Museum Anthropology最新文献

This paper examines the role of human remains in genocide memorials and museums to evoke and narrate individual experiences of genocide. Understanding that the display of human remains is contested, I suggest that their presence in memorials and museums can play a valuable, but hitherto neglected, role in the development of individualized and evidentiary narratives of genocide. Such narratives, developed through explicit information regarding the provenance of the remains and the forensic analysis conducted, can deepen the engagement with and understanding of the victims of genocide by museum visitors. Based on the Forensics Exhibition in Tuol Sleng, Cambodia, I argue that explicitly displaying and explicating the remains develops a powerful evidentiary narrative complementing those developed in more familiar exhibitions. In so doing, I expand on debates regarding the liminal position of human remains as person and object, arguing that the display of such remains in a forensic and public context supports engagement with the remains as individuals. In so doing, the paper provides an opportunity to consider the management of the dead and human remains in the aftermath of mass violence and genocide, attempting to marry the emotional and social needs of the survivors with the desire for “evidence” articulated in the legal, historical, and pedagogical realms.

This article describes the “Dialogues with Africa” project of the Barcelona Museum of World Cultures, which consisted of workshops using personal objects of African guests residing in Catalonia, and objects from the museum's African collections. The dialogues revealed the existence of both a migrant memory connected with objects chosen for their capacity to evoke origins and a museum memory linked with artifacts that were chosen as representing distant cultures. The main aim is to describe this migrant memory in relation to the objects and analyze how it connects with the museum's institutional memory in order to contribute to the discussion of the role of ethnographic museums in a plural society. We suggest that incorporating migrant memory will make possible an opening up to new meanings for objects that have been turned into heritage from an exoticizing standpoint, and that this is in keeping with a more inclusive anthropological museology.

In the past few decades, the literature in museum anthropology has advocated efforts to be more transparent about its colonial origins, address the historical injustices of imperial collecting, and rethink display narratives in collaboration with source communities. In this paper, however, we question the extent to which the epistemic and political predicaments underlying ethnographic representations are being fundamentally and systematically confronted. As we highlight with the example of ancient Egyptian material, it is apparent that significant parts of museum holdings remain freighted by unquestioned colonial and Eurocentric discourses. We employ a case study of the Egyptian material redisplayed in the “World Cultures” gallery of the Horniman Museum, London, to demonstrate how the ethnographic museum continues to unwittingly produce “silences” around collections. To redress the lacunae we provide examples of the way in which this body of material could be more meaningfully integrated within museological discourses that have informed the rethinking of other aspects of world culture.

Studies focusing on the history of collections generally emphasize what is estimable about them, but how should we make sense of collections that, once held in high regard, have subsequently been judged worthless? Such is the case for eoliths, stone objects resembling early artifacts, which held a pivotal position in arguments concerning the origins of human tool-making, but which are now largely considered nonartifactual. This article discusses the circumstances in which eolith collections were assembled, with reference to national and local museums in southeast England, but is mainly concerned with how and why, with the passing of the eolithic heyday, so many objects described as eoliths were lost, why others remain in museums, and what this tells us about curatorial practice.

Miami's sizeable Cuban diaspora has long used museums and galleries to produce and preserve their sense of community, united through the loss inherent to exile. Recent influxes of migration from Cuba (and beyond) are increasingly interpreted as a threat to the cultural forms many consider an “authentic” preservation of something now lost to Castro's Revolution. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic research within several of these organizations, this article argues that a recent proliferation of new museum spaces and their physical distribution across the city indicate growing anxieties and conflicts between diasporic cohorts. Drawing upon Foucault's concept of heterotopias, the article maps these conflicts onto other measures of difference, such as ethnicity and socioeconomic class. The article concludes that hegemonic and normative public spaces are being weaponized in a diasporic struggle over Cuban identity, while newer arrivals are responding in kind through the inauguration of counter-spaces of cultural representation.