The most detailed and well-illustrated study of material culture
for any northern Athabascan language group to date, Gwich'in
Athabascan Implements reproduces pre- and early post-contact
tools that ...are historically important to the Athabaskan people. A
long-term collaboration between anthropologist Thomas O'Brien and
Athabascan elder David Salmon, this volume provides more than one
hundred one-to-one sketches of a wide variety of implements, many
of which are no longer commonly found in use.
Reckoning with colonial legacies in Western museum collections What are the possibilities and limits of engaging with colonialism in ethnological museums? This book addresses this question from ...within the Africa department of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. It captures the Museum at a moment of substantial transformation, as it prepared the move of its exhibition to the Humboldt Forum, a newly built and contested cultural centre on Berlin’s Museum Island. The book discusses almost a decade of debate in which German colonialism was negotiated, and further recognised, through conflicts over colonial museum collections. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork examining the Museum’s various work practices, this book highlights the Museum’s embeddedness in colonial logics and shows how these unfold in the Museum’s everyday activity. It addresses the diverse areas of expertise in the Ethnological Museum – the preservation, storage, curation, and research of collections – and also draws on archival research and oral history interviews with current and former employees. Working through Colonial Collections unravels the ongoing and laborious processes of reckoning with colonialism in the Ethnological Museum’s present – processes from which other ethnological museums, as well as Western museums more generally, can learn. With a preface by Sharon Macdonald. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
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.
This is a study of a unique collection of Inner Mongolian artifacts at the National Museum of Denmark. They are described, analyzed and presented in a catalogue of more than 800 items, documenting ...the daily life of pastoral society in and around the tent, in the herding of the animals, in caravan trade and in hunting, crafts, sports and games, and in ritual life. Information about the objects was obtained during two expeditions to Inner Mongolia in the 1930s led by the Danish author Henning Haslund-Christensen, who had many years' experience of travel and expedition life in Mongolia. This is also a detailed account of the expeditions; of the routes, means and measures, as well as the worries and hopes of the participants; of their struggles with scientific aspirations; and of the conditions for collecting against the backdrop of the Chinese civil war and the Japanese occupation. The First and Second Danish Expeditions to Central Asia took place in 1936-1937 and 1938-1939 respectively. These expeditions were the sole foreign parties with access to the area at the time, and therefore their members were among the few observers of Inner Mongolian pastoral society at a time and place for which information was, and still is, scant and fragmented. Hence, the material objects and data obtained are of great scientific importance in the documentation of the life and material culture of Inner Mongolian herders in the 1930s - the main subject of the present book.
The paper examines the state of ethnological collections in two post-apartheid South African museums, with a specific focus on cataloguing, and is based, inter alia, on an appraisal of ...anthropological discourses that informed the collections. A discussion of the artefacts’ background is of importance in establishing their origins, motives for their presence in collections and the current state of these collections. Presently, such information is difficult to establish since persons who have knowledge regarding the makers, donors and collectors of artefacts are no longer part of the museums’ establishment. Evidently, curators face a huge challenge in cataloguing such materials with only patchy information available.In South Africa many ethnological collections of artefacts produced by Africans are 'owned' by heritage institutions, but the care expanded on the objects consists mainly in placing them in storeroom facilities where they are distant from custodians, devoid of identifying material, and insufficiently researched. I contend that the lacklustre manner of assessing items of indigenous material culture in museums of ethnography, and the accompanying decontextualization, are irreconcilable with their original socio-cultural and environmental significance, their meanings and technological trends. The question is what to do with museum collections of rare indigenous material culture, created in the colonial and apartheid era but which, unfortunately, are left without relevant information?
As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic
development, indigenous tribal people known as adivasis continue to
be overrepresented among the country's poor. Adivasis make up more
than eight ...hundred communities in India, with a total population of
more than 100 million people who speak more than three hundred
different languages. Although their historical presence is
acknowledged by the state and they are lauded as a part of India's
ethnic identity today, their poverty has been compounded by the
suppression of their cultural heritage and lifestyle.
In Adivasi Art and Activism , Alice Tilche draws on
anthropological fieldwork conducted in rural western India to chart
changes in adivasi aesthetics, home life, attire, food, and ideas
of religiosity that have emerged from negotiation with the
homogenizing forces of Hinduization, development, and globalization
in the twenty-first century. She documents curatorial projects
located not only in museums and art institutions, but in the realms
of the home, the body, and the landscape. Adivasi Art and
Activism raises vital questions about preservation and
curation of indigenous material and provides an astute critique of
the aesthetics and politics of Hindu nationalism.
This book explores a complex relational assemblage, a collection of 1481 Pacific artefacts brought together by Captain Edward Henry Meggs Davis, during the three voyages of HMS Royalist between ...1890-1893. The collection is indicative not just of a period of colonial collecting in the Pacific, but also the development of ethnographic collections in the UK and Europe. This period of history remains present in the social and cultural lives of many Pacific Islanders today.Using the collections as a starting point the book is divided into two parts. The first provides the historical background to the three voyages of HMS Royalist, discussing each voyage, its aims and outcomes, and the role that Davis played within this. Davis' motivations to collect and the various means of collecting that he employed are then explored within this historical context. Finally the first part considers what happened to the collection once it was sent from the Pacific to England, where and how it was sold, and how the collection was a part of and subject to the networks of museums, and private collectors in the UK and Europe during the end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century. It offers a detailed view of the contents and development of the collection, and what the collection can tell us about British ethnographic collecting at the end of the nineteenth century.The second part of the book explores the traces left by the ship amongst the Pacific Islands communities it visited. Focusing on three Pacific Islands- Vanuatu, Solomon Islands and Kiribati- the chapters in this section interrogate the contemporary relevance of this period of colonial history for Islanders today, exploring current social, political and environmental issues.
Islam and Heritage in Europe Sharon Macdonald; Katarzyna Puzon; Mirjam Shatanawi
2021, 20210525, Letnik:
1
eBook
Odprti dostop
Islam and Heritage in Europe provides a critical investigation of the role of Islam in Europe’s heritage. Focusing on Islam, heritage and Europe, it seeks to productively trouble all of these terms ...and throw new light on the relationships between them in various urban, national and transnational contexts. Bringing together international scholars from a range of disciplines, this collection examines heritage-making and Islam in the context of current events in Europe, as well as analysing past developments and future possibilities. Presenting work based on ethnographic, historical and archival research, chapters are concerned with questions of diversity, mobility, decolonisation, translocality, restitution and belonging. By looking at diverse trajectories of people and things, this volume encompasses multiple perspectives on the relationship between Islam and heritage in Europe, including the ways in which it has played out and transformed against the backdrop of the ‘refugee crisis’ and other recent developments, such as debates on decolonising museums or the resurgence of nationalist sentiments. Islam and Heritage in Europe discusses specific articulations of belonging and non-belonging, and the ways in which they create new avenues for re-thinking Islam and heritage in Europe. This ensures that the book will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of heritage, museums, Islam, Europe, anthropology, archaeology and art history. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (see also http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).
Because the archaeology of West Mexico has received little attention from researchers, large segments of the region's prehistoric ceramic sequences have long remained incomplete. This book goes far ...toward filling that gap by analyzing a collection of potsherds excavated in the 1960s and housed since then, though heretofore unanalyzed, at UCLA. The authors employ the rarely used statistical technique known as correspondence analysis to sequence the Long-Glassow collection of artifacts. The book explains how correspondence analysis works and how it can be applied in archaeology. In addition to describing the archaeological sites in north central Jalisco where the collection comes from, the authors provide an ethnohistorical overview including information on the earliest Spanish explorers to reach the sites. They sequence more than seventy ceramic types and derive a master sequence from more than ten thousand potsherds. In addition to Mesoamerican archaeologists, the audience will also include other archaeologists concerned with ceramic analysis or the application of statistics to archaeology.
Heritage work has had a uniquely wide currency in Africa's politics. Secure within the pages of books, encoded in legal statutes, encased in glass display cases and enacted in the panoply of court ...ritual, the artefacts produced by the heritage domain have become a resource for government administration, a library for traditionalists and a marketable source of value for cultural entrepreneurs. The Politics of Heritage in Africa draws together disparate fields of study - history, archaeology, linguistics, the performing arts and cinema - to show how the lifeways of the past were made into capital, a store of authentic knowledge that political and cultural entrepreneurs could draw from. This book shows African heritage to be a mode of political organisation, a means by which the relics of the past are shored up, reconstructed and revalued as commodities, as tradition, as morality or as patrimony.
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