Clark-Oakley Fellowship Annoucement

An announcement forwarded to Museum Anthropology by Michael F. Williams:

2010–2011 Clark-Oakley Fellowship

The Oakley Center for the Humanities & Social Sciences, Williams College, and the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, a center for research and higher education as well as a public art museum, jointly offer a fellowship for national and international scholars, critics, and museum professionals who are engaged in projects that enhance the understanding of the visual arts and their role in culture. The Clark/Oakley Fellowship is an academic year appointment for a scholar in the humanities whose study addresses some aspect of the visual.

Clark/Oakley Fellows receive stipends, dependent on sabbatical and salary replacement needs, reimbursement for travel expenses, and local housing. Williamstown is located in a rural setting in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Both Boston and New York City are about three hours away by car. Photos and more details of the Scholars’ Residence are available at clarkart.edu/research.

Applications are invited from scholars with a Ph.D. or equivalent professional experience in universities, museums, and related institutions. Because of the highly competitive nature of the fellowship competition, we do not normally award fellowships to scholars whose dissertations are only recently completed. For full fellowship guidelines and an application form, as well as further information, please visit clarkart.edu/research or williams.edu/resources/oakley/fellowships.htm. The application deadline for fellowships awarded for the 2010–2011 year is November 2, 2009.

Update During a Quiet Period

I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has supported Museum Anthropology so vigorously over the past three and a half years. It has been an honor to edit the journal and to collaborate not only with the members and leaders of the Council for Museum Anthropology but with the entire museum anthropology and material culture studies communities worldwide. I am eternally grateful for the support and assistance and encouragement that I have received from so many talented and generous people.

As I noted in a post last December, the Council for Museum Anthropology has named Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stephen Nash as the journal's next editors. Chip and Steve are on the curatorial staff of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. They have been planning to take up the journal for many months now and I am very excited by all of the enhancements that they have in store. After much anticipation, the moment of transition is almost upon us and I am now working with them to hand the work off in the best ways that I can.

One point of interest is this journal-focused weblog. Chip and Steve intend to continue using it in various ways during their editorship. While this is (probably) my final post to the blog, I anticipate that it will again be a lively digital destination beginning in July, when they begin their work in earnest. To Steve and Chip, I want to say "Welcome and thank you."

Readers of the journal will also be interested to know that work on the Fall 2009 issue is nearly complete and it should arrive in mailboxes very early in the fall season. It is filled with lively reviews and articles and I hope that everyone finds it useful. Thanks go to all of the authors, peer-reviewers and staff who made it happen.

Thanks go as well to my colleagues and students at Indiana University who so generously supported the work of Museum Anthropology.

AAA Annual Report Available Online

Anthropologists with an interest in the wider work of the American Anthropological Association may be interested in the newly issued 2008 Annual Report of the AAA, which can be downloaded online, as has been reported today on the AAA's weblog. Find the report post, with a link to the full report, here.

For the record, the report (p. 20) misidentifies me, in its listing of AAA editors, as "Baird Jackson." It should have been Jason Jackson or Jason Baird Jackson.

New Exhibition on Kiowa Pictorial Calendar

From a SNOMNH Press Release:

The fully restored pages of a rare collection of Kiowa calendar art will be on view in a new exhibition opening May 1 at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman. “One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record” features hand-drawn illustrations by renowned Kiowa artist and calendar-keeper Silver Horn representing 100 years of Kiowa tribal history. The exhibit will be on view through Aug. 23.

The traditional Kiowa calendar uses pictorial images to represent events in the tribe’s history. Each year is represented by two images – one for the summer and one for the winter. The events depicted are agreed upon by tribal elders and drawn and maintained by designated tribal calendar-keepers. The calendar records were originally kept on hides or cloth, but eventually were copied into ledgers.

Silver Horn was born in 1860 (“The Summer That Bird Appearing was Killed,” according to his calendar). Both his father and older brother also were calendar-keepers for the tribe. He was a prolific artist, and created hundreds of drawings representing Kiowa history and tradition before his death in 1940.

Only one other full Silver Horn calendar is known to exist today. It was created by Silver Horn in 1904 specifically for the archives of the Smithsonian Institution and covers the period from 1828 through 1904. The SNOMNH Silver Horn calendar also begins in 1828, four years earlier than Kiowa calendars by other artists, and continues through the winter of 1928-29. It includes more than 200 drawings on 80 pages.

Candace Greene, a Smithsonian scholar and expert on Silver Horn’s work, prepared explications of each image for the exhibition. Greene is also the author of a new book about the calendar. One Hundred Summers: A Kiowa Calendar Record, will be published this spring by the University of Nebraska Press.

“Entries in this calendar are probably the last drawings that Silver Horn made,” said Greene. “Before this book was found, I thought he had quit producing in the 19-teens because he was going blind. But obviously he was very committed to continuing this work. There are a few other calendars that continue into the early 1900s, but this one, with entries well into the 20th century, offers a unique perspective on that period of history.”

The calendar on view in this exhibition was donated to the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in 2001 from the estate of Nelia Mae Roberts, who ran an Indian trading post in Anadarko. The museum subsequently received a Save America’s Treasures Grant that provided for the conservation and restoration of the calendar’s fragile pages by a professional paper conservator. The process took over a year, but the restored pages are now available to be viewed for the first time by museum visitors.

ICME Meetings in Seoul

From a notice provided by Annette Fromm:

Call for Papers

ICME/2009/Seoul
Museums for Reconciliation and Peace
Roles of Ethnographic Museums in the World

Seoul, Korea
19-21 October 2009

ICME (the ICOM International Committee for Museums Ethnography) will hold its 2009 annual conference in Seoul, Korea on 19-21 October, 2009. The meeting will be hosted by The National Folk Museum of Korea (icme2009seoul.icom.museum).

ICME 2009/Seoul invites papers addressing one of two topics – Peace and Reconciliation, as addressed in ethnographic museums and The Role of Ethnographic Museums, in general. This conference invites museum ethnographers and others to address either this very focused topic or the more general topic both from the point of view of museum collecting activities and public programs including exhibitions and educational programming.

Reconciliation and peace is a topic much of concern in today’s world. Inherent in intercultural understanding are such values as mutual respect, trust and shared commitment to each other and to the institutions of multi-ethnic and multi-cultural societies. Museums stand poised as educational facilities to serve as neutral places where issues of difference and similarities and the historical, cultural, linguistic and religious particularities of their region can be presented and discussed openly. At this conference we seek to learn how ethnographic museums in many parts of the world have tackled this significant issue.

Authors may address questions such as:
• How committed are museums to collecting cultural materials representative of all cultures in the community-at-large?
• Are the history, cultural traditions, and values of all communities presented in exhibitions in an equal manner?
• Do public programs for youth and adults strive to bring together individuals from different cultural backgrounds?

In a more general sense, papers are invited on the general topic of Roles of Ethnographic Museums in the World. The conference seeks to serve as a forum to understand the place that ethnographic museums have sought to take in their own societies whether they are representing cultures living in their communities or the cultures of overseas peoples.

The exchange of ideas on these two topics promises to be rich and interesting.

This conference is open to museum professionals and all scholars involved in the issues and topics of the annual meeting. Presentations should not exceed 15 minutes. The main language of the conference will be English. We are encouraging the use of visual images wherever possible.

Abstracts, which should not exceed 250 words, should be sent to Dr. Yang Jongsong, Senior Curator, The National Folk Museum of Korea by 31 May 2009, at the latest. Abstracts will be submitted to our editorial committee and a decision on their suitability will be made by the end of June.

Dr. Yang Jongsung, Senior Curator, Folklorist
National Folk Museum of Korea
Samcheongdong-gil
Jongno-gu Seoul 110-820, Korea
Phone +82-2-3704-3101; fax +82-2-3704-3149
icme2009seoul@gmail.com.

Final details are still being confirmed. The general format of the annual meeting will consist of keynote speakers, papers, roundtables, and museum visits. Registration forms and other details will be available on the ICME and the conference websites in April at http://icme.icom.museum & icme2009seoul.icom.museum.

Note: There is no registration fee for the ICME/2009 conference. Hotel arrangements are being made with the Somerset Palace Hotel (http://www.somersetpalaceseoul.com), near the National Folk Museum of Korea. Hotel fees for all invited or accepted speakers will be paid by our hosts. One half of the hotel fees will be paid other conference attendees. All post conference fees will be paid by our host.