Museum Anthropology最新文献

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.

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.

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.

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.