Museum Anthropologist Research Articles

Museum and Pandemics a Cautionary Tale from History: Impact, Innovations, Learning from Crises

The invisible virus created a terror among the most survived ‘Wise Man’ (human) who survived millions of year and seen uncountable epidemic challenges and now packed in a home with less facility. The question is now where we go from here and does this trauma will leave a permanent epidemic marks on our civilization like happened in history? The world don’t want to visit those dark areas happened in early. But now this Novel COVID-19 created a whole new ball game where the entire world came into the pitch and ultimately the entire community leading to psychiatric illness. The potential of museum personals is now has been challenged to create meaningful experiences for the civilizations to overcome from this pandemic situation which is central to their service as a champion tool to identify the social values of the communities. As agents of trusted institutions the museum personals specifically the museum anthropologists are facing challenges to overcome from these challenges of inclusion and diversity and the difficulty of navigating complex social issues in this isolation situation. The healing process of our societies after the COVID-19 crisis will be long and complex for many museums as places of meeting and learning for societies. Museums have important role to play now to repair and strengthening the social fabric of communities which are affected due to this pandemic. “Governments all over the world have taken necessary measures to stop the virus from spreading, by closing schools and public spaces, and especially Museums. Billions of people have been confined to their homes, and the number keeps growing. During this period many museums and museum personals are finding ways to keep engage the people with the museums and ICOM as representing the international museum community, calls on policy and decisionmakers to urgently allocate relief funds to salvage museums and their professionals, so they can survive the lockdowns and continue their vital public service mission once it is over, for the generations to come out from the situation,” the council announced in an statement on April 2. As Museum Anthropologist we used to study history, archeology and anthropology as Humanity and with this Humanity we study what makes us humans. Anthropology and history like a source has reminded us that humanity has faced lot of similar challenges in past and that this pandemic is really not unprecedented. Though these thing has been a part of culture since millennia and even only a hundred years ago similar challenges has been faced by our ancestors. Museums and Museum anthropologists needs support to make the humanity understand what collections means to you and what the collections may represent to the future anthropologists during such pandemic situations.

A Museum Anthropologist in Academic Practice

M personal and professional journey as a museum anthropologist has spanned more than 35 years and provided me with opportunities to serve as a curator, division head, museum director, and university professor. My early career included appointments in curatorial positions in a range of museum settings including the Oklahoma State Historical Society, the Oklahoma State Museum of History, the White Hair Memorial, a cultural center for the Osage Indian community, and the Science Museum of Minnesota. In these capacities, I contributed to the stewardship of collections and the development of interpretive exhibitions, programs, and publications. In each case, the focus was museum practice with limited incentive or encouragement to engage in research and publication activity that was not directly related to museum matters. A decade into my career, I received an invitation to teach undergraduate students as an adjunct professor at Macalester College and Hamline University. This was my first experience in applying my practical experiences to college level instruction in museum anthropology. Fifteen years into my career, I ventured into museum management, accepting an appointment as Senior Curator at the Gilcrease Museum, a municipal museum of history and art in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Over the next decade, I discovered that I not only enjoyed administration but also valued the opportunity to engage in long-term programmatic and institutional development. As the scope and scale of my responsibilities changed over time, I engaged in some limited teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Tulsa and struggled to sustain a research and publication program in Native American ethnology and ethnohistory. My professional transition is from museum to academy. In 2003, I accepted a position at the University of Memphis as Associate Professor of Anthropology and Director of the C. H. Nash Museum of Anthropology and Chucalissa Archaeological Park. Just as my management and administrative responsibilities increased, A MUSEUM ANTHROPOLOGIST IN ACADEMIC PRACTICE

Museum Anthropology as Applied Anthropology: Engaged Scholarship and Practice

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 Christina Kreps; Museum Anthropology as Applied Anthropology: Engaged Scholarship and Practice. Practicing Anthropology 1 July 2015; 37 (3): 57. doi: https://doi.org/10.17730/0888-4552-37.3.57 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 Search

Centering Culture in Museum Work/Centering the Museum in Culture Work

T is a great time to be a museum anthropologist. Museums of all kinds are seeking insights into how better to engage their diverse publics and how to more creatively represent cultural issues. I can recount a few stories from my own experiences both at The Field Museum and with others to illustrate the point. One of the most intriguing recent experiences I had was working with renowned Chicagobased architect Jeanne Gang. Gang was commissioned as one of nine architects to participate in an exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and design a new development for a depressed vicinity in the Chicago Metropolitan Region. Gang knew of my work in Chicago and that we had done a study of Mexican immigrants social networks and arts practices. She consulted with me about what kind of housing and public spaces might work for working class Latino immigrants (now the fastest growing demographic in Chicago). Gang’s final designs and models (as sh own in the exhibit [Museum of Modern Art 2015]) incorporated flexible use spaces for extended family households and public recreational and multi-use spaces. MOMA’s exhibit, titled “Foreclosed,” is part of a growing trend by art museums to showcase social concerns through an aesthetic lens. In another example, the Queens Art Museum did an exhibit on housing foreclosures in Queens (Cohen 2009) and hired a “community organizer” to reach out to Queens residents to both see and comment on the exhibit. The community organizer could just as well have been an anthropologist. At The Field Museum, our anthropology practice has most recently focused on integrating standard museum multimedia and visual communications strategies as part of participatory CENTERING CULTURE IN MUSEUM WORK/ CENTERING THE MUSEUM IN CULTURE WORK

Peter Gathercole (1929–2010): A Life Well-Lived

Peter Gathercole, museum anthropologist, teacher, archaeologist, biographer of V.G. Childe and long-time supporter of the aims of WAC, died on 11 October in Kernow/Cornwall, UK. The funeral was held on 5 November in Cambridge, where his partner Bobbie Wells lives. A lifelong Marxist, it was Peter’s undergraduate involvement with the Communist Party that brought him into early contact in 1949 with past WAC President, Jack Golson, at Cambridge University. They remained firm friends until Peter’s death, both leaving the Communist Party in the 1950s as the contradictions of Stalinism became ever-clearer. It was Jack who encouraged Peter to switch to Archaeology from History for his first degree (awarded 1952). Peter had come to University after his military service in Egypt in the Royal Army Education Corps, while Jack had resumed his studies after conscription as a ‘Bevin Boy’ in the Nottinghamshire coalfields. Peter took out a Postgraduate Diploma at the Institute of Archaeology in 1954, studying under Vere Gordon Childe. It was Jack Golson again who encouraged Peter a few years later in 1958 to make the move to New Zealand to take up the second academic appointment created in archaeology in that country. Jack, in Auckland on the North Island in 1954, was of course the first such appointment. Peter quickly established the University of Otago in Dunedin on the South Island as the second great centre of archaeological teaching and research. The friendly rivalry between these two key New Zealand departments of anthropology continues to this day. Peter had started his post-degree professional career working at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery from 1954 to 1956, and before heading overseas had been the Curator of the Scunthorpe Museum and Art Gallery from 1956 to 1958. After his New Zealand interlude ended in 1968 he again took up his museums career at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, moving to Cambridge in 1970 as Curator of the University Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. During the rest of his career he produced numerous publications in the field of museum anthropology, often returning to consideration of Pacific and of course particularly New Zealand Maori artefacts and their meanings. O B IT U A R Y

A Conflicted Legacy: Paul Sidney Martin as Museum Archaeologist, 1925-38

ABSTRACT Paul Sidney Martin excavated archaeological sites in southwestern Colorado for the State Historical Society of Colorado and the Field Museum of Natural History between 1927 and 1938, although he began working for museums in 1925. His work in three realms—research, exhibition and outreach, and collections—helped redefine the role of the museum anthropologist at a time when archaeological research, particularly that based in museums, was in transition away from the search for exhibition-quality objects and toward research-driven expeditions. With data gleaned from relevant archives, in this article I present previously unpublished details of Martin's work to suggest that Martin leaves behind a conflicted legacy from an important era in the development of North American archaeology.

A Paean to the Epistemological Potency of ArtifactsMuseums, Anthropology, and Imperial Exchange. By Amiria Henare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

A Paean to the Epistemological Potency of Artifacts<i>Museums, Anthropology, and Imperial Exchange</i>. By Amiria Henare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

For Hearth and Home: African Ceramics from the Keith Achepohl Collection

Mary S. Thieme is a museum anthropologist and ethnographer with extensive experience studying the pottery traditions of Mexico. In the 1960s she spent two years in Western Nigeria. In addition to assisting her ethnomusicologist husband in his Yoruba music research, collecting and documenting musical instruments for the Smithsonian Institution and the Nigerian National Museum, she studied drum making and researched and collected pottery and textiles for the Smithsonian. After a 30‐year career working in museums, including the Smithsonian and the Museum of African Art, she is now retired and lives in Panama City, Florida.

Alfred Kroeber as Museum Anthropologist

Museum AnthropologyVolume 17, Issue 2 p. 27-32 Alfred Kroeber as Museum Anthropologist Ira Jacknis, Ira Jacknis Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley.Search for more papers by this author Ira Jacknis, Ira Jacknis Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology, University of California at Berkeley.Search for more papers by this author First published: June 1993 https://doi.org/10.1525/mua.1993.17.2.27Citations: 3AboutPDF ToolsExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume17, Issue2June 1993Pages 27-32 RelatedInformation

Isabel Kelly: From Museum Anthropologist to Archaeologist

Isabel Kelly: From Museum Anthropologist to Archaeologist

Margaret Mead as a Museum Anthropologist

Margaret Mead's museum-related activities involved establishment of a sizable ethnographic collection (particularly during her fieldwork on Manus and in New Guinea), exhibition of these artifacts in her Peoples of the Pacific Hall, and an active concern with conservation and restoration of overall ethnographic research collections. Her attitude toward museums reflected a characteristic blend of the pragmatic and the intensely personal.

Collecting Korean shamanism for the National Museum of Denmark: ethnographic objects as collecting devices

It is a basic undertaking amongst museum professionals who work with various aspects of a collection’s meaning, interpretation and history to explore the biography of a historical museum object. This article attempts to depart from this by conceptualizing historical, ethnographic objects as ‘collecting devices’. The focus is thereby shifted from the historiography of an ethnographic object to the ways in which an object and its history can be employed as a device in staging new empirical fields for the museum anthropologist. This points toward potentials inherent to the ethnographic museum, namely the possibility that museum professionals and visitors alike can employ ethnographic objects as a means of encountering people outside the museum and everyday social world that they inhabit.

A New Role for Anthropology in the Natural History Museum

Previous articleNext article No AccessA New Role for Anthropology in the Natural History MuseumStephan F. de BorhegyiStephan F. de Borhegyi Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Current Anthropology Volume 10, Number 4, Part 1Oct., 1969 Sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/201023 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1969 The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological ResearchPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Mary Elizabeth King Curators: Ethics and Obligations, Curator: The Museum Journal 23, no.11 (Mar 1980): 10–18.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.1980.tb01267.xMary Ellen Conaway The Roles of the Curator in Natural History Museums, Curator: The Museum Journal 21, no.44 (Dec 1978): 321–328.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2151-6952.1978.tb00553.xFred Wendorf Stephan F. de Borhegyi, 1921-1969, American Antiquity 35, no.22 (Jan 2017): 194–200.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0002731600085152