Museum Anthropology最新文献

Northeastern Pennsylvania was home to the anthracite coal industry for about two centuries. The area was originally settled by various waves of immigrants, first from western then southern and eastern Europe. The new immigrant miners faced many forms of prejudice and were exploited in a system of unchecked capitalism. They were racialized and placed at the bottom of the job hierarchy. Some capitalists did not consider them human, and therefore not deserving of safe working conditions, descent housing and equal pay. At the turn of the twenty-first century, a new wave of Hispanic immigrants from the Caribbean, Mexico, and South and Central America entered the region to work mainly in low-paying fulfillment center jobs. Their arrival is being met with various forms of xenophobia, much like the immigrant miners faced over a century ago. The online exhibition “We Are Anthracite,” hosted by the Anthracite Heritage Museum, addresses the call from the American Alliance of Museums for museums to be civically engaged, build social capital and connecting new populations to place. The exhibition bridges the experiences between the past coal mining communities and new Hispanic immigrants. The state-operated museum hosting this exhibition lends validity to the new immigrants' place in this region, creating a narrative that their experiences are similar to the region's inhabitants' ancestors. By connecting common experiences, past and present, we are creating a form of bridging social capital that connects these different populations. While the northeastern Pennsylvania immigrant story is not well-known, it is rich and complex like many Rust Belt communities undergoing similar major demographic shifts.

The museum world is currently grappling with questions of how to decolonize anthropological collections and many of these debates are epistemologically oriented. In pursuit of colonial ordering, material culture was extracted from colonized societies, deprived of its contextual meaning, and scrutinized through the lens of colonial knowledge. This article considers how an empirical decolonial practice can be applied drawing on from the current work at the Manchester Museum (MM). Dialogue, open engagements, multivocal conversations, collaborations, and shared authority in knowledge production are some of the decolonial strategies that I share. To illustrate this praxis turn in museum decolonial work, I first look at how we have addressed cultural objects looted from Benin in 1897 that we hold and “contain” at MM in our living cultures collection, underscoring a commitment by MM to transparency and a provision of access to the living collection by different groups of people. The second example is drawn from a collaborative provenance research that I undertook with Nongoma community members in South Africa in rewriting biographies of Zulu beadwork that we house at MM. Overall, I argue that decolonization should embrace a relational practice of caring for objects through active relations of reciprocity and dialogue with communities. The downside of decolonial practices and how are they are inherently shaped by power imbalances and tensions between curators and communities is also critically discussed.

Of the 158 million things housed by the Smithsonian Institution, about 56 objects originate from Sámi communities. By all accounts a small group of objects—even by the standards of the Arctic collections at the Institution—it may be easily overlooked or dismissed as insignificant, based on entrenched ideologies about idealized collections. Presenting a community-based methodology for the engagement of distant museum collections using three-dimensional technologies, this article establishes the latent potential of small collections for Indigenous communities. We demonstrate how a group of 56 objects not only chronicles complex histories of exchange and colonialism, but also provides a manageable conduit for learning and exchange to facilitate the continued restructuring of relationships between museums and descendent stakeholders, from the individual to community level. Small collections, far from incomplete, may not only contain materials significant to descendent groups on their own terms, but provide the grounds to generate new forms of Indigenous initiated, balanced reciprocity.

Studies have reported challenges of debonding of dental zirconia crowns to from luting cement and prepared teeth. The aim of the study was to explore the application of dental glazing systems for enhancing the bonding of zirconia dental ceramics to luting resin cement. Commercial glaze powder and liquid (Vita Akzent) and experimental mica-based glaze powders were used for the study. X-ray diffraction analysis of the glaze powders (XRD) and Fourier Transform InfraRed Spectroscopy (FTIR) was done on the glaze liquid. Sandblasted sintered dental zirconia (Katana, Noritake) were the control samples. Glazed zirconia samples were coated with commercial glaze and experimental glaze powders which were further etched with 5% hydrofluoric acid. Shear bond strengths of sandblasted and glazed zirconia samples to resin composites were evaluated. XRD of commercial and experimental glaze powders revealed a broad peak confirming the amorphous nature of glass and FTIR analysis of the glaze liquid revealed symmetrical stretching (CH₂-CH₃) of the alcohol group indicating a mixture of iso-butane and ethanol. Glazed and etched zirconia showed significantly higher shear bond strength to resin cement compared to sand-blasted zirconia. The study confirms the glassy nature of dental glaze powders and the presence of ethanol-based mixtures in the commercial glaze liquid. Glazing systems have the potential to be explored for enhancing the bonding of non-etchable zirconia ceramics to resin cement and tooth substrates.

In the 1830s, George Catlin undertook several journeys to the American West to document, through painting, writing, and collecting, Native North American communities he perceived as vanishing. He later assembled the different media in his Indian Gallery, which he toured through the United States and Europe. In this article, I begin to redocument Catlin's Indian Gallery and his exhibitionary practice by paying attention to its largely overlooked material culture collection. Many items display signs of non-Native modification, like imitations of Plains pictorial tradition and detachment and reattachment of quillwork. Moving beyond questions of (in)authenticity, I focus on the objects' role in his exhibition, taking them seriously as one of Catlin's material museological practices. Through close-looking analysis, I identify patterns of alteration and fabrications: replacement, repurposing, creating similarity and types, and emphasis on visual appeal. Based on these patterns, I suggest understanding Catlin's own approach to this material as a collection of props fabricated and employed to authenticate and support claims of cultural realism for his representations of Indigenous life. By studying this collection, we gain a deeper understanding of predisciplinary exhibitionary practices and how later ethnographic display technologies also relying on props, like dioramas, developed.