When Wartime Plunder Comes to Campus
An archaeologist considers whether students should learn from antiquities looted from Iraq. ✽ IN 2022, the Art Crimes Division of the FBI became interested in a palm-size piece…
Tag: museums
How Virtual Reality Is Restoring Liberia’s Culture
Traveling Treasures is a new project led by a team of anthropologists that puts Liberians directly in touch with their dispersed cultural heritage through immersive technologies designed to…
A Poetics of Liberation: An Imagined Archive
A Tanzanian historian and poet conjures alternative engagements with Black African women who were marginalized by violent colonial histories and imprisoned in the archives. As the 2024 poet-in-residen…
Super-cultural-commodity-phantasmatic extra-econo-base last instances.
Writing on the ways the changes in museum display can be understood as a record of political and economic, especially colonial, articulation (without insisting there are any direct…
Envisioning a More Empathetic Treatment of Great Ape Remains
Many museums are reckoning with the colonial legacies of the human remains and cultural objects in their collections. Now anthropologists are advocating to pay similar respects to primates.…
Fred Myers and Terry Smith on their book, Six Paintings from Papunya
https://www.dukeupress.edu/six-paintings-from-papunya Jennifer Biddle: As a way of beginning, could you briefly introduce yourselves, and what brought you together on this project. …
Home-Carrying—A Repatriation Trip to Vanuatu 100 Years in the Making
An anthropologist and poet reflects on a journey of return that tells a larger story about human connection, acts of Indigenous solidarity, and the potential for repair within…
Survival Notes
Black African women in former colonial centers such as London gesture to subversive ways of communicating with those imprisoned in archives across generations. ✽ despite the Maangamizi,( Maangamizi…
Spain’s Move to Decolonize Its Museums Must Continue
In early 2024, Spain’s culture minister announced that the nation would overhaul its state museum collections, igniting a wave of anticipation—and controversy. ✽ WHEN SPAIN’S CULTURE MINISTER, E…
Archived Haints
SAPIENS’ 2024 poet-in-residence conjures the voices of those imprisoned in archives. ✽ when the writing is done reference room locked index cards slotted library doors bolted when the…
An Ancient Child Who’s Changing Archaeology
A Brazilian archaeologist reexamines the way people treat ancestral Indigenous remains housed in museums—starting with one important encounter. Can museums and archaeology harm the dead? An Indigenou…
The Visit
SAPIENS’ 2024 poet-in-residence imagines a wordless conversation with a troubled figure from the past and considers legacies of marginalization during the figure’s life and in archives. The Visit…
Museum Practice in Folklore Studies (a.k.a. Museum Methods): Spring 2024
There are too many things needing to be written about. Many of them are grim. Here I want to begin the work week with positivity. This past semester,…
Education Requirements and Museum Jobs (April 2024)
This week in my undergraduate museum practices course, we will discuss museum careers (and graduate school). For the first time since 2017, I have again done my calculations…
Learning From Snapshots of Lost Fossils
Not all fossil discoveries happen in the field. In museum archives, researchers found photos of remains from Paleolithic children who had belonged to a group of early Homo…
Longjia [Miao] Village
[Suojia (a.k.a. Suoga) [Longhorn] Miao Eco-Museum], Longjia [Miao] Village, Suoga Miao, Yi, and Hui Ethnic Township, Liuzhi Special District, Liupanshui [Prefecture-Level] City, Guizhou, China. [A…
Nannuoshan [Hani] Village
[Hani Culture Park,] Nannuoshan [Hani Administrative] Village, Gelanghe Hani Ethnic Township, Menghai County, Xishuangbanna Dai Autonomous Prefecture, Yunnan, China. Visited December 26, 2023. …
Infant, Name Once Known
A poet-anthropologist of the Chickasaw Nation honors infant remains historically used in teaching collections at the University of Illinois. “Infant, Name Once Known” is part of the collection…
How Museum Items Go Missing
After alleged thefts from the British Museum, a curator explains the challenges of keeping track of collections—and the legal limitations on returning cultural material to source communities. A…
Restoring Faces and Dignity to Skeletal Remains
An anthropologist explains how a South African university used community-driven research to honor human remains acquired unethically. This article was originally published at The Conversation and has…
The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions – review
In The Museum of Other People: From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions, Adam Kuper interrogates the history of anthropological museums and considers questions of colonialism, race, and …
Cold Hubris and Fundo
A poet-historian reflects on the legacy of colonial-era collecting practices in Tanzania that tore Black Indigenous ancestors from their communities and history. ✽ Euro-American colonial collections o…
Why Store 41,000 Bison Bones?
An archaeologist explains why a museum keeps so many bones from the Jones-Miller site, an ice age bison kill on the North American plains. In the 1970s, archaeologists…
Collaborating So a 200-Year-Old Pipe Can Continue Its Work
A museum curator and a First Nations leader explain how a treaty pipe, sold at auction, exemplifies a new path for repatriations in Canada. A PIPE’S HOMECOMING In…