheres like the French, the American and the Chilean. The book presents its case in the introduction written by myself, Diego and Philipp in a way that didn’t drift far from how we envisioned the book back in 2023. Then come the chapters written by Glenn Penny, Professor of German History at UCLA, and by cultural anthropologist Marcus Scholz, the first one tackling the overarching German relations with Rapa Nui through Chile and the second the activities of Bavarian Capuchin monks among the Mapuche and Rapanui peoples. In both chapters we see clearly how often Chile worked as an intermediary between Germanic researchers/missionaries and the island and its people. Continuing with the Bavarian Capuchin angle, Diego and Philipp work through a chapter that connects and old museum in a Capuchin monastery in Altötting and the Museo Antropológico Padre Sebastian Englert in Hanga Roa (based on the collection of a Bavarian Capuchin priest), comparing how Rapanui objects were displayed on each.
My chapter deals with Germanic authors collecting oral traditions between 1882 and the 1950s, treating them as semi-historical or partially factual accounts in order to reconstruct the dark and mystery-ridden history of Rapa Nui. After this Chilean professor Andrea Seelenfreund and French anthropologist Théo Milin cover thoroughly the 1950s field research of Thomas S. Barthel, a seriously underrated scholar who devoted many years to Rapanui studies. Finally, German archaeologist Annette Kühlem writes about a more recent fieldwork, the one of the German Archaeological Institute that carried-out the last significant archaeological excavation on Rapa Nui: a whole decade in Ava Ranga a Uka a Toroke Hau, a several kilometer long ravine that used to have a river running from an overflow of the Rano Aroi lake and where monuments were raised. Two afterwords, one by Chilean professor Rolf Foerster and another by the Rapanui scholar Noah Paoa Kannegiesser enrich the volume.
Now even though it focuses more on the German side of things as the ones driven by interest in Rapa Nui, their subject, the agency and interpretation of these entanglements by the Rapanui people are clearly manifest. Germans left their impressions in published or unpublished written material, art or photographs. The Rapanui side transmitted some of these entanglements orally and obtained copies of the German materials to recycle or reshape them for their own purposes. So the book is not about how Germans saw Rapa Nui, the island, or Rapanui, the people, but mostly how these encounters were relevant on the island for its community, how the materials were partially shaped by the Rapanui agency, and how much of the island’s realities of the time became truly manifest in each entanglement.
We are eager to see and read the reactions to it.
The book is available as a free download here:
OAPEN Library (full book): https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/114626
JSTOR (by chapters): https://www.jstor.org/content/oa_book_edited/jj.38092612
MUSE (by chapters): https://muse.jhu.edu/book/143015
Open Research Library (full book): https://openresearchlibrary.org/content/4ec1f242-e064-4922-a950-15fb3a2787bc