Colonial Museum Research Articles

Spreading the “scientific approach”: the chemical turn in conservation from the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro to colonial museums in the French empire

ABSTRACT This text retraces the installation of the laboratory in the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro in the 1930s. It questions the ambitions that lay behind the “scientific” conception of museum conservation as promoted by the museum’s technical assistant, Adrien Fédorovsky, in parallel with many other European museums. Particular attention is paid to chemical methods of conservation and the setting up of toxic chambers. The products used and their suppliers are documented, and overlaps with other social fields sketched out. Finally, the text traces the spread of chemical conservation methods to planned and completed museums in the French empire.

Excavating Whiteness in the African Archive: The Story of Amandus Johnson's 1920s Expedition to Angola for the Penn Museum

AbstractAs we further seek to “decolonize” museum images of Africa, the museum archives of African Collections—the correspondence, ledgers, diaries, photographs, and other documents of White explorers working in Africa—suture the colonial practices that produced ways of seeing Africa—and Blackness more broadly—back onto the objects that museums maintain and display today. As increasing scholarly attention seeks to rectify the anti‐Black colonial violence of the archive, this research aims to situate the pedestrian colonial ethnographic practices and spectacular African explorer mythmaking found in museum archives within the foundation of museum anthropology and the museum itself. It also looks to the possibilities of contemporary museum practice to reframe and repair colonial museum constructions of Africa.

How to address a ‘curation crisis’: rethinking collection storage at the Museum of Tropical Queensland

ABSTRACT Since the establishment of early colonial museums, concerns around collection storage, funding, and staffing levels have continued to exacerbate ‘curation crises’. In 2020, the Museum of Tropical Queensland began to address its own ‘curation crisis’ by restructuring the First Nations collections in storage and auditing collection knowledge. The project reconfigured embedded colonial structures where objects were stored by ‘object type’ or ‘collector’, and instead grouped collections by Country and Traditional Owners. The restructure enabled curators to identify the extent of provenance information missing from the collections and highlighted the need for more in-depth and continuous engagement with First Nations communities to better understand and give voice to the collections in the care of cultural institutions, and to the communities they belong to. This paper intends to challenge the global museological issue of ‘paralysis by provenance’ and encourage new ways of prioritising collection knowledge.

Anthropology and image in colonial contexts: the scientific expedition to Spanish territories in the Gulf of Guinea (1948)

Spanish Guinea, as the largest Spanish colonial territory in sub-Saharan Africa, was the object of scientific attention by several official Spanish institutions such as the Institute of African Studies (IDEA) and the Ethnological and Colonial Museum of Barcelona (MECB). Both were interested in describing and documenting the colony’s ways of life and sponsored the 1948 Expedition to Spanish Guinea that inaugurated other MECB study trips during the 1950s. Images, in various formats (drawing, photography, etc.), played a significant role in these investigations, becoming a major instrument to describe the colony’s past and present. In this way, it not only contributed to consolidating the Spanish colonial vision and actions but also helped to confirm, scientifically, the subordination of the indigenous populations to the metropolitan colonial power. This article presents the details of the 1948 Expedition as well as the visual record generated. Finally, some reflections are made on the role of images in this context.

A repository of colonial intervisuality and memory: the Colonial Museum in Rome

A repository of colonial intervisuality and memory: the Colonial Museum in Rome

Morton’s memento? Reading Indigenous counter-networks in the ‘post’-colonial museum

This article considers the use of Indigenous counter-networks as a methodology for the research and interpretation of Pacific objects and images in Australian museum collections. A photographic album from the collections of the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery is used as a case study to demonstrate how historical visual materials may be comparatively analysed alongside written archives to excavate Indigenous networks. The article considers the migration of eleven Queensland South Sea Islander (SSI) men to the Australian Territory of Papua (Papua New Guinea) in 1907. It seeks to reinscribe the album with Indigenous presence and perspective, uncovering traces of SSI movement, resistance, and acculturation to colonial society in response to the White Australia policy in Queensland and Papua in the early twentieth-century.

Sepulcherised Objects and Their Decolonial Futures in African Museums: The “Robert Edward Codrington Collection” at the Zimbabwe Natural History Museum

This essay builds on the emerging (museum) decolonizing perspectives to (i) explore the biographical details and modes of curation and classification to which “ethnographic”1 objects collected during the colonial era have been exposed; to (ii) foreground the complexities of inherited colonial museum processes embedded in African urban contexts; and, to (iii) consider alternative modes of engagement with ethnographic objects and local Indigenous communities to challenge the embedded regimes of care and the marginalization rendered to Indigenous epistemologies. One of the biggest questions facing museums in the world today is how to deal with the hordes of objects collected from various Indigenous communities and placed in museums far away from the communities who made and used them. Using the case of an “ethnographic” collection in a former colonial museum, we call for a paradigm shift in museum practices, and challenge the present state of affairs of museum curatorship. We then briefly suggest possible ways in which such museums can confront their imperial histories and unsettle their inherited regimes of care and representation. We call for museums to enter into conversations with communities, listening to them and effecting curatorial activities that re-center local ways of knowing, while embracing the complexities associated with such engagements.

Review: Museums as Agents for Social Change: Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum, by Njabulo Chipangura and Jesmael Matago

Book Review| February 01 2022 Review: Museums as Agents for Social Change: Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum, by Njabulo Chipangura and Jesmael Matago Museums as Agents for Social Change: Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum by Njabulo Chipangura and Jesmael Matago. Routledge Museums in Focus series. New York: Routledge, 2021. xii + 138 pp.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $59.95; eBook, $20.65. Julia Wells Julia Wells Rhodes University in Makhanda Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar The Public Historian (2022) 44 (1): 116–118. https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.1.116 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Julia Wells; Review: Museums as Agents for Social Change: Collaborative Programmes at the Mutare Museum, by Njabulo Chipangura and Jesmael Matago. The Public Historian 1 February 2022; 44 (1): 116–118. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/tph.2022.44.1.116 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentThe Public Historian Search This is a feisty book which tackles the heavy legacy of colonial museums in Africa today. The authors carefully explain just how awkward a museum, as an institution founded to support race-based colonial assumptions, can be. Throughout Africa, colonizers built museums both to celebrate their own claims to technological superiority and to hold the indigenous people in place as curious others. This book demonstrates how such apparent handicaps can be turned inside out and put to good use. It includes a series of case studies of initiatives successfully undertaken at the Mutare Museum in Mutare, Zimbabwe. As a guide not only to what is wrong with museums, but to a host of remedial actions, it is a book that should be of interest to anyone interested in museum management throughout Africa. In fact, it should be required reading for all decisionmakers and funders within the sector. The lessons can easily... You do not currently have access to this content.

Lost and Found Property: Evaluating Efforts to Resurrect and Resuscitate ‘Institutionalised Garbage’ in Post‐Colonial Zimbabwean Museums

AbstractThis article evaluates efforts to bring to life some museum collections in Zimbabwe. Scholars have argued that the removal of objects from their social environments into museums literally kills them. The ‘heritagisation’ and ‘museualisation’ processes stand accused of killing objects. On the other hand, indigenous African communities consistently and situationally imbued their landscape with spiritual, political and social meanings. These cultural landscapes epitomise ‘living museums’ where diverse cultural objects were curated with traditional management systems. European colonialism, however, resulted in the denigration of these cultural practices. Objects which were critical for the well‐being of Africans were taken into captivity in colonial museums and eventually became ‘forgotten’ or ‘dead’. Ethnographic museums, in particular, are perceived as places of the dead and evil spirits. They are places to dump ‘garbage’ that no longer has a function in society. Post‐colonial African museums have struggled to attract and sustain local community interest. However, there is still hope to re‐ignite and sustain public interest in museum programmes. We invoke the notion of ‘living archives’ as an approach to decolonise the museum. The article appraises case studies of museum collections that have triggered immense public interest.

Visualizing Colonial Power

Abstract The aim of this paper is to compare the ways in which some of Europe’s most important colonial museums displayed their exhibits—how colonial territories and colonial subjects were represented through visual exhibition, how the display cases were arranged, which objects and artefacts were presented and in what sequence—as the clearest possible representation of the biological, technological, and cultural superiority of Europe with respect to the populations on display. The paper will therefore emphasise both the differences and different histories as well as the similarities between colonial museums in Europe. In fact, while acknowledging that there are special features linked to the differing conditions of both the motherland and her overseas territories, a common cultural horizon can be found in the different national museums taken into consideration here and in the interpretation of the inherent propaganda such institutions promoted.

Curation by the Living Dead: Exploring the Legacy of Norwegian Museums' Colonial Collections

ABSTRACT While the history of Norwegian museum acquisitions and collection formation has long been a topic of research, the extent to which colonial structures are still embedded in various Norwegian collecting institutions is seldom addressed. In this paper, we discuss the legacy of colonial collections in Norway through two case studies; Inge Heiberg’s collection of Congo ethnographica in various exhibitions at the University of Oslo’s Museum of Cultural History from the early 1900s to the present; and the Norwegian Kon-Tiki Museum’s initiative to repatriate human remains and other material excavated by Thor Heyerdahl on Rapa Nui in the 1950s. Presenting two cases that have been promoted as attempts at decolonisation – apparent “best practice” scenarios – we ask how the collections of Heiberg and Heyerdahl are used in current research and representations, and discuss whether the exhibiting and repatriation of the collections represent a continuation of, rather than break from colonial museum practice. We argue that attempts to revise current exhibition practices and research agendas prove consistently difficult. We conclude that in their very different ways, the cases illustrate that museums are effectively trapped in their collections. Heyerdahl and Heiberg still have the privilege of being curators of their collections.

Opening the Eyes of South Asian Museums: Making Sense of the Visitor Gaze

Since the introduction of museums in South Asia during the colonial period, there has been one troubling factor – the visitors. Colonial museum administrators/curators continuously failed to comprehend local visitor interpretations/interactions. This incomprehension led to visitors being variously classified as uneducated/illiterate; a stereotype that has stuck till today where the majority of visitors to museums are denigrated for their inappropriate behaviour and consumption of exhibits. This paper unpacks the misunderstood visitor experience through local visual practices, in particular the role of vision as embodied and enchanted rather than that pertaining to the modern gaze in the museum, in order to understand the South Asian museum experience. This re-assessment is grounded in a critical re-examination of South Asian vision, which so far has been singularly conceptualised as darshan, proposing instead the need for other scopic regimes to be investigated such as nazar. By applying this expanded view of the South Asian gaze to visitor interactions at the Lahore Museum, this paper aims to overcome the persisting bias against local visitors and suggest that their affective responses are not incongruous to the idea of the museum but relevant to contemporary museology.

Gazing at Egypt's museums: toward a new internationalism

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the transformation of the concept of cultural tourism within the sociopolitical empowerments, changes of visual realms and normative contexts, which is embedded within museums as institutions.Design/methodology/approachThese discussions will be conceptualized through investigating the shifts in the metamorphosis of the architectural vocabulary of Egypt's museums between nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This analysis will be highlighted through connecting both the notion of the “tourist reflexivity” of John Urry and Jonas Larsen in The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (2011) and the notion of the “interstitial spaces” and “new internationalism” of Homi Bhabha in The Location of Culture (1994). The analysis expands to interrogate these two notions as prelude for reflecting on representations of colonial and postcolonial museums in Egypt, starting from the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, Cairo (c. 1863) to the most recent, the Egyptian Grand Museum, Cairo (c. 2002).FindingsThe analysis revealed that while colonial museums endeavored to stage external cultural authority and postcolonial ones staged traditions' liminality through “New internationalism”, they created spatiotemporal interstices. This finding, while is a timely example with the rising global cultural encounters that emerged during this transformative age, it challenges the collective imaginations of architects to liberate from traditional nationalism.Originality/valueThe paper offers novel theoretical and architectural analysis of Egypt's museums through the exigency of nationalism and “new internationalism”. The encounter between both notions is a timely example given the recent involvements by the “Modern State” and the recent pandemic upheaval that revealed the inevitability of globalism and the discursivity of such notions.

Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum

Necrography: Death-Writing in the Colonial Museum

Bringing the Empire to the Provinces: Colonial Museums and Colonial. Knowledge in Fascist Italy

In Mussolini’s totalitarian state the colonial collections, displaying raw materials and natural history specimens as well as ethnographic collections, were part of wider political contexts; they provided comforting ideas of supremacy and control. Through them the Empire came to be understood by people less as something “out there”, and instead it came to have a palpable, material presence all over Italy. Through objects visitors were able to glean information about diverse people’s culture and climates, make assumptions about their relative positions in socio-evolutionary hierarchies, and justify their own political and economic subjugation of such people. The aim of this paper is to underline the existence of a dialogue between peripheries in which the transmission of materiality between the two has been shaping the colonial consciousness of the Italian people, beyond the fall of the fascist regime.

Conflation of the Japanese Colonial Museums in Korea

Conflation of the Japanese Colonial Museums in Korea

Figuras de cera para una historia moderna. Los maniquíes del Museo de Luján como símbolo de una época en transición (Buenos Aires, primera mitad del siglo XX)

El artículo examina las figuras de cera de tamaño natural, con rasgos fisonómicos y atuendo de otras épocas, que conformaban las “reconstrucciones de escenas objetivas” del Museo Histórico y Colonial de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, inaugurado en Luján en 1923. Proponemos recons­truir el contexto en el cual el Museo las incorporó, analizar la complejidad de estos artefactos como instrumentos museográficos, y determinar el impacto que generaron en el público dentro y fuera de la institución. Consideramos que estos objetos permiten observar al menos tres proble­mas historiográficos de mayor envergadura relacionados con la cultura material: la interacción de los sujetos con artefactos confeccionados para usos y propósitos diversos; los mecanismos me­diante los cuales los objetos mutan o acentúan sus significados primigenios dependiendo de las intenciones de los agentes que los interpelan en contextos específicos; la capacidad de los artefac­tos para recuperar experiencias sociales previas, captando expresiones y manifestaciones colecti­vas intangibles.

조선총독부박물관 초기 소장품의 형성과 성격

This paper examines the process of acquiring the collection at the Museum of Joseon Governor-General in 1915-1916. The early collections can be divided into four categories; The first is artifacts from the outside institution such as Japanese Military Command at Joseon. The second is what has been stored along with the works having been performed by some sections in Joseon Governor-General. The third is the outputs of the academic research projects of relics by some sections which were given to the museum. The fourth is the donated collections from powerful individuals. The early collection was not only the by-products of the colonial ruling system but the outputs of the academic research projects for the colony, which illustrated its character as the colonial museum. Another accession path of the early collection was donations. The major donors were the Governor Terauchi Masatake and Kuhara Husanoske who were at or near the peak of the colonial power in the colony. The museum seems to have initially collected its collection by referring to the classification and criteria of the Tokyo imperial Museum which was based on the one of ‘past and old antiques’ in early modern Japan. The museum acquired large collections in a short time when opened, which led to the problem of poor registration and management of them. Since August 1916, the Museum has systematically acquired its collection through excavation and discovery as well as donation, purchase.

SANKOFATIZATION AND DECOLONIZATION: The Rapprochement of German Museums and Government with Colonial Objects and Postcolonialism

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how node three national museums in Germany are dealing with colonial objects in their spaces. It also explores the German government’s recent rapprochement with scholars in its ex‐colonies on how to deal with its colonial past within a discourse of evidence and sankofatization. Sankofatization is defined as a Ghanaian‐Akan ideology that signifies the selection of past ideas for retention within a type of renaissance paradigm. In December 2015, the German Federal Foreign Office invited delegates from Togo, Ghana, Namibia, Tanzania, and Cameroon to take part in a unique program dubbed “A Themed Tour of German Colonial History.” Reporting on this tour, the paper assesses the activism of German civic organizations and museums in their ongoing attempts to decolonize colonial cityscapes, street names, and exhibits. But this discussion is much more than an ethnographic report. The implications of this rapprochement policy for discourses on the archaeology of German colonialism and the anthropology of colonial museums denote significant changes in transnational cooperation. Overall, the themed tour recalled that silencing of negative past experiences and past misdeeds is never permanent. Generational change often influences a renaissance, or sankofatization, of past realities to serve emerging postcolonial needs.

‘My dear Hooker’: the botanical landscape in colonial New Zealand

ABSTRACT From the 1860s, there was a flurry of activity around the natural sciences in colonial New Zealand, as the native flora of this place was collected, analysed, identified and classified. While males dominated the professional world of knowledge production in the recently established field of ‘serious’ scientific botany, the amateur field was populated by highly talented females, including Georgina Hetley and Sarah Featon. James Hector, first Director of Wellington's Colonial Museum, was a keen botanist, and regularly communicated with 'My dear Hooker', Joseph Dalton Hooker of Kew Gardens. Hector supported several scientific publications by males in the 1870s and 80s, yet his lack of support for locally produced works by females is notable. This paper investigates the networks that both supported and restricted female activity in this field. It will consider the contributions of female practitioners, highlighting that the life of a ‘flower painter' occupied a liminal realm – never fully at home either in the world of science, or of art. It will imagine how different these women’s lives and careers may have been if they had been privileged to communicate with 'My dear Hooker' and to receive letters addressed in turn to, for example, 'My dear Hetley'.