Museum Anthropology最新文献

The discourse around Black History in Florida's public schools and public spaces has been notably controversial and in high demand in recent years. Black museums are few in the Tampa Bay area, making the Woodson African American History Museum in St. Petersburg, Florida, a community treasure. The Woodson Museum partnered with the Montague Collection, launching Women's History Month in March 2024 by featuring the “Sister Gertrude Morgan: A Ministry of Divergence” exhibition. This exhibit centers on religion, rhythms, and artistry. Sister Gertrude Morgan was an African American, New Orleans-based, multidisciplinary artist and street evangelist from the late 1950s to the mid-1970s. Morgan repurposed the streets into her muse, medium, pulpit, and exhibition space in a way that can serve as a Black museum praxis framework.

With one African American museum in the county, many heritage organizations have attempted to build a museum to house artifacts and present community narratives for years. This commentary describes heritage organizations' efforts to establish a museum in a South Florida city.

Ella Spencer (my mom) was born in 1908 and died in 2002. She once told me that people of color were treated worse than farm animals, especially when they died. “They didn't get funeral rites like White folks,” she said. I contend the problem is that no one is keeping vital records such as photographs, maps, and burial ledgers of where African Americans were buried. After numerous years, several American states, cities, and counties had reported bountiful discoveries of unknown African American remains of all ages during constructions or demolitions. In 2023, more than a few news outlets were continuously reporting the findings of African American remains from beneath buildings, parking lots, overgrown vegetation, and woods. This qualitative research project was based on digital archival data research methodology and theoretical visual anthropology framework adding creativity components (e.g., photography, painting, and photo bashing technique) to effectively collect data of Alachua County, Florida African American cemeteries. This paper aims to add to the academic literature and fill the gap in African American life after death acknowledgment. In conclusion, this is a project that has many branches that need to be researched to get the whole story of African American cemeteries' survival.

Many African American museums face financial constraints and need resources to preserve their collections, create exhibits, and offer educational programs. Grant funding is crucial for the sustainability of these museums. Black anthropologists are essential in grant writing because they provide their extensive knowledge of African American history and culture to help museums develop compelling narratives that resonate with grant funders. Additionally, Black anthropologists are needed as reviewers of grant proposals. By leveraging their unique insights from professional training and personal experiences, Black anthropologists can champion the cause of these museums in the grant-making process. Their expertise allows them to assess proposals from a culturally sensitive perspective, considering the unique needs, goals, and challenges African American museums face. This essay highlights the significant contributions of Black anthropologists who have advocated for and strengthened grant applications from African American museums, ensuring that they align with the mission and vision of the grant-making institutions. By helping African American museums secure grant support, Black anthropologists also convey the significance and value of other African American museums.

This commentary argues for the recognition and preservation of historic black cemeteries as primary components within associated archival networks. Such networks include death certificates, historic newspapers, maps, church records, oral histories, and a host of other conventional and nonconventional sources. These sources, when viewed in tandem, work to corroborate and provide insights into other sources and spur new investigations. As the primary components of such networks, both extant cemeteries and burial grounds hidden within the landscape can be utilized as active sites for research, education, and commemoration. This place-based remembrance encourages the identification and retrieval of local histories and works to increase the number of individuals interested and involved in preservation efforts.

Sophia Labadi begins her book by asking us to consider why of the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)—which include a total of 169 sub-goals—only one (Target 11.4) directly mentions culture and heritage. The singular recognition aims at strengthening “efforts to protect and safeguard the world's cultural and natural heritage…” to create more inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable human settlements (p. 2). Although this aim is worthwhile, Labadi draws from her extensive field experience and body of published works to highlight the pitfalls in this approach. Culture, and by extension heritage, are resources for development, though, as she fully demonstrates in the book, ones that need to be considered in greater depth to actually increase well-being for peoples across the globe. Labadi supports her argument by examining how culture and heritage were employed in projects funded as part of the UN Millenium Development Goals Achievement Fund (MDG-F). Each project had varying lengths but took place within a 5-year span (2008–2013). The MDG-F, which included support for “Culture and Development” projects, was established by the Spanish government to help achieve the Millenium Development Goals, which are a precursor to the SDGs. She applies her analytical focus to examine projects in Ethiopia, Mozambique, Namibia, and Senegal. Labadi's aim through the case studies is “to understand whether and how heritage has contributed the three key dimensions of sustainable development (namely poverty reduction, gender equality and environmental sustainability) within the context of its marginalisation from the SDGs and from previous international development agendas” (p. 3).

The book is organized as a historical and conceptual overview of cultural approaches to development, namely at UNESCO, followed by an analysis of the case studies. After the introduction, Labadi examines, in Chapters 2 and 3, how UNESCO and its partner institution, the World Bank, have historically engaged with culture in their broader development agendas. She begins her discussion in the 1970s with the efforts of postcolonial nations to have their national and cultural sovereignty recognized at the international level. This section concludes by demonstrating how the emphasis on culture for (sustainable) development expanded in the 2000s. Labadi also highlights how the limited attention given to culture or heritage in the SDGs was due, in large part, to political machinations of various parties, including the United States and UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova. Bokova created a crisis during her administration by recognizing Palestine as a member state. As a result, to appease the United States and strengthen her case for becoming UN Secretary General, Bokova, did not motivate UNESCO to lobby for greater inclusion of culture in the SDGs. By the first decade of the new millennium, culture had become a “politicized” term that United States delegates and those f

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 seeks to rectify the anti-Black colonial violence of the archive, this research aims to situate the pedestrian colonial ethnographic practices and spectacular African explorer mythmaking found in museum archives within the foundation of museum anthropology and the museum itself. It also looks to the possibilities of contemporary museum practice to reframe and repair colonial museum constructions of Africa.

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 national immigration museum in Nova Scotia in 2019. The article demonstrates how curators invite objects to narrate kinship, and entangle visitors as theoretical accomplices, all while building national projects. Layered concepts of “family” plays a central role in this exhibit, simultaneously introducing “family” as complex, diverse, and varied while also reproducing middle-class conventions of family. I argue that this contradiction partly undercuts the representational content of the exhibit, and that the simultaneous multivalence and ideological uniformity of family in this setting points to how museum practices and procedures can unintentionally reproduce conventional ideas that implicitly counter curatorial work.