Now Accepting Exhibition Announcement Submissions

The Museum Anthropology Editors, Tony Chavarria and Dr. Maxine McBrinn, and Blog Intern Lillia McEnaney are now accepting submissions for exhibition announcements. 

If you would like your exhibition covered on the Council for Museum Anthropology's blog, please send an email to mua4web@gmail.com or directly to Lillia.

Please feel free to include press releases, images, and curatorial remarks in addition to the basic exhibition announcement. 

Although we cannot guarantee the posting of all shows, we will do our best to publish information about exhibits that we feel are most relevant to the readers of Museum Anthropology. 

Council for Museum Anthropology website

Please check out the updated Council for Museum Anthropology website, where you can find information about the organization including the CMA board, awards, bylaws, membership information, and annual meeting reports.

http://museumanthropology.org/

Brave New World Curator: Curating the Americas collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford

A new blog by Laura Peers, curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum - including answers to comments in the museum's visitor book and a recap of a recent conference on "The future of the ethnographic museum."  

More here.

Online Writing as a Tool for Decolonization

The methods and ways we think about and implement decolonizing practice is an important topic in museum anthropology. Below is a link to an article about academic writing as it relates to generating decolonizing praxis.

http://decolonization.wordpress.com/2013/01/08/online-writing-as-a-tool-for-decolonization/

Looking Back at Anthropology in 2011

Thinking back over 2011, anticipating the new year. Some thoughtful commentaries and blog entries ...

Honoring Janus, looking backward and forward

Neuroanthropology – 2011 Highlights

Savage Minds Annual Highlights

More here

Inside the President's Studio

A new feature on the AAA blog, worth mentioning, is a series of interviews between AAA President Virginia Dominguez and leading anthropologists. So far, the interview list includes:

+ T.J. Ferguson, archaeologist and AAA Executive Board member
+ João Biehl, award-winning Princeton anthropologist
+ Carolyn Sargent, medical anthropologist and former president of the Society for Medical Anthropology
+ Monica Heller, AAA Executive Program Chair for the 2010 annual meeting in New Orleans

100 Incredible Anthropology Lectures

A useful list to find great anthropology lectures online.

We've only a watched a few. But lectures like the one by Wade Davis on Endangered Cultures will inspire you to become an anthropologist all over again.

[Ed. Note: A few links seem to lead to websites that want you to buy something. But most links lead to a cool lecture!]

Visual Anthropology of Japan

Stumbled across this blog yesterday. Some great images, commentaries, etc. on the visual anthropology of Japan.

100 Best Blogs

Yeah for the Museum Anthropology Blog! We were recently named among the 100 best blogs for anthropology students. Check out the list! Congratulations to our fellow anthropology bloggers for the honor and good work, too!

Dawn at the Museum

A well argued blog entry by Olivia Judson about the ongoing scientific value of museum collections, especially biological objects--a series of reflections offered after wandering the Oxford University Museum of Natural History's storied halls. One wonders, though, how this argument could articulate with anthropological collections, particularly as we contemplate how things made by particular cultural communities to be valued in specific cultural contexts are used for more expansive questions that answer to the history of all humanity.

To Bits of News to Note

Two bits of news to note. CMA members and other subscribers to Museum Anthropology should see print copies of the fall 2008 issue in mailboxes soon. The issue has been available for several weeks online in AnthroSource and via Wiley InterScience. Thanks to everyone who contributed to this issue.

Those interested in the AAA publishing program should be aware of the recent announcement from the association regarding a move to provide free access to the American Anthropologist and Anthropology News with a 35 year moving wall. This is a complex and interesting matter. Find the press release on the AAA website and find lively discussions on the move on Savage Minds, Long Road, Open Access Anthropology, Open Anthropology, and other anthropology and library-related blogs. See also a full length story in Inside Higher Education.

Curators on the Loose

Readers of the Museum Anthropology weblog might find a recent post by anthropologist and former Royal Ontario Museum curator Grant McCracken of interest. He reflects on the increasing popularity of the concept of (the, being a) "Curator" outside museum contexts, particularly in digital settings. Find it here.

"Far from Home" at the North Carolina Museum of Art

Museum Anthropology editorial board member and the North Carolina Museum of Art's Associate Curator of Contemporary and Modern Art Kinsey Katchka has just opened an exhibition examining themes of "displacement and relocation in the global community." The exhibition project, titled Far From Home includes new media elements such as a weblog and podcasting. Kinsey invites the museum anthropology community to participate in the dialogue that the exhibition will hopefully produce. The press release follows. All of the exhibition's media projects, as well as general information can be found here.


Lalla Essaydi, Silence of Thought #2, Proposed purchase, North Carolina Museum of Art, Art Trust Fund, 2008, Courtesy of Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York. © 2003 Lalla Essaydi

RALEIGH, N.C.—On February 17, 2008, the North Carolina Museum of Art opens Far from Home, an exhibition of 29 works of art that address the displacement of people and populations in the global community as they relocate for economic, political, educational, or familial reasons. Admission to the exhibition is free.

Drawn from both public and private collections, Far from Home features 20 of today’s most compelling artists—both widely acclaimed and up-and-coming—from diverse national and cultural origins, many of whom have never been exhibited in this region and appear at the North Carolina Museum of Art for the first time.

Whether focused on the individual or larger community, works of art in the exhibition speak to the expansion of global networks as people relocate and travel, making their way in new places while maintaining connections to homelands and heritage, however tenuous.

“Focusing on the artists’ own narratives alongside processes or conditions such as displacement, separation, and belonging allows for a more nuanced, global identity and for commonalities not often accommodated within the gallery space–among artists, and viewers as well,” said Kinsey Katchka, associate curator of modern and contemporary art.

Artists include Ghada Amer, José Bedia, Jane Benson, Skunder Boghossian, Tseng Kwong Chi, Achamyelah Debela, Ruud van Empel, Lalla Essaydi, Maria Elena González, Seydou Keïta, Hung Liu, Ledelle Moe, Zwelethu Mthethwa, Youssef Nabil, Brigitte NaHoN, Vik Muniz, Michal Rovner, Lorna Simpson, Sebastião Salgado, and Renée Stout.

Far from Home explores various ways that displacement takes visual form in creative expression. Some works offer recognizable images that portray visible transformations of peoples’ identities, while some illustrate spaces of departure, arrival, or dispersal. Other, more abstract forms may accommodate a wider scope of interpretations, as personal changes take place alongside wider group dynamics of belonging and exclusion.

Far from Home will be at the North Carolina Museum of Art February 17, through July 13, 2008.

Far from Home has been organized by the North Carolina Museum of Art. The exhibition is made possible, in part, by the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources and the North Carolina Museum of Art Foundation, Inc.

For more information about the exhibition or the N.C. Museum of Art, visit www.ncartmuseum.org or call (919) 839-NCMA.

Intute: Social Sciences

We learned today that the Museum Anthropology weblog has been added recently to Intute: Social Sciences, a "a free online service providing you with access to the very best Web resources for education and research, selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists. The service is brought to you by a consortium of UK universities and partners." Find the Intute: Social Sciences home page here. The Museum Anthropology weblog's page can be found here. Thanks to the folks at Intute for including us.

Kim Christen Guest Blogging on Savage Minds

Incoming CMA Board Member and Museum Anthropology contributor Kim Christen is currently guest blogging on Savage Minds. Her most recent post is of special relevance to museum anthropologists and I urge Museum Anthropology weblog readers to check it out here. Her posts are arriving during a busy period of discussion in anthropology on numerous wide-angle issues (such as the HTS program), but I urge readers to follow up with her earlier Savage Minds posts on the current political crisis in indigenous Australia. They are smart (as always) and very eye opening.

Following the Nyinkka: See the Color Pictures!

On her blog, Kimberly Christen has posted some color pictures to supplement her paper in the new issue of Museum Anthropology. Included among the pictures that she has posted is the issue's cover image in color--Michael Jampin Jones' self portrait--as well as a photographs of the artist and and of the Nyinkka Nyunyu Art and Culture Centre, the subject of her paper.

Thanks Kim!

Web Projects Update Part 1: The Museum Anthropology Blog

Museum anthropologists (and friends) in, and beyond, the Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA) may be wondering about the state of Museum Anthropology (MUA) and the story behind its spinoff projects, the Museum Anthropology weblog (which you are reading right now) and the seemingly out-of-the-blue emergence of Museum Anthropology Review (MAR). I will report on all of these projects in full at the fall CMA/AAA meetings, but I can note a few highlights and contexts here. To keep these postings relatively brief, I will divide them up, covering the blog, MAR and MUA separately. Today I will touch briefly on the blog, saving the others for forthcoming posts.

The blog is pretty easy to explain. It is coming up on its one year anniversary, which will fall on July 27. Last summer, while I was waiting to finalize the fall 2006 issue of Museum Anthropology (it was then being typeset, I think), I decided to experiment with setting up a blog on which news and views related to the journal could be shared, as could news from the field. Under this later heading could come such things as exhibition notices, calls for papers, etc. Like all weblogs, this one has ebbed and flowed with the availability of content and time to spare. Besides my time and that of the journal editorial assistants who have helped with it, the effort has cost nothing and been reasonably well recieved. This reception is measured in direct feedback to the editorial office as well as visitation statistics and internet chatter, as when posts to the site are linked to or discussed on other blogs. Thankfully, various agregators, such as MuseumBlogs.org have helped people find the site, as have friends such as The Attic and Kim Christen. With one year under its belt, I anticipate keeping going with the blog in something like the current form during the next year. Please keep the blog in mind as a way to spread news of your exhibition (editorial, conference, etc.) projects. We are happy to recieve press releases (etc.) and will do all that we can to note relevant news items.

PS: While enjoying the Museum Anthropology blog, also consider checking out the CMA's own redesigned website. It still needs some fine tuning, but it is up and running and can be found here.

Student Museum Project Blogging

As has been illustrated by various active blogs, such as The Attic, graduate students in museum studies and museum studies-related disciplines have been very active in experimenting with the use of weblogs for scholarly and professional communication. In this vein, Selina Morales, a graduate student with whom I work here at Indiana University has recently built a blog to chronicle an exhibition and research project that she is currently pursuing. Titled Botánica Jardines, the project is documenting and interpreting the life and work of a Puerto Rican espiritista healer. Find Selina's blog here.

Collections Research and the Web: Reflections on a Successful [Half-] Day's Work at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Editor's Note: I am pleased to share a guest weblog post by Alison Petch, who is both Museum Registrar and Researcher on the ESRC-funded project "The Other Within: The Anthropology of Englishness" at the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. As noted here previously, Alison recently authored a paper on the role of Notes and Queries in the history of museum anthropology that appeared in the most recent issue of Museum Anthropology. Thanks to Alison for this reflection, which I found to be an encouraging dispatch from the front lines of collections research.

Collections Research and the Web: Reflections on a Successful [Half-] Day's Work at the Pitt Rivers Museum

Alison Petch

On Tuesday 1 May 2007 I resumed work on a research database that I am compiling (which will ultimately be available online at the "The Other Within" website, here).

There are approximately 350 named companies and manufacturers associated with English objects in our collections. On that day I was trying to find out if there was any information on the web about a gunmaker from Oxford called Nicholes. The Museum previously only knew his surname, no other information, this information having come from the accession book entry:
Accession Book Entry - F. C. WOODFORDE, Esq. Market Drayton, Salop. May [1911]. - Pair of flint-lock pistols by Nicholes of Oxford, with steel wrench for turning the barrels. [1911.15.1]

A search for Nicholes in Google led me to one of my favourite sites: http://www.headington.org.uk/, which is expertly compiled by Stephanie Jenkins in her spare time and contains much valuable information. In this case, John Nicholes (and his father of the same name), as well as being gunsmiths, were both mayors of Oxford (see here for the site that I actually located the information on).

So I had discovered that the firearms were much older than we had thought. Then I noticed on the same site that there is a reference to the famous Parson Woodforde visiting the site and mentioning it in his diary: Parson Woodforde visited Nicholes’s gunshop when an undergraduate in Oxford, and wrote on 29 June 1763: “For a Pocket Pistol, alias a Dram Bottle, to carry in one’s Pocket, it being necessary on a Journey or so—at Nicholl’s, 0. 1. 0.”

So I googled James Woodforde and found both the wikipedia entry, which says when he was at Oxford and also the Parson Woodforde Society. Both of these sites contained much useful information.

I had already noted that the donor was called F.C. Woodforde, and had previously thought it likely that his full name was Francis Cardew Woodforde, so I got the Chairman of the Society's address and emailed him. Martin Brayne is an expert on James Woodforde and the Woodforde family, and he was kind enough to email by return and provide even more information about Francis Cardew Woodforde and the Woodforde connections. Within 2 hours I had found out it was more than likely that our firearms were owned by James Woodforde, passed to FCW and thence to us.

And all this before lunch! This kind of research would have previously taken much time to complete, would have relied upon my following up the Woodforde name similarity, reading all of the journals on the off-chance of a Woodforde connection to Nicholes being mentioned and then being able to tie in Francis Cardew to his ancestor.

The joy that webpages compiled by experts bring to researchers is not often acknowledged. I happened to be in correspondence with Jason, Museum Anthropology's editor and told him how much I had appreciated the way the web had facilitated my research, and enabled me to contact and gain knowleddge from so many experts and he encouraged me to write this piece for the Museum Anthropology blog. The more we use the web and, particularly, the more we add information to the web, the better the information will be and the more we will all gain - imagine what such investigations might be like in 100 years time.

This blog post is dedicated to Stephanie Jenkins and Martin Brayne without whose work and help I would not have had such a successful outcome.

Darwin Revisited

On the Material World blog, Haidy Geismar has posted a supplimental note related to the review of the Darwin exhibition that she and the students in her Anthropology and Museums course authored last year for Museum Anthropology. Find the note here and the review itself in AnthroSource here. The review was highlighted in a previous post and the review is a great essay considering an important set of issues for our field.