Curator: The Museum Journal最新文献

Tangible and intangible elements of culture are the primary sustenance of heritage tourism. They include traditional dance, folklore, songs, arts and craft, indigenous technologies, festivals, rituals, and rites. All these are cultural products designed to embody different activities. They constitute some of the major attractions of present-day cultural museums. Although these objects are imbued with functional roles through which they interact with society, yet within the confines of cultural museums, they are seemingly lifeless; needing the curator to narrate their relevance. Their functional role in the community seems lost as no opportunity is given or created to display their cultural relevance to amuse curious museum visitors. This raises some questions, is the museum a mausoleum of cultural products? How can mere narration of lifeless objects satisfy visitors' curiosity and taste for a new experience? To answer these salient questions, this paper employed desktop research design using two case studies, the Osun Osogbo sacred grove in Osun state and the palace of the Oba of Benin Nigeria, to explore the significance of cultural museums in promoting heritage tourism through the functional role of its collections. The study found that living heritage negates their original community role upon entry into the modern museum. The paper concludes that the significance of cultural museum collections can be revived by decolonizing the Eurocentric paradigm and indigenizing curatorial practices of western-modeled museums in Nigeria.

Frederic Webster, chief preparator at the Carnegie Museum (CM) from 1897 to 1907, is credited by some for “rescuing” Lion Attacking a Dromedary (LAD) from destruction by the American Museum of Natural History. Webster's work on LAD was not his only involvement with the preparation and display of controversial bones, however. Webster mounted the hide and bones of Confederate General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson's war horse, Little Sorrel and displayed the skeleton at CM. In 1949, Little Sorrel's skeleton were returned to Virginia, where it was eventually cremated and interred under a statue of Jackson in a public ceremony in 1997. This article compares the return and reburial of the bones of a Confederate horse to the continued display of the remains of a person of unknown origin in LAD to highlight the very differing treatment of these human and equine individuals. By considering the return of Little Sorrel's remains to be a repatriation, I argue that the horse was transformed from a museum specimen into a monument, leveling him as a symbol of the Lost Cause and further cementing the status of the individual contained within LAD as a specimen. Through a displayed proximity to animals, Jackson (and his horse) become more human, while the person whose remains remain on display in LAD is treated as less than human.

This contribution explores the relationship between performance and art museum practice, through a creative practice-led approach, as part of a collaboration with MUVE, Fondazione dei Musei Civici in Venice. The focus here is on the exploration of performance opportunities embedded in the museography of the case study institutions, encompassing both artistic and curatorial considerations. Through a reflection on current challenges faced by such institutions and through speculative implementation of creative practice ideas, the argument here is that, as museums have re-opened their doors to the public in the aftermath of COVID-19, their performance activation may be crucial in reclaiming their role as physical contexts for cultural dialogue. Performance provides a useful lens to explore and re-imagine the experience of visitors, emphasizing their subjective positionality and their inter-relational connections with each other, with the collection and with the museographic configuration of the space.

Lions Attacking a Dromedary created at Maison Verreaux brings up a larger discussion about representations of racialized bodies (real and synthetic) in the history of museum display. Looking to the history of racialized bodies on display, I outline how taxidermied animals and racialized mannequins oscillate to reinforce continual colonial projects of the present. I show my reader how the construction of a ‘specimen’ is used in the dehumanizing processes that shapes who and what is human: a recognizable being that is (borrowing from Judith Butler) grievable upon death. Since the discovery of real human remains inside the racialized mannequin, the group is now redisplayed at the Carnegie Museum alongside educational insights that seek to ethically interrupt the colonial violence that the display narrates. In order to push this discussion further, I seek direction from decolonial artists and scholars on the best approaches to take in response to postmortem human rights abuses (past and present) and to show the ways that art can be both a destructive and reparative exchange.

The diorama “Lions Attacking a Dromedary” is notorious, not just as a remarkable 19th century example of taxidermy, but also its controversial representation of human culture and animals, its questionable accuracy and the murky ethics of the materials sourced for its construction. This study examines whether the diorama is a reasonable representation of the Barbary lion in North Africa. We review the history of lions in North Africa and their interaction with humans in the 19th and 20th centuries. The ecology and biology of North African lions, supported by scientific knowledge of the species, enables assessment of the value of diorama depiction, whether it is realistic and informative, or an artistic interpretation, or mere fiction. Furthermore, if the depiction is fictional, whether the representation is entirely unrepresentative, or at worst a stereotypic fabrication based on Western colonial perspectives of the 1800s. The paper does not explore cultural aspects, although refers to the experiences of people in local communities as well as colonial visitors through 150 documented accounts of lions in the region (modern day Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) between 1830 and 1960. The analysis explores whether real experiences are reflected in the depiction presented in the diorama and identifies that some aspects of the exhibit can be considered authentic, while others appear to emphasize drama rather than lived reality. Recommendations are offered for well-informed future presentation of “Lions Attacking a Dromedary.”

One of the best-known exhibits at Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History features the man-eating lions of Tsavo. Over a period of nine months in 1898, this pair of lions systematically hunted, killed and consumed railroad workers engaged in building a bridge over the Tsavo River in East Africa. The lions were eventually killed by an engineer, J. H. Patterson, who afterwards wrote a best-selling book about the episode. His dramatic story has been retold in countless articles, books, and motion pictures, each more sensational and gory than the last. What parts are true? Fortunately, the lions' skins and skulls offer an independent and verifiable chronicle of events that actually transpired. These two specimens effectively re-wrote their own history through the scientific research sparked by their notoriety, reminding us that the collections of natural history museums hold almost limitless potential to illuminate the world around us and its history.

The diorama Lion Attacking a Dromedary found in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History rightfully belongs to an Orientalist artistic tradition that crystallized many of the discriminatory misrepresentations of people of color that have plagued our society to this day. Camels and dromedaries, associated with the “Orient,” constituted an integral element of the exotic vision held and disseminated by Europeans. The motif of the camel and its dark-skinned rider, however, emerged many centuries prior to the context of colonial Europe and across media. This paper explores the surfacing and subsequent proliferation of the camel as a symbol of otherness and foreignness in Antiquity and the Middle Ages in relation to Christian and imperial ideologies. I argue that the material evidence points to a long-standing associative combination of the camel with people of color and/or of foreign origin and thus establishes a precedent worth our attention as we continue to wrestle with the racial and political ramifications of Lion Attacking a Dromedary.

Black Americans have long been disproportionately represented among the victims of state-sanctioned violence. In response, the Black community has mobilized around movements like Black Lives Matter and Say Her Name. However, the exploitation, objectification, and anonymization of Black bodies persists. In many academic disciplines, Black death and suffering are regularly presented as acceptable research findings. Here, we consider the role objectified Black bodies have played in upholding white supremacy within the context of the museum by piecing together the suspect itinerary of the individual whose skull is contained within Lion Attacking a Dromedary. This diorama, currently housed at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, exemplifies how scientific institutions have perpetuated imperial scientific ideologies in their ongoing exhibitions. By engaging with Black feminism and decolonial frameworks, we present a path forward for such artifacts and consider how museums can truly support the Movement for Black Lives.

The taxidermy assemblage “Lion Attacking a Dromedary” (LAD) has been critiqued as a piece of French colonial propaganda, containing unethically sourced human remains, that desensitizes visitors to violence against people of color and lacks value for science education. It has also been on display continuously since 1899 at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and has sentimental and pedagogical value for local community, thus making it complicated to remove. To address its difficult legacy while maintaining its display, LAD has been re-interpreted multiple times with new descriptive labels. This approach is of limited success, however. Re-interpretation cannot sufficiently counter the visual narrative of the diorama itself. In addition to the aforementioned critiques, the figures in LAD are posed to tell a harmful “man versus nature” story. LAD points toward a broader narrative bias in natural history, namely an overemphasis on competition and an underemphasis on cooperation. For ethical and effective contemporary science education, and for galvanizing action on climate change and other sustainability and justice crises in the 21st-century natural history museum, there is an urgent need for radical deconstruction of dioramas like LAD.