Collecting Contemporary Urban Culture: An Emerging Framework for the Field Museum

Abstract

The article discusses a process and protocol for adding contemporary urban material culture to the Field Museum. The Field Museum is a natural history museum with significant anthropology collections that has experimented with exhibiting contemporary cultural themes but lacks a significant collection in this area. I argue that urban lifeways are an important area for collecting work and that building such a collection should be done within the parameters of anthropological theorizing on social life, material culture, and the urban context. [collections protocols, urban material culture, Field Museum]