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- Convenors:
-
Ulrik Johnsen
(Moesgaard Museum)
Jaanika Vider (University of Vienna)
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Short Abstract:
What lessons do ethnographic objects in study collections offer today? This panel explores the potential of objects in the education of anthropology students and broader publics, as well as their capacity to stimulate anthropological thinking and dissemination in universities and museums.
Long Abstract:
The close relationship between ethnographic collecting and the development of anthropology as an academic discipline at the turn of the century is well established. Material culture standing in place of living cultures fueled anthropological research and played an instrumental role in the education of anthropology students. While collecting activities and use of collections in teaching continued into the mid-20th century, museums and material culture faded into the background of academic anthropological discourse until it was revived by Indigenous repatriation claims in 1970s and the ‘material turn’ of the 1980s.
This panel explores the affordances of ‘study collections’ defined by their use in anthropological research or teaching, particularly in university contexts. Today, many such collections are part of public ethnographic museums that balance their need to appeal to broad audiences with intensifying scrutiny and activity from Indigenous and local community groups, artists, researchers as well as public at different ends of political spectrum.
Inspired by Nicholas Thomas’s (2010) notion of ‘museum as method’ and Laura Peers and Giovanna Vitelli’s (2020) call to learn from objects, we invite papers that view museums as analytical spaces and their collections as creative technologies capable of stimulating anthropological imagination and knowledge production. Attentive to the challenges anthropology faces in responding to ongoing decolonization discourse and engaging with new audiences, we ask what lessons can be drawn from anthropology’s study collections. How can old links between universities and museums be rethought and refurbished? How can ethnographic collections and objects inspire creation and dissemination of anthropological thinking?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Tuesday 25 June, 2024, -Jaanika Vider (University of Vienna)
Paper short abstract:
This paper draws on Karin Knorr-Cetina’s theorisation of scientific practice to argue for rethinking anthropology as an objectual practice, thereby bringing material and museum studies into the centre of the disciplinary endeavour.
Paper long abstract:
It is commonly understood that anthropology at its inception was a deeply material practice. The collection, organisation, comparison, and analysis of data in the form of written reports, sound and image recordings, objects, and even people were at the heart of the discipline and drove the development of the intensive participant-observer method. As ‘epistemic objects’ characterised by their ‘lack of completeness’ that accommodates and enables ‘structures of wanting’ (Knorr-Cetina, 2001), materials in ethnographic study collections trace past desires and remind us of anthropology’s extractivist nature. However, they also enable and accommodate reconciliation and revitalization. They place demands on our discipline.
While a great deal of anthropologists now recognise the significance of such collections and the need to address our disciplinary history, the labour of meaningfully engaging with these material traces is left to a handful of museum anthropologists and museum staff, who are often seen to exist outside of social and cultural anthropology.
Drawing on my experience learning and teaching with museum collections, I argue that museum and material anthropology needs to be brought to the heart of our disciplinary training. Through object-based teaching, the logic of past thinking can be brought into meaningful dialogue with contemporary research methods thereby facilitating a more consciously active and pluralistic practice.
Alyssa Grossman (University of Liverpool)
Paper short abstract:
My paper discusses a collaborative, cross-disciplinary, arts-based research project that revisits and creatively engages with a colonial-era collection of rocks found in the archives of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden.
Paper long abstract:
This paper outlines a cross-disciplinary, arts-based research project involving a collaboration between myself, a visual anthropologist, and Selena Kimball, a visual artist. The work centres around an unusual collection of rocks found in the archives of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden. The rocks were gathered in the early 1900s by Erland Nordenskiöld, a well-known Swedish anthropologist who specialised in South American indigenous material culture and history. Kept alongside many other indigenous, colonial-era artefacts (baskets, pottery, tools, carvings), they have been sitting undisturbed in the museum’s storage drawers for over a century.
My paper describes our ongoing process of re-engaging with this overlooked collection of rocks. While there is scant information in the museum's archives about their provenance or cultural significance, their history is clearly connected to the larger institutional and political narratives of so many existing ethnographic collections linking the projects of anthropology and colonialism, connecting the organisation and management of archives to the administration of order in the world.
Our project calls attention to such practices through upending traditional approaches to ethnographic labelling and object classification. We engage with ‘storied’ forms of knowledge that reveal the rocks’ significance not through established taxonomies, but by acknowledging their entangled and shifting relationships and encounters over time. We employ exploratory methods of archival research, use Surrealist practices such as collage, automatic writing and ‘involuntary sculpture’, and playfully experiment with the genre of the exhibition catalogue to both theorise and operationalise decolonising practices within the contemporary ethnographic museum.
Ulrik Johnsen (Moesgaard Museum)
Paper short abstract:
Tara is a Buddhist goddess. One of her avatars from the Kathmandu Valley has been in Moesgaard Museum since 1959. She played a central role in the exhibition "Museum of Impermanence", in which the curators explored the concept of impermance through museum collections.
Paper long abstract:
A beautifully carved wooden sculpture depicting the Buddhist goddess Tara played a central role in the exhibition "Museum of Impermanence", which was on display in Moesgaard Museum, Denmark, during the Spring 2019. The exhibition synthesized ethnograhpic insights from three different fieldsites - Papua New Guinea, Tibet and Nepal - in order to explore the concept of impermanence. The wooden sculpture has been a museum artefact since 1959, and in the exhibtion it was juxtaposed with a newly carved version of Tara. In the exhibition, the two statues were engaged in a silent conversation, which the audience was invited to be a part of – intellectually and physically on the floor between them.
The specific form of the two statues and the context of their reproduction (the handicraft and purpose of the object) points to broader cultural, social and religious continuities and changes in the Kathmandu Valley from the 1950s until today. The juxtaposition of the two versions of Green Tara opened a space to explore at least two temporalities. First, the ‘divine conversation’, which the museum audience could follow, focused on the continuity and change in the reproduction of particular forms in Nepal. Second, it offered an approach to an understanding of how material culture - and museum collections more specifically - can generate ethnographic insights and contribute to anthropological theory.
Nicole Anderson (University of Edinburgh)
Paper short abstract:
This paper reflects on what researchers may learn from conducting anti-colonial projects with contested collections in university museums. I argue that uncertainty becomes pedagogically useful, asking researchers to balance political and ethical risks with their accountabilities to these collections
Paper long abstract:
Edinburgh University's Anatomical Museum contains a room with the cranial remains of nearly 1800 people, stolen in the 19th and 20th centuries. Many ancestors are unaffiliated, their identities unknown; their provenance often inconsistent, disorganised and sometimes missing. Although the ancestors and various associated objects such as measuring instruments are no longer used in anatomical teaching, the collection has resurged as a point of academic inquiry for undergraduates, postgraduates, and larger international research teams. These projects seek to reconcile these colonial legacies, often working with inconsistent provenance to reunite ancestors with descendants.
This paper reflects on what anthropologists may learn from initiating 'activist-orientated' research within higher education institutions. What would an ethically-sensitive, proactive, anti-colonial research methodology look like for contested colonial collections? How do researchers produce knowledge in a context where some things (and people) may remain unknowable? How may anthropologists do collaborative work with communities, when ancestors’ identities are missing?
Recognizing their historical and institutional responsibilities, anthropologists must balance various political and ethical risks to reckon with these collections. I argue that working through the uncertainty, hesitancy and ambivalence that surrounds this collection has pedagogical value. I theorise that these uncomfortable situations produce a 'methodology of discomfort' that challenges researchers to examine their accountabilities to this work and to descendants. I show how this methodology delineates the space between ‘learning about’ the collections, and ‘learning from’ them (Britzman 1998: 117), which also asks researchers to consider what they stand to gain from these encounters.