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.

In the fourth chapter of fantasy author Pullman's (1997) The Subtle Knife, Lyra, his young protagonist, stumbles upon the Pitt Rivers Museum while wandering in a parallel world. While this alternate Oxford proves strange to Lyra—full of people whose souls do not reside outside their bodies as talking animal companions—the Pitt Rivers, an institution that does not exist in her version of the city, feels familiar.

A recent exhibition of props and costumes from the BBC/HBO television adaptation of Pullman's His Dark Materials series sees objects displayed across three Oxford museums in 2023—The History of Science Museum, the Story Museum, and the Pitt Rivers. Of these, the Pitt Rivers is the only one to appear in the novels and television program. The museum's inclusion in a fantasy series suggests that there exists a permeable boundary between the fantastical and the ethnographic. However, unlike the academic literature that critiques these ties, Pullman's works of fiction embrace an exotic take on the material culture of non-European and non-Euro-American peoples. While not a full exhibition, the display of objects from a fantasy series alongside ethnographic collections presents an opportunity to revisit critiques of the ethnographic museum form and to reconsider how such museums' many, varied publics approach ethnographic collections.

Through a door at the back of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, the Pitt Rivers appears to the casual museum goer to be an extension of the prior, as Lyra assumed. However, the transition from the Natural History Museum into the Pitt Rivers is a stark one. The main hall of the former is grand and full of natural light, the towering articulated dinosaur skeletons given ample space for visitors to admire them. By comparison, the Pitt Rivers appears to be a shadowed, crowded cavern of curiosities. Finding the cases that contain the props involves navigating a riot of glass boxes, packed with objects grouped, in keeping with the museum's mandate, by type.

The Pitt Rivers website includes a map that shows the locations of the props, as well as other objects and exhibits linked to the Arctic. Set out in numbered order, the list leads guests on a set course through the museum, providing a brief description of each listed object along with simple questions for young visitors to answer. With eight stops total, the “His Dark Materials Self-guided Museum Trail” includes,

Much of the first novel in Pullman's series, Northern Lights—and the first season of the television program—takes place in a fantastical version of the Nordic Arctic. As someone whose research concerns perceptions of the Arctic, the inclusion of Arctic material culture in the museum's self-produced educational materials piqued my curiosity and served as the focus of my visit.

Lyra's Northern clothing is the presumed highlight of the His Dark Materials display as the only

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.

In the summer of 2020, two museums in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, simultaneously hosted art exhibitions by Indigenous artists. The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) hosted an exhibition of works by Shuvinai Ashoona, an Inuk artist part of the Dorset Fine Arts Co-operative, based in Kinngait, Nunavut. At the same time, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) hosted an exhibition of the work of Kent Monkman, a Cree artist known for exploring themes of colonization and sexuality in his work. Each exhibition offered signage in an Indigenous language: in Inuktitut and Cree, respectively. Reflecting on the ways Inuktitut and Cree were used in these exhibitions has led us to write this review article, in which we draw on recent scholarship that addresses questions of language in museum spaces (Sönmez et al., 2020; Lazzeretti, 2016).