Scholarship as Adventure. Etta Becker-Donner in Africa and Latin America

Etta Becker-Donner (1911-1975) served as director of the Museum of Ethnology from 1955 to 1975. As the first (and for many years the only) female director of a state museum she was a well-known and highly respected personality in the Austrian and international museum scene; she also played a seminal role with respect to the reorientation  of the Museum of Ethnology after World War II. Her representation as a heroic pioneer able both to survive in the “wild, exotic jungle” and to succeed in the male-dominated world of science and museums constructed a public persona that made herself – as well as the museum and Ethnology as a discipline – popular and well-known throughout Austria. On the downside, her image as a female adventurer cast a shadow over her scholarly work and on her contributions to the museum, both of which have mostly been overlooked until today.


From an aesthetic point of view, the masks and figures of the Dan people in Liberia are particularly striking. Then again, the every-day objects of the Warí from Brazil remain fascinating documents of their first encounter with Western civilization, and are regarded as seminal both by scholars and the Warí alike. And last but not least, the selected examples of Latin-American popular art continue to inspire with their vitality, spirituality and embeddedness in local festivities.