Museum Anthropology最新文献

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 competitive relationships between Greeks and Turks with legitimate claims to the site. Greeks and Turks are typically portrayed as antagonistic, but understanding the historic properties as a form of inheritance much like the estates fundamental to “house societies” described by Claude Lévi-Strauss reveals a transnational community with shared concerns around memory, heritage preservation, transnational identity formation, and touristic enterprise. [heritage, inheritance, house, memory, Turkey]

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 cultural reclamation and (re)vitalization projects. In this special issue of Museum Anthropology entitled “Materiality, Belonging, and the Activation of Difference,” we seek to bring these three fields into conversation. We seek to extend recent work arguing for an expanded view of museums as sites of translation (between local needs and global agendas) and frames for more inclusive, dynamic, collaborative, politically informed action. As a set, these articles argue that museum anthropology as a discipline must allow for ethnographic exploration of, coexistence with, and engagement across these emphases: the centrality of objects and how they are mobilized in various forms of knowledge production; debate over what a museum is and what its social role(s) might be (can a home be a museum? Can a city? What happens to our notion of “museum” when we expand beyond architectural objectifications of state/national authority?); and the embodied, affective, and sensorial experiences of museums and museum-like spaces. [museum objects/things, museum places, heritage, tourism, authenticity]

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 violence with an idiom of mutual obligation.

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 the present and future of cloth-making manifests in part as differing perspectives among weavers and government officials about legitimate quality assessment criteria and methods, and the appropriate color of the local cloth. At the center of these competing ways to evaluate or define traditional cloth is the question of authority: who has the right to assess quality and what aspects of their identity should factor into this right? The case of traditional weaving in Morocco underscores how “knowing” and “knowing what’s best” are thoroughly entangled in the domain of cultural heritage and its management.

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 of classification in museums remain in large part rigid and immutable. Concrete approaches to addressing these issues in museum collections have been slower to emerge. This article presents an approach to the description of objects, influenced by attribute analysis and thick description, that has the potential to make salient information about museum collections more accessible to source communities. With two case studies (parfleches and moccasins from the Great Plains collections at the American Museum of Natural History), this article demonstrates how collaborative object-centered inquiry can help to disentangle objects from historical systems of classification in museum settings and “remobilize” them. Moving beyond classification to document the cultural practices documented in historical material culture can aid in reconstructing the complex movements of people, objects, and ideas in the past.