Museum Anthropology最新文献

This article describes the “Dialogues with Africa” project of the Barcelona Museum of World Cultures, which consisted of workshops using personal objects of African guests residing in Catalonia, and objects from the museum's African collections. The dialogues revealed the existence of both a migrant memory connected with objects chosen for their capacity to evoke origins and a museum memory linked with artifacts that were chosen as representing distant cultures. The main aim is to describe this migrant memory in relation to the objects and analyze how it connects with the museum's institutional memory in order to contribute to the discussion of the role of ethnographic museums in a plural society. We suggest that incorporating migrant memory will make possible an opening up to new meanings for objects that have been turned into heritage from an exoticizing standpoint, and that this is in keeping with a more inclusive anthropological museology.

In the past few decades, the literature in museum anthropology has advocated efforts to be more transparent about its colonial origins, address the historical injustices of imperial collecting, and rethink display narratives in collaboration with source communities. In this paper, however, we question the extent to which the epistemic and political predicaments underlying ethnographic representations are being fundamentally and systematically confronted. As we highlight with the example of ancient Egyptian material, it is apparent that significant parts of museum holdings remain freighted by unquestioned colonial and Eurocentric discourses. We employ a case study of the Egyptian material redisplayed in the “World Cultures” gallery of the Horniman Museum, London, to demonstrate how the ethnographic museum continues to unwittingly produce “silences” around collections. To redress the lacunae we provide examples of the way in which this body of material could be more meaningfully integrated within museological discourses that have informed the rethinking of other aspects of world culture.

Studies focusing on the history of collections generally emphasize what is estimable about them, but how should we make sense of collections that, once held in high regard, have subsequently been judged worthless? Such is the case for eoliths, stone objects resembling early artifacts, which held a pivotal position in arguments concerning the origins of human tool-making, but which are now largely considered nonartifactual. This article discusses the circumstances in which eolith collections were assembled, with reference to national and local museums in southeast England, but is mainly concerned with how and why, with the passing of the eolithic heyday, so many objects described as eoliths were lost, why others remain in museums, and what this tells us about curatorial practice.

Miami's sizeable Cuban diaspora has long used museums and galleries to produce and preserve their sense of community, united through the loss inherent to exile. Recent influxes of migration from Cuba (and beyond) are increasingly interpreted as a threat to the cultural forms many consider an “authentic” preservation of something now lost to Castro's Revolution. Drawing upon fifteen months of ethnographic research within several of these organizations, this article argues that a recent proliferation of new museum spaces and their physical distribution across the city indicate growing anxieties and conflicts between diasporic cohorts. Drawing upon Foucault's concept of heterotopias, the article maps these conflicts onto other measures of difference, such as ethnicity and socioeconomic class. The article concludes that hegemonic and normative public spaces are being weaponized in a diasporic struggle over Cuban identity, while newer arrivals are responding in kind through the inauguration of counter-spaces of cultural representation.

Cryo-electron microscopy (cryoEM) has become a well established technique to elucidate the 3D structures of biological macromolecules. Projection images from thousands of macromolecules that are assumed to be structurally identical are combined into a single 3D map representing the Coulomb potential of the macromolecule under study. This article discusses possible caveats along the image-processing path and how to avoid them to obtain a reliable 3D structure. Some of these problems are very well known in the community. These may be referred to as sample-related (such as specimen denaturation at interfaces or non-uniform projection geometry leading to underrepresented projection directions). The rest are related to the algorithms used. While some have been discussed in depth in the literature, such as the use of an incorrect initial volume, others have received much less attention. However, they are fundamental in any data-analysis approach. Chiefly among them, instabilities in estimating many of the key parameters that are required for a correct 3D reconstruction that occur all along the processing workflow are referred to, which may significantly affect the reliability of the whole process. In the field, the term overfitting has been coined to refer to some particular kinds of artifacts. It is argued that overfitting is a statistical bias in key parameter-estimation steps in the 3D reconstruction process, including intrinsic algorithmic bias. It is also shown that common tools (Fourier shell correlation) and strategies (gold standard) that are normally used to detect or prevent overfitting do not fully protect against it. Alternatively, it is proposed that detecting the bias that leads to overfitting is much easier when addressed at the level of parameter estimation, rather than detecting it once the particle images have been combined into a 3D map. Comparing the results from multiple algorithms (or at least, independent executions of the same algorithm) can detect parameter bias. These multiple executions could then be averaged to give a lower variance estimate of the underlying parameters.

Nwadjahane, a small village in southern Mozambique, is set apart from other settlements as the birthplace of Eduardo Mondlane, one of the nation's founding fathers. Declared a national heritage site and made into an open-air museum, Nwadjahane has become a landscape where national and local memories are negotiated. Mondlane is at once a national hero celebrated with statues, exhibitions, and commemorations, as well as locally linked to ancestors and memorialized through ritual sites and sacred trees. I examine how diverse audiences engage, appropriate, and contest the different spaces of Nwadjahane: the village, the museum, the space of ancestors. Highlighting the fractured nature and the politics of this landscape, the tensions, contradictions, claims, and counterclaims made upon a single locale, I use Foucault's concept of heterotopia as an analytical tool to interrogate the juxtaposition of distinct spaces and temporalities, focusing particularly on local interpretations and the historical conditions that made Nwadjahane a national heritage site.