Search

On 12 June 2016, Orlando’s Pulse nightclub became the site of the largest single-shooter massacre in US history: 49 clubgoers lost their lives while celebrating Latin Night at a club popular with the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer community of Central Florida. In the days that followed the curators and collections staff of the Orange County Regional History Center found themselves affected both as community members and as museum professionals. This brief account addresses the complexities of facing a mass tragedy in real time at the human and museological level, describes the process of moving onto an active footing in the collection and preservation of memorial sites, and offers insight into what, unfortunately, has only become a more common challenge in both our communities and in our professional field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves as an introduction to this issue's Museums theme, also represented by the contributions of Dirk van Delft, Peter Donhauser, Martha Fleming and Jennifer Landry. Together these papers look at how the modern science museum has recreated itself in recent years. This introduction argues that a key moment of change in the late 1980s and early 1990s marked a crisis to which science museums had to respond or be consigned to history. The introduction sets the scene, by discussing the longer-term development of the science museum as a category, and by describing the short-term context of that widely perceived crisis in the science museum around the turn of the twenty-first century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entre 1750 et 1850, des collections importantes de livres, d'objets et de documents sont entrés dans le patrimoine culturel des États-nations postrévolutionnaires ou réformés de l'Europe occidentale, ce qui engendra des débats sur la collection et l'organisation du savoir à un moment où des bibliothèques, des musées et des archives nouvellement nationalisés commençaient à se positionner comme institutions du savoir public. En Grande-Bretagne, les catalogues et les pratiques de catalogage du British Museum et du Public Records Office ont été façonnés par ces débats. Au British Museum, le premier catalogue général du département des livres imprimés (Department of Printed Books) a été façonné par les débats au sujet des mérites relatifs de la classification chronologique et de la classification alphabétique, en lien avec les buts et les obligations d'une bibliothèque publique nationale, alors que les catalogues systématiques du département de l'histoire naturelle (Natural History Department) ont été le résultat des débats au sujet de la classification et de la nomenclature des espèces dans les collections d'histoire naturelle. Les « catalogues » compilés par les prédécesseurs de la Public Records Office en Grande-Bretagne ont été, pour leur part, formés par les débats sur la valeur relative du catalogage par rapport à l'impression comme moyen de rendre les documents de la nation britannique disponibles au public. Une série d'enquêtes parlementaires en 1835, en 1836 et entre 1847 et 1849 ont été des forums critiques dans lesquels ces débats ont eu lieu et ils ont fourni le point focal de base du présent texte, qui se veut le deuxième article d'une étude en deux parties qui explore le rôle qu'ont joué les catalogues dans la collection et l'organisation du savoir dans les cultures émergentes des bibliothèques, des musées et des archives. Between 1750 and 1850, significant collections of books, objects, and records became part of the cultural patrimony of revolutionized or reformed nationstates in western Europe, prompting debates about the collecting and ordering of knowledge as newly nationalized libraries, museums, and archives began to position themselves as public knowledge institutions. In Britain, the catalogues and cataloguing practices of the British Museum and the Public Record Office were shaped by those debates. Within the British Museum, the first general catalogue of the Department of Printed Books was shaped by debates about the relative merits of classified versus alphabetical arrangement in relation to the aims and obligations of a national public library, while the systematic catalogues of its Natural History Department were born out of debates about the classification and naming of species in natural history collections. The "catalogues" compiled by the Public Record Office of Great Britain, for their part, were shaped by debates about the relative value of cataloguing versus printing as a means for making the records of the British nation available to the public. A series of parliamentary inquiries in 1835. 1836, and 1847-49 were critical fora for the airing of those debates and provide the primary focal point of the present article, the second of a two-part study exploring the role played by catalogues in the collecting and ordering of knowledge in the emergent cultures of libraries, museums, and archives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines some recent museological initiatives aimed at responding to the important issues raised by the famous protest against the exhibition Into the Heart of Africa, organized by the Royal Ontario Museum in 1989. Despite the significant temporal hiatus from the historical protest, many of the questions raised in that context continue to be relevant in thinking of ways to engage and present African collections in a mainstream encyclopedic institution. Rather than rethinking a new, more culturally sensitive narrative, I suggest that the introduction of multiple voices and perspectives may be the only way to disrupt the linear authoritative narratives and promote a more significant and affectively relevant engagement with historical collections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Germany, the new cultural center Humboldt Forum (to open in 2019) has become a major site of debate. It will include the contested collections of both the Ethnological Museum and the Museum of Asian Art, which contributed to the negotiation of the role of colonial legacies and their reverberances on contemporary Germany. We took those contestations as a point of departure for the exhibition Object Biographies (2015), part of the program Humboldt Lab Dahlem designed to experiment with innovative displays for the Humboldt Forum. Here we reexamine our research collaboration with the Beninese art historian Romuald Tchibozo that was part of the exhibition. His call for the "decolonization of research" was the central guideline in our museum practice aiming for cosmo-optimistic futures. We argue that focusing on processes and questions engaged by the exhibition project can transform contested museum spaces to enable negotiations on ownership, representation, and memory politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The opening of the World Cultures galleries in Edinburgh in 2011 marked the renewal of the well-loved, much visited, and rebranded National Museum of Scotland, a museum that has long envisaged its role in national and international terms. Tracing an episodic trajectory over 150 years, the article highlights key moments (in the 1850s upon founding, the 1940s after World War II, and the late 2000s during the renovation) when culture and citizenship were subjects of debate. This museum historiography forms the explanatory framework for the principles underlying the development of new World Cultures galleries and the collecting of indigenous North American art and material culture. Two galleries—Artistic Legacies and Living Lands—are used to explore the theoretical underpinning and representational practices deployed, and how voices, objects, images, and partnerships were used not only to respond to critiques of ethnographic museum display but also to engender more open and optimistic connectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A collection of photographs by colonial officer and amateur anthropologist James Henry Green now in the collections of Brighton Museum & Art Gallery has been extensively reappropriated and reused by members of the Kachin community from northern Burma who originally formed their subject. This article considers one specific use, in a music track and video produced as part of a collaboration between a Burma-based Kachin rap artist and a Kachin singer and media producer currently living in China. Released at a critical moment for the Kachin community, following the recent breakdown of a long-standing cease-fire agreement between the Kachin Independence Organization and the Burmese government, the track and video reveal some of the tensions at play between the outward-looking, transnational, and cosmopolitan tendencies of the growing overseas Kachin community and the nostalgic, territorially based ethnonationalism that has been at the heart of Kachin demands for greater political autonomy since the 1960s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can the online distribution of heritage facilitate successful forms of collective online memory production? Two online archives from India are taken as case studies to analyze practices that make online archives effective as devices for recalling and constructing the Indian past. It is not only contextual conditions of the Internet age, but also particular applied practices of presenting, communicating, and using social media that enable it. Yet, the analysis of the two recently created online archives, which are partially driven by the idea of widening access, show that they do not so much set up counterpositions to established conceptions of archives as regulating entities, but rather aim at becoming acknowledged heritage agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article starts from the question of whether the concepts "cosmopolitan memory" and "shared heritage," with their inherent universalism, are helpful when dealing with ethnographic collections from the Amazon. After presenting some historical context information on the collections in focus, I contrast different notions of "cosmopolitanism" and "cosmopolitics," drawing on Latin American perspectives. The latter claim to represent an epistemological alternative to a Europe-centered cosmopolitan project. They propose a focus on difference, which in relation to the museum and its working processes means looking at the collections through the others' lenses. This approach is applied to a collaborative research project between the Ethnological Museum of Berlin and an indigenous university in the Amazon, in order to document and reflect on the outcomes and dilemmas that have emerged thus far. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Having a dual perspective as researcher of expressive culture and museum curator, I engage in the ceremonial aspects of repatriation through a practice-based "museology from within." Focusing on a handover of human remains by the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm to indigenous claimants from Australia (2004), I combine material from my own participant observation with sources such as interviews and written and photographic documentation. The aim is to bring an autoethnographic perspective to a discussion on the ritual dynamics of repatriation. The transfer of custody and right of interpretation was accomplished with a ceremonial process, cocreated by museum staff and indigenous claimants. Drawing on differing cultural scripts as well as on improvised interplay, participants engaged in turn taking and intercultural translation of symbolic communication. Certain themes were ritualized redundantly, such as mutual exchange and reconciliation, but there also existed the more paradoxical copresence of seclusion and openness, closure and continuation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last decades the museum sector has experienced substantial changes. The need for change has been stressed by such well-known museologists and practitioners as Stephen E. Weil, David Flemming and others. Moreover, the change of and within museums has arisen as one of the most important topics of several professional networks and conferences, such as "We Are Museums", which was created in 2013 as yearly event at the intersection of culture and innovation. Thus, we can speak about paradigm of change in contemporary museums that affects their performance and future strategies. This paradigm of change in museum sector seems especially interesting if we think about the symbolic role of a museum. Traditionally a museum is an institution that keeps our heritage intact and until recently this task has been perceived as its main function. Not without reason the museum has been used as symbol for standstill, unchangeable in art and literature. Yet now we are asking for museums to change themselves and their public offer. The aim of the article is to track the development of paradigm of change in museum sector and to outline the most important fields that had been affected by change during past decades. The change of museum sector has been viewed in regional context, marking the most important trends: 1) changes in the models of museum funding; 2) changes in museum's strategic priorities; 3) changes in our perception of a museum. Still, it is important to remember that an organization can never change just one thing - in most cases museums are subjected to more than one of these trends. The results in almost all cases are similar - growing importance of museum management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Museologia e Patrimônio is the property of Museologia e Patrimonio and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The curatorial is a discursive formation that has emerged from critical engagements with curating as a practice of object presentation and a rejection of dominant practices of knowledge formation traditionally associated with the museum. In this article, I argue that the curatorial in fact makes use of the relational potentialities of the museum display, but, in so doing, is in danger of overlooking the critical opportunity disavowed by traditional museology that lies at the heart of the museum: the irreducible gaps of the exhibitionary encounter. To unfold both the relational power of the museum’s display mechanisms and the ever-presence of distance in moments of exhibitionary proximity, I use an early critique by Mieke Bal of the American Museum of Natural History. Arguing that what Bal makes evident is the impossibility of total coincidence in practices of museum ‘showing’, I turn, in conclusion, to the work of artists Fred Wilson and Jade Montserrat to suggest how the gaps within exhibition display may be (re)practiced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article critiques the settler colonial politics of recognition in relation to Canadian museological practice. Despite a strong intellectual legacy critiquing asymmetric power relations and the problems of representing 'otherness,' there have been few sustained examinations of the ways in which museums are implicated in settler colonial regimes of power. Dene scholar Glen Coulthard has written extensively on the manner in which the 'politics of recognition' perpetuates settler colonialism in Canada. I argue that the normative shifts in Canadian museum practice post-1988 exemplify institutionalized shifts toward the colonial politics of recognition within Canadian museums. Further, I find that this is part of ongoing settler colonial practices of domination. I argue that current museological practice, particularly as it relates to Indigenous pieces within museums, must include a critique of the settler colonial politics of recognition as part of both critical analysis and normative orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparing and relating displays is arguably one of the most important cognitive activities in galleries and museums for many reasons, as they help viewers recognize artistic styles, follow the progression between displays, and identify aesthetic differences. This research looked at covisibility, particularly the proximity of displays, and whether it affects the way displays are mentally compared. The experiment demonstrated that similarity judgments for pairs of visual stimuli depended on two physical design factors: (1) the proximity of the stimuli to each other and (2) the viewing distance from participant to stimuli. In the experiment, 36 participants rated the similarity of pairs of human faces based on their visual appearance in photos. The outcome yielded an interaction between the distance from participant to stimuli and the proximity of the stimuli pair. More specifically, when participants viewed pairs of stimuli at a short distance, the pairs presented close together were rated as being less similar than those presented far apart, but when participants viewed pairs of stimuli at a long distance, the pairs presented close together were rated as being more similar than those presented far apart. Overall, the results revealed the complex relationship between the spatial proximity of stimuli and the spatial distance from participant to stimuli. The results also highlighted the importance of testing findings that come from a two-dimensional laboratory in a three-dimensional setting. The results reported here should be of interest to museum curators and exhibition designers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Iguaçu Regional Museum, located at the Governador Ney Amintas de Barros Braga Hydroelectric Plant, in the town of Reserva do Iguaçu, opened under the administration of Governor Jaime Lerner, in 2000, it is one of the most modern memorial places in the interior of the state of Paraná. To this end, in the context of New Museology, the article analyzes the discursive and imagistic language that the Iguaçu Regional Museum has built for itself and its audience, identifying the identities intended to protect. On the other hand, it reflects on the self-image (associated with environmental preservation and cultural heritage), that the Companhia Paranaense de Energia Elétrica (Copel) has conveyed both in Brazil and abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to establish a theoretical framework for the analysis of what I propose to call "naïve museums" by making reference to three actual instances of the phenomenon in contemporary Romania. All these naïve museums - as I venture to call them - are quasi-anonymous, private collections, mainly ethnological in character, set up out of passion by people few of whom have any specific expertise. What unites them is the enthusiasm and creativity they bring to the task of gathering, selecting and displaying objects they consider representative of the local culture. Thus, naïve museums must be approached from the perspective of their creators' intuitive museological discourse, as they most often emphasise one particular type of local identity and are pervaded by their founders' biography and tastes and strongly marked with their own creative touch. In something of a contrast with the culturally composite character of the mainly rural areas where such museums are springing up in contemporary Romania, their creators configure a local identity that makes strong references to an undefined, remote and idyllic past. Taking as a guiding principle Eric Hobsbawm's understanding of tradition as a social construct and practice of modernity, I will subject to analysis three such naïve museums by using the principle of the "syntax of objects," a theoretical framework designed to reveal the meanings enshrined in these museums by their creators, themselves merely agents who constantly interpret and transform, through verbal and object discourse, both their local culture and their museums [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this critical assessment of the 'museology of science' I cherry-pick recent scholarship and practice to unpack the functions of science collections. Some practices (exhibition, engagement, study) have already attracted considerable attention, others not yet (storage); but all tend to be considered separately as case studies from particular institutions and for particular disciplinary audiences. Juxtaposing different reasons to collect reveals both the tensions inherent in science collections and the opportunities these collections afford, especially around their materiality. This is why we have collected science, and why we should continue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article identifies and discusses the different contexts for a museological and cultural-political use of the concept of participation, and how these contexts overlap with the context of market orientation. By introducing Nico Carpentier's concept of participation, it makes an argument for the meaningfulness of 'low-effort' forms of museum participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Being able to look back in time at organisms that once inhabited our planet has fuelled the imagination of many through the years, as well as lending inspiration to many science fiction stories. Successful extraction of DNA from archived alcohol-fixed white-eye fish specimens using an ancient DNA protocol. [Extracted from the article]

This chapter introduces the participatory art museum and discusses some of the challenges it raises for philosophical aesthetics. Although participatory art is now an essential part of museological programming, an aesthetic account of participatory art is still missing. The chapter argues that much could be gained from exploring participatory art, as it raises fundamental challenges to our understanding of issues in aesthetics, such as the nature of aesthetic experience, the value of art, and the role of the spectator. Moreover, participatory art fundamentally questions the status of the museum as an exhibition space for contemporary art practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museums establish specific contexts, framings, which distinguish them from viewing the world face-to-face. One striking aspect of exhibition in so-called participatory museums is that it echoes and transforms the limits of its own frame as a public space. I argue that it is a mistake to think of the meaning of an exhibit as either determined by the individual viewer's narrative or as determined by the conception as presented in the museum's ‘authoritative’ narrative. Instead I deploy the concept of a model of comparison to illuminate the philosophical significance of perspective in understanding the idea of objectivity in museum narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent museum practice has seen a return to ‘wonder’ as a governing principle for display and visitor engagement. Wonder has long been a contentious topic in aesthetics, literary studies, and philosophy of religion, but its adoption in the museum world has been predominantly uncritical. Here I will suggest that museums draw on a concept of wonder that is largely unchanged from seventeenth-century philosophy, yet without taking account of early modern doubts about wonder's efficacy for knowledge. In this paper I look at Descartes' and Spinoza's views about wonder and the uses and disadvantages of wonder as a learning tool. This examination is extended to consider Descartes' and Spinoza's likely views about ‘museums’, in the sense of spaces that link objects both to feeling and to knowing. Finally, I suggest that there are resources in Spinoza's philosophy for bringing knowledge-enhancing feelings into the museum without resorting to the problematic concept of wonder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first part of this essay asks: What is the function, purpose and value of a museum? Has any museologist or philosopher given a credible account of philosophical problems associated with museums? Is there any set of properties shared by the diverse entities called museums? Overgeneralization is the principal problem here. The essay then examines a central kind of museum experience; one that invokes and relies upon nostalgia. I argue that the attraction of museums are varied but are best explained affectively and in terms of the orectic (appetitive, desiderative, wishing) rather than cognitively conatively (willing, deciding). Although this need not be taken as conflicting with the idea that museums are focused on scholarship, it is more consonant with the claim that exhibitions are central. Museums may at times both pique and satisfy our curiosity. However it is a mistake to see ‘curiosity’ as merely, or even primarily, a matter of cognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

National museums both mediate and inculcate official and formal versions of national culture and by this means make and maintain national identity. Three times in the course of the twentieth century, various groups have attempted, and failed, to establish a national museum, identified variously as British or English. This paper explores just one of those attempts: the Museum of British History Project, first proposed in 1996 and finally killed off in 2008. The focus here is, therefore, on failure and on the role of the conflation of Britishness and Englishness in that failure as well as the nature of British identity construction more generally.All three attempts to create a national museum placed the rural idyll at the heart of the project. In the course of a detailed investigation of the Museum of British History project, this paper will pay particular attention to the proposed designs for a ‘British Landscape Gallery’ and the project's hegemonic, ruralised and Anglocentric perspectives. The gallery was the principal way in which established constructs of England and Englishness became conflated in the museum with Britain and Britishness and served to perpetuate the dominance of the ‘rural idyll’ in hegemonic manifestations of the nation. But the project remained stillborn in the face of the new museology: a failure which undoubtedly demonstrates the limits to the cultural power of the rural idyll. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1985 the shipwreck site and related artifacts from the steamship SS Xantho (1872) have been key elements in the Western Australian Museum Maritime Archaeology Department's research, exhibition, and outreach programs. This article describes a continually evolving, oft en intuitive, synergy between archaeological fieldwork and analyses, as well as museum interpretations and public engagement that have characterized the Steamships to Suffragettes exhibit conducted as part of a museum in vivo situation. This project has centered on themes locating the SS Xantho within a network of temporal, social, and biographical linkages, including associations between the ship's engine and a visionary engineer (John Penn), a controversial entrepreneur (Charles Broadhurst), a feminist (Eliza Broadhurst), and a suffragette (Kitty Broadhust), as well as to Aboriginal and "Malay" divers and artists. Achieved with few funds, the project may be a valuable case study at a time when funds allocated to museums and archaeological units are rapidly diminishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Is second wave feminism something that can be collected? Does it even have a material culture? If so, what would a second wave feminist object be? This issue of the Journal of Australian Studies places feminism and the museum together to find whether Australian museum practice and feminist culture resonate or not, and whether social movements such as feminism are amenable to collection and exhibition in the public sphere. Our primary interest is in museums as institutions that collect items of cultural, historical and scientific value; however, the broader, European definition of museums, which includes art collections, can also yield invaluable insights regarding the relations between feminism and the museum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article speaks to a post-human feminist museology. It argues that considerations of a feminist museology would benefit from engaging with post-human feminist dialogues currently unfolding within academia. Dynamic political landscapes and global circumstances challenge dualist paradigms. Theorizations of museums are not exempt from these challenges. Critiques of androcentricity indicate that feminist theorizations have never fully centred on “the human”, but always already contextualized how we affect the world, and how the world affects us. Discussions in this article follow Barad’s agential-realist theorization of the material-discursive practices that shape our understandings in and of the world, and Haraway’s notion of diffraction that engages the material and re-tools recordings of object histories as entangled human and non-human processes that can be taken apart and reassembled, making different possibilities possible. The article demonstrates that museological alternatives that emerge from conversations about entanglements not only aim to move beyond the paradigms they have been circling within for so long, but towards a re-thinking of museology and cultural heritage museums. Thus, considerations of a feminist post-human museology re-imagine museums as entangled becomings that make different possibilities possible. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses examines various types of objects and their layered meanings from two museums located in the Anglophone Northwest Region of the Grassfields in Cameroon, namely the Mankon Museum and Babungo Museum. Topics covered include the movement of art objects to and from the museum sphere, specific instances when works are borrowed from the museum and ways in which the works of art are affected as they move in and out of the museum, and case studies which trace two objects from the Mankon Museum.

Early nineteenth-century zoology in Britain has been characterized as determined by the ideological concerns of its proponents. Taking the zoologist Robert E. Grant as an exemplary figure in this regard, this article offers a differently nuanced account of the conditions under which natural-philosophical knowledge concerning animal life was established in post-Napoleonic Britain. Whilst acknowledging the ideological import of concepts such as force and law, it points to an additional set of concerns amongst natural philosophers – that of appropriate tool use in investigation. Grant's studies in his native Edinburgh relied heavily on the use of microscopes. On his arrival in London, however, he entered a culture in which a different set of objects – museum specimens – held greater persuasive power. This article relates changes in Grant's ideas and practices to the uneven emphases on microscopic and museological evidence amongst European, Scottish and English natural philosophers at this time. In so doing, it identifies the reliance of London-based natural philosophers on museology as constituting a limiting effect on the kinds of claim that Grant sought to make regarding the nature of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stimulus for this article has been the reworking of displays within the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Wing at the British Museum. The need for a cohesive narrative led us to look hard at objects that have reposed in the museum's collections since the 19th century and, in particular, to "reopen" the case of the Sun-God Tablet and the Cruciform Monument. It turned out that most of the long-cherished assumptions about these objects failed to withstand modern scrutiny. With the benefit of Hormuzd Rassam's original papers, we have now been able to reconsider the finds as a whole, with surprising consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]