As part of a team of curators and scholars, I have been involved in a research and exhibition project on the history of tobacco use since March 2018. On Saturday, 25 May 2019, we opened the exhibition Allerwärts: Herrnhut in der Welt des Tabaks, at the Ethnographic Museum in Herrnhut, Saxony.

The exhibition approaches tobacco from a unique angle. Rather than looking at the cultural history of smoking, or the historical development of debates about health, we use tobacco as an example to discuss local-global networks through a lens of interelated cultural, economic, and social history questions. Apart from sociocultural contexts of tobacco consumption, along with utensils (such as pipes and pouches) in diverse source communities, the exhibit opens up local contexts between merkantile and missionary activities of the Unity of the Brethren (Moravian Church). On the one hand, the Moravian Church ran a thriving company, Abraham Dürninger & Co, that was already a global player in the textile and tobacco trade during the 18th century. The exhibition discusses Dürninger’s tobacco networks, as well as the company’s advertising and how their ads’ imagery fit within global historical trends of promoting colonial products and of representing colonized peoples.

On the other hand, tobacco played a major economic role in many of the Moravian mission stations spread all over the world. The exhibition uses examples from stations in Greenland, South Africa, and the south Russian Wolga region to show how tobacco supported the economic subsistence of the stations, or was handed out as a gift to (potential) converts.

Finally, the exhibition addresses the historical role of tobacco for ethnographic collections: it presents objects related to tobacco consumption that were collected by Moravian missionaries and given to museums in Saxony. In addition, it discusses how ethnogaphers used tobacco as currency to obtain objects from source communities.

I focused my contribution on “Indian” imagery in tobacco ads, ranging from broadsides and cigar box labels to the Anglo-Saxon tradition of “cigar store Indian” statues and German collectible image albums that were major advertising devices after the 1920s. One of the central objects in the exhibit is a  statue of an “Indian” wearing a plains feather headdress with integrated mechanism to cut cigar tips and to light a cigar. The Dürninger company had ordered the carving of this statue to decorate its Berlin show room for the 1936 Olympic Games.

The research group is currently working to complement the exhibition with a collection of academic essays to present research results. We expect this collection to be published in 2020.