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- Convenors:
-
Uma Kothari
(University of Manchester)
Lisa Palmer (University of Melbourne)
Marcia Langton (University of Melbourne)
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- Chair:
-
Marcia Langton
(University of Melbourne)
- Stream:
- Archives and Museums
- Sessions:
- Tuesday 15 September, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
Previously colonised peoples whose cultural heritage is represented in archives and museums are now gaining access to work with these collections in diverse ways. We ask how archives and collections are being engaged with, interrogated and reworked in ways that unsettle colonial certainties.
Long Abstract:
For those previously colonised peoples whose cultural heritage is represented in the museums and collecting institutions of former colonial powers, objects and archives are a precious, but often inaccessible, legacy. When descendants of the communities of origin do gain access to work with these collections, they often discover that the narratives about their ancestors that have been recounted by others, do not represent their past as they have learnt it. Indeed dominant accounts of the provenance and histories of these objects often reproduce particular colonialist versions that marginalise, diminish or ignore the stories of others. We ask how we can engage with, interrogate and recreate these archives and collections in ways that foreground, and hold in tension, partial truths and agencies. Additionally, we want to explore how these truths and agencies are being negotiated in place and in specific historical and geographical contexts. We invite papers that activate the stories and agencies of objects and archives in ways that unsettle colonial certainties.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 15 September, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
During a 1929 visit to Chief Sinthumule in South Africa, British Museum curator, H.J. Braunholtz was presented with a small collection of objects. Regarded as ethnographic, African agency in the formation of the collection has been obscured, but for recent research in the archive.
Paper long abstract:
In 1929 British Museum (BM) curator of ethnography, H.J. Braunholtz, visited South Africa as a delegate of the British Association for the Advancement of Science whose annual meeting was being held there that year. Following the sessions, Braunholtz and some colleagues travelled north to Great Zimbabwe, stopping en route at the so-called ‘native location’ of Sinthumule, then chief of the Western Venda. Here Braunholtz, representing the BM, was presented with a group of ‘nice old “pieces”’. Once at the Museum, the items were ‘ethnographised’, which entailed stressing their ‘tribal’ and European field-collector/donor provenance, effectively obscuring African agency in forming the collection. Treating the Museum collection as archive, and with reference to the Sinthumule case study, this paper draws on recent scholarship and offers a methodological approach for recovering traces of indigenous agency in ethnographic collections. The reworked archive emerges as a productive space, enabling stories of agency hitherto untold.
Paper short abstract:
In the post-conflict East Timor, archival records are developing to record diverse cultural practices and performances and to make these recordings available to a wider audience and enable inter-generational knowledge transmission and education.
Paper long abstract:
Post-conflict development in the Asia Pacific region is enmeshed within differently understood forms of social and environmental governance. In the post-Independence era of East Timor from 2002, the struggle to restore household livelihoods and the lingering effects of military occupation has seen a revitalisation of ancestral traditions across Timorese society. This 'return to custom' encompasses a range of practices, performances and orientations designed to reinvigorate local livelihoods, strengthen social resilience and reinstate a variety of customary practices in the lives of rural Timorese communities who comprise the majority of the population. As Verran and Christie have argued in an extra-regional context, customary knowledge produces worlds in place through continually negotiated practices and performances (2007: 219). Archival records are now developing to record these diverse practices and performances and to make these recordings available to a wider audience and enable inter-generational knowledge transmission and education. Reflecting on the compilation of a research and community archive with which we are involved, we explore, in a context specific way, how this archive might be enabled to reflect these continuously negotiated worlds. We ask how a digital archive can foreground and hold in tension these always partial truths and diverse forms of agency and discuss the challenges and opportunities for maintaining the multidimensionality, temporality and situatedness of these practices and performances.
Paper short abstract:
Photographs of flowers from the author's personal Cook Island family collection are examined alongside those from photographic archives in a British museum as a contribution to understanding the value of archives and museums in decolonial Pacific futures.
Paper long abstract:
Flowers have been an intimate part of meaning-making in everyday life in many Pacific places. Over time their diverse colours, shapes, scents and their feel have generated different embodied responses. Their perishable nature however, means they lend themselves to being captured in visual format. As part of a larger project informed by a decolonial feminist cultural economy of flowers in the Pacific, I work with photographs of flowers, beginning in the early twentieth century, from personal records of my Cook Island family and from the photographic archives in a British museum. In this paper I begin with the simple question of how these different photographs invite different ways of understanding how flowers contribute to practices and performances that simultaneously ground, but also destabilise meaning-making in the Pacific. This contributes to understanding the value of archives and museums in decolonial Pacific futures.
Paper short abstract:
This paper discusses how people of Punjabi descent have been using archives to explore ancestral place and family history, raising questions of how the colonial presence in specific collections has been formative to their pasts and present.
Paper long abstract:
Many cultural institutions are seeking to bring new understandings to the colonial legacies of collections they hold. However, many are often faced with challenges where many of the communities whose heritage is featured in these museums and archives feel physically, emotionally and intellectually disconnected from these collections. This paper will draw on research carried out with people of Punjabi descent who took part in workshops using collections from the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) to explore questions of family heritage, ancestral place and genealogy. It will outline how they used the archives to confront and explore their personal histories and broader complex global histories. By opening up new ways of using and examining some of these public collections, the paper also discusses the ways in which people of Punjabi descent have constructed and interrogated their own family archives through oral histories, objects and heirlooms, alongside examples of public archives that have raised questions of how the colonial presence in some of these collections has been formative to their pasts of where their ancestors came from, to where they are located now.