There are many paths to development. Some of them are for bikes.

One of my goals for this summer is to finally get around to visiting some of the museums that I didn't during my last trip to Vienna. At the time, I told myself this was because I had decided to concentrate on meeting Austrians more than "seeing" Austria. But, if I'm being honest with myself, I spent more time on Facebook than was probably necessary. On many occasions, I wasn't doing anything but was simply too lazy to get bundled up and leave my dorm to go do something. Today, though, was sunny and not overly warm, so I had no excuses. I decided to visit the Museum für Völkerkunde (anthropology). And I would bike there.

Citybike* is Vienna's free bike rental program. Yes, free. You pay a one-Euro start-up cost, and then you can (with the swipe of a credit card for deposit) take bikes out of over 60 stations throughout Wien, which are conveniently located near U-Bahn stations or other highly-trafficked areas. You don't pay anything for the first hour of each bike rental, and you can return the bikes to any station, not just the one where you rented the bike. Because the idea is that you will use these bikes to get somewhere, as a replacement for walking or public transit. Although you could totally use them for a leisurely ride as well: they cost just one Euro per hour for the next three hours after the first.

So what was it like, to bike from my dorm in the second district across half the Ring to the Museum für Völkerkunde? Incredibly easy, even for an inexperienced rider like me with a fear of going fast and an even greater fear of going downhill. Because the bike lines that are marked on the sidewalk - which seem so confusing to pedestrians in their constant shifting - make perfect sense on two wheels. Everything is clearly marked, bike lanes are protected from traffic, and you even get your own stoplights!

My first bicycle commute was an absolute joy (and much preferable to the humid Staßenbahn or the crowded U-Bahn). I was sweating slightly upon my arrival at the Museumsquartier, but I bought myself a prickelndes Vöslauer and entered the museum.

I have to admit, I was a little nervous about visiting a museum of ethnology. Some of my closest friends at Harvard are social anthropologists, and I have nothing but the utmost respect for the discipline -- now. But early anthropology was at the root of eugenics, colonialism, racial hierarchies, modernization theory -- in short, everything that was wrong in the West in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And in my experience, post-colonialism and post-modernism, with their questioning of the hegemonic view of the West as the society with the most progress along some unilinear path of civilizational development, have made less of an impact on Austrian social sciences than on American scholarship. How much could I really expect from the Museum für Völkerkunde, in its Kaiser-era building among the other relics of nineteenth-century Austrian imperialism? I wouldn't have been at all surprised if the Museum für Völkerkunde turned out to be just an opportunity to oggle the exotic specimens from the uncivilized world.

So imagine my delight when I found an entire exhibit dedicated to exposing and problematizing just that aspect of early anthropology. "Was Wir Sehen" - What We See - revisited the work of German anthropologist Hans Lichtenecker from the 1930s in what is now Namibia. With the full support of the German colonial regime, Lichtenecker sought to collect "specimens" in the form of life-casts of the faces of local people and audio recordings in local languages to put on display for a European public hungry for a taste of the exotic. The new exhibit took those audio recordings and translated them into German. For the first time, the actual words of these subjects of anthropological research - and with them, their thoughts, emotions, and perspectives - were taken seriously. And the results were fascinating. Some people took the opportunity to rail against the colonial regime, some talked about how painful the process of making a life-cast had been, and some simply documented the extent of their suffering after the arrival of the Germans. I was incredibly impressed with this exhibit and its attempt to refocus the anthropological lens on the subjectivity of these people, long seen as simply "objects" of Western theory-building. This truly was new anthropology at its finest.

The other major exhibit concerned the Cultural Revolution in China. It's hard to visit a German-language exhibit about a dictatorship without thinking about the Third Reich. All of the words that have for you become so tightly bound with Nazism from all your years of German class confront you once again. A description of Mao as "der Große Führer" has reverberations that "Great Leader" will never have.

The best part, though, was that the museum was almost completely empty. This surprised me -- it was, after all, a weekend afternoon in the Hofburg complex -- but there seemed to be far more people loitering around outside (which is, okay, Heldenplatz) than actually entering the building. Then again, critical anthropology probably has a limited audience. I'm happy to be one of the people, though, that finds it absolutely fascinating.

* Yes, it's really called that. See this hilarious blog post for a discussion of English-language marketing in German-speaking countries.