Museum Anthropology
Aug 14th, 2009 by mamason
Over and over I hear it, and over and over again it surprises me. I hear colleagues at the Smithsonian and elsewhere say, “I am a museum anthropologist: I study collections.” I am surprised because for me, being a museum anthropologist means I make exhibits so visitors can learn about other communities and cultures, times and places. It also means working with communities to represent them in our museum. My work as a museum anthropologist includes studying collections but so much more.
I am fortunate to work at a venerable museum with a long history and a huge collection. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History has more than 126 million objects in all and approximately 265,000 ethnographic specimens. These objects provide rich data about the past lives of many different communities and cultures, but they also provide resources for representing these people to the seven million visitors we get each year.
When we work with communities to determine what to include in an exhibition, the work is intense. Every community-based exhibition is an intellectual achievement, but it is also a political accomplishment. Most communities have a good sense of how they want others to see them, what they want to exhibit and—importantly—what they don’t want to show. (In fact, some anthropologists have written about “cultural intimacy”—those parts of a culture that a community wants to obscure from outside scrutiny and so anthropologists avoid.) Of course not everyone in a given community agrees, and developing an exhibition can ignite old tensions and forge new alliances. In the end, exhibitions are about facts—what we know, what images we have to show, and what objects we have to display, but they are equally about messages—what we want visitors to know, see and experience.
Dr. Mason,
I am the editorial assistant for the Journal of Folklore Research Reviews. We would like to contact you for a review request, but the only e-mail address we could find for you bounced back to us. Could you please contact me at jfrr@indiana.edu? Thank you.