Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on church run ethnographic museums and the intentions of their curators in India's borderlands. My case studies are located in Northeast India, one of South Asia's most diverse regions: ethnically, linguistically, religiously.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on church run ethnographic museums and the intentions of their curators in India's borderlands. My case studies are located in Northeast India, one of South Asia's most diverse regions: ethnically, linguistically, religiously. Local attempts to curate such diversity continue to draw on colonial aesthetics and vocabularies of caste, tribe, and race, developed under the Raj in the late 19th and early 20th century. In many cases the forms and the language used are identical. How do we interpret these colonial ethnographic tropes when deployed under the radically different intentions of contemporary curators? If we take the curator's' intentions seriously, much of the existing literature on colonial ethnographic museums in South Asia seems unfitting or perhaps even disingenuous, especially when rooted in heavily Foucauldian frameworks linking knowledge and power. In response, I propose a move away from the reliance on Foucault's early writings, on power and knowledge, in order to engage with Foucault's later writings on technologies of the self. I take up Foucault's arguments on becoming moral subjects to provide an alternative framework for analysing church patronage of museums.To this end I frame my analysis through the 'anthropology of the good' as outlined by Joel Robbins (2013). Lastly I offer some comments on other regional strategies of narrating indigeneity, particularly those that wish to naturalise tribal identities in a Hindu civilisation narrative.

References:

Robbins, Joel. "Beyond the suffering subject: Toward an anthropology of the good." Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19, 3 (2013): 447-462.