Call for papers: ‘Faith and Community: Interpreting beliefs in the Modern Museum’ MEG Conference 2015

Manchester Museum
18 and 19 April 2016

Manchester Museum is part of the University of Manchester and is internationally renowned for its encyclopaedic collections, innovative exhibitions, and extensive learning and engagement programme. The museum is critical to communicating the results of ground-breaking University of Manchester research, such research has informed exhibitions including Breed: The British and Their Dogs, Rapa Nui: The Statues from Easter Island and most recently Gifts for the Gods: Animal Mummies Revealed. This year it has initiated an exploration of South Asian collections across the museum, the Whitworth, and Manchester Art Gallery, collectively known as the Manchester Partnership,  in preparation for several exciting forthcoming projects. A significant percentage of this material is linked to faith in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora, making the conference topic particularly relevant to this research. The conference will provide Manchester Museum with an invaluable opportunity to hear from other colleagues and organisations working in this area, we’re hoping for a diverse range of papers to stimulate debate and discussion. Manchester Museum actively encourages you to consider submitting a paper proposal and welcoming to Manchester in April 2016.

If you are interested in submitting a paper for the conference please send your title and draft abstract (c.100 words) to Stephen Welsh at Manchester Museum by 5pm on 12th February 2016.

Deciphering Richard Spruce's legacy: people and plants in the Brazilian Amazon

Date: Friday, November 6, 2015 - 16:15
Location: Herbertson Room, School of Geography and the Environment, South Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3QY

The biocultural objects and associated information collected by Richard Spruce in the Brazilian Amazon in the 1850s constitute a unique point of reference for the useful plants, ethnobotany, anthropology and environmental history of the region. This priceless collection, housed at RBG Kew and the British Museum, incorporates indigenous plant-based artefacts, samples of useful plant products, detailed archival notes on the use of plants by inhabitants of the Amazon, and accompanying herbarium voucher collections. These form part a larger body of 19th century material held in European collections, much of which has been poorly researched and is unavailable within Brazil. Such collections have huge potential as data for studies of Amazonian vegetation and ethnobotanical knowledge over the last 200 years, and provide a basis for analysis for future studies being conducted in Brazil.
The talk will explore the nature and context of these objects and data in the context of Richard Spruce's remarkable explorations, and outline an emerging initiative to research, document and evaluate their value and significance in the context of past, present and future relationships between people and the Amazon forest.

Dr William Milliken is a Research Leader at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. His experience in the Brazilian Amazon, including ethnobotanical research with indigenous peoples and botanical exploration of remote areas, stretches back almost three decades. He is the author of several books on these subjects.

For more information see here.

Arms and Armour at the Horniman Museum

In March 2015 the Horniman’s Collection People Stories project came to an end. The project had seen three years of intense work on the collection. Focused curatorial research, documentation review and object photography had transformed our understanding of the Museum’s 80,000 odd anthropology objects. The project had also brought our collections to new audiences and pioneered specially devised engagement techniques.

To conclude Collection People Stories my colleague Sarah Byrne and I wanted to host an event which would build on the project’s achievements and hopefully also break new ground. Our teams in the stores had just gone through the Museum’s extensive collection of arms and armour and it struck Sarah and I that these under represented objects, so typical of the collections of ethnography museums, but so unwieldy in the context of contemporary curatorial practice, would make a very good topic for a conference.

We tentatively issued a call for papers, raising the problems inherent in the representation of violence in other cultures, highlighting the necessity of unpacking the multiple meanings often imbedded in weapons and ultimately asking how to display objects that are all too often absent from the galleries of today’s  ethnography museums. Perhaps, we thought, our subjects is too niche, a micro-specialism in the tiny world of museum ethnography? The positive response we received, therefore came as a delightful surprise. Submissions arrived from scholars, curators and conservators based at institutions across the world. It turns out that many felt strongly about our questions and were keen to contribute to the discussion.

The morning of the first day of the conference gave Sarah and I the satisfaction of seeing people who share an enthusiasm meet for the first time. We ordered the papers so that those speakers who planned to raise more universal rather than specific questions and arguments came first. The appropriately named Bob Savage, Curator of Edged Weapons at the Royal Armouries opened with a discussion of the bodily trauma which most weapons are designed to deliver, illustrating his presentation with shocking images of machete wounds. Many a half-eaten croissant was returned to its plate, but Bob had made an important point: that although we may display weapons – we are very unwilling to confront what they designed to do.

Andy Mills of Norfolk Museum Services was next with an ambitious and convincing synthesis concerning the pan-cultural agency expressed by weaponry. Papers on particular weapon types, museum case studies and indigenous perspectives followed, which sadly I cannot elaborate on here as my 500 word limit is fast approaching, so I will take the opportunity instead to put in a plug for Weapons, Violence and the Anthropology Museum, a forthcoming book, published by Cambridge Scholars and edited by Andy Mills and myself which features thirteen chapters worked up from papers given at the conference as well as a few new contributions. A must read for anyone who has got to the end of this blog post!

 

The Horniman has produced the video above which covers some of the conference and is certainly worth watching if this blog has piqued your interest.  Especially compelling is an interview with Naga artist Temsuyanger Longkumer and footage of the intervention he made in the Museum’s conservation lab on the second day of the conference. I am very grateful to him for his contribution.

Tom Crowley
Curator in the Anthropology
Horniman Museum and Gardens.

Bard Graduate Center/AMNH Fellowship in Museum Anthropology

Bard Graduate Centre and the American Museum of Natural History invite applications for a two-year postdoctoral fellowship jointly appointed at Bard Graduate Centre and in the Anthropology Division at the Richard Gilder Graduate School of the American Museum of Natural History. The fellow’s project focuses on a specific area of material culture: Southeast Asian textiles, including textiles from Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, Brunei, East Timor, Philippines. 

Past areas of specialization have included the indigenous cultures of the Pacific Northwest, Oceania, South American textiles, and Australian Aboriginal cultures. The project makes use of the AMNH collection. A PhD in Anthropology or a related field is required.

The fellow teaches one graduate course each year and mounts an innovative small exhibition, ideally drawing on the collections of the AMNH, in Bard Graduate Centre’s Focus Gallery. A major purpose of the Bard Graduate Centre-AMNH Fellowship is to promote mutual scholarly interest and interaction among our fellows, faculty, and students, and the AMNH academic community.

To apply, please submit the following materials via email as a single PDF to fellowships@bgc.bard.edu: cover letter, curriculum vitae, sample publication, and a list of three references. Candidates will be judged primarily on their research abilities, experience, and on the merits and scope of the proposed research. The Fellow will have office space and be expected to participate fully in the intellectual life of both institutions. Salary is $35,000 per year. Housing is available, as is a small research/travel fund while the Fellow is in residence. The deadline to submit the application is November 1, 2015 and the position commences in the fall of 2016.

Bard Graduate Centre is an AA/EOE employer. Please direct any questions AND YOUR APPLICATION to fellowships@bgc.bard.edu and see our Frequently Asked Questions page. Please add “AMNH Fellowship” to the subject line when you submit your application.

 

 

European Registrars Conference

Early Bird Registration is open now!

The organizing group of the Austrian Registrars Committee would like to invite you to Vienna for the 10th European Registrars Conference – ERC 2016 – from June 8 to 10 2016 at Hofburg Vienna.

This symposium is a crucial, occupational platform for continuing education, a lively exchange of valuable information and networking among registrars, exhibition and collection managers, art transport and insurance companies and many more …from all corners of the globe! 

www.erc2016.at

SEMINAR SERIES AT THE ROYAL ANTHROPOLOGICAL INSTITUTE

'Museum ethnography and the origins of anthropology in the mid-19th century'?

Dr Jonathan King, Von Hügel Fellow, Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge

Wednesday 7 October at 5.30 pm

‘Thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately before us’ (Hegel). During the mid-nineteenth century thought was for the first time imposed on ethnographic display. This created a dialectic, or discussion between anthropology and objects, negating all that had come before.  In three places, the British Museum, and the private museums of Henry Christy and William Blackmore, ideas of antiquity and evolution created newly constructed worlds. This development can be compared to the reception and interpretation of the more dominant temporary exhibitions and spectacles of the period, and on the other hand to fictive anthropology.   

This event is free, but tickets must be booked. To book tickets please go to http://jonathanking.eventbrite.co.uk