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"Museums Anthropological aspects"
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Museums and anthropology in the age of engagement
\"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\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Our indigenous ancestors : a cultural history of museums, science, and identity in Argentina, 1877-1943
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.
eBook
Museums : a visual anthropology
Museums: A Visual Anthropology provides a clear and concise summary of the key ideas, debates and texts of the most important approaches to the study of museums from around the world. The book examines ways to address the social relations of museums, embedded in their sites, collections, and exhibitions, as an integral part of the visual and material culture they comprise. Cross-disciplinary in scope, Museums uses ideas and approaches both from within and outside of anthropology to further students' knowledge of and interest in museums. Including selected, globally based case studies to highlight and exemplify important issues, the book also contains suggested Further Reading for each chapter, for students to expand their learning independently. Exploring fundamental methods and approaches to engage this constantly evolving time machine, Museums will be essential reading for students of anthropology and museum studies.
eBook
Preserving what is valued : museums, conservation, and First Nations
What are the \"right ways\" to preserve heritage? Are the aims and purposes of museums necessarily at odds with those of First Nations? This thoughtful book explores the concept of museum conservation in light of cultural repatriation issues, and helps readers understand the complex relationship between museums and Aboriginal peoples.
eBook
Decolonizing Museums
Museum exhibitions focusing on Native American history have long been curator controlled. However, a shift is occurring, giving Indigenous people a larger role in determining exhibition content. InDecolonizing Museums, Amy Lonetree examines the complexities of these new relationships with an eye toward exploring how museums can grapple with centuries of unresolved trauma as they tell the stories of Native peoples. She investigates how museums can honor an Indigenous worldview and way of knowing, challenge stereotypical representations, and speak the hard truths of colonization within exhibition spaces to address the persistent legacies of historical unresolved grief in Native communities.Lonetree focuses on the representation of Native Americans in exhibitions at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Minnesota, and the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways in Michigan. Drawing on her experiences as an Indigenous scholar and museum professional, Lonetree analyzes exhibition texts and images, records of exhibition development, and interviews with staff members. She addresses historical and contemporary museum practices and charts possible paths for the future curation and presentation of Native lifeways.
eBook
Assessing Classic Maya multi-scalar household inequality in southern Belize
Inequality is present to varying degrees in all human societies, pre-modern and contemporary. For archaeological contexts, variation in house size reflects differences in labor investments and serves as a robust means to assess wealth across populations small and large. The Gini coefficient, which measures the degree of concentration in the distribution of units within a population, has been employed as a standardized metric to evaluate the extent of inequality. Here, we employ Gini coefficients to assess wealth inequality at four nested socio-spatial scales–the micro-region, the polity, the district, and the neighborhood–at two medium size, peripheral Classic Maya polities located in southern Belize. We then compare our findings to Gini coefficients for other Classic Maya polities in the Maya heartland and to contemporaneous polities across Mesoamerica. We see the patterning of wealth inequality across the polities as a consequence of variable access to networks of exchange. Different forms of governance played a role in the degree of wealth inequality in Mesoamerica. More autocratic Classic Maya polities, where principals exercised degrees of control over exclusionary exchange networks, maintained high degrees of wealth inequality compared to most other Mesoamerican states, which generally are characterized by more collective forms of governance. We examine how household wealth inequality was reproduced at peripheral Classic Maya polities, and illustrate that economic inequity trickled down to local socio-spatial units in this prehispanic context.
Journal Article
Undisciplining the Museum: Indigenous Relationality as Religion
What does it mean to decolonize or undiscipline the anthropology museum? What happens when the museum is confronted by Indigenous and descendant communities who demand an ethic of care rooted in relational ontologies and epistemologies? This article features Indigenous creativity as it has disrupted ‘business as usual’ in anthropology museums. This is primarily evidenced by Fork Peck Tribes who confronted the University of Montana to enact a long-overdue repatriation. Additional examples from The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard demonstrate diverse expressions of relationality among Indigenous and descendant communities. These interventions are analyzed through Critical Indigenous Theory to specify the ways in which Indigenous religious traditions refuse the narratives and norms of settler colonial knowledge production and undermine the imperial museological practices of preservation. Instead, relationality is prioritized in the caretaking of and connection with more-than-human entities and materials in the museum. This article emphasizes relationality and repatriation as religious acts that challenge assumptions embedded in imperial and settler colonial approaches to history and science. From various social locations and through multiple strategies, we see the active undisciplining of the museum by Indigenous and descendant communities.
Journal Article
Plundered skulls and stolen spirits : inside the fight to reclaim native America's culture
A leading anthropologist \"explores the fraught project of repatriating Native American sacred objects in this moving and thoughtful work\" ( Publishers Weekly).
Who own the objects that connect us to history? And who has the right to decide, particularly when the objects are sacred or, in the case of skeletal remains, human? As senior curator of anthropology at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, Chip Colwell has navigated questions like these firsthand. In Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits, he examines how to weigh the religious freedom of Native Americans against the academic freedom of scientists—and whether the emptying of museum shelves elevates human rights or destroys a common heritage.
Today, hundreds of tribes use the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act to recover their looted heritage from museums across the country. Colwell shares a personal account of this process, following the trail of four objects as they were created, collected, and ultimately returned to their sources: a sculpture that is a living god, the scalp of a massacre victim, a ceremonial blanket, and a skeleton from a tribe considered by some to be extinct.
These stories reveal a dramatic process that involves not merely obeying the law, but negotiating the blurry lines between identity and morality, spirituality and politics. Repatriation, Colwell argues, is a difficult but vitally important way for museums and tribes to heal the wounds of the past while creating a respectful approach to caring for these rich artifacts of history.
eBook