Short Abstract:

The lecture will provide a framework for understanding the power and value of museum collections as an educational resource. I will focus on how objects engage peoples’ attention through ‘wonder’ and ‘curiosity’, and their potential as ‘pedagogical tools’ to enhance people’s understanding of the world.

Long Abstract:

Viewing material objects as educational resources challenges the distinction between research and education by encouraging the student to learn about, and gain knowledge through, the exploration of form. The dialogical relationship between the expressive and semantic aspects of objects makes them an important resource for showing how and why things are valued in different ways by different people in different times. The seemingly ordinary can be made extraordinary when we explore its significance.

The argument will be developed as a pedagogical exercise through a close examination of a number of objects in museum collections. Material culture objects seem to provide a direct point of contact with the hand of the maker and user across space and time, and their expressive properties can excite emotions cross-culturally. But to make meaningful anthropological connections we need context. We need to understand what the objects meant or mean to the people who made them. And the analysis of the material object itself – it shape, its material properties, the techniques of manufacture, its functional potential and so on - provide a major source of evidence for placing it meaningfully in the time of its making.

The ‘humility’ of the object provides the potential for its analysis but also for its recontextualization over time. The history of objects in collections is a history of changing values. How an object was acquired, understood and used in different times is not just part of its history but an entry point into those pasts. The lesson from this is not that the object itself is ever changing but that its form remains relatively autonomous. The different ways in which an object has been interpreted, how it has been valued inside and outside the museum, is part of its history, and that history is often characterised by discontinuity. First placing the object in context at the time of its manufacture is a fundamental beginning to retrieving its agentive history. Almost by definition the museum exemplifies the ways in which relatively autonomous cultural trajectories have been disrupted, in particular, by globalisation and colonisation. The collections provide evidence for a greater understanding of those complex histories but also the resources for reengagement with past histories in continuing and contemporary lives.

Thus the pedagogical value of museum collections is that they provide a vital resource for recovering different pasts and connecting them to present lives. They are the product of different and distinctive knowledge systems and ways of being in the world that can continue to challenge, delight and inform present generations. Museums are inherently relational entities but a dialogical approach enables people to engage with different temporalities – to understand the conversations that occurred at different moments in the history of the ‘same’ artefact. Such an approach provides an entry into the process of history, but also engages with particular moments of time to enable us to see discontinuities as well as continuities, and work through those histories in the discursive and cross-cultural and cross-temporal space of the museum.