Review: Chiefs and Governors: Art and Power in Fiji, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

Necklaces made from whale ivory and fish hooks of ivory, pearl and turtle shell were part of a lavish system of gifts between Fiji’s chiefs and their first British governor in the nineteenth century.


The importance of the sea resonates through the exhibition: whales, turtles, pearls, shells and coconuts. Jewellery and breastplates were made using an ingenious system designed for building canoes. 

More here.

Dawn at the Museum

A well argued blog entry by Olivia Judson about the ongoing scientific value of museum collections, especially biological objects--a series of reflections offered after wandering the Oxford University Museum of Natural History's storied halls. One wonders, though, how this argument could articulate with anthropological collections, particularly as we contemplate how things made by particular cultural communities to be valued in specific cultural contexts are used for more expansive questions that answer to the history of all humanity.

"Ties that Bind": A Wedding Customs Exhibit at Wake Forest MOA

From a Wake Forest University Press Release:

"Ties that Bind: Wedding Customs from Around the World,” a new exhibit showcasing wedding costumes from different cultures and exploring the role weddings play in different communities, will run Jan. 25 through May 3 at the Wake Forest University Museum of Anthropology.

The exhibit was developed by Lydia Dorsey, a senior anthropology major at Wake Forest, under the instruction of Beverlye Hancock, the museum curator. It includes traditional outfits and other items from the Hmong culture in Thailand, the Maasai culture in Kenya and many other cultures around the world. The exhibit shows how weddings and the connections they create are essential to social stability and continuity.

The wedding costumes in the exhibit are on loan from Ten Thousand Villages in Greensboro. Items from the museum’s collections are also incorporated in the exhibit.

In conjunction with the exhibit, Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz, author of “Wedding as Text: Communicating Cultural Identities through Ritual,” will present a lecture at 7:30 p.m. April 3. Leeds-Hurwitz is professor of communication at the University of Wisconsin at Parkside. The event is free and open to the public.

Admission to the museum is also free and open to the public. For more information, contact the museum at (336) 758-5282 or visit http://www.wfu.moa.edu/.

Image: Hmong wedding outfits displayed in the exhibit "Ties that Bind: Wedding Customs from Around the World."

Reviewed: I Do: The Marriage of Fashion and Art

As I have discussed previously, special exhibition reviews are notoriously difficult to commission for scholarly journals of all kinds. Thus I am pleased to have published today the first such review to appear on Museum Anthropology Review. Click here to access Carrie Hertz' fine review of the exhibition I Do: The Marriage of Fashion and Art, which was recently staged at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.

Darwin Revisited

On the Material World blog, Haidy Geismar has posted a supplimental note related to the review of the Darwin exhibition that she and the students in her Anthropology and Museums course authored last year for Museum Anthropology. Find the note here and the review itself in AnthroSource here. The review was highlighted in a previous post and the review is a great essay considering an important set of issues for our field.

The Museum of the Battle of Ideas

Published today on Museum Anthropology Review is an extended review essay by Michelle Tisdel Flikke in which she considers The Museum of the Battle of Ideas (el Museo a la Batalla de Ideas) in the Cuban town of Cardenas. This is the museum established by the Cuban government in the wake of the international custody battle centered on Elián González. The review essay is sure to be of interest to many professional readers in diverse fields as well as to the general public.

As a publishing matter, I am happy to note that this essay, which builds upon the momentum gained with the recent publishing of Karen Duffy's review essay on Pueblo pottery, is our first to offer a large number of author-submitted photographs. The ability to publish these color photographs at negligible cost highlights the value of this new media.

Appreciation is extended to Dr. Flikke for her interesting contribution. Readers will find her essay here.

Review Essay: Darwin on Display

The new issue of Museum Anthropology, [30(1)], which has just arrived in my snail mail box, also includes, in addition to the two articles previously highlighted here (and here), a rich, extended review essay of the Darwin exhibition organized by the American Museum of Natural History and now circulating to many large natural history museums. The review was undertaken by a team led by Haidy Geismar, known to many of us for her fine editorial work on the Material World blog. Working with Haidy were a group of students from her museum anthropology graduate seminar at New York University. The review can be found online in AnthroSource here.

The authors of this great essay are: Haidy Geismar, Lindsay Anderberg, Miranda Appelbaum, Jamieson Bunn, Cristina Diaz-Carrera, Robert Forloney, Sarah Malaika, Erin McLaughlin, Kristen Olson Eckman, Kathryn Osborn, Laura Potts, and Regina Richter.

What is going on with the reviews?

Those consulting the Museum Anthropology blog lately may have noticed the appearance of additional full blown reviews (and an obituary)--the kind of material typical of the journal itself. On the editorial side, the work of Museum Anthropology is going very, very well. Thanks to many generous, talented colleagues, we have outstanding contributions, both accepted articles and solicited reviews, arriving each week. I am eager to share this great work as quickly as I am able. On the structural side, Museum Anthropology and its sponsor, the Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA), are facing many of the same challenges and changing circumstances that are affecting many other scholarly journals, and academic publishers more broadly. The stresses being confronted by the sections of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and their journals in the AAA publishing program are a subject of considerable discussion in American anthropology. I will not explore this topic here except to note that, in the present environment, we are not in a position in which additional pages can be added to the journal's print issues. Adding an additional issue or issues to each volume, while imaginable now on the editorial side, is even more beyond our present means.

Some of the review authors in the recent cue have proven willing to join an experiment in which we begin offering their fine scholarly work online. Reviews by three colleagues--John H. McDowell, Joshua Piker and Carol Hendrickson--have been posted to this weblog. The results so far are instructive. If one does a Google web search for the three titles that they have reviewed--The Cord Keepers by Frank Salomon, Practicing Ethnohistory by Patricia Galloway, and Fashioning Tradition by J. Clarie Odland--one finds that the reviews that appeared here are already showing up at the top of Google's ranking. Galloway's book is a relatively recent work that has not yet been widely reviewed. In its case, Piker's review appears (as of last night) at the top of the rank, second only to the book's page on its publisher's website. Odland's book has a title that appears in other unrelated pages, but of the pages related to this book it is also in second position, after an earlier online review by the Textile Museum of Canada. After just a few days, Hendrickson's review already appears above the book's page on its distributor's website. McDowell's review of The Cord Keepers is particularly informative. This review was solicited by the editorial office long after the book was out and attracting substantial attention in the field. By the time McDowell's review appeared here, the book had already won the American Society for Ethnohistory's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Prize for 2005 and had been reviewed in a large number of journals in, and beyond, anthropology. Despite arriving late in the process, McDowell's review already ranks very high, with only a few reviews (ca. 2005) ahead of it. The review posted here ranks above older reviews in distinguished venues such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Quarterly, and Ethnohistory. I recognize that a Google ranking is not a definitive measure and that many will read these other reviews in print format or via search tools other than Google, yet I still find these results remarkable. A related measure comes in the form of visitor and search statistics available for this blog. A sizable number of people are now visiting this site and a significant number of these visitors are clearly reading the reviews. This is enlightening evidence that speaks to the position of those who advocate for open access models in scholarly publishing. I will not take up this larger topic here, but I did want to contextualize what is unfolding vis-a-vis Museum Anthropology's review program.

On a case by case basis, I am asking authors of reviews-in-hand if they would be willing to publish their review online. Publishing reviews in this way takes advantage of the following benefits of the online medium (among others): immediate rather than delayed publication, free access to anyone in the world with internet access, the ability to incorporate internet hyperlinks, the ability to publish color images along with the review, the ability (if desired by the author) to turn on the blog's comment function for the review (thus allowing others to comment on the review or its subject matter), and the ability for an author to simply send an email link for the review to whomever they wish to share the review with. Because reviews published thus are easily found by anyone doing internet searches, they may become a subject of discussion elsewhere on the web. They can also benefit from the power of the social networking dynamic of the web today, such as with folksonomy tagging. This strategy also provides more space for publication of peer-reviewed articles in the journal itself.

For most new reviews, we are now soliciting them, from the start, with the intention of publishing them online. All the reviews published online will be noted in the table of contents of the print journal. This was the approach taken in recent years by the American Ethnologist as it published its book reviews in online-only format.

This blog, which was itself an experiment launched last summer, was intended as a venue through which to share news of the journal, the CMA, and the wider field of museum anthropology, particularly offering such items as exhibition notices and calls for papers. Technologically, it is a good tool for distributing such information and it is gratifying how much visitation this site is now getting. As a means of publishing substantive contributions such as reviews, it is less good, both technologically and editorially. To address these problems, we have set up a different site on which just the substantive contributions (essays, reviews, obituaries, etc.) will be published. This site is called Museum Anthropology Review and it can be found here (the URL is museumanthropology.net). As described there:

Museum Anthropology Review (MAR) is a companion project of Museum Anthropology (MUA), a journal of museum and material culture studies published by the University of California Press for the Council for Museum Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. MAR is an open access journal supplement. Its purpose is the dissemination of reviews, essays, obituaries and other editorially-reviewed content complementing the work of Museum Anthropology. It reflects the research and outreach interests of the Council for Museum Anthropology and is offered as a resource enhancing all fields concerned with the study of material culture and with the place of museums and related institutions in social life.

Like this blog, Museum Anthropology Review is an experiment unfolding during a period of rapid change, not only in terms of technology, but also in the social organization of scholarly life and academic publication. It is reasonable to assume that these systems are only stopping points in a longer journey. The transitory nature of new media is of particular concern to me and I am now working actively to develop preservation plans for the substantive content that we publish in this way. We have not worked out the details yet, but I am committed to the goal of seeing these contributions preserved both digitally (in a more robust system, cataloged with solid metadata) and in good old fashioned paper copies placed in one or more responsible archives central to the field.

I will share more details of the process as the experiment unfolds and as more pieces fall into place. For the near future, I anticipate continuing to actively publish reviews and other editorial content online. Now that it is up and running, I expect to place the full content on Museum Anthropology Review and to make note of it, with links, here. This approach will enable this site to transition back to its news-from-the-field function.

Please contact the editorial office [museanth (at) indiana (dot) edu] with comments, questions, and concerns. Thanks to all who are contributing so richly to all of these efforts to enhance the field of museum anthropology, both in print and online.

Journal of Folklore Research Reviews

The Journal of Folklore Research (JFR) is a longstanding journal of central importance to the field of folklore studies worldwide. Since its inception, JFR (originally it was known as the Journal of the Folklore Institute) has been edited at Indiana University by faculty and students in the unit that is now known as the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. This is the program in which I teach and which is the current editorial home of Museum Anthropology. One year ago, my colleagues John McDowell and William Hansen, together with a talented team of graduate students, launched a digital companion to JFR known as JFRR, which is short for Journal of Folklore Research Reviews. JFRR is a free service in which reviews of books and other media are sent by email to a list of subscribers. One need not be a subscriber to JFR (the journal) to be a recipient of (or contributor to) JFRR emailings. All that is needed is to submit one's email address to the editors. In addition to emailing out reviews of materials of interest to folklorists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists and others, these reviews are made available online via a searchable database. The range of materials reviewed is quite broad and the quality of the reviews is typically very good. Celebrating the project's one year anniversary, the JFRR crew is seeking to get the word out about a project that has proved very successful and of great use to a significant number of scholars. They are eager to expand their list of readers and contributors. I urge readers of this blog, and of Museum Anthropology, to check the service out. It represents another interesting experiment in reworking the work of scholarly production, circulation and conversation.

Pasifika Styles: An Exhibition Review Case Study

The exhibition Pasifika Styles opened at the Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology on May 5, 2006. From the western side of the Atlantic, the website, press materials, and informal buzz all suggested, when it was initially announced, that it was a show that really deserved to be reviewed formally and seriously in Museum Anthropology. We immediately began seeking a reviewer in the United Kingdom willing to write a review of it for the journal.

Exhibition reviews are notoriously difficult to commission. One must find someone prepared for the task who is both willing to devote time, attention, and travel to the task (for free) and in possession of enough social distance from the organizers to offer a reasonably unbiased review. This is particularly difficult when social networks of specialists are dense (as they seem to be in the UK) or when the topic falls into an area where a small number of specialists find themselves constantly reviewing each other's work.

Unfortunately, the case of Pasifika Styles illustrates the way the process sometimes ends unsuccessfully. After weeks of email exchanges (and some unreturned emails) we found a reviewer willing and well prepared to take on the review. Like most journals, Museum Anthropology regularly sends reminders to reviewers (of books, digital exhibitions, and gallery exhibitions) whose reviews are past due. These reminders are a normal part of life for scholarly journals and most scholars, at one point or another, find themselves over-committed and behind on such review obligations. Often the reminder leads to completion of the review but sometimes a reviewer must withdraw because new obligations prevent completion of the assignment. When this happens, an editor must decide whether to take up the search for a new reviewer or not. This is what has happened with the planned Pasifika Styles review. After a gap of many months, the reviewer who had planned to do it needed to withdraw. This scholar, in a much appreciated bit of assistance, recommended an alternative reviewer (who thankfully we had not yet asked). The proposed alternative reviewer, unfortunately, was unable to do it. This colleague, again generously, suggested a new candidate (another one whom we had not already asked). Checking into this possibility, we learned that this latest prospect had already reviewed the exhibition for a different journal. I relate this tale as an illustration of what sometimes happens. We have all known great projects--both books and exhibitions--that have, for what seem like inexplicable reasons, gone unreviewed in the literature. Sometimes an editor, having unsuccessfully asked everyone whom she or he can find, just has to give up. I hate to give up seeking a commissioned review of Pasifika Styles, but the quest has reached the point where it does not make sense to keep pestering colleagues about it, one at a time. It is partially a matter of how much time is available to any particular task and partially a problem of throughput. Each day the editorial office receives news of new exhibitions and copies of new books for review, including new works on the art of Oceania for which we will wind up troubling the same community of scholars in hopes of reviews. This is a discouraging reality of the work. We cannot review everything and sometimes projects that clearly deserve our collective attention go unattended to.

Perhaps web 2.0 can accomplish something of what the traditional system of reviewer recruitment, in this case, could not. If you have observations on the Pasifika Styles exhibition that you can share, please feel encouraged to leave a comment here.

Pasifika Styles runs through February 2008 and has an extensive website.

Digital Exhibitions: FYI

Since Museum Anthropology (MUA) 29(1), we have been offering reviews of online exhibitions and other digital media projects. These reviews can be found in the print journal and online via AnthroSource. We previously posted a list of exhibition titles, with links, on the MUA page within the website of the IU Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology. This list of links has been updated and can now be found online here.