Full Description
This book explores anthropological and global art collections as a catalyst, a medium, and an expression of relations. Relations—between and among objects and media, people, and material and immaterial contexts—define, configure, and potentially transform collection-related social and professional networks, discourses and practices, and increasingly museums and other collecting institutions themselves. The contributors argue that a focus on the—often contested—making and remaking of relations provides a unique conceptual entrypoint for understanding collections'—and 'their' objects' and media's—complex histories, contemporary webs of interactions, and potential futures. The chapters examine the local, translocal, and transregional relations of collections with regard to their affective, aesthetic, performative, and socio-moral qualities and situate them in the larger geopolitical constellations of precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial settings. Together they investigate ongoing shifts in the relations of collections and collecting institutions by identifying alternative approaches to conceive of, and deal with, anthropological and global art collections, objects, and media in the future. The book is of interest to scholars from anthropology, global art history, museum studies, and heritage studies.
The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Contents
Introduction: Collections as Relations (Hansjörg Dilger, Barbara Göbel, Lars-Christian Koch, Stephanie Schütze and Alexis von Poser)
PART I: Identities and (Re-)Orientations of Belonging
1. Reorientating Provenance: Identifying Te Arawa Māori Works Cross-institutionally as
a Decolonising Approach to Collections Research (Elizabeth Cory-Pearce)
2. Shared Soundscapes: Everyday Archiving and its Potentials for the De-mocratization of Anthropological Collections (Ingrid Kummels and Gisela Cánepa Koch)
3. "No One Had Ever Asked me to Tell the History of White People", Translation and Enactment in an Artistic Collection on the Colonial Encounter (Thiago Oliveira da Costa and Andrea Scholz)
4. Materialising Relations? On Objects and Orientations in and out of the Museum (Magdalena Buchczyk)
PART II: Cultural Heritage and Property Disputes
5. Collections between History, Law and Justice: Reflections on the Debate about Restitution, Colonial Provenance, and Ownership (Larissa Förster)
6. Colonial Cultural Heritage as Disputed Heritage? The Case of Cameroon and Germany (Richard Tsogang Fossi)
7. The Collection of the Ayoreode in the BASA Museum as Glocal Space (Carla Jaimes Betancourt, Karoline Noack and Naomi Rattunde)
8. Towards Democratising the Production of Knowledge: Collaboratively Researching Sensitive Collections from Namibia (Julia Binter)
PART III: Epistemic Cultures and Knowledge Infrastructures
9. The Afterlives of Gold Artefacts from Southeast Asia (Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz)
10. Challenging the Jacobsen Collections from the American Northwest Coast and Alaska. A Long
Duree of Multilateral Engagement and Complex Relationships 1881-2021 (Viola König)
11. Vegetal Entanglements across Collections: Flowers and Medicinal Herbs in Chinese Art and Material Culture (Juliane Noth)
12. From Index Cards to Digital Catalogues: Incomplete Object Documentation as Reflection Space (Quoc-Tan Tran)
Afterword (Sharon Macdonald)
