Museum Anthropology最新文献

This paper explores how one type of traditional Moroccan cloth comes to be known through different epistemological frameworks or “knowledge ideologies.” The case in question involves a rural women’s weaving cooperative and Moroccan state strategies to rationalize cloth production, which here takes the form of technical training and product development workshops. A struggle over the right to determine the present and future of cloth-making manifests in part as differing perspectives among weavers and government officials about legitimate quality assessment criteria and methods, and the appropriate color of the local cloth. At the center of these competing ways to evaluate or define traditional cloth is the question of authority: who has the right to assess quality and what aspects of their identity should factor into this right? The case of traditional weaving in Morocco underscores how “knowing” and “knowing what’s best” are thoroughly entangled in the domain of cultural heritage and its management.

The ethnological collecting expeditions conducted by museums in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have had impacts on source communities and on the composition and interpretation of museum collections that have been critically examined from a number of perspectives. Although categories such as ethnicity and tribal affiliation are now understood to be situational, relational, and contingent, systems of classification in museums remain in large part rigid and immutable. Concrete approaches to addressing these issues in museum collections have been slower to emerge. This article presents an approach to the description of objects, influenced by attribute analysis and thick description, that has the potential to make salient information about museum collections more accessible to source communities. With two case studies (parfleches and moccasins from the Great Plains collections at the American Museum of Natural History), this article demonstrates how collaborative object-centered inquiry can help to disentangle objects from historical systems of classification in museum settings and “remobilize” them. Moving beyond classification to document the cultural practices documented in historical material culture can aid in reconstructing the complex movements of people, objects, and ideas in the past.

Refugees are often mischaracterized as either “threats” to their new nations of resettlement or as remarkably virtuous, resilient “survivors” of harsh expulsions from their home countries and difficult years in refugee camps. Both imageries fall short of forced migrants’ actual lives and stories. Museums’ display practices and their interpretations of “refugee arts” can easily fall into stereotypes, especially sugary, positive ones. This case study delves into display practices that led well-intentioned curators and their student collaborators to lodge a small exhibition’s vision of refugees and their art production at superficial levels. Many universities now encourage students to conduct community-based research and display findings in campus museums. This study argues that even well-motivated shows on forced migrants’ art production should be executed with subtlety, so as to avoid inaccurate classification schemes regarding “refugee art.”

The Tasmanian Aboriginal people have historically been defined by their visible lack of stereotypical “Aboriginal” characteristics and their supposed nonexistence. This article examines how Tasmanian Aboriginal individuals are bridging such gaps through material cultural production. In thinking about how communities mobilize the past to produce themselves in the present, I argue that canoes, kelp water carriers, and shell necklaces are vehicles through which alterity and distinction are rendered concrete. As such, these processes are best understood in relation to Bell and Geismar’s “materialization” and Ingold’s “meshworks.” Despite internal debates amongst practitioners over proper methodologies and styles, revitalized culture can be productively imagined as compensation for outward shortcomings and deficiencies. Efforts at revitalizing culture are willed connections to a deep ancestral past and represent the discursive enactment of a continuity that is often otherwise conspicuous by its absence. [material culture, cultural revitalization, Indigeneity, Tasmania, Australia]

Choices that admit things to, or omit things from, museum collections rely on institutional and individual assumptions about value, ownership, skill, history, and people. Historical decisions about what was worth collecting, how collections should be organized, who would oversee collections care, and what uses collections could serve reverberate through the years, affecting museums’ abilities to research, exhibit, and engage collections. Using recent research into one Balinese slendang in the Brooklyn Museum’s collection, this essay examines how the Museum’s frameworks and curatorial assumptions enabled the neglect of nearly 200 Indonesian textiles for decades. It examines how the Museum parsed collection categories, how Indonesian textiles complicated and confounded those categories, and how the ensuing inattention inadvertently enabled a well-preserved collection. By attempting to weave the textiles’ collecting histories into narratives of their embedded colonial and institutional histories, it hopes to rekindle their usefulness for scholars, for communities, and for the Museum.

Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were iconic figures whose contributions to visual anthropology are well documented, but what is less well known is their role as collectors and curators of Indonesian objects. The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) houses a large Balinese collection with numerous textiles, paintings, carvings, and puppets. Some of these objects were housed in permanent exhibits, such as the AMNH’s Hall of Pacific People (HOPP), curated by Mead, or displayed temporarily in the Museum of Modern Art’s traveling exhibit, curated by Bateson. Against this backdrop, this article adds to the critical discussion of curating, anthropological history, and categorization schemes in Western museums by exploring how Bali and Java came to be so prominent in the AMNH’s Indonesian alcove. Stimulated by visitor responses to exhibits, museum archives, ethnographic notes, and actual physical displays, it traces how Mead and Bateson’s study (1936–1938) of “culture areas” and traits such as “art” in Bali influenced the representation of Indonesia. The alcove’s emphasis on art and aesthetics as forms of cultural equanimity and consistency can be related to prevailing hierarchies of religion and technological development as well as how ahistoricism became an anthropological device of freezing, categorizing, and representing. [Bali, Margaret Mead, Gregory Bateson, art, ahistoricism]