Museum Anthropology最新文献

This article focuses on the provenance of the Stanley Collection—a group of 69 items from reserves in the Touchwood Hills area of Saskatchewan. The items were collected by reserve farm instructor Edward Stanley and his wife Elizabeth at the turn of the century and then sold to the Saskatchewan Museum of Natural History in 1914. By analyzing historical documents, artifacts, and oral histories, this study shows that the Stanley Collection was acquired under a colonialist collecting model that was largely influenced by power relations and then became part of provincial identity building in the early 1900s. Such insight contributes to a growing body of literature on collecting in the Canadian Prairies and also seeks to address reconciliation efforts in Canada. As the first study of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum's founding ethnographic collection, this paper provides an intriguing look at early collecting practices and the formation of the first museum in the Prairie provinces.

Drawing on fieldwork in an Aboriginal community in Western Australia, this article chronicles the life of a collection of Indigenous art and material culture through archival research, ethnography, observation, and interviews. Moving from a school to community keeping spaces, through a natural disaster, to an art center and a university conservation center, this examination reveals how entanglements between people and the collection play out in the local context. The moving and returning of the collection signifies various trajectories that articulate with different value systems and demonstrates that negotiating differences between groups and individuals is an inevitable and necessary part of maintaining and caring for collections in source communities. The article attests that time is needed at local levels to support Indigenous-led processes which include value creation, cultural protocols, change, continuity, and the (re)valuation of objects.

Drawing insight from various museological concepts, such as “disciplinary museum” and “exhibition complex,” I sketch a brief history of museums that first emerged in China during the mid-nineteenth century. In this paper, the museums in China—from the late Qing dynasty (1850–1912) to the early Chinese economic reform period of the late 1970s and early 1980s—will be studied through a Foucauldian lens to further illuminate the nation's museum history. By studying four types of museums—China's first foreign museums, private museums, the Kuomintang museums, and the Chinese Communist Party museums—I explore how these institutions provided the public with different modes of consciousness and civil identity and how individuals respond to the cultural effects of museums. Whereas museums had been utilized as an instrument for different political parties, I aim to show how discourse has been radically transformed while these institutions represent the administrative mechanisms throughout different periods. I hope to initiate a discussion for future studies on how the contemporary museological phenomenon might be linked to the reminiscence of museums in the past.

The collections of ethnographic ceramic vessels made by Kari'na women in Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil present part of the history of a ceramic tradition that was consolidated over at least 200 years. The characteristics of ceramics and their production process can be associated to historical relations established by the Kari'na with different collectors and other peoples, as well as the agency of potters to maintain and transform their own tradition. By relating the history of these collections to the global history of museum institutions, this article contributes to the debate on museum decolonization and the transdisciplinary study of ethnographic ceramic collections. In addition, a look back into the past of collections can also give elements for a look forward into the future of the relations between objects and peoples.

Located mere feet from the busy Yeouido Bus Transfer Center, the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA) Bunker is a former military bunker from 1970s authoritarian South Korea that now showcases changing art exhibits. Debuting in November 2019, Paju (by artist Kim Seung Rea) features a series of paintings and statues capturing life in the town of Paju in the Geyeonggi Province near the border of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea. As a critique of militarization, Paju not only offers a glimpse into the life that blossoms amidst the guard towers, bulwarks, and barbed wire, it challenges the power dynamic implicit in the space of the bunker. Cold War ideologies overlap in SeMA Bunker, for while the bunker was purportedly designed to keep the former president, Park Chung-hee, safe during potential North Korean attack, the town of Paju was to act as human and infrastructural sacrifice to keep the rest of the country secure. Therefore, to bring Paju into the bunker via the exhibit is to inverse that power relationship and thus work to demilitarize the space, the town, and ultimately the patrons.

Recently human rights movements among Japan's Buraku people have become increasingly globalized, situating the Buraku struggle among those of other caste-based minorities around the world. Scholars have theorized that this globalization manifests in a global–local feedback loop in which decisions made by global and local actors inform one another. In this study, I utilize field research and qualitative content analysis of brochures at three Buraku human rights museums in western Japan to investigate this global reorientation. I show that two museums correspond to global–local feedback loop theory and I further identify how local nuances affect the disparate strategies the museums employ to engage with this new globalized Buraku identity. The third museum, however, serves as a counterexample by electing to keep its exhibits locally focused, reflecting its community-driven mission. I argue that these museums function as interlocutors of Buraku identity at both the local and global levels.