Ethnographic museums are at a crossroads; caught between colonial legacies, and the difficulties of captivating new audiences in a digital world. Reframing the Ethnographic Museum brings together leading scholars and curators to study the shifting role of these institutions in a rapidly changing cultural and political landscape. From Asia to Africa, the book explores how different museum strategies have grappled with decolonization and digital transformation, engaging in critical analysis and including case studies of innovative curatorial practices.
As museums confront calls for accountability and reconsider their collections, this volume provides a relevant exploration of the dilemmas and possibilities facing ethnographic display today. Reframing the Ethnographic Museum urges us to rethink how we engage with the past, and how museums can become spaces of dialogue and reflection.
Reviews
Table of Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Part I: The historic legacy of ethnographic museums
1 The changing politics of ethnographic display: a review
Michael Rowlands, Nick Stanley and Graeme Were
2 Ethnography and art at the British Museum’s Museum of Mankind
Ben Burt
3 Success and failure: the life history of Birmingham’s ’Gallery 33: A Meeting Ground of Cultures’
Nick Stanley
Part II: Current practices
4 ’Tervuren remains a place of false memories’: on the impossibility of an epistemological rupture at the Royal Museum for Central Africa (Belgium)
Boris Wastiau interviewed by Arnaud Lismond-Mertes
5 Ethnographic collections at Queensland Museum: histories and politics of exhibiting in a settler-colony
Chantal Knowles
6 ‘We hate ethnography...’: curating beyond description in a post-colonial museum
Sean Mallon
7 The dawn of Japanese anthropology and the ethnographic museum in Japan: reconsideration from a post-colonial perspective
Taku Iida
8 Redefining ethnographic museums and ethnographic displays in China: a century-long debate
Luo Pan
Part III: Future directions
9 Indonesian youth practices in creating a media museum to preserve the sense of nationalism in a digital age
Endah Triastuti
10 Replicas and religious heritage in the ethnographic museum
Ferdinand de Jong
11 Entangled knowledges: re-indigenising biocultural collections at National Museums Scotland
Alison Clark, Shona Coyne, Alistair Paterson and Tiffany Shellam
12 Digital heritage technologies and issues of community and cultural restitution in ‘new style’ ethnographic museums: a digital update
Michael Rowlands and Graeme Were
Index