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"Gable, Eric"
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The new history in an old museum : creating the past at Colonial Williamsburg
The New History in an Old Museum is an exploration of \"historical truth\" as presented at Colonial Williamsburg. More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork—including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research—Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with pedagogical principle in Colonial Williamsburg to blur the lines between education and entertainment, patriotism and revisionism.
During much of its existence, the \"living museum\" at Williamsburg has been considered a patriotic shrine, celebrating the upscale lifestyles of Virginia's colonial-era elite. But in recent decades a new generation of social historians has injected a more populist and critical slant to the site's narrative of nationhood. For example, in interactions with museum visitors, employees now relate stories about the experiences of African Americans and women, stories that several years ago did not enter into descriptions of life in Colonial Williamsburg. Handler and Gable focus on the way this public history is managed, as historians and administrators define historiographical policy and middle-level managers train and direct front-line staff to deliver this \"product\" to the public. They explore how visitors consume or modify what they hear and see, and reveal how interpreters and craftspeople resist or acquiesce in being managed. By deploying the voices of these various actors in a richly textured narrative, The New History in an Old Museum highlights the elements of cultural consensus that emerge from this cacophony of conflict and negotiation.
eBook
Worldliness in Out of the Way Places
This paper looks at such youthful cosmopolitan aspirations among Manjaco of Guinea-Bissau and Lauje in Sulawesi. It is often argued that these attempts at worldliness reflect claims for equal rights of membership in an unequal global society. Yet, an aspiration to worldliness also entails their assertion that we are, or at least should be, like them. This paper suggests that Manjaco and Lauje might seem to want to look like us but they talk very differently about what they expect of us in a world we mutually make.
Journal Article
The anthropology of guilt and rapport
In this article I use Clifford Geertz's backhanded defense of Malinowski's seeming emotional hypocrisy-his dislike of the natives whose point of view he wished to understand-to argue that while empathy or at least sympathy are integral components of the intimacies of fieldwork, they are also the catalyst for the darker and usually far less openly discussed emotions that are associated with these feelings-guilt, anger, and disgust-that are also at play in the fieldwork encounter. Indeed these sentiments, inevitably intersubjective in origin and expression, are intrinsic to the kind of knowledge we produce as ethnographers. I explore how these emotions emerge from or shape conversation in the field and then inflect subsequent analyses. I review encounters I have had with Lauje of Sulawesi, Indonesia, and Manjaco of Guinea-Bissau, and museum professionals at Monticello where my interlocutors attempted to guide my research by enlisting my sympathy for their condition, and how such attempts to create fields of moral mutuality inflect in often unpredictable ways my understandings of social life in those places. My focus will be on how the fraught emotion of guilt emerges from and shapes the experience of moral mutuality in ethnographic encounters.
Journal Article
Anthropology & egalitarianism : ethnographic encounters from Monticello to Guinea-Bissau
Anthropology and Egalitarianism is an artful and accessible introduction
to key themes in cultural anthropology. Writing in a deeply personal style and using
material from his fieldwork in three dramatically different locales -- Indonesia,
West Africa, and Monticello, the historic home of Thomas Jefferson -- Eric Gable
shows why the ethnographic encounter is the core of the discipline's method and the
basis of its unique contribution to understanding the human condition. Gable weaves
together vignettes from the field and discussion of major works as he explores the
development of the idea of culture through the experience of cultural contrast,
anthropology's fraught relationship to racism and colonialism, and other enduring
themes.
eBook
The New History in an Old Museum
The New History in an Old Museum is an exploration of \"historical truth\" as presented at Colonial Williamsburg. More than a detailed history of a museum and tourist attraction, it examines the packaging of American history, and consumerism and the manufacturing of cultural beliefs. Through extensive fieldwork—including numerous site visits, interviews with employees and visitors, and archival research—Richard Handler and Eric Gable illustrate how corporate sensibility blends with pedagogical principle in Colonial Williamsburg to blur the lines between education and entertainment, patriotism and revisionism.During much of its existence, the \"living museum\" at Williamsburg has been considered a patriotic shrine, celebrating the upscale lifestyles of Virginia’s colonial-era elite. But in recent decades a new generation of social historians has injected a more populist and critical slant to the site’s narrative of nationhood. For example, in interactions with museum visitors, employees now relate stories about the experiences of African Americans and women, stories that several years ago did not enter into descriptions of life in Colonial Williamsburg. Handler and Gable focus on the way this public history is managed, as historians and administrators define historiographical policy and middle-level managers train and direct front-line staff to deliver this \"product\" to the public. They explore how visitors consume or modify what they hear and see, and reveal how interpreters and craftspeople resist or acquiesce in being managed. By deploying the voices of these various actors in a richly textured narrative, The New History in an Old Museum highlights the elements of cultural consensus that emerge from this cacophony of conflict and negotiation.
eBook