Who Owns the Past? (Reviewed)

I continue to be distracted by worthy obligations in Oklahoma where I am working for the summer, but I managed to see another valuable review published on Museum Anthropology Review today. Building on earlier MUA and MAR contributions on heritage and cultural property policy is this review by former Museum Anthropology editor Christina Kreps. Christina offers a detailed and engaged assessment of the edited collection Who Owns the Past? Cultural Policy, Cultural Property and the Law. Given the high level of interest in these topics generally and the contention surrounding this book specifically, I anticipate that Christina's review will find a significant readership. Speaking personally, I am especially appreciative of Christina's continued support for the broader Museum Anthropology effort. Find her review here.

Museum Anthropology (etc.) Update

Activity on the Museum Anthropology blog and at Museum Anthropology Review has been slow of late because I have been traveling to (and getting organized in) Oklahoma, where I am pursuing six weeks of curatorial work and research at the Sam Noble Oklahoma Museum of Natural History in Norman, OK. In the midst of this I have been trying to finalize issue 30(2) of Museum Anthropology for submission to the press.

Things will slowly return to normal over the next couple of weeks. In the meantime, I realized that I did not note here the publication of a fine review by Kristina Wirtz of the book Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. Find her review here.

Yearbook of Cultural Property Law (Reviewed)

Posted today to Museum Anthropology Review is an examination of the new annual called Yearbook of Cultural Property Law. The series is published by Left Coast Press under the editorship of Sherry Hutt and the sponsorship of the Lawyer's Committee on Cultural Heritage Preservation. Michael F. Brown has authored our review of the innuagural volume (2006). Find it here.

Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa (Reviewed)

Posted today to Museum Anthropology Review is an examination of Steven C. Durbin's book
Transforming Museums: Mounting Queen Victoria in a Democratic South Africa. The reviewer is C. Kurt Dewhurst, the Director of the Michigan State University Museum and a scholar-practitioner actively collaborating with museum professionals in contemporary South Africa. Find the review here. This is the 23rd contribution to Museum Anthropology Review and the first focused specifically on an African topic.

Classic Hopi and Zuni Kachina Figures

Offerred today on Museum Anthropology Review is a review of the book Classic Hopi and Zuni Kachina Figures by Barton Wright. The reviewers are Dorothy Washburn and Emory Sekaquaptewa and they use the opportunity of this review to intervene and correct what they identify as a number of longstanding and widespread misunderstandings surrounding the carved figures known to the world as kachinas. I am confident that everyone concerned with Native American arts from the Southwest, including, curators, scholars, collectors, and dealers will have an interest in consulting their review. Find it here.

Mana Tuturu (Discussed)

While speaking of Museum Anthropology Review, I would note that a recent review of the book Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights by David Delgado Shorter (the reviewer) has been attracting considerable attention and has recieved several extended comments, including one by the book's author Barry Barclay. Find out what the discussion is about here.

Markets and Cultural Voices (Reviewed)

The latest contribution to Museum Anthropology Review is an assessment of Markets and Cultural Voices: Liverty vs. Power in the Lives of Mexican Amate Painters by Tyler Cowen. This review has been contributed by Alan R. Sandstrom, who has, himself, written on the paper arts of indigenous Mexico. Find Professor Sandstrom's review here.

Museum Anthropology: From the Beginning

Readers of the blog and of Museum Anthropology Review will have noticed a recent slowing of editorial activity. The end of the semester at Indiana University brought about a flury of work obligations as well as the need to catch-up on overdue non-editorial matters. The normal flow of activity will soon begin to resume. In the meantime, I can note our most recent revew and share some good journal news vis-a-vis AnthroSource.

A couple of days ago, a new book review, by Joanna Cohan Scherer was published on Museum Anthropology Review. Readers will find her review of Peoples of the Plateau: The Indian Photographs of Lee Moorhouse, 1898-1915 by Steven Grafe here. Thanks go to Joanna for this contribution--the 20th published in Museum Anthropology Review.

I am pleased to report that I discovered today that the full run of back issues of Museum Anthropology are now accessible in AnthroSource. Special thanks to Candace Greene for her work rounding up the missing early issues and to her colleagues in the Department of Anthropology at the National Museum of Natural History for making them available for scanning. I have only begun to dip into the earliest issues, which I have never before had a chance to study, but it is clear that they are a key resource for understanding the history of our field and of the Council. While there will be, as with the materials previously posted into AS, bugs to find and (somehow) clean up, it is a great thing for the field to have digital access to the journal's thirty years of content. Find Museum Anthropology in AS at: http://www.anthrosource.net/loi/mua

Reviewed: The Antiquities Act

Published today on Museum Anthropology Review is an assessment, by Linda S. Cordell, of The Antiquities Act: A Century of American Archaeology, Historic Preservation, and Nature Conservation, a collection edited by David Harmon, Francis P. McManamon, and Dwight T. Pitcaithley. Thanks to Dr. Cordell for this fine review of an important title in our field. Find the review here.

Reviewed: The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao Album”

Thanks go to Jiang Lu, the latest contributor to Museum Anthropology Review. In a review published today, she considers the book The Art of Ethnography: A Chinese “Miao Album.” Please enjoy Professor Lu's assessment, which can be found here.

On Transactions and Creations

Museum Anthropology contributor and booster Michael F. Brown, whose work on cultural property issues is well known to many in the field, has just published a helpful, detailed review of Transactions and Creations: Property Debates and the Stimulus of Melanesia edited by Eric Hirsch and Marilyn Strathern (in PoLAR). While the collection does not focus specifically on museum-related property issues, Michael's review suggests that it will become an important work in the broader literature on the anthropology of heritage policy and intellectual/cultural property debates. You can find the review in AnthroSource here.

The Pottery of Zia and Santa Ana Pueblos

A substantive review essay examining two works on the pottery of Santa Ana and of Zia pueblos in New Mexico has been authored by Karen M. Duffy and published on Museum Anthropology Review. Please find the review here. Thanks to Karen for her careful, in-depth examination of these two works.

Landscapes in India

Next up on Museum Anthropology Review is a careful review of the book Landscapes in India: Forms and Meanings. Thanks go to our reviewer, Catherine B. Asher. You will find the review here.

Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights

Some exhibition news that just arrived today will be forthcoming here later this week, I promise. We do not want the blog to devolve into a kind of online table of contents for materials appearing in Museum Anthropology (MUA) or on Museum Anthropology Review (MAR). Keeping this concern in mind, we cannot resist announcing the latest contribution published on MAR. Appearing there today is a excellent review of Mana Tuturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights by Barry Barclay. The review is by David Delgado Shorter. I encourage everyone with an interest in intellectual property issues, heritage policy, indigenous rights, media, the arts, and the Maori people to check it out and to spread the word. Thanks to David for his valuable contribution. Please find the review here.

Icons and Treasures from Te Papa Tongarewa

Posted today to Museum Anthropology Review is a brief, but valuable review by Moira Smith of two companion works published by the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa--Icons Ngā Taonga from the Collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa and Treasures from the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Find the review here. Thanks go to Moira and to all our diligent reviewers.

Thank Yous

A couple of thank yous are in order.

Thank you to Open Access (OA) scholarship advocate Peter Suber for discussing Museum Anthropology and Museum Anthropology Review on his important and influential Open Access News. See "OA book reviews in anthropology" posted on 3/25/2007.

Thanks also to the Korean studies community worldwide for visiting Museum Anthropology Review today. In less than one day, more than 120 of you came to consult Ken Vos' review of Art Under Control in North Korea. MAR uses the weblog software provided by WordPress.com. Today's heavy traffic led to MAR being identified by WordPress.com as a "Growing Blog" (22nd out of 100). The number of people reading the previously posted reviews and the number of people subscribing to MAR via feed readers continues to grow daily. Thanks to everyone who is supporting this ongoing experiment.

Art Under Control in North Korea (Reviewed)

Please enjoy the latest review posted to Museum Anthropology Review. It is a review of Art Under Control in North Korea, examined by Ken Vos of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden. Thanks go to Ken for sharing a valuable review of this interesting title.

Olmec Art and Archaeology, Reviewed

Our newest book review, an examination of Olmec Art and Archaeology in Mesoamerica, has just been posted to Museum Anthropology Review. The title is a collection edited by John E. Clark and Mary E. Pye that has been published by Yale University Press. Thanks go to Jenna Wallace Coplin for her valuable review.

Cross-Cultural Collaboration (The Book)

A great book review, by Ann McMullen, has just been posted to Museum Anthropology Review. The title is Cross-Cultural Collaboration: Native Peoples and Archaeology in the Northeastern United States. It is a collection edited by Jordan E. Kerber and published by the University of Nebraska Press.

What is going on with the reviews?

Those consulting the Museum Anthropology blog lately may have noticed the appearance of additional full blown reviews (and an obituary)--the kind of material typical of the journal itself. On the editorial side, the work of Museum Anthropology is going very, very well. Thanks to many generous, talented colleagues, we have outstanding contributions, both accepted articles and solicited reviews, arriving each week. I am eager to share this great work as quickly as I am able. On the structural side, Museum Anthropology and its sponsor, the Council for Museum Anthropology (CMA), are facing many of the same challenges and changing circumstances that are affecting many other scholarly journals, and academic publishers more broadly. The stresses being confronted by the sections of the American Anthropological Association (AAA) and their journals in the AAA publishing program are a subject of considerable discussion in American anthropology. I will not explore this topic here except to note that, in the present environment, we are not in a position in which additional pages can be added to the journal's print issues. Adding an additional issue or issues to each volume, while imaginable now on the editorial side, is even more beyond our present means.

Some of the review authors in the recent cue have proven willing to join an experiment in which we begin offering their fine scholarly work online. Reviews by three colleagues--John H. McDowell, Joshua Piker and Carol Hendrickson--have been posted to this weblog. The results so far are instructive. If one does a Google web search for the three titles that they have reviewed--The Cord Keepers by Frank Salomon, Practicing Ethnohistory by Patricia Galloway, and Fashioning Tradition by J. Clarie Odland--one finds that the reviews that appeared here are already showing up at the top of Google's ranking. Galloway's book is a relatively recent work that has not yet been widely reviewed. In its case, Piker's review appears (as of last night) at the top of the rank, second only to the book's page on its publisher's website. Odland's book has a title that appears in other unrelated pages, but of the pages related to this book it is also in second position, after an earlier online review by the Textile Museum of Canada. After just a few days, Hendrickson's review already appears above the book's page on its distributor's website. McDowell's review of The Cord Keepers is particularly informative. This review was solicited by the editorial office long after the book was out and attracting substantial attention in the field. By the time McDowell's review appeared here, the book had already won the American Society for Ethnohistory's Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin Book Prize for 2005 and had been reviewed in a large number of journals in, and beyond, anthropology. Despite arriving late in the process, McDowell's review already ranks very high, with only a few reviews (ca. 2005) ahead of it. The review posted here ranks above older reviews in distinguished venues such as the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Anthropological Quarterly, and Ethnohistory. I recognize that a Google ranking is not a definitive measure and that many will read these other reviews in print format or via search tools other than Google, yet I still find these results remarkable. A related measure comes in the form of visitor and search statistics available for this blog. A sizable number of people are now visiting this site and a significant number of these visitors are clearly reading the reviews. This is enlightening evidence that speaks to the position of those who advocate for open access models in scholarly publishing. I will not take up this larger topic here, but I did want to contextualize what is unfolding vis-a-vis Museum Anthropology's review program.

On a case by case basis, I am asking authors of reviews-in-hand if they would be willing to publish their review online. Publishing reviews in this way takes advantage of the following benefits of the online medium (among others): immediate rather than delayed publication, free access to anyone in the world with internet access, the ability to incorporate internet hyperlinks, the ability to publish color images along with the review, the ability (if desired by the author) to turn on the blog's comment function for the review (thus allowing others to comment on the review or its subject matter), and the ability for an author to simply send an email link for the review to whomever they wish to share the review with. Because reviews published thus are easily found by anyone doing internet searches, they may become a subject of discussion elsewhere on the web. They can also benefit from the power of the social networking dynamic of the web today, such as with folksonomy tagging. This strategy also provides more space for publication of peer-reviewed articles in the journal itself.

For most new reviews, we are now soliciting them, from the start, with the intention of publishing them online. All the reviews published online will be noted in the table of contents of the print journal. This was the approach taken in recent years by the American Ethnologist as it published its book reviews in online-only format.

This blog, which was itself an experiment launched last summer, was intended as a venue through which to share news of the journal, the CMA, and the wider field of museum anthropology, particularly offering such items as exhibition notices and calls for papers. Technologically, it is a good tool for distributing such information and it is gratifying how much visitation this site is now getting. As a means of publishing substantive contributions such as reviews, it is less good, both technologically and editorially. To address these problems, we have set up a different site on which just the substantive contributions (essays, reviews, obituaries, etc.) will be published. This site is called Museum Anthropology Review and it can be found here (the URL is museumanthropology.net). As described there:

Museum Anthropology Review (MAR) is a companion project of Museum Anthropology (MUA), a journal of museum and material culture studies published by the University of California Press for the Council for Museum Anthropology, a section of the American Anthropological Association. MAR is an open access journal supplement. Its purpose is the dissemination of reviews, essays, obituaries and other editorially-reviewed content complementing the work of Museum Anthropology. It reflects the research and outreach interests of the Council for Museum Anthropology and is offered as a resource enhancing all fields concerned with the study of material culture and with the place of museums and related institutions in social life.

Like this blog, Museum Anthropology Review is an experiment unfolding during a period of rapid change, not only in terms of technology, but also in the social organization of scholarly life and academic publication. It is reasonable to assume that these systems are only stopping points in a longer journey. The transitory nature of new media is of particular concern to me and I am now working actively to develop preservation plans for the substantive content that we publish in this way. We have not worked out the details yet, but I am committed to the goal of seeing these contributions preserved both digitally (in a more robust system, cataloged with solid metadata) and in good old fashioned paper copies placed in one or more responsible archives central to the field.

I will share more details of the process as the experiment unfolds and as more pieces fall into place. For the near future, I anticipate continuing to actively publish reviews and other editorial content online. Now that it is up and running, I expect to place the full content on Museum Anthropology Review and to make note of it, with links, here. This approach will enable this site to transition back to its news-from-the-field function.

Please contact the editorial office [museanth (at) indiana (dot) edu] with comments, questions, and concerns. Thanks to all who are contributing so richly to all of these efforts to enhance the field of museum anthropology, both in print and online.