Download or read book Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement written by Christina Kreps and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-10-18 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement considers changes that have been taking place in museum anthropology as it has been responding to pressures to be more socially relevant, useful, and accountable to diverse communities. Based on the author’s own research and applied work over the past 30 years, the book gives examples of the wide-ranging work being carried out today in museum anthropology as both an academic, scholarly field and variety of applied, public anthropology. While it examines major trends that characterize our current "age of engagement," the book also critically examines the public role of museums and anthropology in colonial and postcolonial contexts, namely in the US, the Netherlands, and Indonesia. Throughout the book, Kreps questions what purposes and interests museums and anthropology serve in these different times and places. Museums and Anthropology in the Age of Engagement is a valuable resource for readers interested in an historical and comparative study of museums and anthropology, and the forms engagement has taken. It should be especially useful to students and instructors looking for a text that provides in one volume a history of museum anthropology and methods for doing critical, reflexive museum ethnography and collaborative work.

Download or read book Pragmatic Imagination and the New Museum Anthropology written by Christina J. Hodge and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-03-14 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pragmatic Imagination and the New Museum Anthropology shifts museum anthropology’s relationship to the broader field from marginal to central by revealing the sophisticated transdisciplinary praxis (theory + practice) at the heart of current museum anthropologies. The book features international case studies that operate at the interfaces of critical museology, anthropology, material culture studies, art practice, and more. The theory of pragmatics proposes that meaning-making is collaborative and best evaluated through its impact in the world. Collectively the chapters in this volume evidence a ‘pragmatic imagination’ at work as museum anthropology practitioners ingeniously combine inventiveness (the possible) and practicality (the actual) in ways that drive the field forward. Defining museum anthropology as a pragmatic practice explicitly theorizes this work in order to mark its significance; demystify its processes of knowledge production; connect it more readily to debates within and beyond anthropology; and facilitate critique.

Download or read book Museums Heritage and International Development written by Paul Basu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-10-03 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While many claims are made regarding the power of cultural heritage as a driver and enabler of sustainable development, the relationship between museums, heritage and development has received little academic scrutiny. This book stages a critical conversation between the interdisciplinary fields of museum studies, heritage studies and development studies to explore this under-researched sphere of development intervention. In an agenda-setting introduction, the editors explore the seemingly oppositional temporalities and values represented by these "past-making" and "future-making" projects, arguing that these provide a framework for mutual critique. Contributors to the volume bring insights from a wide range of academic and practitioner perspectives on a series of international case studies, which each raise challenging questions that reach beyond merely cultural concerns and fully engage with both the legacies of colonial power inequalities and the shifting geopolitical dynamics of contemporary international relations. Cultural heritage embodies different values and can be instrumentalized to serve different economic, social and political objectives within development contexts, but the past is also intrinsic to the present and is foundational to people’s aspirations for the future. Museums, Heritage and International Development explores the problematics as well as potentials, the politics as well as possibilities, in this fascinating nexus.

Download or read book Museums Societies and the Creation of Value written by Howard Morphy and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-30 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value focuses on the ways in which museums and the use of their collections have contributed to, and continue to be engaged with, value creation processes. Including chapters from many of the leading figures in museum anthropology, as well as from outstanding early-career researchers, this volume presents a diverse range of international case studies that bridge the gap between theory and practice. It demonstrates that ethnographic collections and the museums that hold and curate them have played a central role in the value creation processes that have changed attitudes to cultural differences. The essays engage richly with many of the important issues of contemporary museum discourse and practice. They show how collections exist at the ever-changing point of articulation between the source communities and the people and cultures of the museum and challenge presentist critiques of museums that position them as locked into the time that they emerged. Museums, Societies and the Creation of Value provides examples of the productive outcomes of collaborative work and relationships, showing how they can be mutually beneficial. The book will be of great interest to researchers and students engaged in the study of museums and heritage, anthropology, culture, Indigenous peoples, postcolonialism, history and sociology. It will also be of interest to museum professionals.

Download or read book Contemporary Museums written by Yves Girault and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2023-08-29 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the center of current debates surrounding the social function of museums, questions concerning museum activities and the participation of both inhabitants and the public arise. In 2019, these questions were the subject of many heated debates at the 34th General Assembly of ICOM in Kyoto, which intended to propose a new definition of the museum. As the representations of the tensions between Universalist and Communitarian approaches are not only largely dependent on the historical and socio-political contexts of the various countries concerned, a generational angle must also be considered. It thus seems totally anachronistic to try to defend a dichotomous vision that is far too simplistic. At the heart of these current events and international issues, this collective work studies, in an international context, the values, actions and discourses advocated for participating in processes such as collection, selection, conservation and interpretation of heritage elements linked to the territories, resources, knowledge and know-how of various communities. The analysis of the tensions and asymmetries of power between various groups of actors – politicians, managers, scientists, visitors, representatives of local or diasporic populations, among others – particularly in the context of decolonization policies of museums, is also a major part of this book.

Download or read book Confronting Colonial Objects written by Carsten Stahn and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-10-13 with total page 593 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The treatment of cultural colonial objects is one of the most debated questions of our time. Calls for a new international cultural order go back to decolonization. However, for decades, the issue has been treated as a matter of comity or been reduced to a Shakespearean dilemma: to return or not to return. Confronting Colonial Objects seeks to go beyond these classic dichotomies and argues that contemporary practices are at a tipping point. The book shows that cultural takings were material to the colonial project throughout different periods and went far beyond looting. It presents micro histories and object biographies to trace recurring justifications and contestations of takings and returns while outlining the complicity of anthropology, racial science, and professional networks that enabled colonial collecting. The book demonstrates the dual role of law and cultural heritage regulation in facilitating colonial injustices and mobilizing resistance thereto. Drawing on the interplay between justice, ethics, and human rights, Stahn develops principles of relational cultural justice. He challenges the argument that takings were acceptable according to the standards of the time and outlines how future engagement requires a re-invention of knowledge systems and relations towards objects, including new forms of consent, provenance research, and partnership, and a re-thinking of the role of museums themselves. Following the life story and transformation of cultural objects, this book provides a fresh perspective on international law and colonial history that appeals to audiences across a variety of disciplines. This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

Download or read book Museum Making in Vietnam Laos and Cambodia written by Jonathan Paquette and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2022-06-07 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Building on archival work undertaken in France and fieldwork undertaken in Southeast Asia, Museum-Making in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia provides a critical analysis of museum histories and development in three former colonial territories. This work documents the development of museums in French Indochina (1862-1954), specifically Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. The book explores the colonial culture of exhibition, traces the growth of museum collections through archaeological missions to Indochina and other parts of Asia, and examines the role of museums in the cultural life of this colonial society. In particular, the author re-contextualizes the role and part played by colonial museums in the implementation of heritage policies during the colonial era in French Indochina, a dimension that is often overlooked. Additionally, the book addresses the effects that the Second World War, the Vichy Regime, and the Japanese occupation had on these cultural institutions. The transformation of these museums in post-independence Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia is also discussed. Providing comparisons with other colonial and post-colonial experiences, Museum-Making in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia will be a valuable resource for researchers in museum and heritage studies. It will also appeal to researchers and graduate students engaged in the study of history, anthropology, sociology, political science, and development and international studies.

Download or read book Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age written by Haidy Geismar and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-05-14 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

Download or read book Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age written by Haidy Geismar and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2018-05-14 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Museum Object Lessons for the Digital Age explores the nature of digital objects in museums, asking us to question our assumptions about the material, social and political foundations of digital practices. Through four wide-ranging chapters, each focused on a single object – a box, pen, effigy and cloak – this short, accessible book explores the legacies of earlier museum practices of collection, older forms of media (from dioramas to photography), and theories of how knowledge is produced in museums on a wide range of digital projects. Swooping from Ethnographic to Decorative Arts Collections, from the Google Art Project to bespoke digital experiments, Haidy Geismar explores the object lessons contained in digital form and asks what they can tell us about both the past and the future. Drawing on the author’s extensive experience working with collections across the world, Geismar argues for an understanding of digital media as material, rather than immaterial, and advocates for a more nuanced, ethnographic and historicised view of museum digitisation projects than those usually adopted in the celebratory accounts of new media in museums. By locating the digital as part of a longer history of material engagements, transformations and processes of translation, this book broadens our understanding of the reality effects that digital technologies create, and of how digital media can be mobilised in different parts of the world to very different effects.

Download or read book Open ing Authority Through Community Engagement written by Elizabeth A Bollwerk and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First Published in 2016. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an Informa company.

Download or read book Our Indigenous Ancestors written by Carolyne R. Larson and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2015-08-13 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Our Indigenous Ancestors complicates the history of the erasure of native cultures and the perceived domination of white, European heritage in Argentina through a study of anthropology museums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Carolyne Larson demonstrates how scientists, collectors, the press, and the public engaged with Argentina’s native American artifacts and remains (and sometimes living peoples) in the process of constructing an “authentic” national heritage. She explores the founding and functioning of three museums in Argentina, as well as the origins and consolidation of Argentine archaeology and the professional lives of a handful of dynamic curators and archaeologists, using these institutions and individuals as a window onto nation building, modernization, urban-rural tensions, and problems of race and ethnicity in turn-of-the-century Argentina. Museums and archaeology, she argues, allowed Argentine elites to build a modern national identity distinct from the country’s indigenous past, even as it rested on a celebrated, extinct version of that past. As Larson shows, contrary to widespread belief, elements of Argentina’s native American past were reshaped and integrated into the construction of Argentine national identity as white and European at the turn of the century. Our Indigenous Ancestors provides a unique look at the folklore movement, nation building, science, institutional change, and the divide between elite, scientific, and popular culture in Argentina and the Americas at a time of rapid, sweeping changes in Latin American culture and society.

Download or read book Mutuality written by Roger Sanjek and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why do people do social-cultural anthropology? Beyond professional career motivations, what values underpin anthropologists' commitments to lengthy training, fieldwork, writing, and publication? Mutuality explores the values that anthropologists bring from their wider social worlds, including the value placed on relationships with the people they study, work with, write about and for, and communicate with more broadly. In this volume, seventeen distinguished anthropologists draw on personal and professional histories to describe avenues to mutuality through collaborative fieldwork, community-based projects and consultations, advocacy, and museum exhibits, including the American Anthropological Association's largest public outreach ever—the RACE: Are We So Different? project. Looking critically at obstacles to reciprocally beneficial engagement, the contributors trace the discipline's past and current relations with Native Americans, indigenous peoples exhibited in early twentieth-century world's fairs, and racialized populations. The chapters range widely—across the Punjabi craft caste, Filipino Igorot, and Somali Bantu global diasporas; to the Darfur crisis and conciliation efforts in Sudan and Qatar; to applied work in Panama, Micronesia, China, and Peru. In the United States, contributors discuss their work as academic, practicing, and public anthropologists in such diverse contexts as Alaskan Yup'ik communities, multiethnic New Mexico, San Francisco's Japan Town, Oakland's Intertribal Friendship House, Southern California's produce markets, a children's ward in a Los Angeles hospital, a New England nursing home, and Washington D.C.'s National Mall. Deeply personal as well as professionally astute, Mutuality sheds new light on the issues closest to the present and future of contemporary anthropology. Contributors: Rogaia Mustafa Abusharaf, Robert R. Alvarez, Garrick Bailey, Catherine Besteman, Parminder Bhachu, Ann Fienup-Riordan, Zibin Guo, Lane Ryo Hirabayashi, Lanita Jacobs, Susan Lobo, Yolanda T. Moses, Sylvia Rodríguez, Roger Sanjek, Renée R. Shield, Alaka Wali, Deana L. Weibel, Brett Williams.

Download or read book Liberating Culture written by Christina Kreps and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Using examples of indigenous models from Indonesia, the Pacific, Africa and native North America, Christina Kreps illustrates how the growing recognition of indigenous curation and concepts of cultural heritage preservation is transforming conventional museum practice. Liberating Culture explores the similarities and differences between Western and non-Western approaches to objects, museums, and curation, revealing how what is culturally appropriate in one context may not be in another. For those studying museum culture across the world, this book is essential reading.

Download or read book Mobile Museums written by Felix Driver and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2021-04-19 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mobile Museums presents an argument for the importance of circulation in the study of museum collections, past and present. It brings together an impressive array of international scholars and curators from a wide variety of disciplines – including the history of science, museum anthropology and postcolonial history - to consider the mobility of collections. The book combines historical perspectives on the circulation of museum objects in the past with contemporary accounts of their re-mobilisation, notably in the context of Indigenous community engagement. Contributors seek to explore processes of circulation historically in order to re-examine, inform and unsettle common assumptions about the way museum collections have evolved over time and through space. By foregrounding questions of circulation, the chapters in Mobile Museums collectively represent a fundamental shift in the understanding of the history and future uses of museum collections. The book addresses a variety of different types of collection, including the botanical, the ethnographic, the economic and the archaeological. Its perspective is truly global, with case studies drawn from South America, West Africa, Oceania, Australia, the United States, Europe and the UK. Mobile Museums helps us to understand why the mobility of museum collections was a fundamental aspect of their history and why it continues to matter today. Praise for Mobile Museums 'This book advances a paradigm shift in studies of museums and collections. A distinguished group of contributors reveal that collections are not dead assemblages. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries were marked by vigorous international traffic in ethnography and natural history specimens that tell us much about colonialism, travel and the history of knowledge – and have implications for the remobilisation of museums in the future.’ – Nicholas Thomas, University of Cambridge 'The first major work to examine the implications and consequences of the migration of materials from one scientific or cultural milieu to another, it highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of collections and offers insights into their potential for future re-mobilisation.' – Arthur MacGregor

Download or read book Museums and Communities written by Viv Golding and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2013-05-09 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With contributions from key scholars in a range of disciplines, this engaging new volume explores the complex issues surrounding collaboration between museums and their communities.

Download or read book Museums in a Time of Migration written by Pieter Bevelander and published by . This book was released on 2018-06-06 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Migration has, across time, contributed to the development and reshaping of societies and urban spaces. Today, migration movements have become a global phenomenon, where the number of countries affected--socially, economically and culturally--by migration is continually increasing. As in past times, the reasons why people move are varied and often intertwined. Sometimes it is about people fleeing poverty, war, ethnic conflicts, environmental disasters or different forms of persecution--for example religious. However, people also move for other reasons, such as work and studies in other countries, or out of curiosity and a sense of adventure. International migration and mobility have implications for many sectors in society, including the museum sector. To be in tune with the times and relevant to all citizens, the museum sector needs, more than ever, to address issues that transcend national borders. As important educational institutions often visited by, amongst others, schoolchildren, museums have the potential to affect our notions of the world. By making museums places for exploring and learning about both the past and the present of issues such as migration, mobility, transnational connections and human rights, they not only become more relevant as cultural institutions, but may also facilitate positive changes in how people relate to each other in the wider society--thereby ultimately contributing to society's sustainable development. This book seeks to contribute to the discussion about how museums can improve their engagement in issues of migration and becoming more inclusive. The book provides both relevant theoretical reflections and new and innovative empirical examples on museums' engagement in migration from several parts of the world. Several distinguished scholars and curators discuss and reflect on museums' perspectives, collecting practices, collaborations, and representations of migration.

Download or read book Academic Anthropology and the Museum written by Mary Bouquet and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2001-12-01 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The museum boom, with its accompanying objectification and politicization of culture, finds its counterpart in the growing interest by social scientists in material culture, much of which is to be found in museums. Not surprisingly, anthropologists in particular are turning their attention again to museums, after decades of neglect, during which fieldwork became the hallmark of modern anthropology - so much so that the "social" and the "material" parted company so radically as to produce a kind of knowledge gap between historical collections and the intellectuals who might have benefitted from working on these material representations of culture. Moreover it was forgotten that museums do not only present the "pastness" of things. A great deal of what goes on in contemporary museums is literally about planning the shape of the future: making culture materialize involves mixing things from the past, taking into account current visions, and knowing that the scenes constructed will shape the perspectives of future generations. However, the (re-)invention of museum anthropology presents a series of challenges for academic teaching and research, as well as for the work of cultural production in contemporary museums - issues that are explored in this volume.