At the centre of the article is Ngonnso, the founding mother and deity of the Nso’ in Cameroon, whose continued presence at the Humboldt Forum shapes engagements between the Nso’ community and diaspora, activists, artists, curators and researchers at the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin, and other actors.
Through these unfolding encounters, I explore how questions of spirituality, vitality, and belonging intersect with colonial histories, political negotiations across multiple scales, and contemporary struggles to reconnect people and collections.
First, Dilger examines how colonial acquisition and epistemic ordering produced disconnections that are now being reworked through collaborative practices and affective contestations.
Second, he analyses how processes of reconnection are shaped by the ambivalent force of artifacts, linking questions of vitality and spirituality to institutional and political contexts.
Attending to affect reveals these dynamics as open ended and entangled with power, offering a lens for rethinking care, restitution, and collaboration in collection-holding institutions.
Focusing on ethnographic collections as affective forces foregrounds the affective labour invested in handling, reanimating, or restituting artifacts, and it reveals how artifacts themselves participate in shaping these processes.
Understanding collections as dynamic assemblages of affective forces thus offers a way to analyse—rather than resolve—how people continually negotiate care, responsibility, and relatedness within and beyond collection-holding institutions.
