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Contributing to the academic field of visual anthropology, the thesis explores what can be learned from photographs in the course of a repatriation of 300 photographs from a host museum to a source community. Norwegian merchant and aspiring ethnographer Oscar Mamen took 300 photographs while living in Urga, what today is Ulaanbaatar, between 1911 and 1913. Mamen came in October 1911, to establish an office for the British American Tobacco Company (BAT). As many adventurers at his time, he was equally interested in documentation and collecting. Soon after his arrival, Mongolia declared its independence from China – then under the Qing Dynasty. An independent government and state institutions were established, and the eighth Khutuktu, Bogd Khaan, was crowned as their religious and political head of state. These events were visually inscribed by Mamen in 300 photographs.
Between 2019 and 2023, the Museum of Cultural History (MCH) in Oslo, Norway, shared photographs, and texts from the Mamen Collection with the Chinggis Khaan National Museum (CKNM) and the National University of Mongolia (NUM), both in Ulaanbaatar. These institutions agreed to collaborate on the production of two books and a photograph exhibition based on Mamen’s digitised photographs and archival texts. The collection attracted widespread attention. Since the collection was first discovered in an old travelling suitcase in the garage of one of Mamen’s grandchildren in 2016, researchers from Mongolia, Cambridge and Aberdeen had visited the collection. In 2020, the Mongolian President K. Battulga travelled to Oslo for the purpose of visiting the collection. On this occasion President Battulga gave me an impromptu presidential scholarship, thereby announcing his support of my research. This occasion attracted massive attention from Mongolian media. The circulation of Mamen’s photographs on Mongolian internet pages grew exponentially.
This thesis argues that the scientific potential of photographs expands their visual historical inscription. Photographs, in this thesis, are image-objects. Based on visual anthropologist Elizabeth Edwards’ scholarship, the central focus is on what photographs do and, more specifically, what kind of work Mongolians expected Mamen’s photographs to do. I explore the nature of photography as material, sensible, and relational objects. Photographs are approached as sites of ambiguity, mutuality, but also as open to independent meaning-making. Photographs make room for alternative histories. My methodology was inspired by Haidy Geismar’s method of ‘walking with photographs’. Starting with Mamen’s photographs, I trace the circulation of these photographs: included as prints in collaborative book projects, printed as large exhibition frames, reproduced by the Mongolian press, and extensively shared and debated, loved and reviled, in online fora. These photographs operated in the present, they enabled the contestation of former Socialist Mongolian historiographies, they were put to work to revitalise traditions, crafts, and personal experiences of what it means to be Mongolian.
In this thesis, I see each of these circulations of Mamen’s photographs, including the collaborative production of the two books Mongolia and Mongols Volume X and Going East, as well as the exhibition of Mamen photographs in Urga, analysed as unfolding in James Clifford’s museum contact zone (inspired by Pratt’s original use of the term). There are significant nuances that set this visual repatriation apart. First, the return takes place between a university museum in Oslo, and the Mongolian state. Expanding on Laura Peers and Alison Brown’s term ‘source community’, I describe Mongolia here as a ‘source nation’. My collaborations were with a larger academic state apparatus. The unequal power dynamics commonly apparent in museum–source community relations, did not apply. The thesis hence address critical theory and power imbalances in source community-museum relations by the use of the term ‘source nation’.
Second, Mamen’s work and travels in Mongolia were made possible by a colonial world order, and he was definitely a product of these. At the same time, Norway was not a colonial superpower in relation to Mongolia. The restitution that the Mamen collection might contribute to Mongolian peoples, is related to how Mamen’s photographs are seen to intervene in Chinese and later Socialist histories of the Mongolian nation. The circulation of Mamen photographs in initiatives shaped by Mongolian academic institutions are, as I will show, different to the more anarchic, bottom-up, circulation of images on Mongolian online platforms. As circulated in Mongolian online platforms, the photographs soon lost their connection to the MCH and to its collector, Oscar Mamen. These circulations did to a larger degree take control of the image-objects and did more radically shape them according to the histories and the identity politics that rhizomatically became promoted.
The Sarr and Savoy Report from 2018 advised the inclusion of restitution as part of repatriation cases. In the return of Mamen’s photographs to Mongolia, the source community-museum relations were partly reversed as Mongolia made use of a state apparatus available to states only. The thesis argues that photographs are especially potent museum objects for this kind of return due to their nature, resisting control from the photographer as well as state institutions, image brokers or museums. They are sites of ambiguousness, opening up the space for alternative histories that might contradict historiographical schools as well as state narratives, histories that, I argue, can contribute to a decolonialisation effect in post-Socialist Mongolia.
