Museum Anthropology最新文献

What happens when sacred Indigenous objects held in international museums have no clear path home? This paper explores the challenges of repatriating poorly documented Aboriginal secret-sacred objects—known as tywerrenge—to central Australia. Despite limited provenance, these objects remain spiritually potent to Aboriginal custodians. Drawing on a multi-year, Indigenous-led project by AIATSIS, Deakin University, and senior central Australian men, the study consulted over 110 ceremonial leaders across nine language groups. All supported the return of tywerrenge, emphasizing spiritual connection over Western legal frameworks of ownership. Leaders called for repatriation to restore ancestral presence to land and community, not just to return physical items. The project culminated in a regional gathering where leaders advocated for a dedicated museum facility in central Australia, governed through adapted ceremonial protocols. The study demonstrates how Indigenous-led models can reshape global museum practice and promote culturally informed systems of care for sacred objects.

I didn't expect to meet Kanchendzonga in a plastic storage container in a British Museum study room. This is the chief mountain deity for my community in the Sikkim Himalayas; we live in his shadow in the valleys of Sikkim, and interact with him through daily rituals. My first response was to engage in a ritual apology that he had been left for so long. My next was to consider how this ritual apology may be extended into an act of ritual care that traces the provenance of this mask as a way to renew relationships between Kanchendzonga and the people of Sikkim, far from the British Museum, as an alternative to the extractive environmental practices underway in the Himalayas. This article contributes to discussions about Indigenous engagement and provenance histories in museum collections, and affirms the importance of ritual care as a form of rematriation.

This commentary introduces the reader to the Siberian audio collection of the Hungarian ethnologist and researcher of shamanism Vilmos Diószegi (1923–1972). Diószegi conducted four research expeditions to southern Siberia and northern Mongolia, in 1957, 1958, 1960, and 1964, to study the shamanic traditions of Indigenous populations in these regions. During these expeditions, he recorded shamanic narratives and collected materials on shamanic practices from former shamans. The primary sources for this research are the audio recordings preserved in the Museum of Ethnography in Budapest, Diószegi's first workplace, along with other secondary materials, including written documents and ethnographic artifacts. The Museum of Ethnography digitized the audio materials and posted them on the museum's website in 2023 to commemorate the centenary of Diószegi's birth. The materials are of interest to representatives of Indigenous peoples of Siberia, as well as to anthropologists, folklorists, and linguists studying Siberian culture and languages.

This article summarizes provenance research regarding a small collection from the Bering Sea region. The items were part of a bigger collection brought together by the painter Gabriel von Max. The city of Mannheim (Germany) purchased it from his heirs in 1917 as the founding collection of a planned museum (today's Reiss-Engelhorn Museums).

Scholars of the history of anthropology in Western countries have called the museum “the institutional homeland” of the discipline. They have analyzed the prominent role played by museum collections in the development of anthropology as a discipline in the nineteenth century. Art historians and historians of empire have extensively explored the Victorian preoccupation with collection, classification, conservation, and display in the context of India. But scholars of the history of anthropology have ignored the constitutive role of museum collections in the making of anthropology in India. This article fills that lacuna by scrutinizing the evolving relationship between the anthropological collection of the oldest and largest multidisciplinary encyclopedic museum of India and the science of humankind. It examines how the anthropological collection of the Indian Museum, amassed by colonial administrators over the nineteenth century, came to act as the exhibitionary incarnation of the theory of racial classification of the people of India, and it then unravels how the university-based Indian anthropologists engaged with the same collection in the mid-twentieth century. In so doing, it foregrounds how the relationship between the museum and the discipline was intertwined with the ideologies of colonialism and nationalism.