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Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) on (Heritage) Tourism in Tanzania with a Focus on Memory Policies regarding German Colonial History 

Tanzania was part of the colony "German East Africa" from 1885 to 1918. Violence, illegitimate land grabbing, civilizing mission, exploitative politics as well as interference in established socio-cultural social systems have left their traces in Tanzania as well as in Germany: colonial heritage consists today of infrastructures, economic-neocolonial dependencies, stereotypes and prejudices, global political power (im)equalities, hero narratives, traumatic family stories, looted artworks or post-colonial knowledge structures. Tanzania is also a popular vacation destination. During a trip to Tanzania, the intertwined collectives of Germany and Tanzania encounter each other, embedded in ambivalent, contradictory, heterogeneous discourses and debates about memory of the shared colonial heritage. This PhD project will empirically investigate the discursive negotiations on how to deal with colonial heritage in Tanzania - in the (cultural and heritage) tourism sector. What are the attitudes of the different stakeholders on the German and Tanzanian side towards transnational memory work and tourism? Is - and if so how, where and why - the German-Tanzanian colonial history in Tanzania received, reflected, remembered and/or used for tourism? And which patterns of argumentation and conflicts of interpretation result from this? The empirical work follows the research program of the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (Reiner Keller) which investigates constructions of reality on the level of institutional actors as well as traces and contextualizes interpretations and knowledge politics. Memory policies of forgetting, ignoring, capitalizing, commemorating or reinterpretation as well as the debate about the appropriate use of colonial history in the field of tourism will be focused. In a combination of text analysis, participatory observation and guideline based expert interviews this research will be conducted with qualitative methods of social science.