New Research

Working in participatory ways with ethnographic collections: Call for case studies!

The Museum Ethnographers Group (MEG) in the UK, as part of their Arts Council-funded Engaging Curators project is looking for examples of the innovative, ethical, participatory use of ethnographic collections in community projects in museums. We want to discover if any case study materials already exist or policy documents about working with local and overseas communities.

Please contact Dr Bernadette Lynch before Friday, June 14, 2013 with information (a selection of case studies will be published on the MEG website and disseminated via the UK Arts Council).  Contact: lynchbernadette@hotmail.com.

The Future of the Ethnographic Museum

This essay discusses the recent past of ethnographic museums and raises questions about their future. In the last thirty years or so, ethnographic museums have faced many challenges arising both from within and beyond anthropology to the extent that in the post-colonial and post-modern era they could be said to have suffered an identity crisis. Many have been renamed, remodelled or rehoused in spectacular new premises (such as the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris). Only a few have remained largely unaltered, as at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford where the authors of this essay are employed. Drawing on the theoretical literature in museum anthropology and material culture, many years of ‘hands on’ curatorial experience and the insights gained from a five year collaborative research project involving ten major ethnographic museums in Europe, the authors investigate how ethnographic museums might engage with new audiences and new intellectual regimes in the future.

You can read the full article in Anthropology Today, Volume 29, Issue 1.

Student Spotlights: The Presentation of Indigenous Heritage

Sarah is the last of our graduate student highlights this week. She researches collaboration as a practice for the development of indigenous museology.

Sarah Carr-Locke
PhD Student in Archaeology
Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada
Supervisor: Dr. George Nicholas

PhD Dissertation: The Presentation of Indigenous Heritage in North American Museums

My PhD dissertation is entitled “The Presentation of Indigenous Heritage in Canadian and American Museums: Exploring Collaboration and Public Perception.” The issue of Indigenous sovereignty over heritage has come to the forefront in several related fields such as archaeology, museology and history as Indigenous peoples have asserted their rights to manage intellectual and physical aspects of their culture within non-Indigenous institutions worldwide. An overview of museological literature since the early 1990s demonstrates that theory and practice has changed in response to this dialogue.

My research will ask: How have the methodologies used to create museum exhibits about Indigenous heritage changed as a result of increased interactions with local Indigenous people in Canada and the United States? To what degree can these interactions be labeled collaborative? How effectively is the collaborative nature of exhibition creation communicated to museum visitors?

I will visit five museums in different corners of North America to conduct research on one collaboratively created exhibit at each. I will interview staff and Indigenous community collaborators/consultants to learn about the nature of the relationships and methods used to create the exhibit. To address the final question, I will also conduct visitor studies at each institution to assess the degree to which the public is cognizant of these methodologies. My research will focus on collaboration as a practice in exhibition creation and will contribute to the development of “Indigenous” museology.
 

Student Spotlights: Human Evolution Traveling Trunk Kit at New Mexico State University

Kylin is the third of our student highlights this week and is working on an education project for the University Museum of New Mexico State University.


Kylin Cummings
M.A. Candidate in Anthropology
Specializations in Biological Anthropology and Museum Studies
New Mexico State University

Graduate Internship Project: Development of a Traveling Trunk in the University Museum of New Mexico State University for Human Evolution K-12 Educational Outreach

A human evolution traveling trunk kit is currently being developed at New Mexico State University in order to provide an educational outreach tool for the University Museum.  This trunk kit will be available to K-12 teachers to use in their classrooms as an alternative source when teaching about this subject matter.

A kit such as this will greatly aid 6th and 7th grade teachers in meeting learning standards mandated by the State of New Mexico.  The kit will provide educators more options to utilize while teaching their students about evolution and adaptations of Homo sapiens and their ancestors. 

The goal of this kit will be to identify these fossil hominins using morphological features of the craniums and to examine the differences in the encephalization and cranial capacities of these species.  It will also stimulate curiosity and encourage exploration for these students, especially in regard to human evolution which is often under served in the target audience.

The University Museum can also use this kit to expand and enhance community-based science and anthropology education within the museum.  The advantage of the production of a traveling trunk kit is that the teachers can bring their students to the museum where the kit can be used as an additional activity during their field trip or when resources and funding are not available for field trips, the teachers can be provided training by knowledgeable museum staff members and introduce the activity to their students in their classrooms.

Student Spotlights: Towards a Decentered Archaeology

Dominic is the second of our graduate student highlights and researches collaborative practice, technology, and the decentering of authority in museums and archaeology.


Dominic Walker
PhD candidate in Archaeology and Anthropology
University of Cambridge, UK

Working Thesis Title: “Towards a Decentered Archaeology: Disciplinary Expertise and Public Engagement in the Contemporary Archaeology Museum”

My research contributes to the ongoing debates about the theory and practice of collaboration in archaeological heritage studies. One of the major outcomes of these debates is the recognition of the expert knowledge which various extra-archaeological communities can contribute, another being the recognition of the ethical need to involve extra-archaeological communities in archaeological heritage management.

Museums have been at the forefront of attempts to decentre the authority of disciplines like archaeology by: initiating collaborative projects with specific communities; introducing reflexive, self-critical curatorial voices in physical exhibitions; and adopting digital technologies (participatory web platforms more recently) to engage and collaborate with online publics. However, the actual impact that these developments have on the authority of archaeology, and the notion of the archaeological ‘expert’, remains under-analyzed.

In my doctoral thesis I am particularly focusing upon museums’ use of internet technologies. With reference to collaborative theory, I will attempt to determine the extent to which museums have truly decentered their authority through the use of these technologies. I am asking questions like: Which communities are empowered? Are long-term, equitable benefits offered for both the museum and the public? For which collections is it necessary to seek multiple sources of expertise? And, more fundamentally, what should be the role of the archaeology expert?

Ultimately, my thesis will determine how effectively museums, and the archaeological discipline more broadly, have re-aligned their authority to allow other communities to act on an equal footing. In the process of doing so I will also attempt to define what a 'decentered archaeology' should look like in the offline and online arenas in which the public encounters archaeology.

More information about my research can be found on my website, http://www.arch.cam.ac.uk/~dw374, and I tweet as @dmncwlkr.

Student Spotlights: Lithic Analysis at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology

Colin is the first of our graduate student highlights and works with the lithic collection at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University.


Colin Porter
PhD Candidate in Anthropology
Brown University

Independent Research: Proctor at the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology

One problem facing many natural history museums is the disposition of huge, poorly provenanced lithic collections. The Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University curates more than 50,000 stone tools. Many come from the Narragansett Basin of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts, a portion of the ancestral homelands of the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and Nipmuck Indian tribes. However, most artifacts can only be traced to the particular town where it was found.

Small, triangular points lacking stems and notches are widely distributed across northeastern North America and represent as much as one quarter of some lithic collections. Archaeologists classify these artifacts as one of four types—Squibnocket, Beekman, Levanna, or Madison—ranging in age from the Archaic to Colonial periods. However, archaeologists widely concede that positive identification is difficult, and in some cases impossible, because many specimens are broken or intergrade. 

As a museum proctor, I recently submitted a sample of 623 triangular points to exploratory statistical and spatial analysis. The aim of the study was to cluster the artifacts by morphology and then to map the geographic distribution of these clusters. This approach yielded an alternate taxonomy of tool forms some of which have distinct spatial distributions, potential evidence of intra-regional and cultural variation not observed using a traditional typological approach.

While the cultural significance of existing lithic collections is beyond a doubt, their potential for archaeological inquiry is often unclear. This research demonstrates that contemporary methods of analysis are capable of generating new archaeological hypotheses, particularly when working at the regional scale.

Highlighting Students in Museum Anthropology

Hello Museum Anthropology Blog readers,

This week we are highlighting work by current students in the field of museum anthropology or the anthropology of museums. We hope you enjoy reading about their work. If you are a student and would like your own work highlighted, please send a 250 word abstract to mua4web@gmail.com.

Enjoy and we look forward to hearing from you!