Paper short abstract:

This paper utilizes a Fowler Museum exhibition to discuss how community engagement can reshape the way collections are displayed and understood. It will also address a more expansive definition of collections care that promotes museum object use by local practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

From October 29th, 2023 to June 2024, the Fowler Museum presents The House Was Too Small: Yoruba Sacred Arts from Africa and Beyond. Bringing together historical and contemporary objects from West Africa and the Americas, the exhibition illustrates the historical legacy as well as the changing and expanding global relevance of Yoruba religion. Utilizing the Fowler’s well-known collection of Yoruba arts, the curatorial team wanted to find a new, dynamic way to engage with it. For this reason, Fowler staff established an advisory team including practitioners, academics, and artists devoted to Yoruba and Yoruba-inspired faiths. Drawing on their religious training, scholarly research, and lived experience, the collective aided curators to select objects, determine exhibition layout, design display furniture, and provided gallery text descriptions for selected artworks. Attempting to create a new model for inclusive collections care and as part of our engagement with practitioners, the Fowler Museum invited three babalawos to utilize museum collection objects for divination and demonstration. These pieces are the center of one section of the exhibition. This approach to collection object use powerfully recognizes how engaging with African, Diaspora, and local communities reveals a plethora of potential futures for museum objects. As concepts of ethical care have begun to shift in light of recent debates about the restitution of arts to Africa, this paper will serve to provide a case study of a single exhibition that is seeking to find a new way to display a museum’s objects with a focus on physical and spiritual care.

Paper short abstract:

Francy Fontes Baniwa is an anthropologist and researcher of the Baniwa people. In her project to safeguard the linguistic and cultural heritage at Museu do Índio in Brazil, she sought to deepen the decolonial relationship of building a collection through the active participation of her community

Paper long abstract:

Francy Fontes Baniwa is an anthropologist and researcher of the Baniwa people. In her project to safeguard linguistic and cultural heritage at the Museu do Índio in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she sought to deepen the decolonial relationship of building a collection through the active participation of her community. The work consisted of requalifying pieces from the Baniwa collection, reworking nomenclatures and relationships with museum collections from a native perspective and building new methodological paths. In this paper, we will look at the third phase of the project coordinated by Francy, which consists of the meeting of ceramic makers with two of the team's researchers, Carolina Campos, a Baniwa ceramicist, and Julia Sá Earp, a designer, ceramicist and anthropologist from Rio de Janeiro. Carolina Campos' community is located in the middle of the Amazon and is approximately 30 hours away from Rio de Janeiro. On their way there, between boats and planes, around 24 pieces of pottery that were to be incorporated into the museum's collection broke. Chance then led us to recompose and recreate the pieces using Baniwa techniques and contemporary urban ceramic technology and materials. These pieces ended up forming Francy's second collection at the museum, undoing rigid assumptions and composing new stories and proposals for decolonial methodologies for ethnographic collections.

Paper short abstract:

This paper will discuss PhD research with Jagera Daran (Indigenous) research partners into bark/wooden material culture items from Yagera Country, which are housed in Australian and United Kingdom museum collections and their importance in holistic culturally modified tree significance assessments.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will present research findings of a PhD project conducted in a collaborative partnership with Jagera Daran (Indigenous Traditional Owners) research partners.

In Australia, very little research has been undertaken linking bark/wooden material culture items to culturally modified trees. This paper argues that understanding the form of bark/wooden artefacts, the tree species and the part of the tree that they are created from, is fundamental to understanding the full context of culturally modified trees. Often, significance assessments of culturally modified trees are carried out without a base knowledge of what Indigenous people were utilising the trees for. This results in a poor record of the overall significance of this important Indigenous cultural heritage site which, on the ground, can lead to these sites being destroyed for residential housing, roads and other infrastructure development projects.

Museums in Australia and the United Kingdom which house bark/wooden material culture items removed from Yagera Country in South East Queensland were visited as part of the PhD research. Connecting Indigenous people with their artefacts through research, along with culturally modified tree fieldwork and interviewing Indigenous people to embed their perspectives, can lead to the creation of holistic significance assessments. This can result in the better protection of these unique Indigenous cultural heritage sites.

This paper will also discuss the PhD developing best practice principles such as Traditional Owners being research partners, writing and signing a Shared Benefit Agreement, including Intellectual Property Rights, so that the Traditional Owners can utilise the research for educational purposes.

Paper short abstract:

The recently installed Gallery for Sikh Art at the MMFA challenges conventional museological approaches, offers new perspectives to Sikh art and art in general, by incorporating Sikhi (learning) as a curatorial praxis and prompting contemporary diasporic Sikh artists to weave new (hi)stories in.

Paper long abstract:

Conscious of its own colonial entrenchment, the MMFA re-orients its Asian collections in the Arts of One World galleries, offering new curatorial interpretations that address the social life of the objects and their various cultural entanglements. Thanks to a major gift from Dr. Narinder Kapany (1926-2022) and the Sikh Foundation International (Palo Alto, California), supported by the Baljit and Roshi Chadha Foundation (Montreal, Quebec), the museum inaugurated in 2022 a gallery devoted to Sikh historical visual and material culture. In this space, miniature portraits of the ten Gurus, military and ritual paraphernalia, textiles and archival material from the time of the Sikh Empire and the British Raj, as collected and filtered through the eyes of Dr. Kapany, have been placed in dialogue with contemporary artists of the Sikh diaspora. While this approach sheds light on one side on the personal collecting practice of Dr Kapany, it also allowed, on the other, artists to propose new modes of self-representation and envision alternatives genealogies while reflecting on how Sikh art has evolved in the past two hundred years. This synergy further highlighted how the inclusion of Sikh art at the MMFA challenged the Eurocentric aesthetic canon, as the content proposed in the space questions the normative paradigm of what “art” entails. This paper reflects on how conventional museological pedagogy was unlearnt by incorporating Sikhi (learning) as a meaningful curatorial praxis for the gallery, as it prompted contemporary diasporic artists to weave their stories in.

Paper short abstract:

What forms of learning and unlearning are required when working with vexed collections? This paper explores collection ethnography and multimodal pedagogy to unlearn residual categories and curatorial habits, reshaping how objects are interpreted within the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin.

Paper long abstract:

What forms of learning and unlearning are required when working with vexed collections? This paper reflects on long-term ethnographic engagement and teaching practice in collaboration with the Museum of European Cultures in Berlin (MEK). Drawing on the collection ethnography and two multimodal student projects co-organized in collaboration with MEK’s curators, the paper explores the potential of anthropological intervention in disrupting entrenched museum practices.

It reflects on the role of collection ethnography in facilitating institutional (un)learning, presenting new ethical and methodological challenges inherent in museum practice. Through anthropological engagement with collections, the paper seeks to unveil their critical curatorial potential by reestablishing connections with source communities and communities of practice that extend beyond the confines of the museum. This exploration not only scrutinizes the object itself but also illuminates the intricate political entanglements, histories of displacement, and imperialism shaping the relations between Berlin and the European periphery.

Furthermore, the paper presents a selection of creative and participatory engagements within student projects in dialogue with the MEK’s collection. These initiatives demonstrate that artifacts, initially deemed challenging for inclusion in displays, can acquire new layers of meaning and curatorial potential through participatory artistic and social research. This includes revealing feminist perspectives on the objects and unlocking the diverse memories with which they are entangled in post-Cold War Berlin. This multimodal pedagogy approach serves as a method for unlearning entrenched museum categories and reshaping the interpretative lens through which objects are viewed within the MEK.

Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to show how children learn and unlearn with museum collections in Brazil and Germany. Children's interaction with objects in contact zones contributes to unlearning old colonial structures, learning about the present and being open to learning about the decolonial future.

Paper long abstract:

Museums are environments where collections can be used to learn and unlearn about the world (Landkammer 2019). Pratt (1992) and Clifford (1997) were pioneers in demonstrating the historical and political aspects of historical narratives and the interactions and power relations of indigenous people with objects in collections in contact zones. This shift in perspective on objects has influenced some institutional and pedagogical practices in museums (Sternfeld 2018), where children also occupy space, albeit with less attention (Wagner 2013). Currently, the Ipiranga Museum (Brazil) and the Forum Humboldt (Germany) have developed research and educational practices to decolonise the exhibitions and objects in their collections. However, the Forum Humboldt still has its image linked to the "Humboldt ideal" and the Ipiranga Museum reproduces the "image of independence". In this sense, it is relevant to ask: How do children learn and unlearn with objects from museum collections in Brazil and Germany? This proposal aims to understand the process of children's learning and unlearning with objects from museum collections in the context of transformation. The research will be conducted using video ethnography in order to capture how the children learn and unlearn with the objects between the exploration phase and the contact zones. The challenge of the proposal is to understand the unlearning of old structures of the museum as a historical space (Walsh 1992), the understanding of the object in the present (Bryant & Knight, 2019), and the prospects for learning in the context of transformation and for the future (Schaffer 2024).

Paper short abstract:

The Asian collection at the Museum of Anthropology at University of British Columbia or MOA is the largest collection at the museum. This paper considers classes and community visits, using the diverse Asian collection at MOA.

Paper long abstract:

The Museum of Anthropology at University of British Columbia (UBC) or MOA, Vancouver is known for its Northwest Coast First Nations collection, but the Asian collection is the largest collection at the museum in terms of number of the items, and around 40% of the entire collection. Vancouver also has a large population of people with Asian heritage, over 40 % of the city’s population. However, given the limited space in the permanent galleries to showcase this large, diverse Asian collection at MOA, it instead gets used for teaching, research and community engagements regularly as a way to activate the collection. This paper considers some examples of actual classes – often non-anthropological classes – of using the Asian collection at MOA, and also how community members, especially Indigenous groups, have engaged with the collection. This paper explores how the museum’s relationship with students or community members becomes reciprocal when activating the collection. It will also ask what the museum learns and unlearns by hosting and working with them and to whom the collection belongs to.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on the Horniman Museum’s transformation into a disciplinary institution under the guidance of A C Haddon as advisory curator. With that in mind, I emphasise instances of deviance and refusal amongst both objects and visitors in order to think beyond and against discipline(s).

Paper long abstract:

In 1901, tea merchant and avid collector Frederick Horniman donated the newly-constructed Horniman Museum to ‘the people’, “as a place of public recreation and instruction”. Under the guidance of anthropologist Alfred Cort Haddon, the museum was transformed into a space where visitors could learn about empire and the world beyond it according to Euro-centric, racist logics. This paper focuses on the museum’s evolution into not just an educational institution, but also a disciplinary/disciplining body in three separate yet related respects. (1) During this period, curation and collecting strategies were heavily influenced by the increasingly formalised discipline of anthropology, which in turn required (2) disciplining objects to rid them of their alterity so that they could be rehabilitated as tools for learning about, and ultimately governing, colonised peoples, and (3) disciplining visitors by restricting the ways in which they looked at, engaged with and learned from objects.

With that in mind, this paper is interested in the radical potential of un-disciplining and unlearning. I turn my attention to the deviant, the recalcitrant, and the unruly to argue that objects contain multiple deviant meanings that frequently elude the imperial surveillance of the museum. I suggest reading this as a refusal of objects to conform and an inability of the museum to represent and contain all meanings. If, as Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang suggest, colonialism is the entitlement to ignore or transgress frontiers, then un-learning requires acknowledging that which is unknowable within the confines of the anthropological museum.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines expressions and implications of male-centered biases at a Mosuo Heritage Museum in southwestern China. Despite the indigenous curators' good intention, their masculine gaze embodied and reproduced emerging patriarchal ideas in the Mosuo's traditionally matrilineal society.

Paper long abstract:

The Mosuo Heritage Museum sought to tell an authentic story of Mosuo (Na) people, an indigenous population of about 40,000 people of Tibeto-Burmese descent in southwestern China. The museum was the brainchild of indigenous curators Dujie and Archei, who for almost two decades travelled around their native Lugu Lake to collect indigenous artefacts and knowledge. Inspired by a "cultural heritage fever" (Blumenfield and Silverman 2013) that swept across China in the early 2000s, the two cultural enthusiasts wanted to do their part in preserving and promoting their endangered culture. Today, the museum stood as a cultural hub and a popular destination for tourists, anthropologists, and Mosuo schoolchildren who sought to learn about Mosuo heritage from indigenous perspective.

Based on my 2023 visit to the recently revitalized museum and conversations with curators and visitors, this paper examines how the collection that Dujie and Archie curated embodied and promoted a masculinized version of Mosuo history and tradition. Their good intention to tell the Mosuo story from their own observation and experience unwittingly cast a patriarchal gaze onto a narrative flow that ended up sidelining the Mosuo's proud matrilineal culture and elevating the role that men traditionally played - and continued to play - in Mosuo family and society. In addition to presenting evidences of this masculine bias in the museum, this paper analyzes the implications of this museum in shaping social norms, gender ideals, and the Mosuo's integration into China's socioeconomy that was largely dominated by patrilineal Han Chinese.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines two case studies of displayed collections of human remains—the Hyrtl crania at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, PA, USA and the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic—to provide a theoretical framework for the way we think about and approach the dead in public spaces.

Paper long abstract:

For archaeologists, scientists, and anthropologists, human remains provide direct evidence and unique insight into the past; in museums, there is hardly an “artifact” more visceral and informative than the physical bodies of the dead. The questioning of ethics surrounding the excavation, collection, and display of human remains is nothing new, especially in the last several decades during which concern over the provenance of skeletal remains has grown exponentiality, particularly of those collected as the result of racial and colonialist violence. Nonetheless, many public displays of human remains endure; in fact, such collections equally elicit feelings of fascination and repulsion that draw in crowds seeking education about the past as much as gross-out horror as part of the ever-popular “dark” tourism industry. It is not the goal of this paper to rehash arguments that have been made over the ethics of museums, repatriation, or even of the display of collections of the dead; instead, this paper will use two case studies—the Hyrtl crania at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, PA, USA and the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic—to examine how such sites come to exist, how they interact with their “difficult histories,” and their current objectives in both academic and public spheres. Moreover, it will provide a theoretical framework that can be used more broadly to ground and contextualize the way we think about and approach interactions with the dead in public spaces.

Paper short abstract:

Based on the example of collection and exhibition "Głusza" (DeafLand) in the Silesian Museum in Katowice, I will present the importance of objects in creating cultural representation in museums narratives, bilinguistic and hybrid video-textual publishing and public spaces.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of the paper is to highlight the problems of constructing inclusive narratives as well as to analyze the social sensorium of the Deaf in terms of counteracting various forms of audism. Taking to account participatory museum model it is necessary to include the deaf community representation into the museum collections, narration and public discussion about common hearing and non-hearing sensorium. The sign language user visitors should exist on equal terms and their identity should be perceived more from a cultural and linguistic perspective than a perspective of medical model of hearing impairments. Museums are the most important space for discourse about the impact of sign language users ant the global context of Deaf minority into the European cultural heritage. The Museum of Silesia model of cooperation with the Deaf community, deaf art collection, exhibition and application "Głusza" are a good practice example for others.