Matters of Belonging

Ethnographic Museums in a Changing Europe

Edited by Prof. Dr. Wayne Modest, Nicholas Thomas, Doris Prlić and Dr. Claudia Augustat

Imprint: Sidestone Press

150 Pages, 6.5 x 9 in, 25fc/16bw

Paperback
9789088907777
October 2019
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$35.00

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Hardcover
9789088907784
October 2019
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$95.00

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Description
Contents
Authors

Matters of Belonging foregrounds critical practices within ethnographic museums in relation to their diverse stakeholders, with a special focus on collaboration with artists and differently constituted, self-identified communities. The book emerges from the EU-funded project SWICH (Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage) that places ethnographic museums at the center of ongoing debates about Europe’s shifting polity and questions around heritage, citizenship and belonging. Addressing diverse political climates and citizenship regimes, legal frameworks and colonial/migratory histories, the articles seek to question the role of ethnographic and world cultures museums within contemporary negotiations of how to define Europe, Europeans, and European heritage, especially mindful of the region’s colonial and migratory pasts. The book is neither celebratory nor congratulatory, and does not depict a triumphal overcoming by ethnographic museums of their troubled pasts. Its aim is to think critically about these museums’ responses, to identify both pitfalls and positive developments, and to sketch out possible futures for museums generally, and ethnographic museums specifically, as they try to locate themselves within discussions about Europe and its futures. Core to the book’s argument is that it may exactly be in their entanglement with the colonial past that these museums can become important sites for thinking about colonial entailments in the present. Facing up to this past is the beginning of addressing these larger legacies. The authors suggest that the ethnographic museum has been the site not just for trenchant questioning of colonial durabilities in contemporary Europe, but also for the development of new practices – of collaboration and authority-sharing, of recognition and belonging. The book explores these models, not as complete, but as a starting point to push forward new practices.

Wayne Modest is the Head of the Research Center for Material Culture, the research institute of the Tropenmuseum, Museum Volkenkunde, Africa Museum and Wereldmuseum in the Netherlands. He is also Professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies in the Faculty of Humanities at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.Modest was previously head of the curatorial department at the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam; Keeper of Anthropology at the Horniman Museum in London, and Director of the Museums of History and Ethnography in Kingston, Jamaica. He has published widely on issues of belonging and displacement; histories of (ethnographic) collecting and exhibitionary practices; and difficult/contested heritage with a special focus on slavery, colonialism and post-colonialism. His most recent publications include Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, with Tim Barringer), and “Anxious Politics in Postcolonial Europe” (American Anthropologist, 2017, with Anouk de Koning).

Prof. Dr. Nicholas Thomas was an undergraduate at the Australian National University from 1979 to 1982; his BA (Honours) thesis, on Fijian politics, was supervised by Anthony Forge. He visited the Pacific first in 1984 to undertake doctoral research in the Marquesas Islands and has since written extensively on exploration and cross-cultural encounters and on art histories in the Pacific. He has been Director of the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge since 2006. Key publications: 2016, (with Maia Nuku, Julie Adams, Billie Lythberg and Amiria Salmond) Artefacts of Encounter: Cook’s Voyages, Colonial Collecting and Museum Histories. Otago: Otago University Press. 2016, The return of curiosity: what museums are good for in the twenty first century. London: Reaktion / Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2012, (with Peter Brunt, Sean Mallon, Lissant Bolton, Deidre Brown, Damian Skinner and Susanne Kuechler) Art in Oceania: a new history. London: Thames and Hudson / New Haven: Yale University Press. Awarded the Art Book Prize

Doris Prlić is coordinator of the European cooperation project SWICH – Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage at Weltmuseum Wien (since January 2015). She previously worked as independent curator, realizing projects for different cultural organisations such as Festival der Regionen or afo – architekturforum oberösterreich (Linz, Austria).

Claudia Augustat is curator of the South America collections at Weltmuseum Wien, Vienna, with a regional focus on Amazonia. In her research, she concentrates on topics such as material culture and cultural memory, collaborative projects as well as decolonization of museum practice. She is project leader of SWICH – Sharing a World of Inclusion, Creativity and Heritage (since January 2018).