How can we rethink anthropology beyond itself? In this book, twenty-one artists, anthropologists, and curators grapple with how anthropology has been formulated, thought, and practised 'elsewhere' and 'otherwise'. They do so by unfolding ethnographic case studies from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland - and through conversations that expand these geographies and genealogies of contemporary exhibition making. This collection considers where and how anthropology is troubled, mobilised, and rendered meaningful. 'Across Anthropology' charts new ground (...) by analysing the convergences of museums, curatorial practice, and Europe's reckoning with its colonial legacies. Situated amid resurgent debates on nationalism and identity politics, this book addresses scholars and practitioners in fields spanning the arts, social sciences, humanities, and curatorial studies."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Museums are key cultural loci of our times. They are symbols and sites for the playing out of social relations of identity and difference, knowledge and power, theory and representation. These are issues at the heart of contemporary anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. This volume brings together original contributions from international scholars to show how social and cultural theory can bring new insight to debate about museums. Analytical perspectives on the museum are drawn from the anthropology and (...) sociology of globalization, time, space and consumption, as well as from feminism, psychoanalysis, experimental ethnography and literary theory. These perspectives are brought to bear on questions of museums' changing role and position in the representation of the nation-state, of community, and of gender, class and ethnicity. The examples in this book are drawn from different kinds of museum around the world, and include significant controversial and experimental exhibitions; the Enola Gay at the Smithsonian; feminist exhibitions in Scandinavia; the National Museum of Sri Lanka; Victorian art at the Tate; the representation of race at Colonial Williamsburg and of colonialism and identity in Canada. (shrink)

The main purpose of this study is the scientific practice of Edgard Roquette-Pinto at the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro during the 1910’s and 1920’s in the XXth Century. The article examines the relationship between laboratory science and nation building. Driven by Physicians-Anthropologists like Edgard Roquette-Pinto among others, the investigations performed at the Anthropology Laboratory there reveal the dynamic of the borders between Laboratory and Field Sciences, and the new biological parameters adopted at that time. The investigative (...) agenda involved plants, animals and human bodies, and it was related to the current Anthropology concept aligned with the debate of Nation construction. The physiological studies amplified the scientific exchange with different institutions, emphasizing cultural exchange between Brazil and Paraguay, and the role played by Edgard Roquette-Pinto there as he inaugurated the Physiological course at Faculty of Medicine at University of Asunción. (shrink)

This article examines the question of how can museum professionals and the interested public resolve the competing claims of traditional ownership and continuing scientific research in relation to museum collections.

This paper explores the process from museumization to decolonization through an examination of a Haida eagle mask currently on display in the Exploring Medicine gallery at the Science Museum in London. While elements of this discussion are well developed in some disciplines, such as Indigenous studies, anthropology and museum and heritage studies, this paper approaches the topic through the history of science, where decolonization and global perspectives are still gaining momentum. The aim therefore is to offer some (...) opening perspectives and methods on how historians of science can use the ideas and approaches relating to decolonization in other fields, and apply them constructively to the history of science, particularly in museum settings. Decolonization is a complicated process and the focus of this paper is squarely on the preliminary steps of its implementation. To understand this process fully, the paper will recontextualize the Indigenous history of the Haida eagle mask at the Science Museum through a careful reconstruction of its provenance record. Through this process it will expose the politics of erasure and hidden voices in museum collections. (shrink)

In his fortieth anniversary commemoration of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts and Decoration in 1937, John Dewey wrote confidently about the development of museums as educational institutions. As Dewey argued, “[o]ne of the most striking features of recent American culture has been the rapid growth of museums in all lines, artistic, commercial and industrial; of natural history, anthropology and antiquities.” Dewey explained that it “has become generally recognized” that museums “occupy as necessary a place in popular (...) education as do public libraries,” arguing that “[v]ision of [museums’] educational function has kept pace with their material expansion.” In general, Dewey contended, a “museum that is directed... (shrink)

This collection of essays is based on the 2005 Society for American Archaeology symposium and presents research that epitomizes Richard I. Ford’s approach of engaged anthropology. This transdisciplinary approach integrates archaeological research with perspectives from ethnography, history, and ecology, and engages the anthropologist with Native partners and with socio-natural landscapes. Research papers largely focus on the U.S. Southwest, but also consider other areas of North America, issues related to museums collections, and indigenous approaches to materials research.

Focused on the material practices of making insect specimens, I explore how shifting concepts of potential are intricately crafted on the lab bench. Different types of time—from personal histories to imagined futures—are created and entangled as butterflies are made into specimens. Transforming a butterfly into a scientific tool does not merely transform the butterfly, I suggest, but also reciprocally folds back to transform the scientist who makes it. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with scientists in the labs and workrooms at the (...) Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC and the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, California, I follow butterflies and moths (Lepidoptera) as they are collected, euthanized, pinned, genetically sampled for rewilding projects, such as reviving a Californian sand dune ecology, and frozen in biobanks for as-yet-unknown future uses. Through a comparative study of practices at these two sites, I examine how a butterfly can contain multiple types of potential: manifesting its inherent potential as it transforms from caterpillar to butterfly, the plasticity of the butterfly body as it is crafted into a scientific specimen, and the potential of that specimen to be used as a site for extracting genomic data. Perceptions of time, salvation, loss, and care emerge as specimens are prepared, sampled, and reimagined as solutions for recreating lost ecologies. (shrink)

This paper aims to demonstrate how museum collection sustainability is grounded in a range of concrete care practices that are social and material. It explores the unstable nature of heritage materials, drawing on the ecological approach of infrastructure and maintenance studies in the field of art and museums. To do this, I analyse the role of mundane operations in the daily functioning of an exhibition area, presenting data from fieldwork I conducted from 2015–2016 at the Musée du quai Branly (...) in Paris, which preserves collections of art and ethnology from outside Europe. I observed the museum's preventive conservation practices, which work to minimise the risks of material deterioration of heritage objects, focusing attention on stabilising the relationship between objects and their environments. These practices contribute to the construction of the temporalities of museum objects. In exploring the means and devices of preserving these heritage objects, the very assumption of perpetuation is destabilised. Environments continually unfold with the silent material metamorphosis of objects. The exhibition becomes a place of flows, where a multitude of entities circulate and cohabit at different scales, such as insects, dust, and powdery fragments. The daily human work of vacuuming, cleaning, trapping, and measuring provide a set of actions united with other entities engaged in the material life of the exhibited object. As we zoom in on the exhibition space, different timelines emerge that are inextricably linked to the different lives of the museum. (shrink)

This groundbreaking book is the first to provide a critical overview of the relationship between contemporary ceramics and curatorial practice in museum culture. Ceramic objects form a major part of museum collections, with connections to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines that engage with the cultural and social history of humankind. In recent years museums have provided the impetus for cutting-edge artistic practice, either as a response to particular collections, or as part of exhibitions. But the question of (...) how museums have staged contemporary ceramics and how ceramic artists respond to museum collections has not been the subject of published research to date. This book examines how ceramic artists have, over the last decade, begun to animate museum collections in new ways, and reflects on the impact that these new initiatives have had in the broad context of visual culture. Ceramics in the Expanded Field is the culmination of a three-year AHRC funded project, and reflects its major findings. It brings together leading international voices in the field of ceramics, research undertaken throughout the project and papers delivered at the concluding conference. By examining the benefits and constraints of interventions and the dialogue between ceramics and museological practice, this book will bring focus to an area of museology that has not yet been theorized, and will contribute to policy debates and art practice. (shrink)

This two‐part article examines the very limited engagement by philosophers with museums, and proposes analysis under six headings: cultural variety, taxonomy, and epistemology in Part I, and teleology, ethics, and therapeutics and aesthetics in Part II. The article establishes that fundamental categories of museums established in the 19th century – of art, of anthropology, of history, of natural history, of science and technology – still persist. Among them, it distinguishes between hegemonic (predominantly Western) and subaltern (minority or Indigenous) museums (...) worldwide. It argues that relations between hegemonic and subaltern museums are often agonistic, and are compromised by claims of universalism on the part of proponents of the former. The article observes that most discussion of museums focuses exclusively and misleadingly on their public exhibition function, and contends that scholarship – not exhibition – is central to all museums. However, that predominantly taxonomic scholarship, while innovative and central to a dominant epistemology based on the observation of tangible things in the 19th century, was compromised by the epistemic shift to abstraction and experimentation in the 20th, which resulted in a loss of initiative and authority. Although epistemological changes currently in progress favor a renewed attention to tangible things as complex matrices to which museums ought to contribute significantly, the fundamental taxonomy of museums by collection type is a clog on the ability of museum scholars to engage with and themselves produce big ideas. In order to function well as sites of scholarship in the future, museums will have to be far more adaptable and attentive to a wider range of things and ideas (including Indigenous ideas incompatible with Western assumptions) than their existing collection divisions permit. (shrink)

As museums begin to revisit their definition of ‘‘expert’’ in light of theories about the local character of knowledge, questions emerge about how museums can reconsider their documentation of knowledge about objects. How can a museum present different and possibly conflicting perspectives in such a way that the tension between them is preserved? This article expands upon a collaborative research project between the Museum of Anthropology and Archaeology at Cambridge University, University of California, Los Angeles, and the (...) A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center to compare descriptions of museum objects by multiple expert communities. We found that narratives and objects in use are key omissions in traditional museum documentation, offering us several possibilities to expand our concept of digital objects. Digital objects will allow members of indigenous source communities to contribute descriptive information about objects to support local cultural revitalization efforts and also to influence how objects are represented in distant cultural institutions. (shrink)

The natural history museum is a place where the line between "high" and "low" culture effectively vanishes--where our awe of nature, our taste for the bizarre, and our thirst for knowledge all blend happily together. But as Stephen Asma shows in Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, there is more going on in these great institutions than just smart fun. Asma takes us on a wide-ranging tour of natural history museums in New York and Chicago, London and Paris, interviewing curators, (...) scientists, and exhibit designers, and providing a wealth of fascinating observations. We learn how the first museums were little more than high-toned side shows, with such garish exhibits as the pickled head of Peter the Great's lover. In contrast, today's museums are hot-beds of serious science, funding major research in such fields as anthropology and archaeology. "Rich in detail, lucid explanation, telling anecdotes, and fascinating characters.... Asma has rendered a fascinating and credible account of how natural history museums are conceived and presented. It's the kind of book that will not only engage a wide and diverse readership, but it should, best of all, send them flocking to see how we look at nature and ourselves in those fabulous legacies of the curiosity cabinet."--The Boston Herald. (shrink)

This book focuses on the reconfiguration of aesthetic anthropology into an anthropological problem of cogitation, opening up a fascinating new dialogue between the domains of anthropology, philosophy, and art. Tarek Elhaik embarks on an inquiry composed of a series of cogitations based on fieldwork in an ecology of artistic and scientific practices: from conceptual art exhibitions to architectural environments; from photographic montages to the videotaping of spirit seances; from artistic interventions in natural history museums to ongoing dialogues between (...) performance artists and marine scientists. The chapters examine the image-work, ethical demands, and aesthetic struggles of interlocuters including artists Mathias Goeritz, Mounir Fatmi, Silvia Gruner, Joan Jonas, and Patricia Lagarde. (shrink)

The stage-like “exhibitionary space,” which members of the public visit, has received more scholarly scrutiny than the pedagogical and curatorial activities that take place in the back rooms of museums. This essay draws attention to the behind-the-scenes places in university museums as a pedagogic site where students learn through the close examination of artefacts. It addresses the social context of learning through the study of incomplete objects, which may involve handling them. This process of using artefacts to engage with different (...) groups of people (collectors, curators, teaching staff and students) contributes to the physical and intellectual development of academic disciplines. It enhances the museum's institutional mission and survival as an incorporated body that is embedded in a greater whole, the university itself. The Ashmolean Museum, in the University of Oxford, and the Balfourian and Sibbaldian Museums, in the University of Edinburgh, were founded in the seventeenth century. But whereas the Ashmolean survived as an institution, the first Edinburgh collections did not. These historical antecedents serve as a backdrop to a discussion of how one particular example, the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (CUMAA), trains new generations of learners to evaluate empirical evidence and by working with different communities of users—students and the wider public—it ensures its survival. (shrink)

The outburst of antiracist protests in the USA in 2020 demonstrates how deeply this society’s present-day problems are rooted in its past. From this perspective, a study of the cultural memory of the time of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the key moment in the contemporary American nation formation, is especially relevant and important. The cultural frontier between the North and the South that had appeared as an outcome of differences in US history has not disappeared up (...) to now. By example of the complexity and inconsistency of the historical memory of the Civil War, slavery, and its abolition in the USA manifested in their visual representations, the article documents how through collective memory, history does not just invade modernity but is present in it, particularly in the form of memorials, monuments, museum expositions, and therefore determines the nation’s modernity to a large degree. (shrink)

Jade products that imitate ancient Chinese art samples are a special kind of objects that, in their form and decor, are close to or likened to more ancient works of arts and crafts. The article explores the artistic form and characteristic features of imitations of ancient jade products of the Qing era, presented in the collections of Russian museums and the Palace Museum of China. The object of the study are objects of Chinese art of jade carving, which are (...) in the collection of the Palace Museum (Beijing), the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Peter the Great (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences (St. Petersburg) and the State Museum of Oriental Art (Moscow), where the use of imitations of ancient objects was discovered. Artistic analysis of jade imitations allows us to conclude that the works of the Qing era were more complex and diverse in form, decor and carving techniques compared to Han products, while the craftsmen, although they managed to preserve the classical sophistication of objects, lost the severity and solemnity of Han jade. As well as the art history analysis of the works, one can see that the forms and decors of jade objects are the product of aesthetic consciousness. The novelty of this study lies in the fact that the varieties and features of imitations of ancient jade during the Qing Dynasty are summarized, and the huohuan technique in jade processing is confirmed. This may be of interest to researchers in related scientific fields. (shrink)

In 1866, six Inuits were taken to the United States for the purpose of serving as specimens to American scientists at the Natural History Museum. Shortly after their arrival in New York, four of them had died. One of the survivors returned to the Arctic, while the sixth, Minik, now alone, fought to make possible the return of the remains of his dead companions to their village. Since the latter were being exhibited, as was then often the case (and (...) happens even today in many museums), in order to offer visitors examples of the Inuk people, Minik protested in vain. In 1909 he returned to Greenland when the scientists denied that the remains of his friends still existed. Several years later, still pursuing the issue, he went back to the United States to take up the fight against the bureaucracy for the repatriation of the bodies. He died in the United States in 1918. It was only in 1993 that he won out and that the remains of the four were returned to the Arctic homeland. (shrink)

The Vrolik ethnographical collection consisted of roughly 300 skulls, mummified heads, skeletons, pelvises, wet-preserved preparations, and plaster models, collected by Gerard Vrolik (1775–1859) and his son Willem (1801–1863). Most prominent in this collection were the skulls, of which 177 remain in the collection of present-day Museum Vrolik. These skulls—a troubling heritage of colonialism and scientific racism—are the central subjects of this paper, which considers the changing meanings and values of these skulls for racial science over approximately 160 years, between (...) ± 1800 and 1960. These shifting meanings are analysed using the skulls themselves as primary sources, including the labels, numbers and handwriting present on them or their stands. Central topics addressed will be matters of classification, hierarchy, scientific bias, and disciplinary development of racial anthropology from the study and collection of idealized national types to a quantitative craniometry of populations. This paper demonstrates that during 160 years of study of this same set of crania, the skulls of white European origin gradually lost racial relevance and were increasingly normalized, whereas the skulls of dark-skinned people of African descent continued to be categorized in a typological racial scheme and as such were increasingly othered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Nature and Nurture in French Ethnography and Anthropology, 1859-1914Martin StaumThe adaptability of non-European peoples to "civilization" was a critical issue deriving from the perennial nature-nurture question that haunted debates in the human sciences in late nineteenth-century France.1 The emerging scholarly disciplines of anthropology and ethnography helped provide a scientific veneer that bolstered existing cultural prejudices concerning the innate limitations or retarded development of non-Europeans. Certainly there were (...) many other pragmatic reasons for imperial expansion, and racists did not automatically become imperialists. But if, as Edward Said contended, imperialism "depends upon the idea of having an empire," there is no doubt that many ethnographers and anthropologists helped legitimate the idea.2 Their debates retain a resonance in our twenty-first century postcolonial world struggling with questions of identity, integration, and cultural diversity.Relying on reports from travelers, missionaries, or colonial officials, human scientists from across the political and religious spectrum justified European superiority. Although a few journalists and philosophers outside the scholarly societies represented a minority anti-imperialist counter-current, the remarkable pervasiveness of hierarchical thinking affected both socially radical anthropologists and more conservative ethnographers.3 While ethnographers proclaimed universal fraternity, they conceded that physical differences affected [End Page 475] intellect and character. The later attack on hereditarianism by Durkheimian sociologists and isolated anthropologists with the catalyst of the Dreyfus Affair is all the more striking.4 As George Stocking has argued concerning a British Victorian thinker, the cultural differences between Europeans and non-Europeans became so entangled with biological issues that there was "difficulty conceptualizing them except in terms of 'race.' "5The two most notable anthropological scholarly societies of the late nineteenth century, both founded in 1859, were the Société d'ethnographie orientale et américaine and the Société d'anthropologie de Paris. Historians have justifiably noted their mutual aversion and have contrasted their differences over scientific method, politics, and religion.6 The ethnographers, inspired by a student of Japanese language and Asian religion, Léon de Rosny (1837-1914), were largely linguists and specialists in Asian texts and pre-Columbian codices that represented partly civilized peoples. Rosny invented the term "ambiantisme" for a philosophy that ostensibly privileged the cultural milieu rather than inborn human nature.7 The society membership varied between 115 in 1864 and 470 in 1878, though it declined to 165 by 1903.8 As a group, compared to the anthropologists, they were more politically conservative, more socially elite, and more inclined toward conventional religion, with its belief in the unity of the species. Their "science of destiny" stressed human freedom and unalterably opposed philosophical materialism.9 [End Page 476]The anthropologists, headed by physician and anatomist Paul Broca (1824-80) consisted of a hard core of like-minded medically trained colleagues. The anthropologists' membership peaked around 500 both in 1885 and 1905, though, they, too declined to 165 by 1914.10 Historians have analyzed the nature-nurture issue more subtly for the anthropologists.11 While the Society almost always expressed interest in both physical and cultural spheres, they privileged the study of crania as an index to the intellectual and moral characteristics of "races." The more extreme hereditarians thought that the nature of allegedly inferior "races" precluded perfectibility. Armand de Quatrefages (1810-92), professor of anthropology at the Muséum national d'histoire naturelle and pioneer of the so-called Muséum school, in his later years cast doubt on whether physical indicators actually demonstrated human superiority. However, the Muséum school did not generally renounce racial hierarchy, though they believed that environmental influences formed and continued to shape human varieties.12 In addition, philosophical materialists, militant atheists, and politically radical thinkers dominated the society in the generation after Broca's death. Almost all were neo-Lamarckians who leavened the idea of a fixed human nature with the possibility of adaptation to a milieu and transmissible acquired characteristics.13 The medical physiologist Charles Richet reported that "heredity and milieu are not antagonistic, but synergistic."14 However, many accounts underplay the differential application of neo-Lamarckianism. In this "racial evolutionist paradigm" already noticed by Laurent Mucchielli, even the Muséum school found only civilized people adaptable... (shrink)

The evolutionist theories of Bachofen on the priority of matriarchy are today no more than one of the most unusual pieces of the historical museum of anthropology. The wealth and diversity of historical and literary sources therein are juxtaposed with the construction of a conjectural chronology organizing the relationship between the sexes in a progressive mode and in accordance with an immanent finality. But it is also necessary to distinguish, on the one hand, Bachofen's historicism as an expression (...) of the evolutionist tendencies of that time, based on natural sciences and the results of Darwin's work, and, on the other, interest in the inter-sexual relationship within the social institution. For the invention of successive stages in order to propose a social history of sexuality is based as much on evolutionism as on constitutive psychic representations of the individual. By projecting these representations into a pseudo-historical period and by ordering them, at each level, in terms of the two parameters of domination / subjection and collectivity / individuality, Bachofen assigned semantics to history and an evolutionary sense to transformations in marriage and the family. And by conferring historical validity on the myths of Antiquity, he set forth an implicit denial both of the work of the imagination (not to say sub-conscious, which would be an anachronism for this pre-Freudian period) as well as of ideological ruses in the political field. Bachovian evolutionism thus developed a new myth out of the ancient myths, false witnesses of the past but authentic representatives of the ahistorical present of the psyche, endowing with scientific color the image of humanity progressing from dominance of the mother and collectivism to the triumph of the father and individualism. The idea of “matriarchy” (Mutterrecht) in Bachofen is indeed to be taken in the sense of “maternal dominance” (as the German expression better suggests), and not that of political power of women. (shrink)

The debate over the influence of American culture upon Europe and the rest of the world is hardly new. Discussions about the cultural effects of video recorders, satellite broadcasting, cable television and their likely content are only the latest episode in a long-running drama in which the young and aggressive culture of America bludgeons the elderly culture of old Europe (or correspondingly overruns and wipes out the quaint but ill-armed ethnic cultures of the less-developed world, dragging the natives from coconuts (...) to Coca-Cola in a generation of identity crisis). But though there has been much written about some aspects of this issue, and most non-Americans who have come into contact with American culture have some awareness of its dimensions, there is also much which remains unclear, and ill- or misunderstood. In this essay two aspects of this large and complex problem will be examined. Firstly, the problem of how the “Americanisation of world culture” has been understood until now will be outlined, by looking at its background in the mass culture critique of the 19th and 20th centuries, with some current notions of what American culture is, and some accounts of how it has been internationalized. My aim in this first section is in particular to try to isolate “American culture” from commercial and industrial culture more generally, for a conflation of these phenomena is widespread and very misleading. Secondly, a normative argument will be outlined from the premises that a “superculture” is indeed developing and that, though it is less threatening than many suspect, it requires a vital measure of resistance if many valuable elements of human experience are not to be relegated to anthropology museums. The central value which will be defended here, however, is not “Europeanism” or “Americanism”, but rather the central liberal virtue of diversity, of which cultural expression is an extremely important form. My attempt to develop a politics of cultural protectionism, then, represents a wish to surpass simplistic rejections of American culture and to come to terms with the confrontation of culture with industrial society itself. This involves going beyond the traditional discussion of culture in one country, however, and trying to extend the mass culture debate to the international arena, where the present debate on this problem is far more complex but often less sophisticated. (shrink)

Embedding Ethics questions why ethics have been divorced from scientific expertise. Invoking different disciplinary practices from biological, archaeological, cultural, and linguistic anthropology, contributors show how ethics should be resituated at the heart of, rather than exterior to, scientific activity. Positioning the researcher as a negotiator of significant truths rather than an adjudicator of a priori precepts enables contributors to relocate ethics in new sets of social and scientific relationships triggered by recent globalization processes--from new forms of intellectual and cultural (...) ownership to accountability in governance, and the very ways in which people are studied. Case studies from ethnographic research, museum display, archaeological fieldwork and professional monitoring illustrate both best practice and potential pitfalls. (shrink)

Museum visitors partake in the effect of what we can call the domestication of the view. They witness the constant changes in how objects are allowed to exist in a museological space. In this way, visitors are challenged to cultivate new sensibilities that simultaneously reveal and conceal things and their relationships. These meanings have been subject to political debates, controversies, disputes, and conflicts around property rights involving museum representatives and other actors. As a result, the domesticated things inside (...) the museums threaten to displace themselves, moving towards the uncertainty of other shelters and other hands. Each time other flows and movements towards other ‘homes’ are asserted by different sort of groups and communities to reclaim or ‘bring home’ objects previously obtained through a mixture of pillaging, acquisitions, donations, and violent actions, distinct voices ask the same question: whose home? By exploring a case concerning the restitution of objects outside and inside museums, this article explores an alternative understanding of the notion of the house as a legitimate relationship between materiality and those worlds in which objects dwell. In the first sections, to explore the idea of heterotopy coined by Michel Foucault from an anthropological perspective, I return to some interpretations of notions such as ‘home’ and ‘house’ drawing on classical ethnographies. Secondly, I focus on what Ghassan Hage calls a ‘diasporic lenticularity’ to explore other “modes of existing” in multiple places and realities. Finally, I conclude by revolving distinct cases concerning museum practices and reallocation processes, transforming and (re)creating new spaces to locate and house unstable objects and presences. (shrink)

Purpose of the essay is to outline the theoretical roots of Ricci’s museum and publishing policies, inscribed within a visual disclosure plan of our archaeological artistic heritage identified as the pivot on which to build a collective identity of our nation at the dawn of its unification. These policies are closely linked to Ricci’s conception of art, recognized by himself as the formal expression of a – both individual and collective – historical feeling, finding its immediate grip on the (...) public in the optical vividness of its representational form. This conception, however, finds its aesthetic-anthropological foundation in a book belonging to Ricci’s early production: “The art of children”. (shrink)

Le Musée d’Anatomie humaine de l’Université de Turin , créé en 1739, fut transféré en 1898 dans le bâtiment où il se trouve actuellement, dans des locaux caractérisés par une architecture monumentale. Il a été récemment restauré dans le but de retrouver l’atmosphère de l’époque, et en même temps, le projet à fait l’objet d’une réflexion attentive sur les possibilités de le transformer de musée savant en musée communiquant. Le Musée d’Anatomie humaine fait partie d’un pôle muséal turinois en développement (...) qui comprend actuellement, en outre, le Musée des Fruits et le Musée d’Anthropologie criminelle « Cesare Lombroso ». Ces trois musées, qui accueillent presque 200 visiteurs par jour, offrent un bel aperçu du positivisme scientifique, qui fut particulièrement important à Turin.The University of Turin’s Museum of Human Anatomy, founded in 1739, was transferred in 1898 to the building it still occupies, which is notable for its monumental style of architecture. It was recently restored to the atmosphere of its day, but during the project, careful consideration was given to possibilities for transforming this scholarly establishment into a communicational museum. It is one of those included in Turin’s new museums project, alongside the Museum of Fruit and the Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology. All three museums, which have about 200 visitors a day, offer valuable insights into scientific positivism, which was particularly influential in Turin. (shrink)

The American Museum of Natural History is monumental not only in its architecture and design but also in its size, scope, and content. This monumental quality suggests in and of itself the primary meaning of the museum inherited from its history: comprehensive collecting as a form of domination.8 In this respect museums belong to an era of scientific and colonial ambition, from the Renaissance through the early twentieth century, with its climactic moment in the second half of the (...) nineteenth century. It belongs in the category of nineteenth-century endeavors such as experimental medicine , evolutionary biology , and the naturalistic novel , all of which claimed to present a comprehensive social study. Such projects have been definitively compromised by postromantic critique, postcolonial protest, and postmodern disillusionment.9But in spite of its appearance, that prefix post- doesn’t make things any easier. Any museum of this size and ambition is today saddled with a double status; it is necessarily also a museum of the museum, a preserve not for endangered species but for an endangered self, a “metamuseum”: the museal preservation of a project ruthlessly dated and belonging to an age long gone whose ideological goals have been subjected to extensive critique.10 Willy-nilly, such a museum solicits reflections on and of its own ideological positions and history. It speaks to its own complicity with practices of domination while it continues to pursue an educational project that, having emerged out of those practices, has been adjusted to new conceptions and pedagogical needs. Indeed, the use of the museum in research and education is insisted on in its self-representations, including the Guide. 9. For an example of the postmodern critique, see Michael M. J. Fischer, “Ethnicity and the Postmodern Arts of Memory,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. Clifford and George E. Marcus , pp. 194-233.10. The metamuseal function of a museum like the American Museum is analyzed in Ames, Museums, the Public, and Anthropology. Mieke Bal is professor of the theory of literature at the University of Amsterdam and retains a visiting professorship in the comparative arts program at the University of Rochester. Her most recent book is Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition. (shrink)

1. Aretè : idei i obrazi v sbornata dobrodetelnost -- 2. Aretè : ekzistent︠s︡ialno-t︠s︡ennostna sistema -- 3. Aretè : obuchenie i vŭzpitanie na lidera -- 4. Aretè : upravlenie na dŭrzhavnostta i sigurnostta -- 5. Aretè v muzei︠a︡ : razvitie v strukturata i upravlenieto na evropeĭskii︠a︡ istoricheski muzeĭ -- 6. Avtoreferat na Aretè-logii︠a︡ : knigi I-V.

The Predicament of Culture is a critical ethnography of the West in its changing relations with other societies. Analyzing cultural practices such as anthropology, travel writing, collecting, and museum displays of tribal art, Clifford shows authoritative accounts of other ways of life to be contingent fictions, now actively contested in postcolonial contexts. In discussions of ethnography, surrealism, museums, and emergent tribal arts, Clifford probes the late twentieth-century predicament of living simultaneously within, between, and after culture.

When culture makes itself at home in motion, where does an anthropologist stand? In a follow-up to The Predicament of Culture, one of the defining books for anthropology in the last decade, James Clifford takes the proper measure: a moving picture of a world that doesn't stand still, that reveals itself en route, in the airport lounge and the parking lot as much as in the marketplace and the museum. In this collage of essays, meditations, poems, and travel (...) reports, Clifford takes travel and its difficult companion, translation, as openings into a complex modernity. He contemplates a world ever more connected yet not homogeneous, a global history proceeding from the fraught legacies of exploration, colonization, capitalist expansion, immigration, labor mobility, and tourism. Ranging from Highland New Guinea to northern California, from Vancouver to London, he probes current approaches to the interpretation and display of non-Western arts and cultures. Wherever people and things cross paths and where institutional forces work to discipline unruly encounters, Clifford's concern is with struggles to displace stereotypes, to recognize divergent histories, to sustain "postcolonial" and "tribal" identities in contexts of domination and globalization. Travel, diaspora, border crossing, self-location, the making of homes away from home: these are transcultural predicaments for the late twentieth century. The map that might account for them, the history of an entangled modernity, emerges here as an unfinished series of paths and negotiations, leading in many directions while returning again and again to the struggles and arts of cultural encounter, the impossible, inescapable tasks of translation. (shrink)

The interdisciplinary field of the learning sciences encompasses educational psychology, cognitive science, computer science, and anthropology, among other disciplines. The Cambridge Handbook of the Learning Sciences, first published in 2006, is the definitive introduction to this innovative approach to teaching, learning, and educational technology. In this significantly revised third edition, leading scholars incorporate the latest research to provide seminal overviews of the field. This research is essential in developing effective innovations that enhance student learning - including how to write (...) textbooks, design educational software, prepare effective teachers, and organize classrooms. The chapters illustrate the importance of creating productive learning environments both inside and outside school, including after school clubs, libraries, and museums. The Handbook has proven to be an essential resource for graduate students, researchers, consultants, software designers, and policy makers on a global scale. (shrink)