Reassembling the Collection: Ethnographic Museums and Indigenous Agency (Advanced Seminar Series) (School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934691941 ISBN 13: 9781934691946

Publisher: SAR Press, 2013

Synopsis

Reassembling the Collection presents innovative approaches to the study of historical and contemporary engagements between museums and the various individuals and communities who were (and are) involved in their production and consumption. Reassembling the Collection is interdisciplinary in scope and international in coverage. It addresses fundamental questions about the nature, value, and efficacy of museum collections in a postcolonial world, and the entangled agencies of those who have made, traded, received, collected, curated, worked with, researched, viewed, and experienced them in the past and present. In moving beyond the concerns of the politics of representation that have dominated critical museum studies, Reassembling the Collection considers the material networks and affective qualities of “things” alongside their representational role within the museum and explores the ways in which concepts of agency and indigeneity need to be reconfigured in light of the study of these concepts within the museum context. The contributors explore key concepts including the idea of museums as “meshworks” of material and social assemblages; how an “archaeological sensibility” might inform approaches to understanding past and present relationships between people, “things,” and institutions in relation to museums; and the “weight of things” and sense of “curatorial responsibility,” which arises from a reconsideration of the nature of museum objects.

About this title

Review

“A lucid, well-focused collection of essays that not only proposes a new engagement between anthropology and archaeology, but challenges weary methodologies in museology and tired museum practices. This stimulating volume proposes nothing less than a ‘Mobius museology’ in which established disciplinary, epistemological, and ethical dualisms are exchanged for an infinitely more nuanced, complex, and dialogical approach. This broad sensibility intermeshes academic, indigenous, and practical viewpoints in the best tradition of critical scholarship to imagine a new terrain on which the importance and significance of museum collections can be reassessed in a non-consensual and increasingly globalized and intercultural world.” —Anthony Alan Shelton, Professor of Anthropology and Director of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Edition details

• Publisher: SAR Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1934691941
• ISBN 13: 9781934691946
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 356
• Editor: Harrison Rodney, Byrne Sarah, Clarke Anne