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).
This paper proposes Virtual Reality (VR) and 360 film as promising fieldwork tools for addressing problematic temporalities in ethnographic museums and for collaborating with communities of origin. Focusing on the Maria Czaplicka Siberian collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, we examine how previous methods of display marginalized the Evenki by denying their coevalness. Drawing on research in Evenkia in 2019 (part of the project Wandering in Other Worlds, Talking with the Spirits), we then analyze the potential of immersive technologies as fieldwork tools. While cautioning against the dangers of blindly trusting the promises of “empathy-production” and “immersion,” we emphasize ways in which immersive technologies can facilitate the decentering of “western” observational focus. We discuss how carrying the museum into the field via VR helped to challenge the observer-observed relationship prevalent in the museum. Studying how community members chose to share, create, and “re-see” their own footage, we further argue that the cocreation of VR/360 film with communities from Baǐkit, Surinda, Chirinda, Tura, and Sulomay destabilized temporalities prevalent in the Pitt Rivers Museum, facilitating a shift toward an Evenki, helical timeline.
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.
This review discusses audio recordings made by Finnish scholars among the Russian Arctic people in the early twentieth century and stored in various archives in Finland. The background of the recordings, together with their broader meaning and the possibilities for research they offer, is brought out.
Between 1818 and 1845, the British Navy sent expeditions to Inuit Nunangat (Canadian Arctic) in search of a passage from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific. In 1845, the Franklin Expedition, consisting of 129 officers, crew, and marines, ended in disaster with all 129 lives lost. When the bodies could not be recovered, the expedition's debris took on a near sacred role in British society. This collection is referred to as the Franklin Relics; akin to those of Christian saints. This process of “Relicization” has resulted in a knowledge gap about the context, uses, and repurposing of these objects that is detrimental to understandings of the expedition, all while enabling the colonial cult of Polar Heroism to persist through interpretations and ongoing colonial narratives embedded in museum records. This paper examines the ways in which these objects have been collected and interpreted through a case study of a small collection of Franklin objects held in the Vancouver Maritime Museum.
This article explores traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) and suggests how TEK could be used as a methodological approach for understanding Native North American art and material culture stewards in museum collections. Drawing on theories by Native North American scholars and object examples, the paper argues that using this methodological approach as a curatorial framework can elicit a deeper understanding of objects as repositories of stories and kinship and the relational dynamics between people, the environment, and their material culture.
Natural history museums function as pedagogical showrooms for science. They operate within the contemporary framework of the biological sciences—presented as secular, value-free, and devoid of social influence. However, I argue the practice of preserving and displaying bodies carries not only an epistemological lineage but also an ontological one. In this paper, I consider the function of preserved bodies in both Catholicism and natural history museums, exploring correlations in their respective developments, methods of collection, documentation, and presentation, as well as the contexts of relationality between human people and nonhuman dead bodies. Through this examination, I argue that, much like the fragmentary remains of saints, these reconstructed nonhuman bodies manifest a new kind of relic, weaving together the past and present through their own special powers of resurrection, reconstitution, and miraculous healing through the engagement with materiality.
Repatriation in Canada is highly situational, with relatively few regulations in place to assist Indigenous communities in returning their cultural belongings home, let alone to protect their rights as stewards. This paper provides a public policy analysis of repatriation regulations in Canada, with special attention paid to the situation they present to the public, to recommend areas for change. We juxtapose these findings with Indigenous repatriation policies and an ethnographic case study partnered with the Tłı̨chǫ Government, which reinterprets repatriation using Tłı̨chǫ traditions for caring for cultural heritage. We focused on two areas of inquiry concerning (1) the identification of existing conflicts between western and Indigenous repatriation directives (e.g., laws, policies, and regulations); and (2) the exploration of repatriation as imagined through an Indigenous lens. Our findings show that we must reconceptualize repatriation from an exchange between two parties into the reclamation of the power to decide how heritage is managed by descendant communities. Contrasting policy analysis with ethnographic data, we found that such a reorientation can only be achieved through both practice and law reform aimed not at strict regulation, but at providing a secure basis upon which Indigenous communities can resituate themselves as recognized stewards of their cultural heritage at home and afar.
This review analyses the exhibition Indigenous Liberators at the Vrijheidsmuseum in Groesbeek, the Netherlands. The exhibition explores the often neglected role of North American Indigenous soldiers in the liberation of the Netherlands in World War 2. Indigenous Liberators shows how Indigenous participation was motivated by diverse factors, from resisting fascism to asserting cultural identity. Despite facing discrimination in the military, many Indigenous soldiers also experienced a rare sense of equality during the war. Additionally, the exhibition effectively positions the Indigenous contribution within colonial histories and the postwar struggle for recognition. Furthermore, personal stories, artefacts, video interviews, and educational materials at Indigenous Liberators challenge stereotypes and enriche our understanding of Indigenous agency in global history while contributing to public awareness.
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