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- Convenors:
-
Magnus Fiskesjö
(Cornell University)
Ulf Johansson Dahre (Lund University)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D220
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 14 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Since the 1990s "world culture" museums have been organized across Europe, as a reaction to globalization. Many museums were re-conceptualized, re-organized or rebuilt. This panel will promote anthropological perspectives on what happened with the concept and practice of "world culture museums."
Long Abstract:
Since the late 1990s, several countries and museums across Europe have struggled with the idea of world culture, which arose in the current wave of globalization. In Sweden, for example, plans to abolish and pool all of Sweden's older government-owned museums with exotic non-European collections into a single museum sparked widespread misgivings, even street protests, in Stockholm. The end result was a compromise: to build the new World Culture Museum in Gothenburg, but retain the three targeted Stockholm museums under a shared umbrella, as Sweden's National World Culture Museums. In France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Britain and other countries, similar debates, developments and reorganizations have taken place. But the once-fierce debate over just what the idea of World Culture would, should, or could mean for all the museums involved, by now seems to have been largely set aside. It is time to take stock, from an anthropological perspective and in a European and global context, of the idea of world culture and world culture museums. We welcome papers that promote anthropological perspectives on the conception and the practice of "world culture museums," either in different countries or comparatively. What happened to world culture and why, did this idea fail, and why, and, where do we go from here.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 14 August, 2018, -Janusz Baranski (Jagiellonian University)
Paper short abstract:
The social role of an ethnographic collection established by a retired farmer . This local museum is a resource of maintaining the identity by his children, who emigrated to the United States, as well as by other émigrés and the local community.
Paper long abstract:
The object of the study is a private ethnographic collection, gathered over the past years by Stanisław Iwańczak, a retired farmer, in the village of Niedzica, in the southern Polish region of Spisz, exposed in a former farm building. The collection consists of agricultural tools and crafts, furniture, housewares, costumes, utensils, religious pictures, photographs, books, letters, decorations. The conducted ethnographic research shows that the collection plays an important role for an ancestral identity, but also a wider one - local and regional. It is an example of growing in number wilde Museen (Jannelli), social institutions which counterbalance global, multicultural and ideological projects of world culture museums. It represents the return to an empirical and ethnographic detail. The museum, with collected objects de memoire, seems to be a kind of mental and cultural asylum especially for the members of the family living abroad. The collection is an anchor protecting against losing relationships with the tradition of the old country.
Mischa Twitchin (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Paper short abstract:
In what sense might the universalising of a "world cultures museum" imply a neo-colonial concept, distinct from any anticipated decolonising concept? And how does this concept distinguish itself from that of the "global contemporary art world"?
Paper long abstract:
In 2010, Neil MacGregor, then the director of the British Museum, published his best-selling book, "A History of the World in 100 Objects". Despite the varied dialogues that it contains, how is the temporality of a concept of "world cultures" addressed (indeed, promoted) between its distinct singularities of history, world, and object - each one drawn from the BM's own collection? Now part of the consultative committee of the Humboldt Forum, how does MacGregor's thinking about curating "cultures" compare with that of either Charles Esche or Olu Oguibe, for example? Furthermore, how does the idea of a "world cultures museum" address changes in the affordances of objects and their images in the digital era? And, of course, in what sense might the universalising of a "world cultures museum" be a neo-colonial concept, distinct from an anticipated decolonising one? Drawing on the example of an "ethnographic fiction" of my own - in the form of an essay-film, "Dahlem Dorf" (https://vimeo.com/172160181) - I will explore these questions as they challenge the scope of museum ethnography in relation to the so-called "global contemporary" art world.
Cengiz Haksöz (Philipps-Universität Marburg)
Paper short abstract:
Museums place Bulgaria and its national culture into world culture and display its cultural aspirations. I evaluate museumification strategies, policies, and practices.
Paper long abstract:
Dominant groups and states have a monopoly in the construction of sites of collective memory or memoryscapes to reflect the dominant understanding of collective memory. However, dominant groups never could control all spheres of collective memory construction. Regional history and ethnographic museums in Bulgaria have served to affirm as well as to hegemonize dominant groups' ideologies and discourses. On the one hand, they serve to place Bulgaria and its national culture into world culture. On the other hand, museums also display the nation-state and later the state-socialist state's cultural aspirations. The nation-state controls how the world, national, and local cultures are going to be represented. Since the last decade of the state-socialism, local history museums are also used as venues of legitimization of forced name-changing campaigns against the Turkish-Muslim minorities. Even though there is some important modification in exhibitions of museums in larger cities during the post-1989 era and Bulgaria's EU accession, most of the peripheral museums' curations remained as they were during the state-socialism. This paper evaluates strategies, and politics of visibilities on the regional, national, and transnational levels in the cases of museumification policies and practices in peripheral Bulgaria.
Magnus Fiskesjö (Cornell University)
Paper short abstract:
The concept of "world culture" for Sweden's state-owned museums of exotic & foreign things originally carried a certain emancipatory potential. I outline this opportunity, and probe the reasons for why it was lost. I attempt to identify the socio-political developments involved in its still-birth.
Paper long abstract:
The concept of "world culture" as proposed in the 1990s for Sweden's state-owned museums of exotic and foreign things, originally carried a certain emancipatory potential, including for transcending the nation-state constraints on global heritage. In this paper I outline this opportunity, and probe the reasons for why it was lost, in the ensuing debates and bureaucratic rearrangements of the Swedish "world culture" museums. I recall the debates of the 2000s, including my own contributions, and reflect on the abandonment of further discussion, which later ensued. I seek to identify the social-political developments that contributed to the still-birth of Swedish "world culture," and the lessons to be drawn for this, for our future.
Ulf Johansson Dahre (Lund University)
Paper short abstract:
During the last decades the Ethnographic Museum has transformed from a cultural heritage institution to a social arena. This paper discusses what this transformation has brought about in terms of activities and ideas at these museums.
Paper long abstract:
This paper has two major aims. Firstly, it aims to analyze the discussions on the current transformation of ethnographic museums, especially in Europe and North America and to some extent in Asia. Secondly, it aims at analyzing, at a broad level, what the transformations during the last decades of these museums actually consists of. Since the 1980s there has been a widespread discussion in anthropology and elsewhere on the political and social role of ethnographic museums. The debate started with the "post-colonial turn" in the 1980s. Today, when issues like globalization and concepts such as multiculturalism, new public management and experience economy are added to the debate, it appears once more as if the whole idea of maintaining ethnographic museums is challenged. Nevertheless, the present debate is, in many aspects, a continuation from the 1980s and the 1990s, when observers like James Clifford (1988 & 1997) deconstructed ethnographic museums and challenged the existence of them as such.
Hélena Regius
Paper short abstract:
This paper addresses the concept of world culture in relation to anthropology. With the establishment of the National Museums of World Culture in Sweden, the anthropological understanding of culture has been progressively marginalised within this museum complex. What are the consequences of this?
Paper long abstract:
2016 was the year of the big museum debate in Sweden focusing primarily on the National Museums of World Culture. It started by the journalist and China expert Ola Wong, who in the major daily newspaper wrote about how the World Culture Museums had developed into megaphones of political ideology rather than dealing with knowledge about the world.
This paper addresses the concept of world culture in relation to anthropology, and the implications in the Swedish context. The National Museums of World Culture was created in the late 1990s as an umbrella for 4 museums housing global cultural heritage. Two of the four museums were ethnographical and formed part of the development of social anthropology as a discipline in Sweden. The Ethnographical Museum in Gothenburg was closed down in 2000, and reopened in 2005 as the World Culture Museum. The museum in Gothenburg was to become a brand new type of museum dealing with global questions, and to do so it was also perceived having to shed its ethnographical past. .
With the establishment of world culture, anthropology and the anthropological understanding of culture have been progressively marginalised within this museum complex. By 2016 when the museum debate started, there were hardly any anthropologists among its staff, let alone area specialist.
What happens when anthropological perspectives are removed from the concept "world culture"? What are the consequences for museums housing anthropological material and their relationship to the world? What is "world culture" after all?
Tom G. Svensson (University of Oslo)
Paper short abstract:
To understand cultures in the world through objects focus on individual persons behind the specifioc objects will add a dimension. To shed light on such position five different artefacts representing five cultures - the Saami, the Netsilik, the Ainu, the Nisga a, and the Hopi - have been chosen, in this way giving the objects an additional voice.
Paper long abstract:
In museum collections most objects are anonymous from the point of view of individual persons. Focusing on persons behind specific objects offers additional information about the culture from which they derive. It is my conviction that such individualization of artifacts, whenever possible through research-based collecting, provides more comprehensive knowledge than simply describing the objects as to function and how they were made.
In the following I build my general argument on five objects, representing five different cultures - the Sámi, the Netsilik, the Ainu, the Nisga´a, and the Hopi. The craft and art objects chosen are all made from natural material, and they were collected by me. Finally they all relate to already existing old collections in the Ethnographic Museum, Oslo, in this fashion also a contribution to the history of the museum.
Implicitly the argument represents a critical position vis-à-vis the broad concept "World Culture", letting specific cultures speak comparatively through carefully selected artifacts.