Museum Anthropology最新文献

The “museum boom” is a global phenomenon with various local manifestations and wide-ranging antecedents. The recent museum boom in Poland, in which a number of national museum complexes have either opened or undergone significant remodeling, is related to changing evidential discourses about collective identity. These discourses are part of the national narratives surrounding the Polish state. This essay asks what can be learned from the Polish museum boom. Notably, museums and museum-like institutions within Poland serve as a space for education and dialogue that both complements and contrasts with history education in schools and written history books. Through comparative case studies, this essay addresses how the museum boom is rooted in the particularities of Poland’s history. Museums elsewhere are experiencing similar shifts, and we ask here what these changes can tell us about the transformations of history museums in Poland.

As conservators of heritage and protectors of patrimony, museums are key players in public discourse about national identity and collective memory. The cultural roles and meanings of the museum as an institution are changing in relationship to local and global currents. Factors include the adoption of digital technologies, the repatriation of cultural artifacts, and the opening of new blockbuster museums. This special issue of Museum Anthropology builds upon a nodal taxonomic model for classifying museum practices, audiences, and the organization of evidence. The collected articles juxtapose cross-cultural case studies drawn from Africa, Europe, and the United States. Topics include the use of evidence in the global circulation of popular African art, discussions of repatriation and decolonization in German museums, the “museum boom” in Poland’s new political climate, and the development of a unique local museum based on minimalist art near the US–Mexican border. The comparative cases demonstrate how museums of different types respond to civic contestations, public debates, and institutional transformations. Curatorial narratives support the use of evidence in contrasting ways as museums build and revitalize their collections. These shifts influence the interpretation of evidence and the display of artifacts both within individual museums and across the global museum landscape.

The valuation and display of African art in museum contexts entails contrasting strategies of objectification. In this process, objects may be used as material evidence for larger cultural trends and new movements. This essay examines the role of curatorial networks in creating discourses about African art objects that reframe their cultural significance and economic value. These curatorial networks are treated as a habitus for the art and a discursive framework for its valuation. This analysis builds upon a taxonomic nodal model, which may be used to identify the reconfiguration of museum discourses, curatorial knowledge, and markets for artistic circulation. Two case studies, examining the paintings of Congolese artist Tshibumba Kanda Matulu (1947–circa 1981) from the 1970s and the collection of legendary Malian photographer Seydou Keïta (1921–2001) from the 1960s and the 1970s, demonstrate how curatorial networks reframe the circulation and evidential status of African art over time. The article concludes with an assessment of repatriation claims with relationship to a framework for analyzing the evidential claims of museums.

Writing through ethnographic fiction, art practice, and art historical research, this essay presents a study of minimalist Donald Judd’s The Chinati Foundation/La Fondacion Chinati (1979–1986), a museum in West Texas designed by the artist. It explores Chinati in relation to its site—the Texas-Mexico borderlands—focusing on three objects of evidence found in and around it: a World War II–era German-language sign inside the former military complex that Judd retrofitted for the museum, and that he dated and autographed; a wall of a derelict adobe building graffitied with a denouncement of Chinati; and a granite gravestone with an Arabic inscription, marking the final resting place of Lebanese peddler Ramon Karam, whose death on the Rio Grande in 1918 was used as evidence in Senate hearings in support of increased U.S. militarization at the border. The essay shows how working with ethnographic fiction toward a new evidential paradigm shifts perspectives on Chinati, Judd’s practice, the borderlands, and the relationship between scholarship and art practice.