-
-
Excavating Whiteness in the African Archive: The Story of Amandus Johnson's 1920s Expedition to Angola for the Penn Museum Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Monique Scott
As we further seek to “decolonize” museum images of Africa, the museum archives of African Collections—the correspondence, ledgers, diaries, photographs, and other documents of White explorers working in Africa—suture the colonial practices that produced ways of seeing Africa—and Blackness more broadly—back onto the objects that museums maintain and display today. As increasing scholarly attention
-
The anticolonial museum: Reclaiming our colonial heritage By Bruni BrulonSoares, London: Routledge. 2023. pp. 155. ISBN: 9781023437941 Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Njabulo Chipangura
-
Museum families: Canadian kinship and material culture Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Jessaca B. Leinaweaver
Understanding and documenting the ways that objects become entangled in, produce, sustain, and rupture family relations are crucial contributions of museum studies to anthropological kinship theory. This article analyzes a Canadian exhibit entitled “Family: Bonds and Belonging,” developed in response to Canada's 150th anniversary, in 2017, by a British Columbia provincial museum, then brought to Canada's
-
Past and present: Immigration and museum exhibitions in the anthracite coal region Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-11-27 Aryn G. N. Schriner, Paul A. Shackel
Northeastern Pennsylvania was home to the anthracite coal industry for about two centuries. The area was originally settled by various waves of immigrants, first from western then southern and eastern Europe. The new immigrant miners faced many forms of prejudice and were exploited in a system of unchecked capitalism. They were racialized and placed at the bottom of the job hierarchy. Some capitalists
-
The Benin tusk and Zulu beadwork: Practicing decolonial work at Manchester Museum through shared authority Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Njabulo Chipangura
The museum world is currently grappling with questions of how to decolonize anthropological collections and many of these debates are epistemologically oriented. In pursuit of colonial ordering, material culture was extracted from colonized societies, deprived of its contextual meaning, and scrutinized through the lens of colonial knowledge. This article considers how an empirical decolonial practice
-
Small collections remembered: Sámi material culture and community-based digitization at the Smithsonian Institution Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Matthew Magnani, Jelena Porsanger, Sami Laiti, Natalia Magnani, Anne May Olli, Paula Rauhala, Samuel Valkeapää, Eric Hollinger
Of the 158 million things housed by the Smithsonian Institution, about 56 objects originate from Sámi communities. By all accounts a small group of objects—even by the standards of the Arctic collections at the Institution—it may be easily overlooked or dismissed as insignificant, based on entrenched ideologies about idealized collections. Presenting a community-based methodology for the engagement
-
His Dark Materials Among the Displays, the Pitt Rivers Museum, December 12, 2022 to December 31, 2023 Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-09-07 Elizabeth Walsh
There she found herself outside a grand building, a real Oxford-looking building that didn't exist in her world at all, though it wouldn't have looked out of place … She discovered that it was a museum …. At the back of the great iron and glass hall was the entrance to another part … in this second chamber she found herself surrounded by things she knew well: there were showcases filled with Arctic
-
Props and the performance of ethnographic realism in George Catlin's Indian Gallery: Fabrications in hide, paint, and text Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-06-28 Leonie Treier
In the 1830s, George Catlin undertook several journeys to the American West to document, through painting, writing, and collecting, Native North American communities he perceived as vanishing. He later assembled the different media in his Indian Gallery, which he toured through the United States and Europe. In this article, I begin to redocument Catlin's Indian Gallery and his exhibitionary practice
-
Indigenous language use in museum spaces Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-05-09 Julia Schillo, Mark Turin
In the summer of 2020, two museums in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, simultaneously hosted art exhibitions by Indigenous artists. The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) hosted an exhibition of works by Shuvinai Ashoona, an Inuk artist part of the Dorset Fine Arts Co-operative, based in Kinngait, Nunavut. At the same time, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) hosted an exhibition of the work of Kent Monkman
-
In search of some “good specimens”: The acquisition of the Stanley Collection at the Royal Saskatchewan Museum Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-03-14 Julie Mushynsky
This article focuses on the provenance of the Stanley Collection—a group of 69 items from reserves in the Touchwood Hills area of Saskatchewan. The items were collected by reserve farm instructor Edward Stanley and his wife Elizabeth at the turn of the century and then sold to the Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History in 1914. By analyzing historical documents, artifacts, and oral histories, this
-
Community collections: Returning to an (un)imagined future Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-03-13 Catherine Massola
Drawing on fieldwork in an Aboriginal community in Western Australia, this article chronicles the life of a collection of Indigenous art and material culture through archival research, ethnography, observation, and interviews. Moving from a school to community keeping spaces, through a natural disaster, to an art center and a university conservation center, this examination reveals how entanglements
-
The Kari'na ceramic tradition through ethnographic collections Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-02-18 Meliam Viganó Gaspar
The collections of ethnographic ceramic vessels made by Kari'na women in Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil present part of the history of a ceramic tradition that was consolidated over at least 200 years. The characteristics of ceramics and their production process can be associated to historical relations established by the Kari'na with different collectors and other peoples, as well as
-
A city in a bunker in a city: Demilitarizing art in South Korea Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Timothy Gitzen
Located mere feet from the busy Yeouido Bus Transfer Center, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) Bunker is a former military bunker from 1970s authoritarian South Korea that now showcases changing art exhibits. Debuting in November 2019, Paju (by artist Kim Seung Rea) features a series of paintings and statues capturing life in the town of Paju in the Geyeonggi Province near the border of the Demilitarized
-
Local roots, global vines: Human rights museums in western Japan as expressions of identity Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2023-02-15 Lisa Mueller
Recently human rights movements among Japan's Buraku people have become increasingly globalized, situating the Buraku struggle among those of other caste-based minorities around the world. Scholars have theorized that this globalization manifests in a global–local feedback loop in which decisions made by global and local actors inform one another. In this study, I utilize field research and qualitative
-
THE FORENSICS EXHIBITION: Displaying Human Remains as Material Evidence of Genocide Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-09-02 Fiona Gill
This paper examines the role of human remains in genocide memorials and museums to evoke and narrate individual experiences of genocide. Understanding that the display of human remains is contested, I suggest that their presence in memorials and museums can play a valuable, but hitherto neglected, role in the development of individualized and evidentiary narratives of genocide. Such narratives, developed
-
JOHN MAWURNDJUL'S ART IN PARIS Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-07-30 Luke Taylor
The Musée du Quai Branly Jacques Chirac (MQBJC) in Paris includes a commissioned ceiling mural by Australian artist John Mawurndjul. Neither the identity of the artist nor the cultural meaning of the work features strongly as part of the visitor experience for this work. Such interpretation is, in general, pushed to the margins in the museum's permanent exhibits. Paradoxically, the temporary exhibits
-
BLIND SPOTS IN MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGY: Ancient Egypt in the Ethnographic Museum Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-07-30 Alice Stevenson, Alice Williams
In the past few decades, the literature in museum anthropology has advocated efforts to be more transparent about its colonial origins, address the historical injustices of imperial collecting, and rethink display narratives in collaboration with source communities. In this paper, however, we question the extent to which the epistemic and political predicaments underlying ethnographic representations
-
MIGRANT HERITAGE: A Dialogue of Objects and Memories in a Barcelona Ethnographic Museum Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-07-30 Gabriel Izard, Gemma Celigueta
This article describes the “Dialogues with Africa” project of the Barcelona Museum of World Cultures, which consisted of workshops using personal objects of African guests residing in Catalonia, and objects from the museum's African collections. The dialogues revealed the existence of both a migrant memory connected with objects chosen for their capacity to evoke origins and a museum memory linked
-
THE KENTISH EOLITHS OF BENJAMIN HARRISON: Their Rise and Fall in Museum Collections and What This Tells Us about the Circumstances of Their Survival Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-07-30 Roy Ellen, Angela Muthana
Studies focusing on the history of collections generally emphasize what is estimable about them, but how should we make sense of collections that, once held in high regard, have subsequently been judged worthless? Such is the case for eoliths, stone objects resembling early artifacts, which held a pivotal position in arguments concerning the origins of human tool-making, but which are now largely considered
-
NARRATING THE NATION: Heterotopian Struggles for Self-Representation in the Cuban Diaspora Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-07-30 Jennifer Cearns
Miami's sizeable Cuban diaspora has long used museums and galleries to produce and preserve their sense of community, united through the loss inherent to exile. Recent influxes of migration from Cuba (and beyond) are increasingly interpreted as a threat to the cultural forms many consider an “authentic” preservation of something now lost to Castro's Revolution. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic
-
THE SILENCES SHAPING THE MEMORY OF THE MAPUCHE IN THE NATIONAL HISTORICAL MUSEUM OF CHILE Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-07-20 Ximena Vial Lecaros
A widespread link between the process of nation-building and the rise of museums is evident in late-nineteenth-century Latin America. The Chilean National Historical Museum (MHN) was founded in 1873 with the purpose of exhibiting the nation's heritage, beginning with the Spanish colonization. This article focuses on examining the narrative displayed in the MHN, particularly the silences surrounding
-
FRACTURED LANDSCAPES AND THE POLITICS OF SPACE: Remembrance and Memory in Nwadjahane (Southern Mozambique) Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-03-18 M. Dores Cruz
Nwadjahane, a small village in southern Mozambique, is set apart from other settlements as the birthplace of Eduardo Mondlane, one of the nation's founding fathers. Declared a national heritage site and made into an open-air museum, Nwadjahane has become a landscape where national and local memories are negotiated. Mondlane is at once a national hero celebrated with statues, exhibitions, and commemorations
-
“TWO IN ONE”: Transnational Inheritance and the Remaking of the Sinasite Houses as Shared Heritage Monuments Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-03-09 Leigh Stuckey
This article examines debates between Greeks and Turks about how to preserve the architectural heritage left behind by the Greek Orthodox population exiled from Sinasos in the 1923 Greek-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange. The restoration of Sinasos as a kind of residential and commercial open-air museum, through the transformation of ancestral homes into hotels, engendered new cooperative and
-
BEING CALLED TO ACTION: Contemporary Museum Ethnographies Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-02-28 Sabra G. Thorner
There has been wonderful work animating vectors of relatedness, negotiation, and collaboration between museums and “source communities”; foregrounding the significance of objects, what they can/might do, and how they act in and through museums; and highlighting the particularity of the photographic archive (and especially photographs as things in need of specific kinds of attention and care) in contemporary
-
-
MAKING KIN: Rawness, Porosity, and the Agencies Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2022-02-21 Joshua A. Bell
This afterword to the special issue “Materiality, Belonging, and the Activation of Difference” begins and ends with Kim TallBear's notion of kin-making as a frame for understanding the relations between objects, peoples, places, heritage regimes, and museums that allows us to keep different ontological perspectives in view. More specifically, “making kin” allows us to unsettle still-dominant settler-colonial
-
-
-
-
-
FRAMES OF REFERENCE: Cloth, Community, and Knowledge Ideology in Morocco Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-12-10 Claire Nicholas
This paper explores how one type of traditional Moroccan cloth comes to be known through different epistemological frameworks or “knowledge ideologies.” The case in question involves a rural women’s weaving cooperative and Moroccan state strategies to rationalize cloth production, which here takes the form of technical training and product development workshops. A struggle over the right to determine
-
CLASSIFICATION, CULTURE AREAS, AND GIFTING ON THE GREAT PLAINS: Remobilizing Objects of Exchange at the American Museum of Natural History Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-12-02 Claire Heckel
The ethnological collecting expeditions conducted by museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had impacts on source communities and on the composition and interpretation of museum collections that have been critically examined from a number of perspectives. Although categories such as ethnicity and tribal affiliation are now understood to be situational, relational, and contingent, systems
-
Classification Schemes Gone Awry: Implications for Museum Research and Exhibition Display Practices Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-11-24 Urmila Mohan, Susan Rodgers
Classification schemes for collecting, studying, and displaying objects in museum contexts are power-filled forms of knowledge in Foucauldian senses. When such typologies are imprecise or, more harmfully, misleading or forthrightly mistaken, a museum’s collecting practices, curatorial interpretations, and exhibition display decisions can go astray and obscure the social structural and ideological processes
-
“REFUGEE LOVE” IN A COLLEGE ART GALLERY: “Refugee Crafts” in the American Political Imaginary, 2017 Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-11-19 Susan Rodgers
Refugees are often mischaracterized as either “threats” to their new nations of resettlement or as remarkably virtuous, resilient “survivors” of harsh expulsions from their home countries and difficult years in refugee camps. Both imageries fall short of forced migrants’ actual lives and stories. Museums’ display practices and their interpretations of “refugee arts” can easily fall into stereotypes
-
Tasmanian Aboriginal Material Culture, Compensation, Belonging Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-11-19 Christopher D. Berk
The Tasmanian Aboriginal people have historically been defined by their visible lack of stereotypical “Aboriginal” characteristics and their supposed nonexistence. This article examines how Tasmanian Aboriginal individuals are bridging such gaps through material cultural production. In thinking about how communities mobilize the past to produce themselves in the present, I argue that canoes, kelp water
-
THE INDONESIAN ALCOVE AT THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY: Art, Culture Areas, and the Mead-Bateson Bali Project Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Urmila Mohan
Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were iconic figures whose contributions to visual anthropology are well documented, but what is less well known is their role as collectors and curators of Indonesian objects. The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) houses a large Balinese collection with numerous textiles, paintings, carvings, and puppets. Some of these objects were housed in permanent exhibits
-
TRACING THREADS OF HISTORY: Rediscovering Indonesian Textiles at the Brooklyn Museum Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-11-12 Meghan Bill
Choices that admit things to, or omit things from, museum collections rely on institutional and individual assumptions about value, ownership, skill, history, and people. Historical decisions about what was worth collecting, how collections should be organized, who would oversee collections care, and what uses collections could serve reverberate through the years, affecting museums’ abilities to research
-
Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial. MargaretavonOswald and JonasTinius, eds. leuven university press, 2020. Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Sowparnika Balaswaminathan
-
Arts of South Asia: Cultures of Collecting. Allysa B.Peyton and Katherine AnnePaul, eds. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019. Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Carla M. Sinopoli
-
Emotional Heritage: Visitor Engagement at Museums and Heritage Sites. LaurajaneSmith. Routledge, 2020. 338 pp. Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-09-01 Erin L. Thompson
-
-
-
THE TASK OF THE MUSEUM IN SHAPING THE AESTHETIC‐POLITICAL FIELD OF MEMORY IN POST‐PINOCHET CHILE Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2021-01-21 Paulina Faba Zuleta, Ángel Aedo Gajardo
How does a museum shape the experience of memory? Focusing on the Chilean Museum of Memory and Human Rights (MMHR), this article develops this question through the analysis of the entanglement of sensations, values, affects, and the museum forms of addressing the beholder. The paper deepens on three critical phenomena that contribute to the shaping of the experience of memory among a heterogeneous
-
CHALLENGING TERMS: Contemporary Art and the Disciplining of Novelty in the UAE Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2020-11-22 Elizabeth Derderian
Curators and gallerists are constantly in search of exciting, new contemporary art from around the globe. Yet in order for “emerging” art markets to become visible to the contemporary art elite, they must adopt infrastructures and criteria from that world. In so doing, they often standardize and lose the very novelty for which they are sought. These infrastructures, such as biennials and commercial
-
Museums, Infinity and the Culture of Protocols: Ethnographic Collections and Source Communities. HowardMorphy. New York: Routledge, 2020. Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Lillia McEnaney
-
Indonesian Textiles at the Tropenmuseum. ItieVan Hout (author and editor) and SonjaWijs (contributor). Volendam: LM Publishers, 2017. Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2020-09-01 Felicia Katz‐Harris
-
MUSEUM TRAJECTORIES AND PROBLEMS OF EVIDENCE IN PUBLIC DISCOURSE: Introduction to the Special Issue Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2020-05-19 Bennetta Jules‐Rosette, J.R. Osborn
As conservators of heritage and protectors of patrimony, museums are key players in public discourse about national identity and collective memory. The cultural roles and meanings of the museum as an institution are changing in relationship to local and global currents. Factors include the adoption of digital technologies, the repatriation of cultural artifacts, and the opening of new blockbuster museums
-
CURATORIAL NETWORKS AND MUSEUM CULTURE: Objects and Evidence in Museums of African Art Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2020-05-19 Bennetta Jules‐Rosette
The valuation and display of African art in museum contexts entails contrasting strategies of objectification. In this process, objects may be used as material evidence for larger cultural trends and new movements. This essay examines the role of curatorial networks in creating discourses about African art objects that reframe their cultural significance and economic value. These curatorial networks
-
SANKOFATIZATION AND DECOLONIZATION: The Rapprochement of German Museums and Government with Colonial Objects and Postcolonialism Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2020-05-19 Wazi Apoh
This paper examines how node three national museums in Germany are dealing with colonial objects in their spaces. It also explores the German government’s recent rapprochement with scholars in its ex‐colonies on how to deal with its colonial past within a discourse of evidence and sankofatization. Sankofatization is defined as a Ghanaian‐Akan ideology that signifies the selection of past ideas for
-
Meanings of the “Museum Boom” in Contemporary Poland and Elsewhere Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2020-05-19 Erica Fontana
The “museum boom” is a global phenomenon with various local manifestations and wide‐ranging antecedents. The recent museum boom in Poland, in which a number of national museum complexes have either opened or undergone significant remodeling, is related to changing evidential discourses about collective identity. These discourses are part of the national narratives surrounding the Polish state. This
-
Transition in Uncertain Times Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2020-03-01 Emily Stokes‐Rees,Phaedra Livingstone
-
Fuegian Museums and Anthropological Discourses: A Comparison of the Representations of Indigenous Societies from Tierra del Fuego in the Two Southernmost Museums in the World (Museo del Fin del Mundo, Argentina, and Museo Antropológico Martín Gusinde, Chile) Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Danae Fiore,Ana Butto
-
COLONIAL, POPULAR, AND SCIENTIFIC? TheExposition du Sahara(1934) and the Formation of the Musée de l'Homme Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Lisa Bernasek
-
AT HOME AND ABROAD: Reflections on Collaborative Museum Ethnography at the Mathers Museum of World Cultures Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Jason Baird Jackson
-
PAOLO MANTEGAZZA'S VISION: The Science of Man behind the World's First Museum of Anthropology (Florence, Italy, 1869) Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2019-09-01 Paul Michael Taylor,Cesare Marino
-
-
-
-
Drone Warriors: The Art of Surveillance and Resistance at Standing Rock. Exhibit at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology. Providence, RI: Brown University. May 11, 2018–April 30, 2019. Museum Anthropology Pub Date : 2019-09-01 J. D. Schnepf
Between April 2016 and February 2017, indelible images of police violence against protestors on tribal reservation and unceded lands in Standing Rock, North Dakota, circulated on the national news and social media. The American public bore witness to law enforcement using tear gas, rubber bullets, concussion grenades, and water cannons against protestors as winter temperatures in the region plunged