Museum Anthropology最新文献

A widespread link between the process of nation-building and the rise of museums is evident in late-nineteenth-century Latin America. The Chilean National Historical Museum (MHN) was founded in 1873 with the purpose of exhibiting the nation's heritage, beginning with the Spanish colonization. This article focuses on examining the narrative displayed in the MHN, particularly the silences surrounding the Indigenous Mapuche. It analyzes the implications this absence brings to the collective memory of the nation. Using museum catalogs, newspapers, and nineteenth-century literature, this research traces the contrast between how Indigenous and colonial artifacts are exhibited in the museum, wherein the Mapuche are framed aesthetically, therefore relegating them to the past. By stripping from them any contemporary existence, the Mapuche are relegated to an anecdote of ancient times. I document how the primary collection of the museum reproduces a narrative by which European heritage is the starting point of the nation's progress, silencing the voice of Mapuche history and hence producing a script that lacks a nuanced understanding of Chile's Indigenous reality. At a time when Chile is experiencing violent conflict in the Araucanía region, the MHN obscures Mapuche identity and inhibits a dialogue between Indigenous communities and the state. [museum, Mapuche, national identity, colonialism, Indigenous]

This article examines debates between Greeks and Turks about how to preserve the architectural heritage left behind by the Greek Orthodox population exiled from Sinasos in the 1923 Greek-Turkish Compulsory Population Exchange. The restoration of Sinasos as a kind of residential and commercial open-air museum, through the transformation of ancestral homes into hotels, engendered new cooperative and competitive relationships between Greeks and Turks with legitimate claims to the site. Greeks and Turks are typically portrayed as antagonistic, but understanding the historic properties as a form of inheritance much like the estates fundamental to “house societies” described by Claude Lévi-Strauss reveals a transnational community with shared concerns around memory, heritage preservation, transnational identity formation, and touristic enterprise. [heritage, inheritance, house, memory, Turkey]

There has been wonderful work animating vectors of relatedness, negotiation, and collaboration between museums and “source communities”; foregrounding the significance of objects, what they can/might do, and how they act in and through museums; and highlighting the particularity of the photographic archive (and especially photographs as things in need of specific kinds of attention and care) in contemporary cultural reclamation and (re)vitalization projects. In this special issue of Museum Anthropology entitled “Materiality, Belonging, and the Activation of Difference,” we seek to bring these three fields into conversation. We seek to extend recent work arguing for an expanded view of museums as sites of translation (between local needs and global agendas) and frames for more inclusive, dynamic, collaborative, politically informed action. As a set, these articles argue that museum anthropology as a discipline must allow for ethnographic exploration of, coexistence with, and engagement across these emphases: the centrality of objects and how they are mobilized in various forms of knowledge production; debate over what a museum is and what its social role(s) might be (can a home be a museum? Can a city? What happens to our notion of “museum” when we expand beyond architectural objectifications of state/national authority?); and the embodied, affective, and sensorial experiences of museums and museum-like spaces. [museum objects/things, museum places, heritage, tourism, authenticity]

This afterword to the special issue “Materiality, Belonging, and the Activation of Difference” begins and ends with Kim TallBear's notion of kin-making as a frame for understanding the relations between objects, peoples, places, heritage regimes, and museums that allows us to keep different ontological perspectives in view. More specifically, “making kin” allows us to unsettle still-dominant settler-colonial violence with an idiom of mutual obligation.