Museum Anthropology最新文献

The museum world is currently grappling with questions of how to decolonize anthropological collections and many of these debates are epistemologically oriented. In pursuit of colonial ordering, material culture was extracted from colonized societies, deprived of its contextual meaning, and scrutinized through the lens of colonial knowledge. This article considers how an empirical decolonial practice can be applied drawing on from the current work at the Manchester Museum (MM). Dialogue, open engagements, multivocal conversations, collaborations, and shared authority in knowledge production are some of the decolonial strategies that I share. To illustrate this praxis turn in museum decolonial work, I first look at how we have addressed cultural objects looted from Benin in 1897 that we hold and “contain” at MM in our living cultures collection, underscoring a commitment by MM to transparency and a provision of access to the living collection by different groups of people. The second example is drawn from a collaborative provenance research that I undertook with Nongoma community members in South Africa in rewriting biographies of Zulu beadwork that we house at MM. Overall, I argue that decolonization should embrace a relational practice of caring for objects through active relations of reciprocity and dialogue with communities. The downside of decolonial practices and how are they are inherently shaped by power imbalances and tensions between curators and communities is also critically discussed.

Studies have reported challenges of debonding of dental zirconia crowns to from luting cement and prepared teeth. The aim of the study was to explore the application of dental glazing systems for enhancing the bonding of zirconia dental ceramics to luting resin cement. Commercial glaze powder and liquid (Vita Akzent) and experimental mica-based glaze powders were used for the study. X-ray diffraction analysis of the glaze powders (XRD) and Fourier Transform InfraRed Spectroscopy (FTIR) was done on the glaze liquid. Sandblasted sintered dental zirconia (Katana, Noritake) were the control samples. Glazed zirconia samples were coated with commercial glaze and experimental glaze powders which were further etched with 5% hydrofluoric acid. Shear bond strengths of sandblasted and glazed zirconia samples to resin composites were evaluated. XRD of commercial and experimental glaze powders revealed a broad peak confirming the amorphous nature of glass and FTIR analysis of the glaze liquid revealed symmetrical stretching (CH₂-CH₃) of the alcohol group indicating a mixture of iso-butane and ethanol. Glazed and etched zirconia showed significantly higher shear bond strength to resin cement compared to sand-blasted zirconia. The study confirms the glassy nature of dental glaze powders and the presence of ethanol-based mixtures in the commercial glaze liquid. Glazing systems have the potential to be explored for enhancing the bonding of non-etchable zirconia ceramics to resin cement and tooth substrates.

In the 1830s, George Catlin undertook several journeys to the American West to document, through painting, writing, and collecting, Native North American communities he perceived as vanishing. He later assembled the different media in his Indian Gallery, which he toured through the United States and Europe. In this article, I begin to redocument Catlin's Indian Gallery and his exhibitionary practice by paying attention to its largely overlooked material culture collection. Many items display signs of non-Native modification, like imitations of Plains pictorial tradition and detachment and reattachment of quillwork. Moving beyond questions of (in)authenticity, I focus on the objects' role in his exhibition, taking them seriously as one of Catlin's material museological practices. Through close-looking analysis, I identify patterns of alteration and fabrications: replacement, repurposing, creating similarity and types, and emphasis on visual appeal. Based on these patterns, I suggest understanding Catlin's own approach to this material as a collection of props fabricated and employed to authenticate and support claims of cultural realism for his representations of Indigenous life. By studying this collection, we gain a deeper understanding of predisciplinary exhibitionary practices and how later ethnographic display technologies also relying on props, like dioramas, developed.

In the summer of 2020, two museums in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, simultaneously hosted art exhibitions by Indigenous artists. The Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) hosted an exhibition of works by Shuvinai Ashoona, an Inuk artist part of the Dorset Fine Arts Co-operative, based in Kinngait, Nunavut. At the same time, the Museum of Anthropology (MOA) hosted an exhibition of the work of Kent Monkman, a Cree artist known for exploring themes of colonization and sexuality in his work. Each exhibition offered signage in an Indigenous language: in Inuktitut and Cree, respectively. Reflecting on the ways Inuktitut and Cree were used in these exhibitions has led us to write this review article, in which we draw on recent scholarship that addresses questions of language in museum spaces (Sönmez et al., 2020; Lazzeretti, 2016).